The Explosive Reaction Between Social Media and SEO

Updated November 7, 2014

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Social media marketing is something so explosive for a medical practice that many doctors are actually afraid to light the fuse and let the explosion happen.

They fear that once the “bomb goes off” they won’t be able to keep up with the increase in business and the time it takes to handle maintaining their social media profiles.

This is not the case at all; in fact, neglecting social media can be as devastating to your medical practice marketing as trying to use wet matches to light your fuse.

Here are some reasons why your site’s SEO and rank are highly dependent upon your social media marketing.

More Activity in Social Media = Better SEO Rankings

Google released their Panda and Penguin Updates in 2011 and 2012 and the game of SEO has been forever changed. No longer could a web site put up the right code in the right order and expect to see results. It's no longer about what's on the page so much as who is sharing it.

Since their Updates were released (including Hummingbird and Penguin 2.0), social media activity such as likes, shares, retweets, comments, and even online reviews have become some of the major factors in Google's evaluation of a site's rank-worthiness (we just made up a new word!).

Social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest are now being used as measures of how popular the pages on a web site are with people in the real world: your patients.

The more popular a web site is with real people, the more credibility Google gives it. The result is that the site will get to the top of their search engine. But there is so much more to the picture.

Back Links

Google highly favors sites that have lots of links pointing to them from relevant and credible sites in the same industry. They measure credibility based on the content of those sites, while relevance is measured by the topic of that site as determined by the keywords being used.

When your social media activity is centered around your keywords and keyword-rich web site pages, you'll not only be boosting your web site traffic; you'll be in Google's good graces.

Social media marketing helps to give you better web site traffic, more social activity, increased credibility, and topical relevance. By having active medical social media accounts, you'll be connecting with patients on a different level than any of their other doctors are!

For example, you may discover that your Facebook fan page is bringing in 200 new site visitors per day. This influx of traffic means that potential patients are interested in your web site and will likely share it with their friends. You’ll gain even more traffic to your social media accounts and to your web site once this momentum gains speed.

This is why we highly recommend that every client install social media plugins for sharing on all of the major social media sites. These little buttons work like magic for making it easier than ever for y0ur patients and fans to spread the word!

With this little addition, you have just performed an SEO tune-up on your site with hardly any effort!

The Results Speak for Themselves

Getting to the top of Google is no easy feat; it takes time and effort to gain in the ranks. However, with a solid medical social media strategy in place, your web site can be a social media powerhouse. In other words, you can include share buttons on your web site so that your visitors can connect with your social media accounts as well as push your content out to their own accounts.

The influx of visitors to your social media accounts and people sharing the links to your web site and social media accounts will increase. With every like, share, and new fan, you gain even more speed. Imagine it like a snowball rolling downhill; the bigger it gets, the faster it goes!

No matter how you slice it, social media marketing makes good business sense. It may be an explosion at first with fast growth and a nearly unstoppable contagion. However, longevity of your social media marketing depends on getting that slow burn going where the fuse stays lit and people are continually referring friends, liking and sharing your content, and feeding your SEO results over time.

If you're ready to implement a new social media marketing plan for your practice, give us a call at 951.665.8360 or contact us here. There's no better relief than placing this vital part of your online reach into highly-qualified hands.