Whether you’re already familiar with SEO or it’s the first time you hear these three letters together, we believe you know nothing.
While this is of course exaggerated, the key message here is that you can never know SEO well enough as SEO requirements are ever-changing. Unless you exclusively manage SEO 24/7, you’re probably doing things the old way already.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start from the very beginning. Let’s look into what SEO is and why it’s essential in this digital world.
What Actually Is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engines are websites like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, etc., where you can type in a certain search query. These search engines will then crawl the whole internet and look for websites that are most relevant to what you’re looking for.
With Search Engine Optimization, we help search engines find more relevant content, and if the engine approves our content, our website will get ranked higher. Once we rank better, we’ll receive clicks from the search engines and everybody is happy. The user, because we’re offering the exact thing they were looking for, and us because we get users who are looking exactly for our offer. In fact, roughly 7% of all Google searches are health-related, amounting to 70,000 health-related searches per minute. Also important to know is that most people only consider the very top results as relevant and “click-worthy” and less than 1% of internet users even scroll to the second search result page.
Great. Sounds easy enough. But how can I get my website to actually rank higher?
The Thing Everyone Gets Wrong
First of all – and this sounds implausible but happens all the time – people misunderstand the essence of SEO:
If nobody is actively searching for your product, your service, or anything you offer, SEO is not the right marketing channel for you right now.
SEO requires search volume, and without it, it’s a waste of time and money.
Not sure what we mean by “search volume”? Please refer to our post here, where we explain the term “search volume” in detail.
How Search Engines Really Work
So now we know that we need search volume to start with, and that a search engine (whichever it is) is interested in improving itself – meaning delivering even more relevant results.
Imagine you’re searching for “red Nike sneakers” and you receive a list of websites selling with ” The North Face hiking boots.” That would be the worst search engine ever.
To help search engines get better, they have their very own way to determine, which result is more relevant than others. They’re called ranking factors. Since Google holds the majority market share worldwide at over 90%, every SEO expert is closely monitoring Google, meaning how they adept their algorithm or their practices.
Examples of Ranking Factors
Authority: If there’s a new product from an unknown brand launching and every major newspaper is posting about it online, this product already has a certain authority or credibility.
Website Speed: Of course a search engine is interested in providing an overall good user experience. If a user waits 10 seconds for a website to load, the user may actually question the quality of the search engine suggesting this unpleasant experience.
Content Itself: The most important factor is probably the content itself. If you’re not offering any red shoes, you’re not going to get found when someone is searching for red shoes.
Want to dive deeper? Check out our comprehensive guide to 200+ ranking factors that actually matter.
The Bottom Line
So at Appeario SEO means serving the best content that users are actively looking for.
It’s as simple as that. Well, not really – but that’s what the rest of our blogs are for.
Now that you understand SEO fundamentals, the question becomes: how does SEO work differently for medical practices? Generic SEO tactics won’t cut it for doctors — the local, service-specific nature of healthcare changes everything. Read our guide on SEO for doctors: why your medical practice needs a different strategy to understand what makes medical SEO unique. Then dive into one of the most overlooked metrics in SEO — search volume and why it’s the make-or-break metric that determines whether your SEO efforts actually bring in patients. If you’re curious about the technical side, our article on Google ranking factors explains exactly what Google evaluates when deciding where your practice appear.
Ready to put SEO to work for your practice? Our Local SEO service is built specifically for medical practices — from keyword strategy and content creation to Google Business Profile optimization and local citation building.