Today’s digital marketing climate consists of numerous push and pull strategies. Between social media, landing pages, branded apps, and content campaigns, it can be challenging to surpass the status quo—let alone exceed client expectations.
Allied health professionals provide essential services, helping patients navigate complex health issues they have limited knowledge about. Services offered by allied health professionals are based on their skills, experiences, and comprehensive healthcare knowledge.
As such, allied health professionals occupy a niche in marketing. To stay relevant, practical, and successful, they need to employ a solid inbound marketing strategy—a pull strategy. Pull strategies focus on attracting customers via service advertisements. If you’re an allied health professional or market for an allied health practice, several inbound approaches surpass all others. The most important of these is link building.
What are Inbound Links?
Whenever a website links to your website, it does so via an inbound link. If someone clicks their link’s anchor text, they’ll enter your allied health practice’s landing page. They’ll be presented with content, service options, contact information, and more.
Modern inbound linking is a significant business venture—as increasing inbound link numbers results in high-standing search engine rankings. Appearing on Google’s first page for a query of “allied health professionals in my area” is an example of this—presenting your service as authoritative, trustworthy, and practical.
Building Strong Inbound Links
In the inbound marketing world, quality is better than quantity. If you try to boost your inbound link traffic with inorganic techniques—like spamming websites, forcing social media page views, or posting relevant URLs across forums—Google may flag your website. When this happens, Google may reduce your PageRank—or your overall search engine rank—due to suspicious activity.
So, how do you build a robust, organic inbound link architecture? Let’s take a look.
Content Creation
Content is your primary source of inbound links. As long as your content is high-quality, provides credible sources of information, and stays relevant—other bloggers, e-magazines, and even healthcare specialists will reference your website’s content. By creating a blog, posting informative articles on social media, and crafting intuitive email campaigns offering insight and value, you’ll attract high-quality impactors who share your website with others. This is the first and most crucial step in learning to build inbound links for allied health practices of any size.
Local Website Outreach
Most Internet users browsing for goods and services tend to search in their area. Local websites don’t have as much competition as big, global websites—and Google can tell when local sources link you. Another great way to build inbound links is to contact providers in your community. When this happens, your ranking will increase significantly across geo-locational allied health searches.
Guest Posting
Guest posts published through another organization’s websites are a powerful approach. Not only will you get to choose your anchor text—for SEO purposes—but you’ll have optimal real estate for providing a direct link. From here, learning how to build inbound links for allied health practices is much easier—because you’ll know who to contact in the future. You can network, too, connecting with sites relevant to your healthcare specialty.
Allied Health Directory Participation
Allied health directories, such as Healthgrades, are fantastic for building links. They let healthcare professionals create profiles, answer potential patient questions, and offer further services directly to their practice. These platforms often feature free Q&A sessions, which open the floor to sincere, long-lasting relationships with prospective patients. Even better: Building authority on these websites will make your practice more relevant in common searches, compounding your link visibility.
Building inbound links for allied health practices involves social syndication, fellowship, outreach, and valuable information. Promoting it to prospective patients is easy once you’ve bolstered your link-building campaign with high-value content. Reach out, extend advice, and connect with prospective patients who need your help the most—and the links to your practice’s website will grow.
