SEO for Midwives and Birth Centers
It’s been a minute since we’ve talked about SEO for midwives, and since we’ve been working on our own SEO here at Marketing TEA, we figured now was the perfect time to reopen the subject! SEO, shorthand of course for Search Engine Optimization, refers to actions that you take on your midwifery practice or birth center’s website to enhance how search engines like Google or Bing rank your content in search results. But we all know that part by now, right? What many don’t know are the ins and outs of how to achieve better SEO rankings within the world of midwifery, and that’s what we are here to do.
Now, a quick word of context is necessary here. Winning the long war of SEO is almost certainly a good goal for any midwife or birth center. But it’s not the ultimate victory. We’ve written in the past before about reactive vs proactive marketing – SEO is reactive marketing: as in, appearing at the top of search results when someone Googles ‘midwife near me’ or ‘birth center near me.’ The win in proactive marketing is when someone Googles your or your practice’s NAME. That’s what we want to see.
Either way, SEO is still a worthwhile endeavor. Some things may be worth doing on your own, some things may be worth working with a professional like Marketing TEA on, and we won’t BS you about the difference – that’s one thing we don’t do here. The 2 main actions can actually be put into 2 main categories based on that rule. Things you could do yourself, and things that you should probably work with someone to do, unless you have a lot of spare time on your hands. In other words:
- SEO Blog Writing and Content Creation for Midwives and Birth Centers
Don’t let anybody kid you. Writing lots and lots of regular blog content that hits on keywords that your target audience is looking for is THE way to win at SEO in the long term on your website. Any approach that doesn’t include this is all smoke and mirrors. Blogging was one of the reasons SEO was developed in the first place. Creators would put together useful information, and search engines would comb that info for keywords and deliver it to searchers. It’s still the number one way to grow your website’s SEO potential. Yes, of course there are some key strategies that professionals like us can use to make your written blog content go further and structure it to comply best with Google’s rules, but this step can be done on your own with commitment to the long game. Write your blog!
- SEO Website Fine-Tuning, Website Design, and Website Development for Midwives and Birth Centers
Alright, we’re still not gonna mess around with you. This part of SEO involves knowledge of website design, mobile usability, and even some coding. You just might want to work with a pro on this. It shouldn’t be excessively expensive to do though, and that’s where some people can make an unfortunate mistake. Your website needs to comply with certain fine-tuned policies that search engines have set into place – generally these rules were established to promote the websites that functioned best, but nowadays it’s more about playing the game. Pages need to be optimized, code needs to be put in place, your site needs to establish connection with your other online channels, and overall, your website needs to be sped up, sized down, and be easy to use and scan by both users and search engines. To start on this work yourself, many website hosting providers like Squarespace or Wix offer guides to promoting your SEO score. We prefer working with WordPress as it allows us as website developers many more layers of customization and software that we can use as a website’s needs and functions grow, but for beginners, there are even great plugins on WordPress that can help get you started on your SEO.
Now, of course this list of items to take care of isn’t comprehensive. There are many other things that can impact the success of SEO for midwives and birth centers, and we’ll certainly cover more of them in future blogs (see? We write a lot of blog content too.) But these are the key things that need to be done for your website, where many of the other SEO components will actually happen off of your website. This list SHOULD give you a starting point for what work you can do on your own site today as well as what things you should speak with a pro about improving. Looking for a pro to talk to? Hmm… we might know someone. I’m talking about us! Let’s have a chat.
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