It is no secret that a strong online presence is essential for healthcare professionals, medical practices and businesses as most people rely on the internet for gaining medical information. It means that with every passing year, SEO for doctors is becoming an increasingly crucial part of healthcare marketing.

For any medical business to succeed in today’s digital world it should have a solid digital strategy. One of the important but often overlooked elements is the significance of having an appealing headline for your content. Besides the colorful images, the first thing to catch your eye and helps a user determine whether to read the text or not is the headline of the content. The main purposes of writing a good headline are:

  • Attract more traffic
  • Help more people to find the content with search engines
  • Make your content more valuable and shareable

Headline represents that heart of the text. It awakens the interest of users and persuades them to read the text. Headlines should not be too long or too short. A big part of content marketing is creating content that is valuable enough to be sought out by your audience. To help your audience find your content, it is important to ensure that the headlines you use include relevant keywords that the users are searching for. Users tend to react immediately, if the headlines use expressive or superlative words. Readers who make searches in Google have specific questions and they look for answers that best satisfy their queries. So the core idea of the content should be emphasized in the heading. This shows that your website can provide helpful content and position your business as a source of relevant and useful information. Avoid using obscure statements that have no distinct connection to the subject and meaningless headings that do not entice online readers.

Online readers are not the only ones who scan through the text, search engines also crawl over the content and pick out the best one. Search engines use crawlers to index sites and can identify a headline marked with the HTML tags. Moving keywords to the beginning of a headline helps search engines know what your post is about and sometimes flipping the order of your headlines is all it needs to improve SEO. Using words like “How”, “When”, “What”, “Why” etc can bring more traffic. These are the common words used by prospects when querying Google. A well-thought out content with suitable headlines and keywords can improve the organic traffic to your text.

Julia McCoy in her write-up in Huffington post categorizes the most popular headlines that went viral into five.

  • Tips and advice: Headlines in this category provide tips and advice, and answer many questions that users ask on Google. Example: “To Anyone Who Thinks They’re Falling behind in Life”
  • Opinion or views: These headlines deal with emotional topics and portray opinions and views about a topic. Example: “Real Love Is a Choice”.
  • Political: They deal with political events happening around the world and political opinions. Example: “Instead Of Trump’s Wall, Let’s Build a Border of a Solar Panel”
  • Trending: These signify topics that are popular and trending. Example: “Ballet Dancer Sergei Polunin Simply Slays Hoziers Take Me to Church”
  • News: This type of headline deals with news and current affairs. Example: The Real Reason White People Say “All Lives Matter”

The effectiveness of your healthcare content marketing strategy depends on the headlines and titles you choose. Headlines optimization is subject to changes in technologies, consumer preferences and trends evolved over the years. In the year 2017, headlines are going to get even more attention than ever before. However, the types of headlines that are most successful will undergo certain shifts. The headline is a very important part of the content as it is the first impression users have about your content. It is estimated that 59 percent of all shared content on social media is shared by people who haven’t read it, which means that the headlines alone will carry your content to greater visibility and circulation. Sharing an article is supposed to take place once the user has already clicked the link, read the article and found it to be interesting or valuable. But often users share an article first instead of reading. This is because it takes considerably less time and effort to share an article than it does to actually read the article. Sharing an article is likely to get more attention of users and gain traffic.

Since majority of the users aren’t paying much attention to internal content, the popularity of the content comes down to the strength of its headline. The content in an article is still important but headlines are the highlight. Without a solid headline, you will not be able to achieve meaningful social shares and new visibility. Healthcare digital marketing providers will enable you to develop content specific to your practice with strong and catchy headlines that will help gain more shares and traffic to your medical website.