SEO is crucial for IVF clinics because it provides a long-term strategy to drive awareness and consideration with those looking to build a family.
Fertility is a high-competition industry, where treatments are heavily researched. SEO ensures that a fertility clinic’s expertise is visible and accessible when those in need are searching. Providing these potential patients with information and answers helps to build trust with potential patients so they’ll choose your practice. But it’s also not just about answering questions – it’s also an emotional journey. A strong IVF SEO strategy will involve expressing empathy and compassion, which can often be a primary driver for why a patient would choose your physicians.
The first 4 SEO strategies are focused on local SEO, which is specifically the optimization of local listings to increase visibility and leads from potential patients near your Fertility practice.We’ve learned as a Fertility marketing agency that local SEO is by far the highest priority type of SEO you should focus on, before moving to other SEO strategies.
1. Create Your Fertility Practice Listings
Your practice listings, specifically those on Google Business Profile, are the cornerstone SEO strategy that will have the biggest impact on getting new Fertility patients through the door. You must claim or create these practice listings for each of your locations. It’s important to make sure that information such as address, phone number, hours and more are accurate.
2. Create Physician Listings
In addition to creating listings for your practice, your physician listings are also extremely important. That’s because patients are often researching physicians on review platforms like Healthgrades. These listings also need to be claimed, and information needs to be as accurate as possible. In addition, many practices don’t know that Google Business Profile also allows you to create physician listings if you have more than a single provider at your location. Creating these physician listings increases awareness of your Fertility or IVF practice and increases the chances you’ll show up in search results.
3. Build out Your Listings Comprehensively
It’s not only important to create or claim your listings, you need to build them out with as much detail as possible, taking advantage of all the features and functionality that platforms like Google provide. When Fertility patients are researching your practice, they’re comparing you to other providers. You want more reviews, more photos and better descriptions than your competition. This will result in patients choosing you more often. But having more built out listings also means that Google is going to rank you higher and show your listings more frequently in the search results.
4. Get More 5 Star Reviews
Google Business Profile listings that have more reviews, and higher star ratings get more visibility in the search engine results pages. The most common issues that Fertility practices have is not having a system in place to get reviews, or not having the right technology in place to pre-screen patients to understand who to ask for reviews. Read more about RUNNER’s system for growing patient reviews.
After you’ve built out your local SEO strategy, it’s time to move on to SEO for your website.
5. Optimize Your Fertility Clinic Website for Search Engines
It’s important that your Fertility clinic website is optimized to be seen as friendly by search engines. There are a few places we see that Fertility Clinics usually need to optimize. In the last several years, Google has prioritized the site experience as a core factor for ranking.
Making Your Site Faster by Optimizing Images
Site speed is one of the most important aspects of SEO, and can have not only the biggest impact on rankings in Google for your practice site, but slow sites also mean potential patients are less likely to become leads.
Making Your Site Display Better on Mobile Devices
As the majority of potential patients will visit your site on a mobile device, it’s important to Google that your site display properly on phones. This isn’t just about about speed, it’s about the user experience – making sure buttons and text are large enough, and that images are sized properly.
Increasing Your Text to HTML Ratio
One signal that a Fertility clinic site isn’t well optimized for SEO is when it doesn’t have enough content. This is measured in many SEO optimization tools as having a low “text to HTML ratio.” This simply means that your site needs more copy.
6. Create a Target Keyword List With High Intent
Great SEO for your Fertility clinic website starts with identifying the right keywords patients are searching. Targeting the wrong kinds of keywords can result in investing time and effort into content that doesn’t turn into patients.
The secret? Focusing on what we call “high-intent” keywords.
A high-intent keyword is one that signals a potential patient is ready to book an appointment. An example of a high-intent keyword would be a patient searching for “IVF doctor near me.”
A low-intent keyword is one that might be relevant to your practice, but they’re still too early in the process and aren’t ready to book an appointment yet. An example of a low-intent keyword would be a patient searching for “what is IVF?”
You want to focus on high-intent keywords because it’s where you’re the most likely to target Fertility patients that are looking to take the next step.
7. Create New Site Pages
Once you’ve identified the high-intent keywords that are most meaningful to your Fertility clinic, you’ll want to make sure that you create relevant pages on your practice site. We recommended creating dedicated pages to answer specific questions that Fertility clinics are often asked. These almost always attract high-intent searches:
- How much does IVF cost?
- Does insurance cover IVF?
- How successful is IVF?
- What is IUI vs IVF?
Remember to create enough content on these pages for them to rank well. The mean word count for a page to rank on the front page of Google is 1,447 words.
8. Create Blog Posts
Crafting SEO-optimized blog posts for an IVF clinic is about blending informative, empathetic content with the focus keywords you identified in your keyword research. But the most important aspect of writing great blog posts is understanding the target audience – couples and individuals seeking fertility solutions – and addressing their concerns, questions, and needs. Make sure your blog content not only addresses the questions potential patients have, but establish your clinic as a compassionate authority. Acknowledge what they’re feeling. In addition, Incorporate patient testimonials to enhance relatability and build trust.
It’s also important to format your blog posts correctly, use headers and subheaders to structure the content, making it easier for both readers and search engines to navigate the key topics. And provide relevant links throughout your blog posts to both content on your site, other blog posts, and any external resources – this will add additional credibility.
9. Create Educational Video Content
Choosing a Fertility doctor is a heavily researched decision for patients. We’ve found that educational video content added to your practice site can increase lead conversion rates – resulting in more new patient leads.
But video is also important for SEO. Video results now show up in about ⅓ of all search engine results pages, so creating video can increase your visibility. In addition, adding video to your site increases the amount of time potential patients spend. This time spent provides an additional quality signal to search engines.
10. Get More Inbound Links
Lastly, inbound links to your website build authority and increase your search engine rankings. So it’s important to secure links back to your site from credible, relevant sources. Some of these links may happen organically through the fertility content you’re creating. There are also a few places we recommend Fertility practices secure links from that provide not only authority, but relevant local signals to attract patients near practice locations. These include:
- Local sponsorships with links from those sites back to your Fertility clinic site
- Editorial listings and links from local news sites
Summary
A well-crafted SEO strategy is crucial for fertility clinics looking to increase their visibility and attract more patients. When it’s done right, your practice can create a long-term pipeline of new patient leads. But when it’s done wrong, it can result in wasted time and money.
At RUNNER, we use our deep experience in medical practice marketing to navigate the complexities of SEO and ensure your Fertility clinic can reach more individuals and couples on their path to parenthood. Request a no-obligation consultation and speak with a Fertility marketing expert.
