We have covered various aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for your allied health website in our blog. Many of these, including on-page SEO and keyword optimisation, focus on practices related to attracting people, i.e. your ideal patients, to your website. Technical SEO is the other side of the coin, which provides the signals to help search engines understand your website and index and rank it on SERPs accordingly. 

Essentially, this helps to ensure that your website is visible to the people who need your expert health care.

What Is Technical SEO

Technical SEO is usually undertaken by developers. So, while it is not necessary to go into too much detail here, having a basic understanding means that you can go into the conversation with an understanding of what they will be working on.

As a practice, it focuses on aspects such as page speed, mobile-friendliness, redirects, duplicate content, XML sitemap, and more. These form the technical structure of your website and can have a great impact on its overall performance on SERPs.

How Do Search Engines Understand Websites

These are some of the key points that should factor into your technical SEO strategy: 

1.     Page loading speeds – Google ranks websites with fast loading speeds more highly. This is also beneficial for the people who visit your site and can increase patient conversions. Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool will give you pointers on any issues that you need to address on your site related to its speed.
2.     XML sitemaps – these map out your website to help search engines identify all the URLs, understand its structure, and find all of the content on it. You can use a free tool to action this.
3.     Mobile optimised – ranking algorithms give preference to websites that are mobile responsive. This is because many people browse using mobile. Again, Google has a tool for this.
4.     SSL certificates – this is a security protocol that allows for the encryption, decryption, and authentication of data on the internet. Using an SSL certificate so that your website address is HTTPS is a trust ranking signal for Google.
5.     Redirects – too many URL redirects on your site can negatively affect it. It can lead to broken backlinks from external sites which increase your authority. Not using the correct redirects can also lead to search engines not indexing the new page. Ensure that you implement the correct 301’s if necessary.
6.     Duplicate content – avoid duplicating content or trying to rank multiple pages for similar content. Instead, concentrate the juice on one to give it the best chance of ranking competitively.

Attracting Patients To Your Website

Undertaking technical SEO forms part of your strategy to improve the visibility of your allied health website online. Better visibility means more traffic, but what happens once patients land there? 

This is when you need unique, high-quality content, as well as well-placed calls to action to keep your audience interested and direct them to your money pages. 

Because these aspects depend on each other, it is important for the marketing and web development team to communicate and identify common goals. One of the best tools for informing this is Google Search Console, which provides tips on how to improve your site’s general performance on Google Search.

The Bottom Line

While we only scratch the surface of technical SEO here, these are some of the more straightforward aspects that you can check for yourself. In the event that anything needs optimising, be sure to speak to your developer team. 

If optimising your website brings more patients to your allied health practice, then we have the solution to help you with case management. Find out more about how iinsight, our industry-leading web-based case management and reporting system, can help you better manage your allied health cases.