In today’s world, Search Engine Marketing is as important to most medical practices and hospitals as a yellow pages ad was 20 years ago. Search Engine Marketing includes both paid and organic (free) traffic that search engines can deliver to your website. To maximize your organic traffic, your site needs to be built and managed by a team that understands SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
SEO is about two main factors: relevance and authority. Your site needs to have content that is relevant to the words and phrases that people are searching for. Your site also needs to have authority, and in the online world, this is largely determined by the number (and quality) of other websites that link to your site or include a citation referencing your business.
If you, or any of the decision makers at your practice, do not have a solid understanding of how SEO works, watch this 3 minute video to learn more:
This is a followup to last month’s blog article about “Reaching Patients Who Don’t Know About Urgent Care“. In that post, I discussed how a Patient Education library can optimize your website, helping you reach people searching for information on diseases and conditions. Today, we’ll look at how those same pages can help with your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) online advertising campaigns.
When you search the Internet, Google, Bing, or Yahoo will provides free (also known as organic) results. These results are influenced by SEO. In addition, you will see sponsored links or ads, which are sold on a pay-per-click basis. Each time someone clicks on a sponsored link, the advertiser pays anywhere from a few cents up to several dollars.
You can choose which keywords will trigger your PPC ads, and then decide what page on your website to link the ads to. While many people direct all ads to their homepage, a much better practice is to send people to a page on your site that is closely associated with the keyword they searched for. For example, if someone searches on “arm puffing up after bug bite”, you would be much better off sending them to a page that describes the symptoms and treatment options for insect bites, along with a call to action for when someone should see a doctor. This approach has both human and technological advantages.
From the human perspective, if someone clicks on an ad related to a condition, and your ad sends them to your homepage, they may not have a full understanding of the service you can provide. But, if you send them to that a condition page instead, educating them about their situation and explaining how you can help, you will increase the chance that your website visitor will become a patient.
From the technological perspective, the search engines use a concept that Google calls your “Quality Score”. This score is calculated based on the correlation among the keyword a person searches for, the words used in your ad text, and the content of the landing page linked to the ad. The higher your Quality Score, the lower you actually have to pay for an ad. In other words, if you and a competitor both bid the same exact price for a keyword, but your quality score is higher than their’s, your ad will appear higher than their’s.
Step 1: Messaging The goal of an occupational medicine sales campaign is to reach decision-makers at local employers and convince them to switch from their current medical provider to your practice. Every provider knows that their practice is the best in the area. This should be easy! However, there are a couple of major hurdles. [...]
This is the question of the week. With all the buzz about Google’s new social networking service called Google+ (or Google Plus), businesses of all kinds, including medical practices, are wondering how to take advantage of it. The short answer: Google+ is not quite ready for business. Currently, there is no way to create a [...]
Many of our recent clients already have a website before we meet them. Some of these practices come to us for a redesign, but many have a different priority – their web traffic has plateaued, and they are looking for ways to reach more prospective patients. Often, these practices have websites that are optimized for their [...]
Increasing an occupational medicine patient base requires sales. The “s” word can cause discomfort for many physicians. No one wants to think of medical care as being sold like a used car or a time-share. Unfortunately, those industries have tarnished sales and made it a nasty word. As a medical provider, you are simply offering [...]
According to a recent survey by Insider Pages and Harris Interactive, 2/3 of patients who search online for information on physicians wish they could find more comprehensive information, and over half agree that it is hard to find what they are looking for. To help your prospective patients find you: Develop a website and include [...]
This post contains a summary of best practices for search engine optimization (SEO) for urgent care websites. I’ll start by addressing on-page SEO tactics – things you can do to your own website to help increase traffic. Then, I’ll move on to discuss off-page SEO factors – things you can do to improve search [...]
Over the past few years, many online directories and search engine advertising agencies have begun to offer inexpensive call tracking phone numbers. These can be used in your practice listings and search engine advertising campaigns to track results of your advertising dollars. On the surface, this seems like a great idea. Unfortunately, due to the [...]
Eric Van De Graaff, M.D., a cardiologist in Omaha, recently blogged about the value of all the physician ratings and review websites that are now appearing in online search results. Overall, Dr. Van De Graaf believes that rating sites could be beneficial to prospective patients but, as of today, the system has two flaws. I [...]
