An audit of indian clinical laboratories’ websites: Analysis of optimization suitability for search engines and digital marketing

Search engine optimization is an important aspect of the digital world we live in today. An extensive literature review showed only an occasional report of analysis of search engine optimization of medical services’ websites. We analyzed 16 websites of clinical laboratories in India for their search engine optimization status through features like secured socket layer, robots.txt and sitemap.xml file, page quality-related tags, page loading speed, link analysis, structured data, and “viewport” tag for mobile responsiveness. Few shortcomings were identified such as thin and duplicate page content in 50% of the websites, lack of structured data in 44.75%, and absence of robots.txt, sitemap.xml files and ‘alt’ and ‘srcset’ tags from 18.75%, 25%, 56.25% and 87.5% websites, respectively. Avoiding these short comings may improve organic traffic to the websites beneficial to both the marketer and the consumers.