SEO updates and its consequences

SEO is a major part of marketing in the age of digital technology. Many industries have started to shift attention away from traditional marketing means towards online marketing. This is because a lot of people have gone mobile and are spending a lot more time on the internet. 

Healthcare Marketers are now adjusting their marketing strategies to meet their customers where they are. They are now blending digitization with new techniques for greater productivity and effectiveness. A huge part of this strategic change is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is very important and that is why as a healthcare provider, you should be up to date with the SEO changes that are affecting your search engine rankings. Google algorithms keep changing regularly as it continues to interact with users and learn new ways to be more efficient. That’s why, understanding the factors that affect your Google rankings and keeping abreast with them will allow you to stay on top of the Google search. 

Some of these changes include:

1. The BERT update: BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers. It is a Google A.I. tool to improve the accuracy of search results. BERT tries to understand the reasons why certain users search for a particular key-phrase, the meaning of the searches, and then identify the best results that will be of help to the user. These updates by BERT will affect your SEO rankings if your content is not optimized properly to meet the BERT requirements. In order words, your content must also be helpful and provide solutions that make things easier for the patient.
2. The Uniqueness and Effectiveness of your Website: Previously, it was pretty easy to get ranked by writing short content with little originality or quality and stuffing it with a lot of keywords. The results, however, were not very helpful to users as they would probably not find what they were searching for. Since then, Google has updated its algorithm to favor long contents that are unique, of good quality, and particularly relevant. This algorithm update is good for the healthcare industry because healthcare content is meant to be helpful and original. If you optimize your content properly using the right keywords you should be sure to get ranked.
3. The Mobile Responsiveness of Your Website: As of 2015, a majority of the world’s traffic and online searches were carried out from mobile phones. This means that the world is going mobile and it has led to Google changing its algorithm to favor more mobile-friendly web pages. As a healthcare company, building your website to be mobile-friendly is one of the steps to ensuring your SEO is spot on. 

These are just some of the SEO updates that are more likely to affect your SEO rankings. Keeping SEO in mind when creating content for healthcare will go a long way to improve your success.