SEO for Fertility Clinics is the organic way to optimize your online presence in the digital landscape to outrank your local fertility clinic competitors and be found by the right audience. In this article, we will discuss the best practices for SEO optimization which will enhance your online presence, drive more traffic to your site, and bring more clients to your fertility clinic.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity, which contribute to helping your site be more relevant, easier to find, and more popular toward a user’s search queries. It is a reliable and budget-friendly marketing strategy that helps drive traffic to your website, grow conversion rates, and help your site rank high on Google’s search result pages (SERP).

To understand SEO, there is on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and Technical SEO which all work together to help your website rank organically.

On-page SEO (also called on-site SEO) is when you optimize your web pages to rank higher on search engines. These include the title tag, relevant keywords, internal and external links, meta descriptions, and the URL structure.

Off-page SEO is when you work on making efforts to your website from the outside. These will include building backlinks, guest postings, social media marketing, and more.

Technical SEO is when you work on the technical aspects of your fertility clinic website for search engines, such as indexing, crawling, keyword cannibalization, and making it mobile-friendly.

1. How does SEO work?

SEO works by optimizing your fertility clinic’s website’s content, like conducting keyword research, earning inbound links, and the website’s visibility once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine.

Every time you use them, their algorithms choose pages that are the most relevant to your query. And then, rank them, displaying the most authoritative or popular ones first.

When the algorithm chooses pages that are the most relevant to search queries, it considers the following elements:

• The meaning behind someone’s query.  This will involve the search intent and matching it to the most helpful content.
• The relevance between the search query and the content on a page. Search engines will assess this through factors like keywords.
• The quality of content. The content that uses the E-E-A-T model will signal search engines to show up in a user’s search query due to their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
• The usability of a site. Elements considered for this involve page speed, mobile friendliness, and other factors that make it easy to discover content on a site.
• The Context. This will rely on the user’s past search behavior and settings like location.

To determine the relevance and authority of your fertility clinic website, you can use the E-E-A-T framework to ensure that your site has quality content:

• Expertise: This signals that you are an expert on the topic.
• Experience: This signals that you have personal experience regarding the content you write about.
• Authoritativeness: Having others use your site pages as sources signals your site’s credibility and authority.
• Trustworthiness: This signals that your fertility clinic website and its content are credible and up-to-date.

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2. Why SEO for Fertility Clinics?

Focusing on SEO for fertility clinics as part of your strategy will give your website many advantages, for instance, improving your digital marketing ROI (Return On Investment), decreasing your advertising costs, being able to promote your fertility clinic business every day, and targeting every date of the buying funnel.

One of the advantages of implementing SEO for your fertility clinic website is that it will get improved visibility. This means that your rank on search results pages will be higher, increasing the likelihood of people clicking on your website.

Using SEO will also help build your credibility for your fertility clinic practice. This is because ranking on the first page on SERP indicates to users that search engines trust your website and its content.

Investing in SEO for your fertility clinic practice involves a long-term strategy that will give your business positive results in the long run. It will generate more organic leads and sales, it will drive high-quality traffic to your site, and you will be able to stand out from your local competitors on search result pages by outranking them.

3. Understanding Search Engines

To understand how search engines operate for SEO optimization, it’s important to understand the following steps:

Crawling involves the discovery process where search engine bots find new and updated content. The content could be a webpage, a PDF, images, videos, and other file types accessible to bots that can be discovered through links. To ensure that your pages show up in SERPs, you need to make sure that they are first and foremost accessible to search engines.

Indexing is the next step after crawling. When a website or page URL is indexed, it stores, analyzes, and organizes the content and connections between pages. Without indexing your URL, it will not be found by potential clients interested in fertility clinic services, therefore it is imperative that you index your URL so it can be found by search engines.

Ranking is when search engines use intricate algorithms to rank web pages. These will be based on criteria such as content quality, user experience, and relevance. A higher ranking result means it will have greater visibility in search results.

4. Local SEO

With SEO, we don’t have to only focus on getting a high site rank in search results pages in general. We can go further by optimizing your fertility clinic page to show up in local search results on Google. As a fertility clinic, you will definitely benefit from local SEO if your business has a physical location (such as your fertility clinic) or if your business serves a geographic area, for instance, Irvine, California.

This is because Google lets you position in front of potential clients in your area. You want to implement local SEO due to local businesses getting 46% of Google searches and also because 87% of consumers use Google to research local businesses and even specific business addresses.

For local SEO, location-based results also focus on analyzing ranking factors like the following:

• Appearing only for searches with a local intent. An example of this could be “fertility clinic near me” or when the user defines the location.
• Containing results that are specific to a relevant location.
• Delivering specific information to users that the user wouldn’t necessarily need to go anywhere else to find
• Primarily targeting smartphone users for local searches because these search queries happen more often on mobile devices.

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5. On-Page SEO Strategies

5.1 URL Slugs 

URL slugs are the last part of the URL address which serves as the unique identifier of the page. If possible, keep URLs short since search engines don’t like reading lengthy strings of words with complex structures. They should also be user-friendly, and you might want to include the target or primary keyword of a specific page.

For example:

• https://www.socalfertility.com/fertility-treatment/
• https://www.socalfertility.com/fertility-treatment/in-vitro-fertilization-ivf/

These examples use a URL slug that provides a clear indication of the content of the website. The first example uses “fertility-treatment” as the URL slug giving the user an indication that they can learn more about the different types of fertility treatments your fertility clinic offers. The second example has a longer and more detailed URL slug of “fertility-treatment/in-vitro-fertilization-ivf”. Using the target keyword in the URL slug, and providing a short description of the page and the specific service being provided will encourage a user to click on the link over a URL slug that has irrelevant information, such as a chain of numbers.

Optimise URL Slugs for SEO:

• Be descriptive (describe the content of the page using your target keyword)
• Make it user-friendly
• Make it concise and easy to read (try to use less than 5 words in your URL slug)
• Separate words (improves the readability of the URL slug)
• Avoid keyword stuff
• Use hyphens, not underscores
• Don’t use URL slugs that already belong to other pages
• Use lowercase characters (they can be case-sensitive so keeping them lowercase avoids any issues)
• Avoid special characters (don’t use emojis)
• Make it future-proof (Avoid using numbers that may change in the future, such as the publishing date)

5.2 Meta Descriptions

A meta description is an HTML tag with a brief summary of the web page, that should be unique, descriptive, and relevant to your page because it helps the user have an idea of the content page and how relevant it is to their search query. You can even use the small intro of your page and reword it to a more concise paragraph to be your meta description. An effective meta description tag will convince users to click on your link, increasing your click-through rate.

Optimize meta descriptions for SEO:

• Your meta descriptions should  be kept between 155 to 160 characters max
• Include your primary target keyword
• It should satisfy the user’s search query (Understand the search intent for an effective meta description)

5.3 Title Tags

A title tag is an HTML element that sets a web page’s title, which can be seen in the browser and search results. A well-optimized SEO title tag will be able to balance the search needs of search engines and users, to make it exciting to read and helpful for keyword rankings.

We recommend keeping your title tags between 50 to 60 characters maximum. This way your words won’t get cut off on desktop or mobile search engine result pages. You also want to optimize your website’s title tags to improve the SEO performance and click-through rates of your fertility clinic site.

Optimize Title Tags for SEO:

• Keep title tag length between 50 to 60 characters
• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Target one primary keyword
• Make your title tags unique on your website and on the SERP
• Make sure the <title> element is present in your page’s HTML
• It should accurately describe your page

5.4 Internal and External Links

Internal Links are hyperlinks or relevant pages on your fertility clinic practice website that provide additional relevant and useful information.

External Links are also hyperlinks, outbound links, or relevant pages but these are found outside of your website that point a reader or user to a different domain. They are used to help search engines and users have a better understanding of a website’s topic. External links can also boost the ranking and reputation of a site when used on authoritative and relevant sources.

Optimizing Internal and External Links

Best Practices for Internal Links:

• Use plenty of internal links throughout your fertility clinic website. Create many internal pages that contain quality written content.
• Link high authority and relevant pages. These will improve your ranking and the user’s experience.
• Avoid phrases like “click here” and replace them with anchor texts instead.
• Include at least 3 to 5 internal links

Best Practices for External Links:

• Link to relevant sources that will add value to your page and to your readers.
• External links should be from credible and professional sources.
• Don’t link your competitor’s website.
• Use keyword anchor texts.
• Make sure that your external links open to a new tab.

5.5 Alt Tags

Alt tags are used to describe the appearance of the function of an image that is used on a page, and they allow search engines to crawl and rank your fertility clinic website. These are also known as alternative text, alt attributes, or alt descriptions. They add additional content to the images used on your articles or blog posts and help screen reading tools to describe them to visually impaired readers.

Your alt tags also ensure that all bots and all users can understand the content of your site, therefore you want to apply best practices to your alt tags for SEO optimization.

Best practices for alt tags:

• Describe the image as accurately as possible
• The description should be relevant to the topic of your blog post
• Use up to 125 characters or less. Keep it relatively short.
• Include primary keywords
• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Don’t include “image of” or “picture of” in your alt text
• Avoid copying the image caption

Update Old Blog Posts

You will want to update all your blog posts to support your SEO efforts, especially if you have many old posts on your fertility clinic website. It will help rank your website higher on relevant searches, and you will be able to maximize the reach and engagement of your posts

How to update old blog posts?

• Update outdated trends or features that are not applicable in the present time.
• Check each internal and external link. Some may have changed to a new domain, and others might redirect your website visitors to dead links.
• Promote your blog using other formats, such as infographics (this is especially useful for long-form content)
• Share them on social media platforms like Pinterest

Use headings to boost the rank of your posts

You want to use relevant headings in all your blog posts. These will increase the chance of your blog showing up on Google’s featured snippets.

If you want to show up on Google’s Search Results Page, you will need effective featured snippets because it will increase your click-through rate, and you will have a better understanding of your target audience’s interest

Featured snippets on Google are highlighted sections of text that appear at the top of Google’s search results page and provide searchers or users a quick answer to their search query.

Tips on how to rank on Google’s Featured Snippets:

• Create and update your content outline
• Well-written and quality content
• The content should match the user’s intent
• Add relevant infographics and lists
• Understand the searcher’s intent

5.6 Keyword Research

Keywords are an essential part of your SEO strategy to help your fertility clinic be found by the right potential clients. Having prior and comprehensive keyword research for your business will help you better understand the search terms your target audience uses when they are searching for fertility clinic services.

Choosing Keywords:

When choosing your keywords, consider the following factors to help with your keyword research.

• Monthly search volume: This indicates the demand for a specific keyword and the number of times it was searched within a month, or within the last 12 months.
• Keyword difficulty: These indicate how difficult a specific keyword can rank organically.
• Relevance to your business: The keywords you use should be relevant to your fertility clinic business. These can be services you offer, the location (or locations if you have more than one practice) where your fertility clinic business operates, and more.
• Search intent: This is the intention the user has when searching for a specific keyword. It can be informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial.

Different types of search intent:

• Informational intent: This is when a user wants to learn more information about something. The searches with informational intent will usually be phrased questions with terms such as “how”, “why”, “tips” and “solution”.
• Navigational intent: This is when a user actively looks for a specific page. Searches with navigational intent usually indicate that the user already knows what they are searching for, for instance, “fertility clinic for IUI”.
• Commercial intent: This type of search intent will usually include keywords that a user has used to research before making a purchase. It can also involve searches such as “fertility clinic near me x reviews”
• Transactional intent:  This is the type of search intent that is used by users who want to find something specific (for instance, fertility clinic for fertility tests), to make a purchase, or even sign up for a newsletter.

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5.7 Keyword Tools for Keyword Research

Google’s Autocomplete Predictions

It’s a feature within Google Search Engine that uses automated systems to generate predictions of what the user is typing, with relevant search queries from real and trending searches. These can also be based on your location.

Google’s Related Searches Section

Related searches are another feature within Google. These are generated based on Google’s algorithm and they can be very useful for SEO-related searches that will help you get a better understanding of your target audience’s search intent.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool you can use to help with your keyword research. This is especially useful when creating search ad campaigns.

Keyword Planner will help you discover new keywords when implementing SEO because this free tool provides keyword forecasts and estimated keyword bids. These statistics will help you better understand how high intent a keyword is and will help you to use the right keywords for your site.

Browser Extensions

Using browser extensions is another way to elevate and help with your keyword research. This is because browser extensions for keyword research offer plenty of benefits, such as helping you with your SEO efforts and helping you save time on your research. Some of the browser extensions we recommend that we have tried and tested are the following:

Keyword Surfer collects search data for your keywords. With this browser extension, you can see essential metrics like search volume, CPC, and estimated traffic. Keyword Surfer also allows you to generate keyword ideas and see search volumes directly on Google search results.

Keywords Everywhere is a fast and easy-to-use powerful keyword research tool that doesn’t require you to log in to any SEO tool online. It offers a “freemium” plan for your SEO keyword research and can provide you with data analytics on volume searches, CPC (Cost-Per-Click), relevant keywords, and even long-tail keywords.

6. Off-Page SEO Strategies

6.1 Guest Posting

Guest posting or guest blogging is a very effective tactic for link-building, which is the process of getting other websites to link back to our fertility clinic website. Guest posting can help get your business in front of a different audience and attract them back to your site. This tactic can also help you get high-quality backlinks to improve your domain’s authority, which all contribute to signaling search engines that you are an industry expert.

Use keywords such as “write for us + fertility clinic” to find guest posting opportunities. These will also provide you with search results of websites accepting guest posts along with specific guidelines you will need to follow/

For guest posting opportunities, you can try using keywords such as “write for us + acupuncture clinic”. This will provide you with websites accepting guest posts along with guidelines.

Tips for writing guest posts:

• Follow their editorial guidelines for guest posting
• Align with their style of writing
• Include internal links from their website
• Proofread for grammar and spelling mistakes before publishing
• Work on your author’s bio (mention something about yourself, what you do, and social channels where they can reach you)

6.2 Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the elements you want to implement as part of your off-page SEO digital marketing strategy. For your content marketing to be effective, you will need to produce content specific to your target audience which is enjoyable to read, but also provides a solution for the reader.

Content marketing is also referred to as a strategic marketing strategy that focuses on attracting and retaining your target audience, to drive profitable customer action, hence why it is important to include it as part of your off-page SEO efforts.

You will want to use different channels to distribute your content to help boost off-page signals, such as the following:

• PR
• Social Media
• Influencer Marketing
• Podcasts
• Content Syndication
• Forums
• And more.

6.3 Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is another off-page optimization strategy we strongly recommend to improve your site ranking. Using this strategy involves engaging with your target audience on social media platforms, for instance, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest.

This off-page strategy can also help increase organic clicks, establish authority, drive on-site engagement, improve local ranking, gather insights from social media metrics, and generate backlinks.

6.4 Online Forums

Another effective off-page optimization strategy you can use for your fertility clinic site is joining online forums, like Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn groups.

Participating in online communities can help boost your off-page SEO. It works by making your fertility clinic site more popular in the digital landscape, and it can improve your rank on SERP or search engine results pages. Joining relevant online discussions is a great opportunity to establish your expertise in the fertility clinic industry, and you can link relevant blog posts from your website to support and further explain your answer in these online forums. Doing so will help build your authority, and as a result, you will gain more backlinks, site traffic, and more new clients.

When joining online forums, consider the following factors:

• Provide accurate answers
• Don’t add links in every single answer you provide
• Don’t spam the comment section only to get more links. (It could make you lose credibility and ruin your reputation)
• Follow the platform’s policies
• Only add links from your website that are relevant to the topic being discussed

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7. Technical SEO Strategies

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, technical SEO focuses on working on the technical aspects of your fertility clinic website. Technical SEO strategies are critical because you want it to be free from any technical issues that may prevent it from ranking on search engines. This strategy is also essential to attract organic traffic that will convert into clients for your fertility clinic.

Optimize your Fertility Clinic Website

Optimizing your fertility clinic site for technical SEO ensures search engines can effectively crawl it, which is one of the elements we mentioned at the beginning of this article, to better understand how search engines work.

The next step for optimizing your site is indexing. It is essential that you index your URL for it to be found by search engines. If you fail to index your URL, your site or blog post will not be found by potential clients actively searching for fertility clinic services.

7.1 Secure your site

Earn the trust of your clients by ensuring your site is secure. Having an unsecured website will risk your client’s personal information to get stolen by hackers. As a result, it will drive away potential clients. Another key element to consider is if your fertility clinic website doesn’t have a “secure connection” sign. Without one, it will suggest to your potential clients that you don’t have an encrypted connection, further giving your site and your fertility clinic business a negative reputation.

In short, it is imperative that your website uses an encrypted connection to avoid ranking lower on SERP since website security is one of Google’s ranking signals.

One way to secure your website is by using HTTPS. This is a secure version of HTTP, and using HTTPS will help you protect sensitive user information from being compromised such as passwords and credit card details. Other factors to consider for securing your site are the following:

• Choose a reliable hosting provider
• Schedule regular website backups
• Update your website to the latest version
• Install an SSL certificate (to authenticate the identity of your site and to establish a secure connection when users access it)

7.2 Page Speed

One of the factors that affect your ranking on both mobile and desktop is page speed, therefore ensuring your website loads as fast as possible is key. Page speed is usually scored from 0 to 100, and you want to aim for a high number as your performance score because the higher it is, the faster your page speed is.

To improve your page speed, implement technical SEO strategies such as compressing your images, minimizing the use of javascript files to improve the loading time of the page, and using a content distribution network so requested files require less distance to travel by using the nearest server.

7.3 Single Website Version

Make sure you only have one version of your website and avoid having more than one version of your fertility clinic website. For example:

• https://www.socalfertility.com/
• https://socalfertility.com/

With more than one version being accessible to users, it can create duplicate content issues that will reduce the effectiveness of your backlink profile. As a result, it will negatively affect your site’s performance on Google, therefore

Having both versions accessible can create duplicate content issues, and it can reduce the effectiveness of your backlink profile, negatively affecting your performance in Google. In short, you want to only use one version of your website.

7.4 Mobile Friendly Website

Having a mobile-friendly website improves your SEO because Google uses mobile-first indexing. This involves looking at the mobile version of your fertility clinic webpage to index, rank content, and see how compatible it is with mobile devices

To check if your fertility clinic site is mobile-friendly, use tools like Mobile-Friendly Test on Google Search Console.

7.5 Duplicate Content

One of the factors that will probably need checking for your technical SEO is finding and fixing duplicate content issues on your site. This happens when you have the same content on different pages of your fertility clinic site, which can cause problems and negatively affect your SEO efforts. You don’t want to have duplicates on your site, because it will make it hard for search engine crawlers to decide which page should rank high. It can cause backlink dilution and wasted crawl budget, hurting your rank on search engines.

Use tools like Semrush to check which pages on your fertility website rank for the same keyword, to ensure you don’t have duplicates. Using tools like Semrush will give you real-time performance reports to identify your rank on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Youtube

7.6 Broken links

Another factor that will require checking are potential broken links. Broken links can happen when pages from your site are no longer accessible by a user. Having broken links can affect the user experience, making these users or page visitors leave your site without performing an action for conversion.

Possible reasons why your fertility site may have broken links could be due to changing the URL of a page on your site, a specific page on your site was removed, or you may have forgotten to redirect old URLs.

To find and fix broken links on your fertility clinic website, use tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker. Tools like Google Search Console can also help track your website’s ranking and performance on Google’s search results page.

7.7 Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is when too many pages on your fertility website contain identical or similar keywords spread throughout the content on your site. As a result, search engines and web crawlers end up having a hard time prioritizing which page should rank higher. Deciding not to fix keyword cannibalization will cause potential site traffic loss and a lower search engine ranking.

How to fix keyword cannibalization:

• Organize all the URLs and target keywords from your fertility website using a spreadsheet.
• Reduce the number of times the keyword is used or simply remove if it possible.
• Work on improving the content of your pages with better quality.
• Check if any pages cannibalize each other and why.

In this article, we shared our insights from running over 1,000 successful SEO campaigns at Yoyofumedia and discussed the best practices you can implement to manage your own successful SEO campaign for fertility clinics. Learn more about our successful SEO case studies on Yoyofumedia’s page.

8. Conclusion

Implementing and investing in SEO as part of your online digital strategy will be a rewarding experience that will have a significant impact on the success of your fertility clinic. Although it’s a continuous monthly process, the results from organically gaining new clients and gaining revenue from ranking #1 on Google’s search engine results will make it worth it.

Since more people rely on search engine results when actively looking for fertility clinics near them or for fertility clinic services, SEO will not only enhance your online presence, it will also attract the right customers for your clinic, thus giving you a competitive advantage over your local competitors.

Although SEO is extremely effective and has many advantages like the ones we mentioned in this article, it can take a longer period of time before you see results so if you’d prefer to get much faster results, learn how Google Ads for Fertility Clinics can also help you.

Schedule your free strategy session now and get started on your SEO journey to build connections with your clients and gain more patient volume to your clinic!