The Write Clinic Meets The Healthcare SEO Geoff Meakin

Virginia (00:06.494)

Hello, I’m Virginia from Write Clinic and here with me today is Geoff from Healthcare SEO. He is an SEO expert, SEO pro, SEO genie. He will make your wish come true with any SEO that you need for your healthcare business, your organisation, and even has some top tips on medical writing and what you can do to boost your healthcare SEO on your internet content. He’ll help you rank on Google so that your audience can find you and you can boost your business or have the impact with the health information that you are trying to share. So welcome, Geoff.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (00:56.393)

Hey, Virginia, thank you very much for having me on the show. This is really exciting.

Virginia (01:01.034)

Yeah, it’s really exciting. Thank you so much for giving up part of your Saturday to do this, and I hope our audience will watch the whole thing and learn a lot, because we’re gonna be answering over 20 SEO questions that you guys have sent us over the past couple of months since we put out the Google Form. And so let’s get into it.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:22.925)

Brilliant, bring it on, let’s see what we got.

Virginia (01:26.543)

So just a super quick introduction to Write Clinic, so who we are. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel, then make sure you subscribe. It’s completely free and we talk all about medical writing and we bring experts like Geoff on all kinds of topics to support you as a medical writer or if you just want to learn more about healthcare content.

About Write Clinic

So Write Clinic was set up by me, Virginia and Hass and we’re both UK qualified pharmacists and we’re now working as freelance medical copywriters. We’re both still registered as pharmacists and Hass is gonna do a quick stint in London for maybe a year or so to get his pharmacist prescriber licence. And I’m living in Germany at the moment but he’s travelled to over 16 countries over the past year and I’ve been to the UK eight times. We both live abroad and regularly travel, and we met online and built a community to help others learn about medical writing as well. 

As a brief walkthrough, both independently and through medical writing agencies, we have worked with the following clients. So I am currently part of the Patient Information Forum (PIF), which looks at high quality health information, content, and the process that people use to create their content. If the content is produced in a way which is accessible and meets all of the 10 main standards, then you get awarded a PIF tick. And I’ve also worked with YouTube Health and the NHS and lots of the brands that you can see here over the past few years between me and Hass. So we’ve worked with a lot of great brands. 

Healthcare SEO Case Studies

So today we are focusing on Geoff and learning healthcare SEO from a pro. Here are a few of the clinics that Geoff has worked with over the past few years and most recently it has been brands and companies and clinics such as Healthpath, the Rylon Clinic,

Virginia (03:42.158)

for women’s health, the IBS and Gut Health Clinic, the London Clinic of Nutrition, the Hertfordshire and London Children’s Orthopaedics Company, and IBS Clinics, Oxford CBT and OJR, which is the Ortho Joint Relief. And here are a few results graphs. So if you’ve not seen an SEO graph before, this is what it looks like.

And you’ll have a blue line which shows the total number of clicks that show people have clicked on a link to go to your website and the total number of impressions. Impressions are how many times your website has shown up in the Google results page. So these are Google Analytics and Geoff, feel free to step in if I get anything wrong. 

Virginia (04:42.39)

So these are the SEO results.that Geoff is sharing with us today to show that he knows his stuff. So this is for IBS Clinics and the scale is quite small. So I’ve just written in the headline here. It’s from August, 2022 to October, 2023. And you can see that there is an upwards trend. So that shows that the SEO work that Geoff has been doing on this website for IBS Clinics has been working. So they’ve been getting more impressions. They’ve been showing up more in search results and they’ve been getting more people clicking on those links in those search results as a result of Geoff’s hard work.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (05:24.937)

Yeah, absolutely. And probably the most important thing to mention there is that IBS Clinics, they actually saw a threefold increase in the number of conversions that they were getting. So while it’s really important to increase traffic to the website, that’s another kind of aspect to it is getting people to actually convert on the website. So I’ve been really successful with those and several other clients as well. So yeah, just worth throwing that in there.

Virginia (05:49.774)

Amazing. Yeah. And I think it’s so important to consider the number of conversions that you get. So if you don’t know what a conversion is and you’re listening in, a conversion is when you actually get someone to do the action that you want them to do. So in medical writing or medical copywriting in particular, when we talk about getting people to take action and you need to include a call to action on your content, that’s what a conversion is. It’s when they actually do your call to action. So that could be clicking and booking an appointment if you are a healthcare clinic or that could be downloading a leaflet to find out more information or it could be going through the website to actually buy something. 

So when you are getting more clicks and more impressions, that’s great, but if it doesn’t really lead to more conversions, so people actually taking action, then you might need to go and look at other aspects of your website to check, how can you get them to convert? Maybe it’s part of the writing or you need to put a button somewhere or some kind of banner to try and attract them to take action. So you’ve done the amazing thing of getting them onto the page, but you’re not quite getting what you want out of them, which is that conversion.

So another great graph here is Rylon Clinic. So this is from October 2022 to October 2023. And again, you can see the upwards trend. And I think it’s also important to point out that on these graphs, you’ll see for the first about six months or so, there’s not much movement. And I think I’m gonna ask Geoff, what would you say the reasons are for the lines being so flat in the first few months?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (07:32.593)

Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So basically anytime you’re doing stuff with SEO, it takes time for search engines to actually pick up those changes and to then process that in the search results and then to reflect it in the search results. So you might start off writing for a website which is ranked on page two or page three of Google. No one’s going there. Once you make your changes, you’ve rewritten the content. It might take maybe a month or so before Google picks that up.They then have to re-rank you. So it’s going to take a couple of months before you start seeing any changes. So there’s always that lag time of about three months is usually the kind of minimum, with six months being a maximum. 

It doesn’t show up very well on here because of the size, because of the scale. But we were kind of doubling the traffic after two or three months. But because it’s really small, there was only like 10 people going to the website.

It doesn’t look like much once now that we’ve zoomed out and that’s kind of, it looks like a flat line, but as long as you’re seeing increases in impressions, which is the number of times that you show up in search, that’s normally a good indicator that you’re going to start seeing a bigger increase in clicks, which should then, like you said, feed through to conversions. But yeah, there’s always that lag of usually a minimum of three months before we start seeing any proper decent results.

Virginia (08:54.486)

Yeah, and I think it’s so important to kind of have that in the background when you’re working on something, because it’s that small, consistent effort that you put in to build something that is going to perform however many months later. And I think also what’s impressive is the average position as well. So you want your average position to be increasing. But sometimes if you are targeting certain words, your average position. That won’t matter so much because there’ll be normally a few pages on your website that are driving most of your traffic and your conversions. So those are the pages you want to work on the most and keep up to date all the time.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (09:36.029)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to be honest, average position as a metric is a really, really difficult thing to use because you might have one page, like you might have privacy policy, which is on page 10 of Google. And then you might rank number one for, I don’t know, immunisation, which would be amazing. But then that’s going to average it out. And it’s going to say you’ve got an average position of 50. That’s not really the case because it’s also taking those average positions are taken globally as well. 

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (10:03.629)

So maybe you rank page five here in the UK or the US, but in Norway you rank number one. So, overall it’s gonna average you out at 25, which it doesn’t really reflect. So it’s always best to try and be as specific as possible when you’re looking at those average rankings. Otherwise it’s a little bit misleading.

Virginia (10:22.218)

Yeah, and I think as people with science and healthcare backgrounds, we always try to get tied up in the data. We can get really tied up in the data, but when you’re looking at SEO, you need to really look at it objectively as well so that you’re actually taking into account what really matters. And having an SEO expert like Geoff is so helpful because then you know what you’re looking at and know what to do in order to put yourself out there in terms of marketing and what content you’re looking at you need to create or improve. 

So this is another one. So this is a lovely gradual upwards climb as well for the Ortho Joint Relief, which shows a graph between May, 2023 and November, 2023. So that’s quite a short window, but you can see a big result in terms of the impressions and number of clicks. And it’s great to see how the total clicks always trends with the impressions, which would make sense. 

And I’m gonna go to the next one. So this is the final one. So again, this is a smaller window, May, 2023 to November, 2023, and this is Oxford CBT. And the impressive thing about this one is the number of total impressions goes into the millions. So 2.23 million impressions and total clicks, 37,000. So, if you imagine getting that many clicks on your website, you. So again, just looking at the data with an expert like Geoff is always really helpful. And I’m sure all of these clinics love you for helping boost their business. 

Healthcare SEO Testimonials

Here are a few happy customers, some of their testimonials that have worked with Geoff. So this is Richard, the founder and CEO of medical startup called Healthpath. And he said, 

“Healthcare SEO’s contribution to our mission has been invaluable. We have no doubt whatsoever that getting a good standing on search engines has really propelled us to the next level. It’s been amazing seeing our rankings, leads and sales improve as a direct result of the team’s efforts. Thank you so much, Geoff”

The next one is from Martin. He’s a business owner, nutritionist and functional medicine practitioner and gut health specialist from IBS Gut Health Clinic. And he said, 

“Healthcare SEO, [which is the company owned by Geoff], have been great from day one. They are easy to contact, massively enthusiastic about the work. And there was a noticeable increase in business within weeks”

Which we have seen from the graphs, we have seen the evidence!

Virginia (13:18.634)

And then the final one is from Kirsten, and she’s a marketing manager and registered nutritional therapist from the London Clinic of Nutrition. She said, 

“Our main priorities when we started working with healthcare SEO was to increase our website traffic, and they have gone above and beyond to exceed our expectations. Not only has our website traffic increased, it has almost tripled in such a short space of time too. And we saw the graph of that.

Better still, we no longer need to rely on paid ads to generate leads and the majority of our traffic is now coming through organic search. That means their content is working and the SEO strategy is working with the content. And we know our SEO is in good hands with Geoff and his team by handing this over to a specialist that has allowed us to focus on other aspects of our in-house marketing that we didn’t have time to develop in the past. Because of this, we are seeing growth across the board.For anyone who is looking to improve their SEO and digital marketing strategy, we can’t recommend healthcare SEO enough.”

So, it’s fair to say that Geoff knows his stuff. And so I hope you really enjoy the rest of this webinar. We’re gonna answer all of your questions, definitely from an expert. We’ve seen his roster of clients and just the amazing feedback and the results that he’s generated.over a matter of months. So, Geoff, are you ready? Let’s do this, let’s do this. Okay, first question. Let’s answer your healthcare SEO questions.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (14:45.043)

I am, let’s dive in.

Virginia (14:54.634)

Questions About SEO for Healthcare

What is healthcare SEO and how do you use it in medical writing?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (15:03.957)

Okay. So SEO is search engine optimisation. So, in other words, making sure that you’re picked up in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and that essentially you’re at the top of the search results, because that’s where all the traffic goes. That’s where most people are going to see. Obviously the medical side of that is specialising in the health and medical industry. While a lot of the basics are the same in SEO across different industries, there’s a lot of nuance and there’s a big difference between different niches. I compare it to selling shoes or sneakers to, choosing what you’re going to do about your dialysis. It’s a big difference and the way that you approach it is very different. If you’re going to be selling things, you have to have a completely different strategy to if you’re trying to gain people’s trust and educate them about medical topics. 

Hopefully that’s a quick run through from a very high level.

Virginia (16:07.342)

Great. So moving on to the next one.

I am looking for tips regarding your use of AI tools for healthcare SEO. Thanks for sharing in advance.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (16:20.709)

Yeah, so AI tools is like the big exciting thing at the moment in the whole digital marketing industry, well, almost throughout the world really. I use AI to generate content myself for clients and it’s great, it takes a lot of the legwork out of it. And the way that I tend to use tools at the moment is I use chat GPT to generate most of the text.

And then I use Google Bard to actually fact check that text.

I’ve got a health background myself, so I have quite a good knowledge already, but it’s always good to run the text through the tools and see if it can reference other sources of information just to give you that kind of authority. 

Now for yourselves as healthcare writers, you’ll already have a lot of that knowledge and that’s where you can differentiate yourself from somebody that’s just using tools by using your own knowledge, your own experience and putting that into articles. So I think from a health writer point of view, I think that’s definitely something that writers need to concentrate on, is making sure that they are experts in the field and that they can bring information and knowledge that the tools can’t. I think that’s very, very important. What do you think, Virginia?

Virginia (17:47.05)

Yeah, I agree. I definitely think that sometimes when you rely too much on AI tools to do the writing for you, your content can end up sounding like everyone else’s because everyone else is doing it too. I think also the really important thing to note is that Google really values your experience and expertise as part of EEAT. So EEAT is expertise and experience and authority and trust. And the way to build EAT is to make sure that you have something unique in there that is a real story, a real case study, and also having experts to review your work and having that multiple kind of person input to create a piece of content is gonna become more and more important. 

I think gone are the days where you can just write something and post it and it’s by you. You need to have other people kind of endorse your content and I think in a way that’s kind of what backlinks are. There are people endorsing your content but having multiple authors is one way for you to stand out so even if you are writing something you would want to contact someone who may know more than you about that topic or speak to a patient, I would be happy to contribute their story or something like that. So trying to, ironically, make the AI content that you generate more human will help you in the long run and think of it as more of a collaboration rather than trying to just speed up the process. 

I think what I would like to see from AI is actually better content. So if we’re cutting out that initial first draft where, you have blank page syndrome or blank pageitis where you’re just like, “I don’t know where to start”. Then you actually have AI get rid of that and can get you going faster and then thinking about really enhancing your content. So I’m excited that content in future will hopefully be more human, but then also higher quality because we’re cutting out all of the hard steps at the beginning.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (20:08.605)

Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. And I think it’s really interesting actually that I think there’s going to be a point where everything becomes homogenised. Everyone’s using AI and it’s going to be, everything’s going to look exactly the same. And I think that Google is going to increasingly value people talking about giving their own opinions, especially from a professional or somebody that is recognized by Google as having a profile and a knowledge bank from which to draw.

Virginia (20:40.554)

Yeah, and I think we’re seeing that already with YouTube Health, their initiative too. I’m sure you see a lot about that, with them trying to get more healthcare experts to actually talk about their specialist topics, because they could talk about it the best, because that’s what they do. They live it and breathe it every day, and they have real case studies with patients. And when it comes to kind of the patient information forum with PIF, our point of view tends to be, if you are going to use patient case studies and stories, you need to think about consent as well, because the last thing you want is to discover that someone’s written up your case study and shared it without your consent and they can identify you from it. And that’s just the worst case scenario we want to avoid. 

So having those content standards in place, like PIF and the NHS and YouTube Health all collaborated to make these content standards. 

So if you want to get that badge on your YouTube videos, you need to think about the SEO around that as well, because YouTube is owned by Google and it’s a search engine as well. So try to think about maybe integrating your YouTube channel into your website pages as well to add rich media, boost the SEO, and provide a more interactive experience for your reader.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (22:03.125)

Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Virginia (22:07.618)

Cool. 

How to stay updated with changing trends

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (22:13.809)

Yeah, this is a really great question.Write the SEO landscape is changing all the time, constantly  from one month to the next. We just had three big core updates they’re called. So that’s where Google goes and changes multiple parts of its algorithm. They do little changes every day, but usually around two times a year, they’ll do a big update, which incorporates all the little changes. Normally that’s two times a year. We just had three big algorithm updates in the last. two or three months. So yeah, it’s a constantly moving target. 

The best way to stay updated on those changes are to follow a website. There’s one website that I use called the SEO Herald, and it compiles all the news from different SEO sources, and they do that on a daily basis. So that’s where I always dip into on a daily basis to kind of stay updated on that.

You can also stay updated through following people on Twitter. Barry Schwartz is a great one to follow. Glenn Gabe is another one. Yeah, they’ll all give you tips and advice on what’s going on. But yeah, the best thing is to read up on news articles. Another one is Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal. They’re both very good as well. But probably the best thing to do if you want to really stay updated on changing trends is to launch your own website on a topic that you’re interested in and just see how it performs and see what happens. Just throw some pages together, wait for them to show up in Google and then see what tweaks you think might change or help or just things that you want to try.

This is the trouble in the SEO industry, there’s lots of different opinions and different people will tell you different things. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t. Sometimes it will be information which is out of date. So the very best way to stay up to date is to have your own website that you can tinker around with and mess about with and it doesn’t matter. Nothing happens. You don’t lose clients, you don’t lose money if it all goes completely south. So yeah, definitely having your own website and watching the changes and the trends within that is probably the most practical way of doing it.

Virginia (24:35.67)

Yeah, and I think also if in doubt hire Geoff. Shameless plug.

I think, if I think Geoff also demonstrates his expertise there because he’s keeping up with all of these different sources. And so it’s really important to get your information from multiple sources and see if they are saying the same thing in the same way that you would with any medical piece of content that you create, if you want to stay up to date with changing trends in SEO, then make sure you have multiple sources and see what they’re saying. 

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (25:12.217)

Exactly. A lot of the time you’ll ask people a question in SEO. One person will say yes, do it. Another person will say no, don’t do it. And then the third person will say, well, you can do it, but it’s probably not a good idea. So it’s really, really difficult to try and pin people down on SEO and everyone has different ways of doing it. So, yeah, finding out for yourself is probably the best way after (obviously) hiring me!

Virginia (25:39.582)

Exactly. And I think also if you have someone that is keeping up to date with the trends, they’re going to know that definitely you can’t just do SEO in two or three months, it’s a long game. You have to constantly update your pages, have your presence online. And that’s why there’s so much demand for content now. And it’s because whoever has the best content really does win.

And there’s only so much you could do to create great content. And if you’re following that plan, then it’s more likely to work. So don’t let changing trends scare you. If you’re doing great work and you’re creating great, great content then you’re more likely to create something that will actually stand the test of time. And then you go back and update it because if there’s one thing that SEO loves, it’s you updating your content because SEO is always updating too.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (26:41.193)

Very true. And I think another thing that’s worth mentioning is that although there are a lot of changes and there’s a lot of trends and different things, and Google’s always trying to bring in new things. You can find yourself on a bit of a hamster wheel, trying to keep up with what they’re saying is best and what they’re trying out and all of this stuff. But really SEO comes down to three, maybe four basic things, which is how well optimised your pages are, your content marketing (blog posts or white papers, articles), backlinks (that’s other websites that then link through to your website) and user experience, which kind of ties all of those together. Like how do people actually interact with your website? Do they come to your website and it’s loads of adverts and it’s horrible, horrible experience and leave? Because if they do, then chances are you’re not going to rank particularly well. Those kinds of elements have been the same for the last 10, 15 years or so and they probably won’t change any time soon. So getting those fundamentals down is really, really important. I would say to any writers out there that want to keep up with the trends, by all means do it, but just make sure those foundations are in place first so you’re not wasting your time.

Virginia (27:58.338)

Yeah, that’s great. I like that. Make sure you’re consistent at what you’re creating, but don’t worry too much about the trends is a consensus. 

How do we know we have used enough SEO? Is there anything as too much SEO?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (28:18.309)

This is a really interesting question. It’s a good question. So you want to use enough SEO that it gets you to the top of search or it gets you near the top. There is such a thing as too much SEO. So you can over-optimise your sites sometimes. If you put in it, like say somebody wants to rank for, “vaccination for COVID”, “COVID vaccination”, okay, really difficult thing to rank for. If you try and put “COVID vaccination” on your page a million times, so it’s every other word, then it’s not going to rank, it’s not going to do well because you’ve over-optimised it. 

It’s exactly the same with backlinks as well. If you have thousands or millions of backlinks that aren’t relevant, don’t contribute to your website overall, again, that can actually have a negative effect on your website. So you need to be quite careful with those things. In terms of using enough SEO, you want to use as much as it takes to get to the top of the search results. 

You only need to be doing more SEO than your competitors. You don’t have to be doing more SEO than the rest of the world. Most people only have maybe 10 competing sites. So as long as you’re above them, you’re fine. So yeah, that’s my kind of roundabout answer on that one. Does that cover it, do you think?

Virginia (30:10.511)

I think that covers it. I would say maybe it’s worth a mention of keyword stuffing, where you just use that word way too much and it’s like not doing anything good for you. So avoid, as Geoff said, putting on that keyword way too much and especially if it just doesn’t make sense in the content. So if you’re mentioning the keyword every two or three words, it doesn’t make sense.

Try to mention it maybe once every paragraph in a natural way. So when people say, put the keywords in naturally, it’s because you want it to sound conversational, like someone would actually want to read your content rather than just writing for the search engine, write for a human. Because like Geoff said, if they have a good user experience, which means they actually read your article and then they go and click on something, then that means your page is performing well, regardless of if it ranks or not. It means that whoever you’ve got to click on your link and go to your page, they’ve had a good experience reading it. And that’s going to help it rank anyway. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind and don’t get too caught up on the technical side.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (31:25.673)

Yeah, I think as well, you mentioned keyword cannibalisation. One of the things that I always do with clients is to say, okay, what keywords do we want to rank for? And then make sure that you have, for every keyword that you want to rank for, you have a page targeting that particular keyword. That way you don’t get those cannibalisation issues where Google can’t decide which of your pages to rank for a particular term. You wanna make it very clear, rank this page for this term, rank this page for that term.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (31:52.765)

And I think the quickest way to get an indication of how many times you should use a particular keyword is to look at what’s already ranking, look at the first page of Google when you type in that particular keyword and just scan through the first maybe five results. Do control and F on a, on a on a Windows machine type in the word and see how many times they’ve actually used it. And then that’ll give you an idea. There’s tools out there that will do that for you, but that’s a very low tech way of getting an idea of how many times you should actually use that word. So there’s a little tip there for anyone that wants to try it.

Virginia (32:28.25)

Yeah, yeah, I definitely have done that in the past and use tools that do that for you. And it’s so helpful to know that you might, you might only need to mention the word 10 times, it’s, it’s got more information on there about other things. So you don’t need to get too stressed about a single word sometimes.

Virginia (32:53.438)

Five Big Questions About Healthcare SEO

There are five bullet points here:

How to do SEO for websites, how to analyse websites, how to improve websites, how to do an SEO audit. That’s an impossible question to answer in two minutes, but Geoff can condense it for all of the knowledge that he has.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (33:29.805)

Thank you, I will try! 

This is a big, big question. 

I would say the best way to get started is to get your own website, write about something that you’re interested in or passionate about, and just see what happens, and then you can tweak it, you can burn it all to the ground, and it doesn’t matter. No one’s going to die, no one’s going to lose any money, and it’ll be fine.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (34:08.021)

That’s always the best way is to get your hands dirty and actually get started doing it. That’s how I started pretty much. I’d set up an affiliate website. I think it made about $9 in the first six months. So it wasn’t a raging success, but that’s the best way to do it and to learn on the job almost. 

How to do SEO for websites; There’s so much information out there and there’s so much knowledge and some of it gets very, very technical. But it all comes back to those foundations that we mentioned earlier. So optimising the pages that you have, creating new content on a regular basis, getting links from other sites to point to your website and user experience. Cause nobody wants to visit a horrible looking website that takes a million years to load. And is it agonising to try and deal with. 

Between those four things, you’ve pretty much got it. There’s lots, lots more that you can dive into each one of those four things, and we could spend the rest of the afternoon talking about each of those. But that’s your starting or your jumping off points. 

Analysing the websites, there’s lots of different ways that you can analyse the website. And again, if you bring it back to those four items, each of those you can analyse on their own. If you’re getting started, I would say to use a simple tool, maybe even a free tool, something like Ubersuggest is very good. That will give you some ideas on keyword rankings and backlinks. I think it’s free. It used to be free. I’m not sure if it still is now. 

Virginia (35:55.498)

Yeah, it’s free. I think you get three free searches a day or something like that.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (36:01.118)

Okay, we make the most of those searches. Or I’ll just open loads of accounts with them, I don’t know. I didn’t say that. So yeah, so Ubersuggest is very good if you’re just learning, getting started. And then if you are progressing a bit more and you want to get more into it and you’re enjoying SEO, you want to find out more about it, then Ahrefs and SEMrush are the two kind of big SEO softwares that most professional SEOs use. They start from about, I think it’s $70 to $150, somewhere in that sort of ballpark for those ones. And they will do, you can get all your analysis that you need from those two tools. If you need to do more in-depth analysis after that, then you’re looking at very specific tools like Screaming Frog, which is a fantastic name for a tool, Lightbulb, or other ones. And that’s where you start getting into the more technical really, really nerdy kind of side of SEO. 

That’s how you analyse, using tools to analyse a website is one way of doing it. Or you can analyse it yourself, like we said, very low tech methods by looking at what your competitor’s doing, where are you in comparison to that? So if you take your keyword that you want to rank for, put it into the search engine and just see what they’re doing versus what you’re doing. That’s  the most low tech way that you can analyse a website.

How to improve the websites? Again, there’s lots of different ways to skin a cat and depending on your client or yourself, what you’re trying to rank for is going to dictate a little bit how you go about improving the website, but always the starting point for me personally, I’ve found it’s that having one target keyword for each page and then going through those four things that we mentioned; so on page optimization, content marketing, link building and user experience. 

Particularly from an SEO point of view, probably the on-page optimisation and the link building, the two major ones out of those. As long as you do those, as long as you’ve got those foundations in place, then that will (nine times out of ten) improve your website traffic. 

How to do an SEO audit? All of the above. Again, you can do it using tools. There’s some tools out there that will do an audit for you from a very high level or you can just do it yourself manually. I think that kind of covers all five points.

Virginia (38:36.91)

I think that was the record in five minutes. So well done. So it all goes back to the same principles. So I feel like the following questions have already been, some of them have already been answered, but we’ll do some recaps.

Virginia (38:55.17)

What should be the keyword density in a 400 words health article?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (39:03.465)

This is a another really interesting one. Google are on the record all the time as saying that keyword density isn’t a thing. It doesn’t matter because they don’t want people trying to stick to an arbitrary number or an arbitrary rule. And they’re right in that insofar as it’s always gonna be different. Whatever keyword you’re trying to rank for, it’s gonna be different. The top results might have keyword density of maybe 5% or it might be 10% or it might be 4%. So just saying “this is what it should be”, it doesn’t really work like that. 

There’s some sites that will have a keyword density of a really high amount, like 20%, something like that. I think once it gets up to about 30 or 40%, it stops making any sense at all and just looks like keyword stuffing and doesn’t seem natural. 

So what should the keyword density be in a 400 word health article? The answer to that is the age old, “it depends”. I wouldn’t go above 5% as a general rule of thumb. Again, you really need to look at what your competitors are doing and see what is ranking already, but it’s an interesting question because, it’s, it’s kind of technical regarding keyword density. 

Virginia (40:31.134)

Yeah, great. So doing some quick math there. So 10% would be 40 words and 5% would be 20 words, if you want a straight answer. Geoff recommends 5%, 20 words max.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (40:46.129)

I mean, to be honest, actually, a 400 word health article is very, very short and I would be quite surprised if you could rank for a 400 word page. I mean, I’m sure you could. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but, generally speaking with health articles, unless it’s a very, very specific topic, you would probably need to have more content than 400 words.

Virginia (41:12.138)

Yeah, I would agree. I would say that especially if it’s health, there’s a lot to consider. And that’s why health articles or health content tends to be quite long. And the better content tends to be the longer content because it tends to try and cover all bases as much as possible. And I recently created a video on YouTube about clove oil, which ended up being 21 minutes long. And I don’t think anyone’s going to beat that for a while because I really did my SEO research and I tried to cover every possible question that people had about clove oil, which is just something that’s really cheap and cheerful. I was trying to fill the content gap because there wasn’t much information from a medical point of view and there was some real there was a lot of misinformation, let’s put it that way.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (42:08.705)

That’s exactly the thing. It comes down a lot to keyword research. When you find those gaps, then you don’t really have to worry so much about keyword density because you know that there’s people out there asking these things and that there’s a lack of information really. So then you fill that gap and everything else kind of goes out the window at that point, because it’s like.

you’re selling water in a desert and it becomes a lot, lot easier.

Virginia (42:36.554)

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Be the water in the desert. There you go. That’s your mantra for SEO. So any piece of content that just doesn’t have enough content is known as thin content. And you want to try and avoid thin content as much as possible for SEO.

How likely will natural medical writing rank for organic healthcare SEO and will the trend change in future? 

 think we’ve kind of answered this one saying that natural medical writing and speaking from human experience is never gonna go out of fashion.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (43:24.701)

I think that there’s a lot of adoption of AI at the moment and that Google isn’t punishing that yet, but it will come to a point where where people say “all of these results look the same”. They’re all saying the same thing or it’s all outdated content or it’s all misinformation and that’s when it will change and Google will say, we need.to update our algorithms so that it’s more unique. We want to see more uniqueness in the search results. 

That might already be beginning, but we’re not quite there yet. So how likely natural medical writing can rank for organic SEO? Very likely at the moment, very likely. Will that change in the future? I think that actually it’s gonna be more likely in the future as more and more people take shortcuts with AI.

Virginia (44:23.454)

Yeah, and I think that’s one of the concerns that people have about AI is that if everyone is using AI to create the same content and AI is out of date, then that is a problem in general. So we want to avoid that kind of situation with health information. And I think it does take some time for information to spread, even if it’s on the internet for all the different top organisations to have the same information and then agree on it. That takes some time. And if you’re relying heavily on AI to create your content, then your content will only be as up to date as the AI is. So it’s important to use more than one source.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (45:15.179)

Yeah. And I think having your own data as well to rely on is a massive thing. If you can pull from data that you’ve collected or data that you’ve seen, and you can bring that original kind of research, I think that’s massive. I think it’s going to probably become bigger as we go forward.

Virginia (45:32.427)

Cool, so next question is what is on page SEO?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (45:38.649)

Yeah, so on-page SEO is optimising the pages that belong to your website. That’s as opposed to off-page SEO, where you try and get links from other people’s website to your website. And on-page SEO, there’s things that are more important than others. So the title is very important and that’s what actually shows in the search results. The meta description is also important. That’s the little description that shows underneath the title in the search results. The URL, so the actual website address, that can help as well with rankings. So it’s important to think about, do you have your keyword in that URL? 

Headings are very, very important. So you have what’s called a H1 and that indicates to Google what the topic is all about. If that matches your title Google sees that as a good thing because it’s like, okay, so somebody clicked on this, hoping to read about arthritis, they land on the webpage and the title of the article, as soon as they land on the webpage is helpful solutions for arthritis. So it’s congruent.

So those are the kind of the main key areas that you want to optimize your pages for. And to be honest, if you do that, that’s like 80% of your on page SEO right there. It’s probably the best place to start if you’re optimising a website because it’s all within your own control.

Virginia (47:12.99)

Yeah. And I think it’s so true that, your cover page on the Google search results is your meta title and your meta description, because that’s all people have to go by before they actually click on it and then go to your page. And then your page actually has to match the description that you’ve given it. And I think when it doesn’t, that’s known as clickbait, because it’s like you’re trying to trick someone to find some information, but actually when they go to your page, it’s completely different information and that’s bad user experience and Google will take your page down the rankings if you do that. And I’m sure you’ve experienced that even with videos or with pictures where you’ve clicked on something as the preview and then it doesn’t match up to what you thought you were going to see.

And that happens on YouTube as well, where people say, here’s how to become a millionaire in two days, and then you click on it. Reality is you can’t unless you win the lottery, it’s just, it’s, it’s one of those things where you have to be really honest with your content and try not to sensationalise it or over exaggerate. And I think there’s a lot of drama with content nowadays where people are trying to say, these are the five best ways to cure something which might not even be curable. So don’t be that writer, be honest and actually give people the information that they’re looking for and high quality information that’s accessible.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (48:43.701)

Yeah, and I think it’s an interesting point as well that you make about using terms like cure, for example. Often those are types of searches that people make very frequently, is how do I cure xyz? And there’s nothing, I don’t know, maybe you might disagree with me here, but I think there’s nothing wrong with having a title that says how to cure xyz and why it may not be that easy or ways to alleviate it, something like that.

People are prepared for the fact that you’re not going to cure it on the web page. Then you can explain that to them. I always try and look at it through that lens of like, okay, maybe that’s what somebody is searching for. We can’t give them a direct answer to that, but we can explain the rationale behind it and maybe what would be a better thing to search for. Just really digging into that, I think, is quite important. It’s quite helpful, because a lot of people will just avoid it altogether. But I think it’s better to rank for something like that and then to explain to people, look, we can’t, no one can cure it, but here’s what can be done to help with it instead.

Virginia (50:10.25)

Yeah, I think it’s so important. I completely agree. And I like the way that you phrase that because I use that as a SEO tactic as well, when somebody’s looking for a cure of something and there isn’t really one, but you can ask the question back to them. So instead of how to cure, you can type it as, can you cure and then answer that question, because at least it’s still related to their original search term. Then you can give them an honest answer. which is probably along the lines of “not right now, we can’t cure it but that doesn’t mean that we’ll never be able to cure it. It’s just that we haven’t done the right science or research”. So everything is, proven until disproven, if you want to be a scientist about it. I think it’s the same with people searching for things, because people want answers. That’s what gets them on Google

Virginia (51:09.134)

My mum was struggling with her blood pressure medication and she was looking for answers. She ended up reading some Spanish research about it. And I said, Mum, how is this related to you? She, I don’t know what she clicked through to get to that page, but she was clearly looking for something and trying to find it. And I’m a healthcare professional, I’m a pharmacist. You know, the fact that she still went through that search journey, and then I had to bring up with her, it goes to show that people are just really looking for answers. So be that person that gives them the answer that they’re looking for, even if it’s not a direct response to their original search.

Virginia (51:52.974)

Cool, so next question is, 

What tools or software can I use to help with SEO in my writing and how much do they cost?

I feel like you answered this previously, but let’s do a recap.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (52:04.507)

I like how much they cost. I like the addition of that. That’s really good. There’s loads of tools and the tools to help you with SEO and content writing have really exploded over recent years. The one that I tend to use most is a tool called Page Optimizer Pro. It’s not that well known out of all of them, but it’s very, very good. It will tell you where you are, where your website is in comparison to the competition. Page Optimizer Pro isn’t particularly expensive either. It’s around, I think about $45 a month thereabouts. It’s not hugely expensive. For me, it’s well worth it. And it would probably be for somebody who’s relying on SEO. Beyond that, there’s a much more technical one, which is called Cora, which goes into a lot more detail, but I would only really recommend that if you’re really into SEO, you really need to do it because that gets very technical. Frase is another one, that’s quite expensive, but that does a very similar thing to Page Optimizer Pro. I mean they all have pros and cons. There’s also Surfer SEO I think it’s called.

Virginia (53:20.286)

Yeah, Surfer SEO, yeah, I’ve heard of that one.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (53:22.725)

I think that’s probably the most popular one, which is why I kind of steer away from it, because I don’t want to be doing exactly the same as everybody else. I don’t know how much that costs. I know they released an AI aspect to it, which I think was quite expensive, but I think those are probably the main ones. It’s probably a ton out there that I’m forgetting that are also very, very good. But yeah, I think those are the main four or five.

Virginia (53:50.302)

Yeah, I’ve heard of Surfer SEO. I have the plugin as well, because I was like, let’s try it out. The freebies are actually quite good. But if you want to do anything with AI, you have to pay. And I will say that it’s pretty good, but it takes a lot of editing. But I think anything you generate with AI is going to take a lot of editing anyway. And I’ve also used Clearscope as well, which is quite an easy one to use. It gives you like a page grade to give you your potential ranking if you release the page.

Virginia (54:19.862)

And yeah, I’ve heard of Fraser of SEO, I haven’t used it. But yeah, I will definitely check out the other ones that you’ve mentioned. But the other thing is that also, if you’ve built an audience as a business already and you’re writing something, then you should really be getting data about the type of content your audience wants directly from your audience. And that will be more worth it than trying to use an SEO tool where people are trying to rank for something and they may not necessarily have an audience. So they’re trying to create one through using tools to create that content that they think their audience is looking for. So if you have an audience, always use that to your advantage. 

I think you’ve kind of proven that with this webinar where we’ve asked you what questions do you want and we’re making this especially for you and you’re gonna watch it because we’re answering questions that you’ve particularly asked us. So we haven’t really done.any research to try and see if your question is worth answering. We’re answering it because you asked us and that’s what made for audience content is.

In terms of cost there are free tools. So Ubersuggest is a good free tool. They recently bought Answer The Public as well, which is a nice free one. It doesn’t tell you any kind of analytics unless you pay for it but Neil Patel is the guy who’s got this YouTube channel. He’s always talking about SEO and social media marketing all the time. So check him out if you’re curious. It depends on your budget, I think. 

How much do they cost? Well, you can, you can shell out loads of money but it depends on your goals and depends on your budget as well. So if you get a lot out of free stuff, then get as much as you can out of the free stuff before you start paying for it because I think you can spend a lot of money and not really need all of those features of those tools. So just kind of keep more money in your pocket.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (56:30.569)

Yeah, I think you’re right. I think certainly for keyword research, there is an argument to be had about using tools. But if you have an audience exactly like you said, and you know your audience well and you know what things they’re searching for. Sometimes your best tool can be something like Google Search Console, which will actually show you the terms that you ranked for. Sometimes those won’t be things that you’ve targeted at all. Those will be things that you say “Oh, people are searching for this, I didn’t even realise”. Or, “oh, that’s kind of related to this article, but not directly so maybe we should write a different article about that”. Then you can really start expanding and broadening out from there.otherwise you’ll be limited by the tools that only have so much data.

Virginia (57:18.262)

Yeah. And I think also one of the other things that I learned over the past year, which I’d never done before is I ran an ad and I found a whole bunch of keywords that people were searching that matched up with the ad. I was like, wow, I didn’t even think people were searching for that, but that can, if you just spend a tiny amount of money on just an ad for maybe a month or two, you will get all the keywords and more than you ever need.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (57:46.061)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Google are kind of, they’re always sneaky in that sometimes you have to pay for ads to get that data, just like you say. They don’t give that information away for free. And sometimes the tools can be way, way out. The tools will tell you, “oh, nobody searches for this particular term”. And then when you actually write an article about it, it’s shows you’ve got 3000 visitors from that one term that the tools said nobody searches for.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (58:14.977)

So you always have to take tools with a pinch of salt for sure. If you’ve got first person, original data from your audience that you can use then that that is much better.

Virginia (58:26.154)

Yeah, and I think also, like Geoff just said, tools are only gonna give you the data that they have up to a certain date, depending on how much you pay. So, that data can go out of date really quickly. So unless you act on that keyword and that content creation really quickly, then it’s not gonna be worth it. So that’s why, take one piece of content at a time, unless. you have a team of people who can create lots of content to try and rank the website quickly, which I’ve done as part of a medical communications agency, when we were launching as the online doctor, they wanted a lot of content in a short space of time, high quality content that had the opportunity to rank. And we did that and we ranked a lot of the pages very high up in Google, which was the goal. And there’s no way you could do that by yourself unless you just don’t eat or sleep. So think about the goal and then how much time and your team as well on top of tools.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (59:35.841)

Another thing to mention as well is actually seasonality too, because a lot of tools will show you, common coughs and colds and things like that, it’ll average out over the year and all of a sudden it looks like, well, that’s not a very good thing to go after. It’s like, yes, that’s a massive thing to go after, but only because it’s searched at this time of the year and not in the middle of summer. So tools can be very misleading. So you really need to read between the lines with them a little bit and ask questions of the data like you said.

Virginia (01:00:10.118)

Yeah, that’s such a good point. And they even told us that in the YouTube Health course that I recently finished, and the YouTube Health Accelerator, and they said, try and predict what the future trends will be based on previous trends from previous years, because there’s always going to be coughs and colds around winter. So if you start creating that content in summer and then release it just before winter, you’ve got more chance of people actually searching for it and looking for it and watching that content or reading that content. So, a lot of people prepare for Christmas in summer, because you can’t just start creating Christmas stuff at Christmas, it’s too much work. And it’s very competitive as well. So everybody wants to sell cold medicines at the same time. Everyone wants to sell hayfever medicines or travel health kits or something like that at the same time.

And so you do have to do a lot of things in advance if you want to target those kind of seasonal things. So thank you for bringing that up, Geoff. Really, really important point with seasonality. 

So next question. 

How do you optimize your platform for discoverability or how do you optimise pages? I feel like it’s the it’s a fabulous four things again.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:01:32.429)

Yeah, it is, its our fab four again. I think that how to optimise pages, we kind of touched on that before, so titles, headings, the URL, obviously having the keyword within the content helps, which we discussed a little bit in keyword density. Yeah, those are kind of the main things, so I think that’s a pretty well-rounded answer there.

Virginia (01:02:00.142)

Yeah, do all the things we said before, basically.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:02:03.402)

Yes.

Virginia (01:02:08.034)

So this is quite an interesting question. 

When to start with healthcare SEO and a good workflow for incorporating SEO, depending on where you are in the journey. 

So for example, if I am about to set up a website, how do I work with SEO? In contrast to if I already have a website, but want to start with SEO, would you use a different approach? So if you have an existing website and you wanna start doing SEO things, or if you’re going to have a brand new website and you want to start doing SEO things, would you do things differently?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:02:44.981)

Yes and no. If you are building a website then you want to have SEO in mind from the start. Again you want to decide what are the key things that you want to go after and what are the keywords that go with those key things that you want to go after and then make sure that you have a page for each of those keywords. That’s very important. 

Now I see it quite often where companies will say “We’ve built our website over the last year and we’re just about ready to launch. It’s launching next week. So can we get it optimised?” The answer is like, “Well…. it’s not quite as easy as that”(!) You’re not going to like the answer because you have to go back to them. You have to say, well, that isn’t going to work for SEO and this section needs to be completely redone for SEO. So yeah, SEO is really like the foundations that you can build on rather than the curtains and the drapes that you put on at the end, and I think it’s very important that companies know that when they’re having websites built. You need to consider it as early as possible, but if you’ve already got a website, you can definitely still optimise it. But you need to go through that same approach of saying what is it that we want to rank for? What is it that drives engagement or conversions or revenue or whatever it might be that you’re website is aiming to do and then targeting the pages or assigning keywords to those particular pages. And so I think that answers the question.

Virginia (01:04:21.974)

Yeah, you can’t do it backwards. Basically. Yeah, yeah.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:04:26.693)

Yeah, you can’t un-bake a cake. You do have the advantage with an existing website that you’ve already got data to work with. You can already see what pages are ranking or what pages are perhaps near to ranking on page one, maybe they’re on page two. So you can think, okay, well, if we put a little bit of content on that page or we get some links to that page or we optimise that page, we can get that up to page one. That’s fantastic and that’s really useful. 

Obviously you don’t have that same advantage with brand new site. So yeah, you can do SEO at both stages. It’s better to do it as early as possible and try and avoid as far as possible just leaving it till the last week and then going “SEO it” and it’s done. Because it’ll probably be more complicated than that.

Virginia (01:05:21.45)

Yeah. And I think it’s so important to think about search intent where you have to think about what are you actually targeting in terms of; does the person who is searching, are they looking for something to buy or are they looking for instructions or are they looking for something to compare? 

I think, there’s navigational, commercial and all of those different types of search intent. It’s important to think about that structure when you are creating new content for an existing website or to create a new website. And you want your pages to flow as well. So if you create a website and just put loads of random content on it and it doesn’t really make sense, it doesn’t really connect together, it’s going to look really disorganised. Google is going to think it’s just not great. People won’t have a great user experience. So it’s not going to rank. You’re not giving yourself a good chance to rank your website. 

So if you’re starting from the beginning, you need to have a plan before you even write any content. I think that’s why I said, can’t really do it backwards. But like Geoff said, the advantage is that at least you’ll have created something on Google, it would have got some data. So you can go and look at that data and then just tweak it to try and get it to rank. Then that might mean removing some content sometimes, which sounds painful and it is. So you’ll feel a bit, hard done by if you have to take away content that you might’ve spent a lot of time on that isn’t really gonna do anything for your website. You want your website to be quite comprehensive so that someone will be satisfied when they use it.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:07:23.925)

Yeah, for sure. And I think that’s another very good point is regarding user intent. And I try and map it out first. So you say, this page is going to be bottom of the funnel. So where we want people to make a conversion, this page is targeting middle of funnel where people are comparing their different choices. And this is top funnel where people are, searching for a particular pain point that they have, or problem that they’re trying to solve. If you can map all of that out in advance, then that’s a really useful thing to do because then you can almost map their journey. Say you want them to go from this page to that page to that page and setting up even setting up your website in that way sends Google a very strong signal that you know these pages are all interrelated they interlink to each other.

So it’s not just that you’re selling coughs and cold medicine, it’s that you’ve got all this other content about coughs and colds and winter illnesses. That’s funneling people through to your sales pages essentially. The more you can do that the better.

Virginia (01:08:34.518)

Yeah, the more you can map out a journey and actually make your website make sense to someone who’s on it. And so they can find all the things that they could be looking for around that intent that they have. 

So, maybe one user’s journey is that they find you on the Google search results page, or they see a social media post about cough and cold symptoms that you might have and then they click on that, they go to your website, they have a read about more symptoms and they identify, “oh, I have a dry cough, maybe I wanna buy this medicine”. I’m not sure if I trust this website, let me go have a look at their about page and let me see if they have any real doctors on their team. That’s the expertise and trust that you’re building an authority. Then you wanna go to actually maybe the product page. So you’re actually gonna decide to buy something. 

If Google can track that kind of journey then it will see that your website is giving someone a good user experience and they’ve gone around your website to see that they can trust you and then they’ve actually decided to make a purchase at the end at the bottom of the funnel. That’s just an example if you’ve not heard of what a funnel is and again touching on conversions when they actually take action. So buying something is a conversion. So yeah, thank you for that, Geoff. That was a really great explanation of why you need to think about the journey of the person who’s using your website.

Virginia (01:10:12.898)

what are some tools to do initial keywords research for healthcare SEO?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:10:24.563)

Yeah, so, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, SEMrush, they’re kind of the main ones, I would say Answer the Public is very good for getting those kind of long-tail keywords, we call them, so very, very specific questions that people have. Or even if you don’t have any budget at all. Just type in the sort of keywords that you want to write for, and see if there’s the people also ask section in the search results because a lot of the time frequently asked questions will show up there. You can use that as a completely free keyword research tool and just start writing stuff on that. Another thing that you can do for absolutely free is to type in the keyword and then just hit the letter A, and it will auto complete, it will show you all the auto complete options. So you say, dry cough and the letter A; dry cough at home, dry cough at school, dry cough, whatever, whatever. You write these down and then before you know it you go through the whole alphabet and you’ve got however many hundreds of keywords that you can write and that’s absolutely free research that you’ve done there. And the tools don’t necessarily reflect that research either. So that can be a very useful tactic for getting started too.

Virginia (01:11:39.946)

Yeah. And I think just one thing to add is I know we’ve been here for like an hour, but for keywords, it doesn’t have to be just one word. So when we say keyword, we actually mean either one word or a phrase. So when we say long tail keyword, we actually mean more than one word. So a keyword could be insomnia and the long tail keyword could be what treatment.is available for insomnia. So a keyword can be a single word or a phrase just to clarify, add that in there. Yeah, don’t worry. And in contrast, short tail keyword just means fewer words. So long tail, we’re talking four or five or more words, possibly short tail would be, even a single word or a couple of words.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:12:18.057)

That’s really good. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, thank you for explaining that. That’s a really good point.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:12:35.241)

Yeah, and the shorter your keyphrase or your keywords, the less words that are contained within that, usually the harder it is to rank for. Some of the hardest things to rank for are acronyms or just three letter abbreviations and things that are usually very hard to rank for. So if you’re starting out, if it’s a new website, it’s usually best to go after those longer tail, very specific search phrases that people use to search.

Virginia (01:13:03.306)

Yeah, because I think the way people search sometimes, especially now, I think they are using longer phrases because there’s more content on the internet. So people are more likely to search a longer keyword. And if you type something in like WHO on Google, do you mean the World Health Organization or do you mean who? Or doctor who?.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:13:26.389)

Virginia (01:13:30.754)

Who knows? Nobody knows. Google is going to try and serve you something, but you’re going to go back to the search bar, and you’re going to start adding extra words. So that’s why I think longer keywords are, again, also easier to target.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:13:44.233)

Actually Google’s getting much, much better with its machine learning algorithms are getting much better at identifying those longer phrases. It used to be before that it would get quite confused by that, but with the new AI revolution that’s going on it can process much more and much, much longer to have more specific keywords, which probably gives us more opportunities as SEOs and as health writers to rank for things that are very specific to people. So, easier to get started in a sense.

Virginia (01:14:17.826)

Well, that’s good. So, and I think also the fact that Google has its own AI, it’s, it’s barred, right? B A R D that they’re probably training that on what people are searching. So they’re almost cornering the little search market with their own AI, but how much access to the data will we have? Not sure yet. So I think that’s still, that’s, that’s the big question, how much are they going to, how helpful will it be?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:14:46.269)

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think for Google, they’re actually building their generative AI, which we don’t have here in the UK, it’s available in the US now, which combines, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you have featured snippets, which appear at the top of search results, and they give like a little explanation. They’re usually pulled directly from a website.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:15:07.985)

Now what Google’s testing at the moment in the States, and it’s starting to expand it to other countries, is generative AI, where they pull lots of different excerpts from different websites and put it all together in one AI answer. There’s a lot of questions from the SEO industry around how is this going to work? Are people going to click through to websites? How’s it going to be attributed to different websites? I think in the healthcare space, we’re very lucky because I think that it’s one space where Google will use this technology last. So we’ll be able to learn from everybody else simply because they don’t wanna mess it up and start giving people bad health advice. But it’s definitely something to watch over the next year or two because that’ll be the next big thing really going back to the long tail keyword research sort of stuff is that there’s some big changes on the way.

Virginia (01:16:03.558)

Interesting. And I think also for our own reassurance, it’s a good thing that they test stuff out in a very small population before they expand it worldwide, because it means that they get to go through those teething problems and fix them. And then it’s not to say that they’ll fix every single problem possible, but when you expand…

you get more problems. So at least try and solve as many as you can first and then expand it out and then you’ve got fewer problems collectively I think. So it’s going to be really interesting to see that. So thank you for sharing that. I didn’t know that. That is quite interesting.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:16:45.429)

Yeah, it’s one to watch for sure.

Virginia (01:16:45.866)

So next question is;

Would you recommend to always hire or collaborate with an SEO expert and a healthcare SEO expert like Geoff?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:17:05.501)

Yes, of course, obviously(!)

To be honest, it depends. If you haven’t got the budget for it, then no. SEO people are always very funny because they’ll say the minimum budget and then they’ll just quote what their minimum budget is. So, if you can afford it, it’s definitely worth doing. It depends on how soon you need to see results. If you need results like yesterday, then SEO isn’t gonna be for you because like we say, there’s that lead time of at least three months. So if you’re in that boat, then you’re better off getting paid ads. Yeah.

Virginia (01:17:38.574)

Mm. Yeah. So I would say keep.or at least try and gather data before you hire someone. So like Geoff has said, putting stuff out there on your website and then seeing what might work and then getting an expert in to tweak it, but not a week before launch, a few months ago.

How much time do you think they someone would need to spend learning how to find the keywords to incorporate into the text or the writing themselves? 

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:18:38.885)

Yeah, it’s a tricky one really to be honest. How much time do you think I would need to spend to learn how to find keywords for incorporating the text myself? It depends how much time you want to put in. I mean, like you say, you can watch some Neil Patel videos and you can go away and that will probably help you to some extent, or you can dedicate your whole life to it and  really delve very deep. You know, it’s a very deep world of knowledge in SEO. So it depends on you and how much time you want to spend and how much time you need to spend. You know, if your job doesn’t need it or your next job that you’re hoping to get doesn’t need it, then just get basic knowledge and don’t over egg it too much. But yeah, that’d be my advice on that really.

Virginia (01:19:27.818)

Yeah, so do as much as you can and don’t overdo it, I think, because you want to put your content out there to start gathering that data. And then you can always go back to it to improve it. And that’s a great way to improve SEO all the time, because Google loves it when you update your pages.

Virginia (01:19:48.694)

Okay, so next question. 

What types of jobs require SEO knowledge and how do you demonstrate this kind of knowledge?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:19:56.301)

Yeah, so a lot of writing jobs now request SEO knowledge. I’m sure you’ve seen that, Virginia. You know, it seems to be something that’s just dropped in there. I think there’s, again, different levels. You know, some people want a basic knowledge, which you might have coming away from this, and some people will want, more advanced knowledge and experience going back years.

Virginia (01:20:04.126)

Yeah, massively, all the time.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:20:24.869)

How you demonstrate this knowledge is a very interesting question because there’s no sort of graduate courses or official, not really proper official certification that you can take, which is kind of annoying, but hey, it is what it is. But in terms of demonstrating it, I think the best thing again is to build your own website and rank it for some search terms. Then when you put on your CV or you apply to a job, you can say, look,I’ve built this website, I’ve ranked it for these keywords; I think that’s really impressive. I think that impresses people more than, saying that you’ve done a course or saying that you’ve read a book. If you’ve actually got that real world firsthand experience that you can share with people, I think that goes probably a lot further.

Virginia (01:21:11.102)

Yeah, and I can definitely attest to that because I set up my YouTube channel and I don’t just make random videos on random health topics. I try to make videos intentionally to rank for certain keywords. And once I achieve that, I can then very easily just take a screenshot and show it to my client and say, look, I know what I’m doing because I’ve done it for myself for my own channel. And here’s the evidence. And it’s so important to have that real world.experience. And when you get to Geoff’s level, and you can show a whole graph for a year, then you know, you’ve got that year of experience of actually putting something in action. It all builds on it on top of each other. So you know, as soon as you get some experience, and then you can because you can rank on something quite quickly if you really find something super niche. 

That’s why Geoff was saying earlier to try and target the longer tail keywords because they’re gonna be the easiest to rank for and maybe something like 10 to 50 searches per month is like the target for completely brand new website. And it’s easier than you think, but then obviously don’t tell the whole world what search terms you’re trying to rank for because then they will compete with you. So you do have to work a little bit in secret sometimes. Then once you get results, then you can show them. It takes time to compete with you. So because you’ve got that history of having ranked for a certain period of time, it’s going to be difficult for someone to kind of knock you off the top spot.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:22:58.193)

Yeah, definitely there’s kind of a compounding effect. Once you start getting the result, then it’s easier to get more of the same result. Almost like an avalanche. But yeah, I mean, I would say as well, it doesn’t take that much to know more about SEO than a room full of people. You know, it’s not that well understood and not a huge proportion of people are very interested in it. I always have to explain to my mum, again, what it is that I do! So, it’s very easy to pick up more knowledge than a lot of people quite quickly.

Virginia (01:23:36.19)

Yeah, and I think that will be what sets you apart from other medical writers who don’t have that SEO knowledge. You’ll be able to say, look, I know how to do this because I’ve done it before and that’s why your health content will be better if I write it rather than someone else. Because you want to think about what’s going to differentiate you as a health writer, medical writer, medical copywriter. 

Can you share a walkthrough guide of the whole SEO process?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:24:12.025)

How long have you got? So, okay, this is a another very big question. Picking a topic, so, do you know what, let’s draw on all the things that we’ve said already. So picking a topic comes down to saying, well, what are your goals? Are you trying to sell something? Are you trying to raise awareness? Are you trying to inform people? Are you trying to get sign-ups?

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:24:39.189)

That’s where it starts is saying, okay, well, what is it that I’m actually trying to achieve here? Then you work backwards from there. So you say, okay, well, what is it that people are searching for related to that? You know, are they, if I’m selling again, cough medicine, then can I rank for cough medicine? Probably not. So then you have to find something else that you can rank for within the next three to six months. So that might be, how to avoid a dry cough in winter. Staying at home, whatever, something which is very, very specific. 

Optimising the site. We’ve been through already, I think the four, the fab four we said, so on-page optimisation, link building, content marketing, and, user experience on the website, try and get all of those taken care of, and then in terms of finalising the piece, you want to make sure that you’ve got your titles, meta descriptions, headings and that you’ve got the keyword actually in the text as well. Yeah, those are the kind of the main four, oh, and in the URL as well. So if you do those, you’ll be covering 80% of your SEO and you’ll probably stand head and shoulders above your competition just by doing those few things. 

Then also as part of finalising it, I would say, look at the analytics, track where it’s going. see if there’s tweaks that can be made, like maybe you rank on page two for a term which you weren’t even targeting, so you want to edit that piece, target it towards the term that you rank on page two for, and then hey, you rank on page one, now you start getting traffic. And constantly reiterating is the best thing to do. Again, a big question, but a very quick run through of the answer.

Virginia (01:26:31.354)

Yeah, and I think you touched on basically everything, the metadata, the where you’re putting your keywords in your headings. It’s so important to think of it as a process and checking all of those boxes as you go along. Then if you imagine you create every piece of content like that, then your website overall is going to have higher authority. When you do it properly, it definitely pays off because it’s easier for you to go back and edit content that’s already amazing, rather than trying to create brand new content, because all of your previous content just is too much hard work to go back and edit it and get it to rank. 

Thank you so much, Geoff!

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:27:30.081)

My pleasure, my pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. It’s been fun.

Virginia (01:27:33.682)

Yeah, it’s been really fun. And if you want to follow Geoff, I’ll leave his link in the description below to his LinkedIn and also link to the healthcare SEO website and speak to Geoff about anything to do with healthcare SEO. He knows everything and anything and he’s got proven results as we showed at the beginning with satisfied clinics and customers and Geoff, I think this is a great time for you to pitch exactly what you do and who you are looking to help.

Geoff (Healthcare-SEO) (01:28:05.445)

Yeah, so I work with healthcare companies, predominantly in the UK, private clinics, or those involved in the healthcare industry selling healthcare products as well. If anyone’s out there that is interested in getting their website to rank higher for those types of searches, then get in touch. I’m on LinkedIn. But yeah, always happy to hear from people and like I say, if anyone’s got any questions, always happy to help out where I can.

Virginia (01:28:35.938)

Amazing. Thank you so much, Geoff. I’m sure we will have more content with you in future, more videos. And if you have any questions for Geoff that we didn’t answer, then feel free to leave them in the comments below and like this video and subscribe to the channel for more content like this. And I guess that leaves me with just saying…

Thank you to the audience. If you’ve attended this live and if you’re watching the replay, thank you also for watching the replay and getting to the end. And if you want to follow us on our LinkedIn page, outright clinic, and also watch our podcast as well, and watch out for more webinars and join the free medical writing group on LinkedIn with over 5,600 members. I’m sure that number will continue to rise by the time I release this video. So we’re a growing community and we love to provide resources like this for you. So if there’s anything else that you want us to create for you, then also comment down below and have a great day wherever you are watching this and we will see you at the next video. Bye. Thank you so much.