SEO for fertility clinics

SEO is a long process and takes time to show you the desired results. Unlike paid advertisements that only get you leads as long as you pay for them, SEO gives you a long-term result by bringing in more and more new patients to your clinic. 

Here are the steps you need to follow to optimize your fertility website for better ranking and visibility. 

1. Understand and segregate the treatments you provided

Fertility is a vast field of medicine involving various treatments and procedures like fertility tests, IVF, IUI, ICSI, surrogacy, and other fertility treatments. Not all fertility clinics have all the above facilities. 

Some clinics may specialize in IVF treatments, while some may specialize in IUI and other fertility tests. So, it is important to understand what treatment you provide and what your clinic specializes in before creating your website. 

Understanding what treatments your clinic provides will also help you identify keywords that you need to focus on while creating your websites. You can also calculate the number of web pages your website would need.

2. Create a website with separate web pages for each treatment

Once you get a clear idea about the treatments and procedures you follow in your clinic, the next step would be to create a website for your fertility clinic. A website is a crucial part of any online business venture because it is how your prospects will learn more about your business. 

Create a well-designed, user-friendly website with separate pages for each treatment and test you provide for your patients. Provide as much information as you can regarding each treatment and let your patients decide whether they want to visit you for fertility consultation. 

3. Set up your Google Business Profile

Getting listed in Google Business Profile (GBP) can make your clinic get closer to your prospects. GBP is none other than the updated version of Google My Business (GMB) with more additional features. 

Having a GBP account allows fertility clinics to inform their patients about their clinics and their services. It also allows your patients to find you when they search in any Google services like Google Search, Google Maps, etc. 

You can add a lot of information about your clinic, like its location, contact details, treatments you provide, price range (if possible), patient reviews, images, videos, and other info to make your prospects learn about your clinic. 

4. Conduct an SEO Audit

An SEO audit is the process of analyzing and evaluating how well a web page is performing and where you can make improvements to enhance its overall performance. 

The purpose of conducting an SEO audit is to identify as many issues in the websites as possible that may affect the ranking of the websites. Some issues that can be found and rectified through SEO audits are

• technical issues,
• on-page SEO issues,
• website structure issues,
• user experience issues,
• potential off-site issues,
• content gaps and opportunities, and 
• competitive marketplace insights.

An SEO audit is, in a way, like a “health check” for your website. It should be conducted on a regular basis to identify and correct any new issues that may have popped up.

SEO audits can be performed using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and other similar tools.

5. Do a thorough competitor analysis

No matter the industry your business is based in, you will always have competitors who fight with you for customers. In such cases, a deep understanding of your competitors can help you exceed them and get more website traffic. 

For fertility clinics, your competitors are those clinics that rank in the top 10 positions (the first page) of the search results for the keyword you aim to rank for. 

For example, if you aim to rank for “fertility clinics near me,” the clinics that now rank on the first page for your location are your competitors. Conducting an extensive competitor analysis on these websites can help you identify what strategies they have followed to get ranked in the top positions. 

Here are some points you should focus on while conducting a competitor analysis.

• Understand why they rank.
• Analyze which of their web pages has the maximum traffic.
• Understand the flow of their content.
• Identify keyword gaps.
• Analyze their referring domains.

Create case studies on your competitors’ analysis, use them in your strategies, and run split tests on them. Understand which strategy works best for you and implement them in your websites. 

6. Do in-depth keyword research

Keywords are search terms that users use when searching for something in the search engine. Researching and identifying the relevant keyword for your clinic and working to rank for them can make your website appear before your patients when they search using the keyword. 

As you already know, Google only ranks websites relevant to users’ searches. Identifying the keywords for your fertility clinic and incorporating them in your content and on-page components can give your website the boost it needs to rank higher in the search results. 

Here are some steps you can follow to do keyword research for your fertility clinic.

• Identify what terms your potential patients use to search for treatments or services related to you. 
• Use keyword research tools, like SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, etc., to identify relevant keywords with the highest search volume. 
• Use a mix of short, mid, and long-tail keywords in your content.
• Use these keywords in various areas of your website’s content, such as titles, headers, sub-headers, main content, etc.

7. Develop content structure

Now that you have completed competitor analysis and researched relevant keywords, the next step is creating a content structure for each web page. As the name suggests, the content structure gives your content a well-structured form, makes it more readable, and makes your readers stay longer on the web page. 

Use a clear and logical content structure for your web pages. Arrange it to make it easier for search engines and users to navigate your content. 

8. Create helpful content that satisfies your user’s needs

As a fertility clinic, ensure your content is valuable and provides ample information to your patients about your services and treatments. A fertility website is not where you can be funny and write whatever you want.

Remember that fertility is a serious issue and the kind of mindset your readers would be when searching for a good fertility clinic. They want to find a clinic that would resolve their issue, not find one that is funny and quirky.

So, understand what your readers need and be empathetic to their situation. You can create content in various formats like

• blog posts,
• articles,
• video content,
• relevant case studies,
• FAQs,
• surveys,
• medical updates, etc.

9. Optimize on-page components

On-page optimization is the process of analyzing and optimizing the structure and content of a website so that it can rank higher in the search results. It is what brings more customers to your website. 

On-page SEO helps search engines analyze your website content and identify if it is relevant to the user’s search query. Google constantly updates its algorithm so that it can better understand users’ search intent and provide content that meets their needs. 

Here are some on-page components that you need to take note of during on-page optimization. 

HTML Meta Tags

• Title tag
• Meta description
• Headers (H1)
• Subheaders (H2, H3, H4, etc.)
• Robots Tag
• Canonical URL
• Open Graph

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

The URL is any website or web page address that helps search engines identify its relevancy to the search query. URL is a ranking factor. So make sure you place your focus keyword in the URL. 

Links

Place internal links (links of your own web pages) and external links (links bought from other relevant websites) in your web pages to build authority for your websites.

Image optimization

• The size of your images should be within 100kb.
• Keep the images in WebP or AVIF formats.
• Use Alt text for images with relevant keywords.

10. Develop a link-building strategy

Backlinks are one of the Google’s ranking factors and are essential to improving your SEO. A higher authority in a niche means you can rank higher on search engines. This can get you more organic traffic and increase the conversion rates for your websites.

There are some ways to build links for a website.

• Guest posts
• Directories
• Working on a listicle
• Press Release (PR)
• Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

11. Ensure your web pages get indexed

Ensuring that the web page gets indexed by Google is one of the major steps of SEO. Only when Google indexes a web page, it can be ranked and found by the users. 

Here’s the process of how Google indexes a web page.

• Crawling: Google bots crawl the web pages and scan the relevancy of the content.

• Indexing: Google analyzes the web pages and stores them in the database.
• Ranking: Google algorithm searches for and picks the webpages most relevant to the user’s search intent from the database. 

12. Fix core web vitals

Once your web pages are indexed, start working on the Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are a metric used to measure a web page experience on both mobile and desktop devices.

Three attributes are used to measure the Core Web Vitals of a web page.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures a web page’s loading speed.
• First Input Delay (FID) measures the page interactivity.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the page’s visual stability. 

These three metrics are very essential for Google Page Experience. So, optimize these three factors to get ranked in search results and give your users the best page experience.

13. Analyze your website’s performance

Now that every step regarding SEO is completed, the next step would be to analyze and measure your website’s performance. You need to analyze and optimize your website’s performance repeatedly to get the best results.

You can use several tools and metrics to measure your website’s performance. Google’s algorithm has over 200 ranking factors to rank a website on the first page.

Some of the aspects that you need to analyze regarding the performance of a website are

• organic traffic,
• keyword ranking,
• SERP visibility,
• Click-Through Rate (CTR),
• bounce rate,
• website authority over time,
• backlinks,
• page speed,
• time spent on a page.