Search Engine Optimization for Healthcare and Health-related Organizations

Search Engine Optimization for Health-related Organizations focuses on improving organic visibility for hospitals, doctors, clinics, health expert centers, telehealth services, and more by optimizing technical, local and semantic relevance and responsiveness related verticals of a web entity. Personally, I am opposed to combining the term “health” with “industry,” as healthcare is a fundamental right for every human being.

That being said, this simple guide is designed for doctors, dietitians, dentists, optometrists, and aestheticians to provide a basic understanding of holistic SEO methods and strategies. The goal is to help accelerate audience growth and assist potential patients in finding the best doctors and medical care more efficiently.

We will go step-by-step to explain what Search Engine Optimizaiton, and how small doctor clinics can compete with hospitals, or hospitals can manage their large-sclae content networks to expand their patient base.

1. Claim your Local Business Listing (Google Business Profile, Microsoft Bing Business Profile, Apple Maps Location)

Claim your local business profile for all the search engines, and platforms such as Google, Microsoft Bing, or Apple Maps Location. Most of the health organizations whether a single-person clinic, or multi-department hospitals have a local address which allows patients to communicate, get directions, achieve contact information, ask quesitons, read reviews, examine services, offers, and latest updates about the specific place.

The Healthcare SEO is mostly based on the Local SEO. The Local SEO refers to the increase rankings in Local Searh Engine result pages with “near me” context. Search engines tend to rank results according to their local proximity to the user, and prominence of the business entity rather than its only relevance. Thus, the “topical map” (planned content network based on semantics and user bheaviors) should cover both local-related, and generic topics for the health services.

Claiming local business profiles, including every search engine and serch platforms help turning a website into a web entity. There is a difference between web entity and website. Website consists of only the web pages under a certain domain, while web entity involves the business listing, social media platforms, review platforms, business directories, news about the business entity, founder identity, and any other member of the business entity whether a doctor, or investor.

Showing the clear transparent reactions, reviews and experiences that demonstrate results of the health operations, or health-related product tests and their results provide search engines to trust elements by providing the sentiment around the business entity.

Google search engine merges the historical visits to the business place from local search context to the visits to the website from organic search context to understand the real-world satisfaction about a web entity.

Thus, try to achieve the checklist below to have higher rankings on Local Search context.

1. Fill all the working hours information accurately for the local business listing.
2. Try to have a hospital, or the clinic brand name that involves the query-terms along with your targeted brand emotion, for example, “Myra Dental Centre Turkey”. The actual name of the company is “Myra” is merged with the “Dental Centre Turkey” which helps for ranking also “Dental Tourism Turkey”, or “Veneers Turkey.
1. Semantically, the phrase “dental” helps for relevance to the “Veneers”.
2. Locally,” the “centre” and “Turkey” helps for the local context annotation.
3. Add all of the contact information including email, phone number, website address, and “book an appointment” options.
4. Ensure you use “My Business App” of Google by downloading it through App Store or Play Store.
1. Ensure you open the messaging possibilities from the app for your local business.
5. Add your services list customized way for demonstrating all of your business prominence.
1. Ensure you have unique images, descriptions, and clear price ranges for these services.
2. Include the query-terms that patients search for in your services or products.
3. Include these products and services in y our website to signal that your business listing and website are symmetric to each other.
6. Add your patients’ questions to the questions section of the Google Business Profile.
1. Add the most frequently asked questions to the your business profile by yourself, and answer them thoroughly.
2. Include the specifically searched query terms in these questions, and their answers.
3. Leave links to your articles, guides, and testimonials from these questions.
7. Answer every review in your business profile.
1. If there is a negative review attack on your listing, report these fake reviews until it is removed.
2. Answer every review respectfully, and in a detailed manner.
3. The most used words in the reviews curated as n-grams which trigger quick search buttons in the user UI to show the general character of the reviews.
8. Use barcodes in the elevator, office waiting area, or different zones in your organization to gather more reviews.
1. Offer discounts, or rewards for the clients who leave an review.
2. If you are an e-commerce business for health products, offer free products, or shipment in the return of a review.
3. Increase your reviews naturally and in-place, or quick-commerce marketing rather.
4. Ensure you have at least 20 reviews in your business profile. Having frequently added reviews help for higher visibility for local search terms.
9. Include regular updates for your Google Business Profile.
1. Add your latest blog posts, vlogs and scientific researches, awards, testimonials as updates in your business profile.
2. Include price offers, discounts and campaigns in your business profile to increase the visibility.
10. If your services target audience from another country, ensure you add these countries, cities and regions to your business listing as “service area” to increase the local visibility.
11. Use local ranking trackers, along with the Google Business Profile performance panel to understand amount of phone calls, physical address direction requests, website visits, emails, and other activities.
12. Ensure your physical address appear at the footer of your website as same in the Google Business Profile.

There are many additional ways to optimize your Google Business Profile and equivalent listings on other search engines. This can include using the correct resolutions for your cover photo, uploading high-quality interior and exterior photos, or leveraging instant verification methods for your profile. However, in this quick guide, we’ve focused on the three main aspects of SEO—local, technical, and semantic optimization. To delve deeper into specific verticals, I encourage you to explore these topics further according to your specific needs.

2. Achieve State-of-art for Technical Optimization in Healthcare SEO

Technical SEO refers to all web development efforts aimed at improving a website’s search engine friendliness. Search engines use different crawlers for various types of content, each serving specific purposes. A crawler is essentially a web request and indexing system that evaluates your website and helps determine its ranking in search results. 

Healthcare SEO related businesses target multiple topics and service types which require having multiple different types of web page layouts, web components, API requests and responses. According to the business entity types in healthcare, you can find the classification of your own healthcare entity for technical SEO aspects.

Crawlers refer to Google’s ranking and indexing systems, which are based on HTML parsing and also incorporate other file types such as JavaScript (JS), CSS, fonts, manifest files, and images. Google is capable of indexing various document types, including CSV, PDF, PPTX, and many others. In the healthcare industry, we have observed that web entities offering multiple document types, such as PDFs, tend to rank higher, especially when there are internal links between HTML pages and PDF documents.

Technical SEO primarily focuses on optimizing websites for search engine crawlers. If a website’s server or development resources are not optimized, leading to higher computational costs for the search engine, the search engine may favor a competitor’s site for ranking purposes. 

If a specific type of crawler is involved, technical SEO is primarily focused on improving communication with that particular crawling system of Google. For instance, “GoogleOther” is mainly used for research and development, focusing on generative AI results, including AI Overviews. In this context, technical SEO should not be limited to just “PageSpeed” but should also involve optimizing content technicalities and content-related web development aspects to reduce the cost of retrieval.

To keep this document at an introductory level and less technical, follow the checklist below to improve search engine communication efficiency.

• Response Time Optimization
• Ensure that the server response time is lower than 100ms. A faster response time improves the user experience and ensures that search engine crawlers can retrieve content efficiently.
• DOM Size Optimization
• Keep the Document Object Model (DOM) size below 900 elements for every webpage. A smaller DOM improves page load speed and reduces the computational cost for search engine crawlers.
• Use of Semantic HTML
• Implement semantic HTML codes (e.g., <article>, <section>, <header>, <footer>) to improve the website’s communication with search engines. Semantic HTML helps search engines understand the structure and context of the content more effectively.
• User-Agent Analysis
• Regularly analyze the hits from Googlebot-related user agents by:
• Identifying the document type being crawled.
• Understanding the crawling purpose (e.g., images, video, news).
• Verifying the returned status code to ensure successful retrieval (200 OK).
• Internal Link Health Check
• Remove all internal links that do not return a 200 status code. Broken links (404, 410) or redirects (302) can negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings.
• Log File Analysis
• Conduct a log file analysis to:
• Identify and remove URLs returning 404, 410, or 302 status codes from the search engine’s agenda.
• Use robots.txt to block unnecessary URLs or implement bulk redirections to resolve redirect chains or dead links.
• SEO-related Response Headers
• Ensure your response headers contain key SEO information to improve search engine communication speed, such as:
• Canonicalization: Indicates the preferred URL for content to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Hreflang Tags: Provide language and regional targeting information for international SEO.
• Sitemap Optimization
• Ensure your sitemap contains fewer than 1,000 URLs to improve crawling and indexation speed.
• Smaller sitemaps facilitate faster indexing by search engines.
• Group related URLs into smaller, well-structured sitemaps to help search engines adjust their crawling intervals more efficiently.
• Use sitemap index files to organize smaller sitemap files for better management.
• Always include image and hreflang information within your sitemap documents for more comprehensive indexing.
• Robots.txt Configuration
• Optimize your robots.txt file to block unnecessary crawlers, such as:
• SEO auditing tools that unnecessarily crawl your site.
• Price-tracking bots that monitor your product prices, potentially from competitors.
• Use log files to monitor what types of price-tracking systems are crawling your website.
• Price Tracking Competitor Monitoring
• Analyze your logs to identify whether large competitors (like Amazon) are monitoring your prices. Competitors may automatically adjust their pricing based on your site, so keeping track of these activities is important for competitive strategy.
• DNS Reverse Look-up for Crawler Validation
• Perform DNS reverse lookups to confirm that crawlers claiming to be Googlebot are legitimate.
• Many SEO crawlers and web scrapers mimic Googlebot by using its name in the user agent.
• A DNS reverse lookup can verify whether the crawler truly originates from Google’s IP range, helping to prevent unauthorized scraping.
• Web Security Response Headers
• Ensure that your web server includes security-related response headers to protect your site and data, such as:
• Content Security Policy (CSP): Helps to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
• X-Frame-Options: Prevents clickjacking attacks by disallowing your site from being loaded in iframes.
• X-XSS-Protection: Provides basic protection against reflected XSS attacks.
• Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS): Enforces HTTPS for secure communication.
• Implement Progressive Web Applications (PWA)
• Progressive Web Applications offer enhanced performance, offline capabilities, and app-like experiences on the web. Proper implementation improves both user experience and search engine ranking.
• Service Workers: Implement service workers to enable caching, background sync, and offline functionality. This allows the website to load quickly even when the user has a poor internet connection.
• App Manifest: Create an app manifest file (manifest.json) to allow users to add the web app to their home screen. This helps enhance user engagement and provides a native app-like experience.
• HTTPS Security: Ensure the site is served over HTTPS, as service workers and PWAs require a secure connection. Google also prioritizes secure websites in search rankings.
• Fast Loading Time: Optimize your PWA for fast loading speeds using lazy loading, prefetching, and caching strategies. The faster your PWA, the more likely search engines will prioritize your pages.
• Add Structured Data
• Structured data helps search engines understand the content on your website more effectively, improving visibility through rich snippets, knowledge graphs, and other enhanced SERP features.
• Schema Markup:
• Use schema.org structured data types to mark up different elements of your content. For example:
• Product Schema: For eCommerce websites.
• Local Business Schema: For local SEO optimization.
• Medical Entity Schema: For healthcare-related sites.
•   Breadcrumb Schema:
• Implement breadcrumb structured data to improve navigation and help search engines understand your site’s structure.
• Article & FAQ Schema:
• For content-heavy sites, use Article Schema and FAQ Schema to get featured in rich results like FAQs or top stories on Google.
• CSS Refactoring: Refactoring CSS enhances performance, reduces render-blocking resources, and improves overall page speed, all of which contribute to better SEO.
• Remove Unused CSS: Analyze the site’s CSS files and remove any unused styles to reduce file size and improve load times.
• Critical CSS:
• Extract critical CSS and inline it for the above-the-fold content, allowing the content to render faster while the rest of the CSS loads in the background.
• Include the logo, header menu, and Largest Contentful Paint element inside the critical CSS.
• Do not incldue the non-critical assets such as footer elements or author box inside the critical CSS.
• Minify and Compress CSS:
• Minify CSS files by removing unnecessary spaces and characters, and compress them using gzip or Brotli to reduce file size and loading time.
• Responsive Design Enhancements:
• Refactor CSS to ensure responsiveness across all devices, prioritizing mobile-first indexing and performance.
• JavaScript Treeshaking
• JavaScript treeshaking is the process of eliminating unused or redundant code to optimize file size and performance, which enhances SEO by improving page speed.
• Bundle and Minify JS:
• Bundle multiple JavaScript files into one to reduce the number of HTTP requests, and minify the code to remove unnecessary whitespace and comments.
• Remove Unused JavaScript:
• Use tools like Webpack or Rollup to perform treeshaking, removing any unused JavaScript code from the final bundle.
• Defer Non-Critical JS:
• Defer the loading of non-essential JavaScript until after the page’s main content has loaded, improving the initial load time and user experience.
• Lazy Load JavaScript:
• Implement lazy loading for non-essential features like interactive elements or third-party scripts, loading them only when needed.
• Dynamic Rendering: Dynamic rendering ensures that both users and crawlers can access your content, even if the content is heavily reliant on JavaScript. This method is useful when search engines struggle to render complex pages with JavaScript.
• Use Pre-rendering Services: Use tools like Rendertron or Prerender.io to dynamically generate static HTML snapshots of JavaScript-heavy pages for search engine crawlers.
• Detect Crawlers for Dynamic Rendering:
• Implement server-side detection to differentiate between user agents (crawlers vs. users). Serve the pre-rendered content to search engine bots while serving JavaScript-based content to users.
• There is an ExpressJS example below to explain the differentiating process between different user-agents according to the crawling systems, and their owner information retrieval systems.

JavaScript

const express = require('express');

const app = express();

const useragent = require('express-useragent');

app.use(useragent.express());

function isBot(userAgent) {

  const botList = [

    /Googlebot/i,

    /Bingbot/i,

    /Slurp/i,

    /DuckDuckBot/i,

    /YandexBot/i,

    /Sogou/i,

    /Exabot/i,

    /facebot/i,

    /ia_archiver/i

  ];

  

  return botList.some(bot => bot.test(userAgent));

}

app.get('/', (req, res) => {

  const userAgent = req.useragent.source;

  

  if (isBot(userAgent)) {

    res.send('<html><head><title>Pre-rendered Content</title></head><body><h1>Welcome, Search Engine!</h1><p>This is pre-rendered content.</p></body></html>');

  } else {

    // Serve the regular JavaScript-based content to normal users

    res.send(`

      <html>

        <head>

          <title>JavaScript Content</title>

          <script>

            document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {

              document.body.innerHTML = '<h1>Welcome, User!</h1><p>This is JavaScript-powered content.</p>';

            });

          </script>

        </head>

        <body>

          <noscript>Your browser does not support JavaScript!</noscript>

        </body>

      </html>

    `);

  }

});

const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;

app.listen(PORT, () => {

  console.log(`Server is running on port ${PORT}`);

});

 

• Ensure Accurate Canonicalization:
• Do not use canonicalization for the no-indexed URLs.
• Do not use no-index and do-follow for the self-canonical URLs.
• Ensure that a URL is opened only in the same format.
• For example, root-domain/diseases/cancer/breast/ and root-domain/diseases/cancer/breast are not the same URLs.
• The trailing slash means that the URL represtns a folder, while ending a file without the trailing slash means that it is a file.
• Ensure you signal the right format according to the URL’s purpose.
• Ensure a URL is opemned only with the small letters.
• Ensure self-canonicalized URLs exist in the sitemaps.
• If a URL is not self-canonicalized, it should not exist in the sitemap, or the internal links.
• Do not internally link the no-indexed URLs, use the HTML tags that search engine crawlers’ can’t perceive or take into the crawl queue.
• Do not use hreflang for the non-200 URLs.
• Do not use hreflang for non-canonical URLs.
• Every hreflang URL should be existing directly in the sitemap document.
• Hreflang is for signalling that the documents are alternatives to each others. Thus, ensure they haev the same content in different languages.
• Ensure you do not have huge number of paginations.
• Do not use infinite scroll if you do not know how to use it in a search engine friendly way.
• Ensure you are using preload, prefetch and preconnect accordingly.
• Ensure you are using fewer third-party requests and edges compared to your competitors.
• Use preconnect for the main third-party resources such as font files, use dns-prefetch for marketing related third-party sources.
• Use preload for the Largest Contentful Paint element which is usually an image, or the main CSS file.

<link rel="preload" href="style.css" as="style">

• Use contextually relevant URL structures rather than flat-URL structures.
• For example, root-domain/topic-1/sub-topic-2/individual-sample
• Do not open a new web page for every new search term, or the similar search term.
• Ensure you have fewer web pages compared to your competitors.
• Use AVIF image extension instead of your competitors.
• Use different rendering sizes according to the screenwidth. Use the example code below to understand the intrinsic and rendering size differences.

<picture>

  <!-- For very small devices (like mobile) -->

  <source srcset="images/image-small.jpg" media="(max-width: 600px)">

  <!-- For medium devices (like tablets) -->

  <source srcset="images/image-medium.jpg" media="(max-width: 1200px)">

  <!-- For large devices (like desktops) -->

  <source srcset="images/image-large.jpg" media="(min-width: 1201px)">

  <!-- Fallback image if none of the sources match -->

  <img src="images/image-default.jpg" alt="A responsive image">

</picture>

• Ensure you are not using “link grid” structures as in WordPress for your category pages, but design multi-purpose web pages with multiple functions such as “reviews”, “products”, “informational” components together. Order these components according to the main query context, and take support from your webd evelopers to order them accurately.

The Technical SEO is mostly “industry-agonistic”, in other words, canonicalization, or image extension related necessities do not change from an industry to another. But some sections such as “schema mark up implementation” changes since it is more about the business type and the industry. And, there are thousands of times more details in the context of technical SEO, for example implementing “decoding” attribute, or implementing ARIA-5 standards for web accessibility, but to keep every segment self-efficient with quick definitions, and checklists, we will move to the semantics component of healthcare SEO guide.

3.  Implement Semantics according to your Business Type and Main Healthcare Service

Semantics refer to the meanings in the concepts. Semantic SEO relies on the patterns between the meaningful word units. A lexical search engine focuses on string similarity, thus the documents are matched according to the heavy document statistics rather than the meaning inside the document. Technically, a search engine can’t understand any document, but the large language models as Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) can imitate the understanding with chain of reasoning. LLMs became a vital part of the information retrieval systems today. Thus, healthcare businesses have to utilize the semantics to communicate with the search engines in a better way.

Semantics Decrease the Cost of Retrieval

We mentioned the cost of retrieval earlier in the technical SEO branch. Cost of retrieval is not a simple that is only related to the page speed, or page loading timing performance and needs. Cost of retrieval is tied to the amount of computational cost that is necessary to evalaute, understand, associate, test and rank a web page. Some websites are easier to understand than others thanks tot heir templatic structure in content ,layout, and technical aspects. 

For example, the amount of necessary compiutational needs for the sentences below are not same.

    "The weather is nice today.",

    "I am planning to go for a walk in the park."

Since both sentences have different amount of words inside, the amount of computational need will be different.

The calculation above is given only for one of the Natural Language Processing tasks which is “sentiment analysis”. There are over 80 different NLP tasks that process the  unstructured text to turn into a structured data format. Some of these are given below.

• Text Classification: Categorizing a piece of text into predefined categories (e.g., spam vs. not spam).
• Named Entity Recognition (NER): Identifying and classifying named entities (e.g., people, organizations, locations) within text.
• Part-of-Speech Tagging (POS Tagging): Assigning grammatical tags (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) to each word in a sentence.
• Machine Translation: Translating text from one language to another (e.g., English to French).
• Speech Recognition: Converting spoken language into written text (also known as Automatic Speech Recognition or ASR).
• Question Answering (QA): Building systems that can automatically answer questions posed by humans in natural language.
• Text Summarization: Producing a concise summary of a longer document while retaining key information.
• Text Generation: Automatically generating text based on a given prompt (e.g., GPT-3 generating coherent text).
• Coreference Resolution: Determining which words in a text refer to the same entity (e.g., linking “he” to “John”).
• Topic Modeling: Identifying the underlying topics that occur in a set of documents (e.g., Latent Dirichlet Allocation).
• Relation Extraction: Extracting the relationships between entities in a text (e.g., “Barack Obama” was the “President of the USA”).
• Sentiment Analysis: Determining the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of a given piece of text.
• Word Sense Disambiguation: Determining which sense of a word is used in a given context (e.g., “bank” as a financial institution vs. riverbank).
• Entity Linking: Linking named entities in text to their corresponding entries in a knowledge base (e.g., linking “Paris” to the city in France).
• Paraphrase Detection: Identifying whether two pieces of text are semantically equivalent.
• Grammar and Spell Checking: Automatically detecting and correcting grammatical or spelling errors in text.
• Text-to-Speech (TTS): Converting written text into spoken language (the inverse of speech recognition).
• Language Modeling: Predicting the next word in a sequence of words (e.g., used in autocomplete or text generation).
• Intent Recognition: Identifying the intention behind a user’s input in tasks like chatbot development (e.g., booking a flight, checking weather).
• Emotion Detection: Recognizing emotions in text (e.g., anger, joy, sadness) beyond just positive or negative sentiment.

If we calculate the cost and complexity of these content-related tasks, it becomes clear that sustaining the largest index on the internet—Google’s index—requires billions of dollars.

The cost of retrieval is a fundamental concept from Koray’s Framework to explain that most URLs that the crawlers hit should be quality, and easy to understand. If a search engine crawls 1 Million URLs from a website, and only 100 of them are necessary, it means that the website has an important amount of fluff, and not useful URL profile. Thus, teh website won’t be considered as a serious candidate for becoming an authority.

Decreasing the cost of the retrieval while increasing the quality (ranking signal) per URL is the fundamental principle of search engine optimization. The cost of retrieval was the inspiration for the Topical Authority concept when I formed it as a methodology and mindset.

Create a Topical Map

A Topical Map is a fundamental concept in search engine optimization (SEO) that aims to reduce the cost of retrieval while improving information retrieval scores through relevance and responsiveness. It’s important to note that relevance and responsiveness are distinct concepts in information retrieval. For example, in response to the query, “What is the main reason for cancer?”, the answer “The main reason for cancer varies depending on the type of cancer” is relevant but not fully responsive. Although it includes key terms like “type of cancer” and “reason for cancer”, which establish relevance, it fails to provide the specific types of cancer and the main reasons for each. Therefore, while the answer is relevant, it is not fully responsive.

In this context, a topical map is a content network strategically planned based on semantic principles to communicate more effectively with search engines. Two competitors may have similar or even identical topical maps, but search engines will favor the one that offers lower retrieval costs with greater clarity and accuracy.

The table below provides an example of various business entity types in the healthcare industry, such as dentists, optometrists, hospitals, cosmetic surgeons, and urgent care facilities. The structure of a website and its topical map must vary based on the type of business entity. A product e-commerce site and a hospital’s website cannot approach the same topic in the same way. For example, the topic of “cancer” would differ in the context of a pharmacy versus that of a doctor.

Search engines like Google classify websites according to their type, function, and purpose. If a website lacks a specific function or focus, its relevance or PageRank alone will not be sufficient to achieve high rankings.

A topical map has five fundamental concepts. These are source context, the core section of topical map, an outer section, central search intent, and central entity.

• Source context refers to the business type to determine the central entity of the topical map.
• The central entity is the entity that exists site-wide to target mainly.
• Central search intent is the main function of the web source, and every web page serves this purpose directly or indirectly.
• The core section of the topical map is to monetise the content network. Most of the ranking and quality signals mainly focus on the core section.
• The outer section of the topical map is to gather more historical data and provide a bigger brand trust to the search engine.

Most of these topical map concepts are explained through multiple SEO campaigns by giving their names in our case studies and speeches. You will see an image of me from the Chiangmai SEO Conference explaining some of the misunderstandings regarding topical maps.

Let’s say you are a Chiropractor in New York City. To earn the trust of the search engine for the entity “chiropractor” you must choose your core and outer sections of the topical map. When we search for chiropractor in new york city, the search engine google gives various query refinements such as “best”, “salary”, “and school”.

Some refinements are directly related to the context of our query and the purpose of our business. For instance, in the query “best chiropractor in New York City,” the use of “best” (a superlative) suggests the need for plurality. Rather than highlighting a single chiropractor, web pages that rank and compare multiple chiropractors are more likely to rank higher. Therefore, the topical map should compensate for this potential “relevance loss” by adjusting the meaning of the query. For example, the content could focus on “best criteria,” “best certifications,” or “best chiropractor practices in New York City.” If you have multiple chiropractors in your clinic or hospital, you can also adapt the query using query semantics to fit your context.

Below is an example of adjusting query meaning for “best” queries. The query “best women’s glasses” typically requires a web document that lists various brands and models. However, Oscar Wylee, one of our managed brands, only lists its own models, yet still ranks #1. This is because we created an informational fashion guide around the “best types of glasses for women,” and product pages were linked directly through the guide. This helped the search engine understand the commercial intent by associating the product images, examples, and comparisons within the guide.

We created a topical map for Oscar Wylee, built on the same five fundamental concepts and more. Oscar Wylee is primarily an optometry company specializing in prescribed glasses. After two years of hard work, it is now surpassing the rankings of OPSM AU, despite having a lower brand search demand.

Brand search demand is a key factor and multiplier for a company’s rankings in terms of topical authority. A higher brand search demand indicates a broader functional relevance that search engines associate with industry-related queries. Moreover, higher click satisfaction further amplifies both current and future rankings.

Oscar Wylee supports its local rankings through over 60 different Google Business Profiles that are attached to 60 different localized service landing pages. There is an informational guide only for the eye anatomy and eye health, along with fashion and beauty related segmetns. Eye health, eye anatomy, optometry locale service pages, fashion and beayty pages basically cooperate together to flow the ranking signals to the main monetization segments. Similarly, any local SEO project, including “chiropractor from NYC” should read the SERP and entity oriented connections, along wit the types of the competitiors.

The second component here is “PAA” which focuses on the “cost” factor. This is technically an “antonym” annotation in the query refinement. Because, in the refinement segment, we have “salary”, here we have the “fee” context. A chiropractor entity attracts currency, price, and other monetary values from different angles and directions. “Salary of a chiropractor” is connected to the “chiropractor school” because the angle and the context here are bound to the “how to become a chiropractor”. Since “school” is also a locale type of entity, it should be included in the outer section of the topical map. Regarding the locale businesses and addresses, we see that two of these chripractors has the “Schedule” button on the local map pack. We also see that 20 reviews business outranks the business place with 158 reviews with an average of 5 ratings. All these signals should be analysed and used in the topical map to increase the possibility of connections whether “read chiropractor reviews from NYC”, “schedule appintment for chiropractor treatment”, or “learn salary, or cost of chripractor jobs/services in NYC”. if you are a “school” you have to take the “salary” to the core section, if you are a chiropractic clinic, you should take the “fee” to the core section as an attribute.

Then, we have exact match domains that involve the “new york” or the “chiropractic” phrases in their brand names and social media accounts with similar approaches. To outrank all these websites, and to have the all of the ranking potential from every vertical of the search engine, all these brands, and other types of analysises should be performed by reading the algorithms of search engines from their interface, and working principles from their patents, official announcements, SERP fluactiations. 

For example, we see that the “videos” vertical appears earlier than “maps” and “images”, thus ranking documents also have videos more than images. And, the images that are chosen from the documents are also parts of various videos or “flowing frames”. 

An example of document with the video content on the first page is given below.

Search engines tend to cluster documents and choose a representative to rank these clusters through different algorithmic processes. For example, “forums” appear in the search qualifier; thus, by using the first segment of this guideline, a “subreddit” should be opened for your brand and managed simultaneously with your Google business profile. Search engines value first-hand experience and people-first content through the forums. You can use this desire to increase your relevance and ranking signals through external web entity connections.

The examples below are a list of entities to process in a possible Chiropractor from New York City.

Informational Segment:

1. Spine (Vertebral Column)
2. Vertebrae (Cervical, Thoracic, Lumbar, Sacral, Coccygeal)
3. Intervertebral Discs
4. Spinal Cord
5. Nerve Roots
6. Facet Joints
7. Cervical Spine (Neck)
8. Thoracic Spine (Upper Back)
9. Lumbar Spine (Lower Back)
10. Sacrum
11. Coccyx (Tailbone)
12. Paraspinal Muscles
13. Ligaments of the Spine (e.g., Anterior Longitudinal Ligament, Posterior Longitudinal Ligament)
14. Tendons
15. Muscles of the Back (e.g., Latissimus Dorsi, Trapezius, Erector Spinae)
16. Pelvis
17. Hip Joint
18. Shoulder Girdle
19. Sacroiliac Joint
20. Scapula (Shoulder Blade)
21. Clavicle (Collarbone)
22. Ribs
23. Skull (Cranium)
24. Craniovertebral Junction (Occiput, Atlas, Axis)
25. Axial Skeleton
26. Appendicular Skeleton
27. Joints (Synovial, Cartilaginous, Fibrous)
28. Synovial Fluid
29. Articular Cartilage
30. Brachial Plexus
31. Thoracic Outlet
32. Lumbar Plexus
33. Peripheral Nerves
34. Sciatic Nerve
35. Piriformis Muscle
36. Iliopsoas Muscle
37. Quadratus Lumborum
38. Trapezius Muscle
39. Sternocleidomastoid Muscle
40. Rotator Cuff Muscles (Supraspinatus, Infraspinatus, Teres Minor, Subscapularis)
41. Coccygeal Nerves
42. Thoracolumbar Fascia
43. Foramen Magnum
44. Occipital Bone
45. Intervertebral Foramina
46. Zygapophyseal Joints (Facet Joints)
47. Anterior Longitudinal Ligament (ALL)
48. Posterior Longitudinal Ligament (PLL)
49. Nucleus Pulposus (Center of Intervertebral Disc)
50. Annulus Fibrosus (Outer Layer of Intervertebral Disc)
51. Atlas (C1 Vertebra)
52. Axis (C2 Vertebra)

Commercial Segment:

1.         Chiropractor New York City
2. Chiropractor in Manhattan
3. Chiropractor in Brooklyn
4. Chiropractor in Queens
5. Chiropractor in Bronx
6. Chiropractor in Staten Island
7. Best Chiropractor in New York City
8. Emergency Chiropractor New York
9. Walk-In Chiropractor New York
10. Top Rated Chiropractor New York
11. Chiropractor for Back Pain in New York
12. Chiropractor for Neck Pain in New York
13. Chiropractor for Sports Injuries in New York
14. Chiropractor for Sciatica in New York
15. Chiropractic Adjustment in New York
16. Affordable Chiropractor in New York
17. Chiropractic Services in Downtown Manhattan
18. Holistic Chiropractor in New York
19. Chiropractor for Pregnant Women in New York
20. Family Chiropractor in New York
21. Chiropractic Wellness Programs in New York
22. Chiropractic Clinics in Upper East Side New York
23. Chiropractic Treatment for Seniors in New York
24. 24/7 Chiropractor in New York
25. Chiropractor Near Central Park New York
26. Chiropractor for Migraines in New York
27. Chiropractor for Car Accident Injuries in New York
28. Chiropractic Rehabilitation in New York
29. Licensed Chiropractors in New York
30. Pediatric Chiropractor in New York

Bridge Segment:

1. Chiropractor (Profession)
2. Chiropractic Care
3. Spinal Adjustment
4. Back Pain Treatment
5. Neck Pain Treatment
6. Joint Pain Treatment
7. Spinal Manipulation
8. Musculoskeletal System
9. Sports Injury Rehabilitation
10. Posture Correction
11. Whiplash Injury Treatment
12. Sciatica Treatment
13. Herniated Disc Treatment
14. Spinal Decompression Therapy
15. Chiropractic Wellness Program
16. Soft Tissue Therapy
17. Chiropractic Adjustment
18. Chiropractic Exam
19. Chiropractic Consultation
20. Manual Therapy
21. Chiropractic Techniques (e.g., Activator Technique, Gonstead Technique)
22. Chiropractic Equipment
23. Chiropractic Clinic
24. Holistic Health
25. Chiropractic Health Insurance
26. Chiropractic for Athletes
27. Chiropractic for Pregnant Women
28. Chiropractic for Children
29. Chiropractic for Seniors
30. Chiropractic Wellness Plan
31. Chiropractic Adjustment Tools
32. Chiropractic X-rays
33. Chiropractic Diagnosis
34. Chiropractic Treatment Plan
35. Chiropractic Rehabilitation
36. Chiropractic License
37. Chiropractic Certification
38. Chiropractic Research
39. Chiropractic Education
40. Chiropractic Associations (e.g., American Chiropractic Association)
41. Chiropractic Techniques (Diversified, Thompson, Activator)
42. Chiropractic Benefits
43. Chiropractic Side Effects
44. Chiropractic Risks
45. Chiropractic Safety
46. Chiropractic Adjustments for Migraines
47. Chiropractic Treatment for Scoliosis
48. Chiropractic Adjustments for Arthritis
49. Chiropractic Treatment for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
50. Chiropractic Appointment Booking
51. Chiropractic Health Records

Outer segment examples:

Chiropractic Certificates:

1. Certified Chiropractic Sports Physician (CCSP)
2. Diplomate of the American Chiropractic Board of Sports Physicians (DACBSP)
3. Certified Chiropractic Wellness Practitioner (CCWP)
4. Certified Chiropractic Extremity Practitioner (CCEP)
5. Diplomate of the American Chiropractic Neurology Board (DACNB)
6. Animal Chiropractic Certification
7. Chiropractic Certification in Spinal Trauma (CCST)
8. Fellowship in Clinical Chiropractic Pediatrics (FCPP)
9. Graston Technique Certification
10. Activator Method Certification

• Chiropractic Schools:
1. Palmer College of Chiropractic
2. Life University
3. Logan University
4. Parker University
5. New York Chiropractic College (NYCC)
6. University of Western States
7. Cleveland University-Kansas City
8. Northwestern Health Sciences University
9. Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College (CMCC)
10. Murdoch University
11. Licenses for Chiropractors:
12. Doctor of Chiropractic (DC)
13. State Licensing Boards
14. National Board of Chiropractic Examiners (NBCE) Certification
15. Continuing Education Requirements
16. International Chiropractic Regulatory Licenses
• Famous Professors and Pioneers in Chiropractic:
1. Daniel David (D.D.) Palmer
2. B.J. Palmer
3. Sid E. Williams
4. Dr. John Demartini
5. Dr. Scott Haldeman
6. Dr. Brian McAulay
7. Dr. Gerard Clum
8. Branches and Specializations of Chiropractic:
9. Sports Chiropractic
10. Pediatric Chiropractic
11. Geriatric Chiropractic
12. Neurology Chiropractic
13. Animal Chiropractic

First, it’s essential to understand that what you see above is not a topical map; it’s merely a list of entity types and examples of entities from those types. Some entities can belong on the same web page, while a single entity may have multiple web pages with different attributes. Over the past three years, I’ve personally written more than 500,000 words and published over 134 success stories utilising advanced semantic practices. Therefore, I must emphasize that anything beyond this point cannot be considered basic. However, we will include only one small example to conclude our guideline smoothly.

To replicate the process or learn more, join the Holistic SEO Communities and utilize our pre-trained GPT Agents by searching for Koray Tugberk GÜBÜR in the GPT Store. You’ll have access to an assistant for various semantic SEO and Holistic SEO tasks.

The entity of “Back Pain Treatment” can have sub-connections to the other entities below.

1. Acute Back Pain
2. Chronic Back Pain
3. Lower Back Pain (Lumbago)
4. Upper Back Pain (Thoracic Pain)
5. Middle Back Pain
6. Sciatica
7. Mechanical Back Pain
8. Radicular Pain
9. Axial Pain
10. Referred Pain
11. Muscle Strain or Sprain
12. Herniated Disc Pain
13. Degenerative Disc Disease
14. Facet Joint Pain
15. Spondylolisthesis-Related Pain
16. Sacroiliac Joint Pain
17. Spinal Stenosis Pain
18. Postural Back Pain
19. Coccyx Pain (Tailbone Pain)
20. Myofascial Pain

However, only some of these entities are important in terms of query semantics. Search engines work through query processing and understanding. If a query is not patterned or connected to an important user cluster, it is harder to create a new index for it.

Thus, “back pain causes and treatments” should be a “locale-agnostic” web page. To connect it to the core section of the topical map for monetisation purposes, a “back pain treatment New York City” page should be created. Then, does it mean that we should also open pages for “New York Acute Back Pain Treatment” and “Lower Back Pain Treatment,” etc.? No.

You should always consolidate the ranking signals as much as possible with fewer pages, more information density, and richness. The intersection between the entities of “Acute Back Pain Treatment New York City” and “Back Pain Treatment New York City” doesn’t have enough level of documents or query search logs to construct a new index. Thus, every topical map should stay dynamic and change according to the indexes of search engines. This requires an always-on checking schedule with a semantic SEO expert and routine. Still, the “Acute Back Pain” can be a separate page, but not alone; it has to be a single page together with the “Lower Back Pain” because their semantic distance to each other is shallow. 

After you review all these combinations and possible intersections, you should start designing the heading, video, image, paragraph, list, table, CTA, and PageRank distribution in these content networks to construct the most lasting, higher quality, lower cost semantic content network. It is difficult, but many web sources outranked global authority brands with hundreds of thousands of referring domains using advanced semantics.

For example, Svalbardi outranked WebMD, Medicalnewstoday, and Healthline with only 27 articles based on advanced semantics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQwgcJAFctY 

An example is a Google Search Console screenshot from Svalbardi’s active days in terms of SEO.

2 Example Projects from the Last 1 Year with Technical SEO and Semantics

The first example project is Doktorsitesi.com is an aggregator for different types of doctors, hospitals and clinics from different cities in Turkey. It was losing rankings heavily for the last one and a half years, and it was able to win the 15th August 2024 Broad Core Algorithm Update. We started to work together three months ago by focusing on decreasing the cost of search engines and increasing the quality of signals per document. 

We have mainly focused on decreasing the amount of the unnecessary URLs from the website. These URLs are from various characters such as unnecessary query parameters, soft 404 pages, empty result pages, or duplicate pages between single doctor profiles and the same doctor’s clinique which has the exactly the same content. During the brief 2 months, we were able to remove over 1 million pages from the website. From the semantics point of view, the website focused on query semantics and provide a most relevant and representative page for the “disease” names. To create a topical map, the SEO expert should understand the “root of the entity network”. The “cancer treatment” comes from “cancer” not from the “treatment”. The query networks, and contexts follow the connection direction between these entities. Thus, if a website doesn’t have a ranking, most representative page for the “cancer”, and every location-focused page competes against each other without a clear ranking signal difference, the website loses its ranking potential for the rest of the query network. Currently, the website constructs these root pages for the query networks based on the entity connections while advancing the technical SEO necessities.

This is the first time that Doktorsitesi.com increases its rankings for the 7 days comparison for the last 1.5 years thanks to semantics and heavy technical SEO.

Diamondrehabthailand.com is another past project where we implemented semantic SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO, alongside PageRank hoarding. The project increased its rankings from zero to 60,000 clicks per month but was impacted by the Helpful Content Update. Over the past year, we focused on neutralizing the negative ranking trend, successfully stopping the decline and recovering lost traffic.

To achieve this recovery, we leveraged branding along with local page service associations. The topical map for the company primarily focuses on various types of addictions and their solutions. While Diamond Rehab Thailand specializes in luxury rehab services, the core section of the topical map covers all types of addictions, allowing ranking signals to transfer from general addiction topics to luxury addiction services.

The project also expanded beyond Thailand into markets like South Africa, which influenced the rankings. Establishing a strong brand identity is essential for Google’s algorithms. Your service area, both in terms of industry and location, must be clearly defined. Any geographic or topical expansion should be justified through third-party sources and gradual internal ranking improvements.

Below, you can see that after the first 20 days of the 15th August 2024 BCAU, 100% of the ranking loss already is recovered. Thus, as a asuggestion, never give up in SEO. Any website can outrank any other website if right amount of data from the correct character is provided to the algorithms.

Welzo.com. This guide is written as a response to a kind request from the owner of Welzo.com, Adonis Hakkim. We have implemented similar structures and strategies to build the organic search visibility baseline for Welzo.com with a topical map, by training the authorship team and creating a Technical SEO work-plan. Of course, there are many other steps including PageRank (backlink, outgoing external link, and internal link), social media presence optimization, web development, web page layout design and more. But, Welzo.com is an example for e-commerce products for the healthcare. Thus, the informational segment and commercial segment should support each other, while internal links should be distributed together with the similar products.

Welzo leverages opportunities for doctors to showcase their expertise with commercial products, utilizing advanced semantic SEO practices and real doctors for content creation, adhering to the “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) standards required for the healthcare industry. The topical map is primarily centered on various types of health categories such as “women’s health,” “men’s health,” “general health,” and “mental health,” among others. These health categories are linked to relevant health products, creating strong topical connections. Medical terms, conditions, and products are interrelated to provide comprehensive topical coverage.

As a result, the brand ranks for nearly 200,000 keywords, but it has yet to fully realize its potential in terms of average position rankings. In cases like this, site-wide microsemantics, PageRank distribution per web page, and brand penetration often need to be optimized.

This guideline has now reached 9,000 words. I aimed to provide a few quick checklists, examples from past projects, conceptual definitions, and practical showcases to help doctors and healthcare professionals achieve their desired patient base. My hope is that through every health project I’ve managed, I’ve helped people turn clicks into meaningful contributions to their health.

Wishing you a joyful and long life with your family, Dear Researcher.