Your Plastic Surgery SEO Guide
This guide aims to help plastic surgeons or cosmetic surgery clinics, as well as marketing professionals who support them, acquire new patients. Plastic Surgery SEO is competitive but a great digital marketing initiative and supplements traditional advertising well.
Regardless of your growth plans, it will take significant investment if you are looking to dominate the first page. So, with that said, let’s dive into the world of SEO for plastic surgeons.
From keywords to technical SEO and link building, this plastic surgery SEO guide is designed to help you put together the perfect SEO campaign to acquire new potential plastic surgery patients.
Regardless of the cosmetic surgery procedures or plastic surgery services you offer, there are always people using search engines to find what you offer, and a good SEO campaign should be part of any digital marketing initiative.
Google Ranking Factors for Plastic Surgery SEO
Understanding Google and other search engine algorithms is a full-time job. Google states there are more than 200 ranking factors. Some of these ranking factors include things such as page titles, the content on your pages, the links pointing to your website, site speed, URL structure, and much more.
While there are many factors, some have more of an impact on the search results than others. Let’s highlight the factors you’ll really want to pay attention to:
Topical Relevance and Authority
This is a fairly broad factor that includes content – specifically content quality and the amount of content on your website. The more high-quality content you have on your plastic surgery website, the more Google and other search engines view you as an authority in your industry.
Keyword relevance of the page
Page-specific Keyword relevance is making sure that each high-value page is targeting and highly relevant to a specific keyword group or search intent. For example, your Breast Augmentation page should really provide the proper information while answering all the questions that your prospective patients may have.
Page speed & technical SEO
With Google’s 2021 Page experience update, website speed and experience is a more important ranking factor than ever. Making sure the site is mobile-friendly and optimized for speed on mobile devices will help you stand out from your competitors.
Link profile
Last but definitely not least, your website’s link profile is still the most important or impactful ranking factor in 2022 for plastic surgery SEO. This includes all other websites on the internet that link back to yours, where those links appear, and from where and how they link out. This is one of the most important SEO services available.
Plastic Surgery Keyword Research: The Best Search Intent Groups
Proper keyword research sets the foundation for plastic surgery SEO campaigns. Without knowing how people are searching for your services online, it will be much more difficult to target them.
However, gone are the days of targeting single keywords on each page and trying to get away with keyword stuffing. Now, it’s important to think of keywords within groups based on intent. For example, if you offer rhinoplasty as one of your cosmetic procedures, you would likely group all related terms together, including location-based keywords for rhinoplasty and nose job-related terms.
Types of keywords and search intent for plastic surgery SEO
While conducting keyword research for the plastic surgery industry, we’ve identified a few specific intents that both drive traffic and convert well.
We can break these keywords into multiple types:
Transactional Keywords – These are keywords that potential site visitors use when they are ready to buy, or their intent is more transactional. They typically include the main business and service-oriented terms which are geo-modified for your specific location, such as:
Plastic Surgeon {Location}
Breast Augmentation {Location}
Cosmetic Surgery {Location}
And so on. While they may not all be ready to purchase, the intent is to find specifically someone who offers those services and is more targeted than someone searching for informational keywords.
Navigational keywords
Navigational keywords in the plastic surgery industry and typically brand-focused or doctor-focused. For example, if someone was specifically searching for a doctor online and that doctor worked in your clinic, then they would ideally land on a bio page on your website. That would be an example of a navigational keyword.
Branded terms such as {your brand} rhinoplasty are other examples of navigational keywords.
Typically, we see more volume in specific doctor name keywords until brands have really established themselves in their market.
Informational keywords
These keywords, while they may not convert directly, support the transactional keywords and help establish your business as an authority in the eyes of potential new patients. These terms are typically what’s called long tail keywords and could include:
mommy make over recovery time
face lift financing options
tummy tuck before and after photos
Can you reverse rhinoplasty surgery
All of these terms suggest that someone is searching online for information, and while they may not be ready to book a consultation, they could still convert into qualified leads for your practice.
Plastic Surgery SEO Content Strategy
Your content is what is going to establish your website as an authority in Google’s eyes. It adds the topical relevance needed to really dominate the SERPs (Google Search Results Page) across multiple terms. It’s truly at the center of any search marketing campaign.
It’s important to remember that Google ranks web pages, not websites. While you may be able to rank for the general terms such as “plastic surgery {location}”, you’ll never be able to dominate other service or informational terms without creating content that specifically targets those intents.
Part of our initial discovery will include a detailed outline of the content gaps that will need to be filled based on our industry and competitive research and will outline the content needed for your plastic surgery website.
These recommendations typically include:
Location Landing pages – these are pages that target your local area – maybe suburbs of a major city or surrounding communities. It’s a great way to show potential patients that you are able to serve an area from your physical location.
Service pages – These are pages specifically for each particular procedure that you offer. These types of pages are critical and really help with your website’s rankings.
Informational pages or blog posts – While it’s not always necessary to have a blog, it’s possible that informational keywords are best suited for a blog post instead of a specific page.
We typically handle all of the content creation needs and will outline when we will create content throughout the campaign if and when needed.
Onsite and Technical SEO for Plastic Surgery Practices and Plastic Surgeons
For most plastic surgery websites, we don’t find a lot of major technical issues as there are not a lot of complexities to the backend web development most of the time.
A few key things that we typically see lacking from a technical SEO perspective for plastic surgery websites include:
Basic on-page SEO factors such as missing meta descriptions, non-optimized page URLs, missing header tags, and other on-page factors.
Structured Data Markup – This usually includes local business markup and FAQ schema.
Crawl Experience – This is the idea that Google or other search engine crawlers should be able to get through the website as efficiently as possible. We would look at things like internal linking and silo creation.
Speed improvements – we touched on this before, but this typically looks at your web hosting environment and optimizing your hosting server if possible, implementing caching and other plugins to help support page experience and speed. Depending on what CMS your website is, this can be simple or quite time-consuming.
Conversion improvements if needed – While this isn’t always necessary, it’s also important to look at how your website is converting. After all, the goal isn’t only to improve rankings but also to acquire more patients. It’s important to pay attention to the sales funnel or appointment process and ensure that these leads are converting. This may include a bit of web design work if needed to improve conversion points.
Local Search Engine Optimization for Surgeons
With any local search, there is usually a 3-pack map result that is displayed in the search results. When you’re doing SEO for plastic surgeons, you cannot overlook the map pack and local SEO.
While there are many factors, some have more of an impact on the search results than others. Let’s highlight the factors you’ll really want to pay attention to in order to improve your local SEO for plastic surgeons:
There are a number of ways to help improve visibility for local maps when doing SEO for plastic surgeons:
Optimizing your Google Business Profile
This factor is very important but is also very simple and straightforward. You need to make sure your business is listed in the proper categories and that you are leveraging all the data possible, such as hours of operation, descriptions, imagery, and more. Having a well-optimized Google Business profile is the first step in improving local SEO for plastic surgeons.
Local plastic surgery citation sources
Citations are simply instances of your business name, address, and phone number appearing on websites across the web. They are often found on business directories, aggregate sites, and similar-style websites. For plastic surgery practices, you’ll want to find a balance of local sources, industry sources, and general sources in order to have the best impact.
While citations are important, they are often referred to as the ante for local SEO – they are fairly easy to create and acquire, so everyone usually has them. While you may not see immediate results from doing them, they are something that will hold back your local SEO efforts if you don’t have them.
Google reviews for your plastic surgery practice
This is where you can really stand out from your competition. Google (and all search engines) love reviews. This is definitely the differentiator for local SEO results, and rightfully so – they are an important social signal, and they are hard to manipulate and acquire.
There are many great ways to increase your reviews, such as implementing a system for existing patients after their surgery that asks for reviews and leveraging both email and SMS systems to have multiple touchpoints during and after the process. If you really want your plastic surgery practice to stand out, getting reviews is definitely going to help.
Link Building for Plastic Surgeons
Link acquisition is one of the most important plastic surgery SEO services. As mentioned earlier, your link profile is still the number one ranking factor. Links are treated like votes on the internet – the more you have, the better, and the higher quality sources, the better. These help both targeted rankings and help to improve your website’s domain authority.
You will never find an aggressive plastic surgery SEO campaign without link acquisition. While many firms may shy away from link acquisition, this is usually due to the inexperience of their SEO specialist or team.
There are many ways to build and acquire links for SEO for plastic surgeons:
Guest Posting
This is a common link-building tactic that exchanges content for links. We write targeted content to help other websites and, in return, send a link back to your website.
Business or website acquisition
This tactic is not as common and is a bit more expensive, but can have significant results. The idea here is to acquire entire websites (whether existing or expiring) that have authority and either repurpose them or leverage them to link to your cosmetic surgery website.
Link Placements
These usually result in the easiest wins and involve reaching out to website owners or bloggers who already talk about plastic surgery or cosmetic surgery and ask for links to relevant pages on your website. While it is often that these website owners are compensated, this is not always required.
Sponsorships or Scholarships
Sponsoring local events and industry events is a great way to not only acquire links but are just great digital marketing efforts in general. Providing annual scholarships can often get you listed on top university and college websites, and while this tactic isn’t used as much as it's used to (due to it being abused), it’s still extremely beneficial when executed properly.
Creating your SEO Strategy
We would love to help you create an effective plastic surgery SEO strategy that generates more patients, new patients, and better patients for your practice every month. Organic SEO is a great way to help grow your practice. Reach out today, and one of our strategists will be happy to put together a plan and walk you through how we can help you succeed.
Examples of some Plastic Surgery Practice Crushing it with SEO
There are a lot of great medical practices and plastic surgery clinics that are crushing it and doing very well in Google search results. If investing in SEO services is something you want to consider, and you want some examples of websites doing it well, here you have it.
Here is a list of medical practices that are investing well in SEO and are likely generating many new patients every month from their efforts in SEO for plastic surgeons.
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