So, you’re starting with your medical practice and are looking to step up your marketing game… Bilingual SEO can be the solution you’re looking for. Optimizing your website for visitors who speak different languages can offer you incredible results and be a budget-friendly strategy, compared to other methods like paid ads. Stay with us on White Coat Web, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about this essential part of your marketing plan.
Bilingual SEO 101
Bilingual SEO is the process of adapting your website to more than one language. The main objective is to give multiple audiences with different native languages easy access to your website using organic search. Multilingual SEO allows you to create content that reaches a new variety of target audiences.
Although the most popular language online is American English, only a percentage of global netizens describe it as their first language. In the U.S., the two main languages are, of course, English with 257 million native speakers and Spanish with 42 million native speakers. These are the two languages that you should consider for your website.
What does this mean? You have to invest in your SEO efforts beyond your content in English if you want to reach new possible patients who speak Spanish.
Why Doctors Need to Implement Bilingual SEO Strategies
Boosted patient attraction
Did you know that 21% of netizens use search engines to look up local businesses every day? This, of course, includes healthcare professionals.
If you don’t take the time to improve your SEO, then you’ll lose the benefits of finding a whole new market for your services. Optimizing your website to rank in search engines using the right keywords, adapting to the language and expressions of the new audience you want to reach, can change everything for you.
Local visibility
There is probably a big percentage of citizens in your area who may not have English as a first language, and they’re missing out on having a trusted doctor to attend to their emergencies. With bilingual SEO, you can break the barriers between their needs and what you can offer, and become a popular healthcare provider in your city.
Building trust and authority
Search engines like Google specifically rank trustworthy websites, especially for the top 3 positions. When you engage in SEO strategies like posting content constantly and link-building, your website can be deemed as trustworthy and begin to gain a good professional reputation.
Lowering your marketing costs
Instead of investing your money, bilingual SEO will require you to invest in learning, investigating, and working for it to have a good outcome, yet it is still a cost-effective way to promote your website.
➡ You might be interested: 5 Bilingual Marketing Solutions To Empower Your Practice
How to Upgrade Your Bilingual SEO
To optimize your site’s content and make it the star of all the search engine rankings, you should consider these five steps:
Use Dedicated URLs
In the context of developing websites, when it is hosted on an exclusive server, its URLs are also named as dedicated. To make this easy, it means that it’s not shared with other websites and is only associated with this specific server’s resources.
Creating dedicated and optimized URLs as a part of your marketing campaign and redirecting them as needed can make a positive change in your strategy. Make a customized link that you can constantly use to lead netizens to new, fresh content.
Apply Hreflang Tags
The hreflang attribute (also known as rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”) is what helps Google identify what language you are using on a specific page, and the search engine can show it as a result for users that are searching in said language.
If your website has a variety of content in multiple languages, using hreflang tags makes sure that search engines display the correct language version based on user preferences. Let’s set an example; if you have both English and Spanish versions of your website, hreflang tags tell the search engine to show these two versions according to the netizen’s language settings.
Please, One Language Per Page
Maybe the idea of translating a few parts of your website while keeping others in their original language has gone through your mind, but it can’t be applied to every case.
A couple of cases where a page can be written in different languages are:
- The main content on the page is multilingual, but the search bar stays in its original language.
- User-generated content is shown in different languages.
Even though you can use this strategy, showing more than one language on a single page can complicate the user experience.
Translating Your Metadata
Not only should your blogs and other content be translated when you create a bilingual website to reach more patients, but the metadata is another crucial part that needs to be translated. It’s a piece of text that provides information, descriptions, and keywords for the search engine, helping you rank better for the new bilingual audience that you want to reach.
Grow a New Bilingual Audience
At White Coat Web, we love to encourage our fellow healthcare professionals in learning new ways to improve their marketing efforts. Bilingual SEO is one of many solutions that can help you cross the bridge between you and new patients who may not speak English.
From multilingual websites to SEO optimizations, we can manage all the technical aspects so you can only focus on your patients’ concerns. Contact us and reach new patients today!