Search Engine Marketing for Health Care Providers

In my last posting, Your Medical Website, I began to discuss the process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO is part of a broader area of marketing called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).   SEM consists of SEO plus the process of advertising on search engines.  These paid ads are generally done through programs called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – you bid on specific keywords that your prospects might search on, and pay only when someone searches and clicks on your link.  The ads appear in the “Sponsored Links” section of the search results.

So, SEM = SEO + PPC.  (And that is all the acronyms we’ll learn in this post. 

The SEO process starts with Keywords.  Medical practices should start their keyword list with their specialty, services offered, and diseases and conditions treated.  From there, you can use a variety of web-based tools to find related keywords to include in your search engine marketing process.  On the PPC side of things, you can reach as many words as you have a budget to reach (more on PPC in my next blog post).   On the SEO side, you can reach as many words as you have pages.  More specifically, as a rule of thumb, you can optimize a single page for one or two primary phrases, along with several more secondary phrases that are related to the primary ones.

There are 4 C’s that are key to the SEO process:

• Content – this is the part of the web page that a person reads, including the title, headlines, header and footer material, and body of the page.
• Code – this is what the search engine reads.  It includes all of the content, along with the code used to make the site look the way it does.
• Connections – these are the other sites around the Internet that link to your site.  Not only do these links provide direct traffic, but they also are one of the factors used by search engine algorithms when determining the rank of your site.
• Citations – these are references to your site, which generally include a link, along with directory information and/or reviews.

I’ll expand on each of these C’s in future posts, but next time I’ll expand on the other half of SEM, the PPC process.