Medical copywriters face a unique challenge when writing for the web. Websites have two distinct audiences that are vitally important to the marketing success of the site – human visitors and search engines.
Human visitors seek concise, accurate copy that assists them to quickly answer a question or solve a problem. Human visitors eventually become patients or customers so copy must ultimately persuade them to take action or all SEO efforts fail.
Search Engines devour text and have little regard for its accuracy or marketing persuasiveness. Copy written for search engines increase the visibility of your website and directly contribute to your website’s search engine rankings.
It is rare that website copy can ignore either target audience so effective copywriting must skillfully balance the requirements of each audience to creating compelling text that will convert visitors to customers and gain high search engine placement.
What SEO Copywriting looks like
Unique Content: More important than almost any other rule, medical website copy must be unique. Websites easily identify copied or duplicate content and it is unlikely to achieve a high search engine results position.
Key words and Phrases: Before crafting SEO copy, high value target keywords or key phrases are identified and used appropriately throughout the text. Maintaining an appropriate density of keywords through your medical copy, while keeping the page readable, is part of the art of SEO copywriting.
Page length: While there are no hard and fast rules, achieving an appropriate keyword density while maintaining readability generally requires between 300 and 500 words of text.
Page Hierarchy: Page structure using a logical hierarchy of headings, sub headings, paragraphs, lists and bolded text improve readability and help search engines assign importance to keywords based on their position in your page hierarchy.
Inbound and outbound links: anchor text to other pages in your website assist readers to navigate as well as indicating to search engines which pages are important for specific keywords.
Title and Meta tags: Although not seen on the web page, these hidden page elements contribute to search engine position and provide the text for snippets used in the search engine results page. Key wording these items and creating compelling copy for meta tags contribute to the click through rate from the search engines to your website.