SEO for doctors and dentists has emerged as one of the most potent tools to promote their practices online at an affordable cost. According to the recent Pew Internet Survey results, 80 percent of all online health inquiries begin at a search engine. That single statistic reveals in the immense potential power of medical SEO marketing, considering that 72 percent of all American adult Internet users say that they checked out the Internet for some kind of health information in the last one year.

Searches for health issues ranging from cosmetic to minor to serious are conducted vigorously, apart from general health information searches via the search engines. Compared to the large percentage of Internet users who relied on search engines to look for specific health information last year, only about 13 percent began their search specifically at health related websites such as Mayo Clinic or WebMD, while two percent began their search at more generic websites such as Wikipedia.

Interestingly, most people are not keen to pay to receive health information online. While more than 25 percent of people searching for health information online say they hit a pay wall, only two percent of those who hit the pay wall actually ended up paying to receive the information. The rest simply turned elsewhere on the Internet to find the same information for free. This should tell medical SEO experts that most Internet users are looking for specific and authentic health information online, but without any charge. The more such information a doctor’s website can disseminate for free, the more targeted traffic it can probably attract.

Healthcare SEO professionals should understand that the best strategy is to develop and present a wide body of original, accurate, current and relevant health content on a doctor’s website. The content simply needs to be oriented slightly to include localized keywords and backed up by appropriate meta tags. That should be good enough in most cases to gain the attention of search engines, and have the medical or dental website rank among the top ranking websites in its area.