In this post, we show you how to market your functional medicine practice without spending a dime using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By ranking at the top on Google when potential patients search for your services, you can fuel the growth of your practice reliably and cheaply.

Given the value of focusing on your local community for patient acquisition efforts, we cover SEO basics and dive into local SEO to help you attract patients right in your community.

Why SEO matters

1. It works.
   Digital marketing is an excellent way for functional medicine practices to acquire new patients.
   
   Your patients are online, so you should be as well. Considering young to middle-aged adults (18-44 years old), over 60% use the Internet to look for health or medical information (CDC).
   
   Additionally, the click-through rates (CTR, percentage of people who click on a link after seeing it) are much higher on organic (non-paid) results than paid ads. In fact, organic clicks resulted for 45% of all search result clicks, despite appearing lower in the ranking (Forbes). This means SEO is often a more effective way to attract patients than paid ads.

2. It’s free.
   You can win on SEO without spending any money. While SEO involves upfront effort, learning, and time, it can drive results without a continuous budget. For cash-strapped clinicians who are launching a practice, this is often especially attractive.

3. It has lasting value.
   Once your page ranks well online, it can continue to attract traffic over time without ongoing costs. There is a virtuous cycle, in which higher visibility leads to more clicks, and more clicks lead to higher visibility. Your domain authority (essentially how reputable Google perceives your domain to be) builds over time, making it easier for future content to rank higher, faster. Ads, on the other hand, stop bringing in traffic once the budget runs out.
   
   Additionally, a lot of the work you will do for SEO will bring value to your practice outside of how well you rank. Among other elements, SEO consists of having high-quality, shareable, visually appealing content on the Internet. This not only makes you more trustworthy to Google, but also to patients. In other words, most of the work you’ll do for SEO will pay dividends for brand building, too.

Key ranking factors

Below, we enumerate the core steps to help your website rank favorably.

Create high-quality content

The single most important thing in your control is having relevant, well-researched, and engaging content.

The framework Google uses to evaluate the quality and credibility of content is known as E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)

• Expertise: The content should be created by someone with sufficient knowledge or skills in the subject matter, especially for sensitive topics, like health or finance. → Luckily for you, as a clinician, you have the expertise Google is looking for! Make sure that your credentials and background are clear on your website.

• Experience: Google's recent update emphasizes firsthand experience. Content written by someone who has direct, personal experience with the topic is considered more reliable and useful. → When possible, weave in case studies, examples, and stories from your and your patients’ experiences.

• Authoritativeness: You and your website should be recognized as a go-to source for information in its field. More on this below!

• Trustworthiness: Your content should be accurate, transparent, and reliable. This includes citing credible sources and providing clear information about yourself as the author. It also means ensuring your site is secure technically.

Google explicitly considers engagement metrics when determining the quality of your content, so keep an eye on your bounce rates (percentage of visitors who land on your page and leave without interacting further), time spent on your page, and click-through rates.

Establish backlinks

A backlink, also known as an “inbound link” is a link from one website to another. When a website links to your site, it essentially vouches for the quality and relevance of your content.

A couple notes:

• Quality over quantity: A few high-quality backlinks are better than many low-quality ones.

• Earned over bought: Search engines value organically earned backlinks over those bought or manipulated.

Our recommendation is to focus primarily on creating excellent content, and secondarily on establishing relationships with high-authority, reputable websites. This might look like writing guest articles for reputable healthcare websites, co-authoring articles with other healthcare professionals that have a more established presence, creating shareable infographics, participating in media opportunities (interviews, podcasts, news), or listing your practice in high-quality, authoritative online directories (e.g., WebMD, Healthgrades)—and always including a link back to your website.

Use keywords

Keywords signal to search engines what your page is about, allowing it to rank for relevant search queries.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to analyze search volumes and identify relevant words that potential patients might use in search engines to land on your website.

Be sure to include the keywords naturally and in context. Search engines penalize pages for “keyword stuffing” (e.g., repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural).

Place keywords strategically in the title tag, meta description, headings, introduction and conclusion, URL, and alt text for images.

• Meta tags

  • Meta title: The title tag appears in search engine results as the clickable headline. A well-optimized title tag with relevant keywords helps improve rankings.

  • Meta description: This short summary appears below the title in search results. While it doesn’t directly impact rankings, it can influence CTR by making the content more enticing to users.

• Headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

  • Headers provide structure to the content, making it easier for both search engines and users to understand. The H1 tag is typically used for the main title of the page, while H2, H3, and so on are used for subheadings.

  • Proper header usage improves readability and signals content hierarchy to search engines.

  • Including relevant keywords in headers can also help with keyword relevance and ranking.

• Image alt text

  • Alt text is a description of an image that search engines read to understand the image’s content, since they can’t "see" images like humans do.

  • It also makes images accessible to users with visual impairments.

Optimize the visual experience

By improving the user experience through the look and feel of your site, you can lower the bounce rates and drive up user engagement.

Practically, we recommend adding images to your page. This increases the visual interest of your site and aids in discoverability, as many people search by browsing photos through the “Images” filter.

A few best practices:

• Use images that are sharp and clear

• Place images near text that is relevant to the image

• Add descriptive alt text to the image (more on this above)

• Use filenames for the image that are short, but descriptive

• Apply image optimization and responsive image techniques to ensure your pages load quickly (more on this below)

Keep your technology up to par

There are a few technology-specific elements that are important to consider:

• Page speed: Faster pages tend to rank better. Review PageSpeed to understand your current performance, and keep things simple to improve your speed.

  • Use as few fonts as possible

  • Use native and system fonts when possible (e.g., Georgia, Times New Roman)

  • Minimize the number of render-blocking CSS and JavaScript files

  • Ensure images are compressed and properly sized

• Mobile optimization: A growing number of users access websites via mobile devices. In fact, mobile visits outpaced desktop by 313% in 2023 (Semrush). Search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites, so it’s essential to ensure your website is optimized for mobile to improve both user experience and search rankings.

• Security: Ensure your site uses HTTPS to protect data and build trust with both users and search engines.

• Crawlability: Proper indexing, clear URL structures, XML sitemaps, and structured data make it easier for search engines to crawl, understand, and rank your website.

  • Indexing is the process by which search engines store and organize content after crawling it, making it available in search results. Ensure that important pages on your site are crawlable by using a clean robots.txt file and avoiding “noindex” tags on key pages. Use Google Search Console to check which pages are indexed and submit new ones as needed.

  • Simple, descriptive, and organized URLs make it easy for search engines and users to understand a page’s content. Use concise, keyword-rich URLs that reflect the content of the page.

  • An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your site, helping search engines discover and prioritize them when crawling. If you’re using a website-building platform like WordPress or Squarespace, your sitemap is likely automatically generated. A quick way to access your sitemap is to add /sitemap.xml to the end of your website’s address (e.g., https://www.ottohealth.io/sitemap.xml). Once generated, submit it to Google Search Console so search engines know which pages to crawl.

  • Structured data is a standardized format (often using schema markup) that helps search engines understand the content of your page and display rich results, like snippets or ratings. Use schema.org to find the correct markup for your content (e.g., reviews, products, services). Add the structured data to your site’s HTML (Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper can create the necessary code for you) or use plugins (if on platforms like WordPress). Test your structured data using Google's Rich Results Test.

By staying on top of these technical elements, alongside creating high-quality content, you set a strong foundation for SEO success.

Additional ranking factors for local SEO

Local SEO focuses on improving a company's presence in search results when potential customers search for services or products "near me" or include location-based keywords. For cash-pay practices, this is especially important given you are more likely to have success with patient acquisition if you begin by focusing locally.

Searches focused locally often have “Places” or “Businesses” results right below paid results and above all other organic results. To visualize this, try searching “weight loss clinic near me” on Google.

For local SEO, the goal is to be one of the top results in this section. The results that appear in this section are Google Business Profiles (GBP). Beyond the ranking factors mentioned above, there are a few additional factors that are critical for GBP Rankings:

• Relevance: How well a local business profile matches what someone is searching for

• Distance: How far each potential search result is from a user’s search

• Prominence: How well-known a business is

Tactically, here’s what you should do:

1. Claim your Google Business Profile (GBP) listing

2. Optimize your GBP listing

   • Add at least 10 unique images

   • Create product listings

   • Max our your business categories

   • Have friends and family ask questions – ideally people who live close by — and respond to their questions

3. Manage your reviews

   • Ask past patients to post reviews

     • Keep in mind that average star rating is more important than quantity of reviews

     • A steady stream of reviews is better than a sudden influx

     • Extra credit for reviews with photos

   • Respond to every review

4. Create geo-targeted content

   • Use location-specific keywords in your content (e.g., add city name in your landing page title)

   • Use keywords to find commonly asked questions at the national level, and create content that answers those questions locally (e.g., “how can I get semaglutide in Orlando, FL?”)

5. Build local backlinks from other websites or directories

   • Collaborate with other local bloggers, healthcare professionals, and news sources

   • Make sure you have a profile on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Healthgrades, and WebMD

6. Ensure citation consistency

   • It’s important that your name, address, phone, and website (NAPW) are consistent and accurate across all online listings

Good luck!

Marketing your functional medicine practice through SEO is a powerful, cost-effective strategy that can drive long-term patient acquisition without ongoing expenses. By focusing on high-quality content, keyword optimization, backlinks, and local SEO tactics like Google Business Profiles, you can significantly increase your online visibility and attract the right patients.

At Otto Health, we help clinicians acquire patients through SEO. If you need support optimizing your online presence or creating a Google Business Profile that ranks, reach out to us. We're here to ensure your practice stands out locally and grows efficiently.