If you’ve been following social media these days, you know the power of videos in holding attention. Video is an important aspect of health content marketing.
Why Video Makes a Difference
Even when coronavirus fears are doing the rounds, a video post certainly draws your important to reach out to people. Ignoring video will leave you woefully short of visibility. 93% of surveyed businesses reported acquiring a new customer via social media, as a result of video content.
Research by HubSpot states that authentic videos are the preference of prospective consumers and customers. These include behind-the-scenes videos, live videos, vlogs, product walkthroughs, etc. These are preferred more than videos having artificial effects or graphics.
With audience preferences being so important, it is important that you have a great video strategy in line with the services you offer, the tastes of your audience and the brand image you wish to portray.
How to Strategize Video Marketing
In every video, you need to target the pain points of your customers or target audience, the matters that bother them the most, and which you can set right with your services. Plan what kind of feelings you wish to evoke in your target audience with the video. Next, you need to get yourself a template that is in line with your branding. Ensure that you distribute the video on various relevant platforms. You must also plan how you integrate your video into various kinds of marketing content.
To keep the audience interest alive, think of new trends and topics on which to make your videos. To ensure the best results, you also need to keep analyzing the performance of the videos you’ve posted – how many people have viewed them, at what periods of the day, their demographics, etc. Based on that data, you can finetune your strategy.
Kinds of Video Content You Can Use
You can have customer testimonial videos that explain how your customers have benefited from your service. They can really give a positive image to your brand. Explainer or how-to videos are also effective. They can educate the audience through a step-by-step process on how your brand can help them solve their problems. Present the problem in detail, and describe the solution in a step-by-step process in an entertaining manner like the video below.
According to WyzOwl research, 72% of surveyed individuals prefer videos to learn about new products. You can show how your products work. How-to videos are quite useful in really satisfying audience needs.
Make full use of videos for healthcare search engine optimization. There are many social networking platforms and channels you can use to market your videos.
Survey reveals that marketers consider Google My Business (GMB) optimization as the most valuable service for local marketing in 2020. That’s insightful for medical website marketing.
GMB Optimization Even Tops Website Optimization
In fact, optimizing for Google My Business is considered even more valuable than website optimization. If you were thinking of placing greater importance on website optimization, this survey would probably make you think twice.
The survey was conducted on 475 local marketers by BrightLocal and covered various aspects such as business practices of the local marketers, the services they offer, the pricing for these services, and the salary they offer staff. Onsite optimization is only considered the 2nd most valuable service for local marketing by the survey participants.
The rest of the most valuable services, according to the survey participants, in the order of their importance, are:
Reputation management
Citation management, and
Website design
GMB Optimization Also the SEO Service Offered Most Frequently
Even in the survey of the most frequently offered SEO services by local marketers, Google My Business optimization takes the top spot. In fact, more marketers are giving preference for GMB optimization over conventional SEO. The next 4 services most frequently offered by local marketers are, in the order of their importance, SEO audits/analysis, onsite optimization, reporting/analytics and citation management. Of particular note is the fact that link building is among the services offered less frequently. Just half of the local marketers surveyed claimed to be offering it.
Google Rankings Most Valued Metric for Local Marketing
In terms of metrics for local marketing, Google rankings are most valued. In fact, the survey also indicates that Google rankings are considered more important than even new leads and customers for businesses. The 4 other metrics that are valued by local businesses the most are, in their order of importance, new customers, new leads or enquiries, organic traffic and the number of fresh reviews.
SEO Still Considered Best Online Method for Attracting New Clients
Though it may not have made it to the top of the list in terms of the services most offered, SEO is still considered by local marketers as the best online method to attract new clients. The other channels considered valuable are, in their order of importance, content marketing, LinkedIn and pay-per-click (PPC).
Surprisingly, in this digital age, the value assigned to word of mouth is still significant. This is still the most valued channel overall to win clients. The other valued channels are also non-digital techniques such as local business groups as well as industry conferences.
These survey results could probably also give you some insight into how you could do things differently for your website. It isn’t necessary to flow with the current. A different approach could perhaps help you stand out from the competition. That’s something innovative medical SEO services would be able to figure out for you.
The principles of search engine optimization and online marketing depend on the algorithmic changes being introduced from time to time by Google. Digital marketing for healthcare would have been slightly affected by some changes noticed on January 23, 2020.
What Happened on January 23?
Was there a ranking algorithm update on Thursday, the 23rd of January, 2020? Now there was a change related to featured snippet deduplication on the 22nd of January, and could the one on January 23 be related to it? This was observed, as with many updates, on the basis of discussions in the SEO forums as well as on the basis of what SEO analysts and webmasters have observed and analyzed. So, we need to study both the updates to come up with something.
The January 22 Deduplication Update
On January 22, it was reported that Google is dropping the normal snippet of a site when its featured snippet has been displayed. This is the result of Google’s experimentation since November 2019. Back then it was testing removing these normal snippets from search results. On January 22, Google finally got this launched. You can no longer see a featured snippet simultaneously with the same site’s URL in the main search results.
This was also confirmed by Danny Sullivan on Twitter. He mentioned that the reasoning behind this was for “decluttering” the search results and reducing the crowding so that people could find the information they’re looking for easily. He also confirmed that featured snippets are to be considered as one of the 10 listings on a search page. The main idea is to avoid duplication.
There was further clarification provided by Google. An image appearing as a featured snippet does not count to this change. This change only works when content is part of the featured snippet. The People Also Ask section is also not part of this change.
Further Clarification on the Featured Snippet
But there were further doubts raised. What if the featured snippet of a website featured an image from another site? The site whose image gets featured by a snippet of another site does not get affected. Only that particular site is affected whose snippet is featured. So there will only be a maximum of 10 unique results, with the featured snippet also part of the result. Earlier, the featured snippet was not considered the first result, but rather position 0. But that has changed.
January 23 Ranking Changes a Result of Deduplication
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz believes that the traffic changes noticed on January 23 by the reporting tools could be the result of deduplication change implemented on January 22. The tracking tools would not quite have been prepared for processing that change. As a result, they could have been showing the changes in the listings of the search queries they track.Schwartz also says that those changes might have been noticed by SEO analysts, causing the discussions in the forums.
The featured snippet-based change is something that will cause websites to redesign their medical website marketing strategies.
Hello! This is Monica Thomas, the Search Marketing/SEO manager for medresponsive.com. This week’s podcast will cover “Ways to speed up your website for SEO purposes”.
Listen to the Podcast now!
Read Transcript
Hello – This is Monica Thomas the Search Marketing/SEO manager for medresponsive.com
The speed of your website is one of Google’s critical ranking factors used to determine your site’s positioning in the search engines. In 2010, Google released their PageRank algorithm. This is a series of highly critical factors that affect website rankings in the search engines. If your site loads quickly, search engine crawlers will be able to access and rank your website quickly.
As of 2016, Google also included mobile website speed as a major factor for determining their mobile search rankings. Most importantly in 2020, your prospects like us all are looking for instant results. We want our search results to come up quickly and to be as accurate as possible.
If a page takes a long time to load, we often get frustrated quickly and move on to the next page. The average load time for most sites is over eight seconds and can even exceed 11 seconds in the tech industry. However, the best-practice benchmark is under 3 seconds. According to experts, 53% of mobile users will leave a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Nearly 10% of web users will bounce to someplace else after 2 seconds. A speedy website greatly contributes to achieving your marketing goals such as improving your overall conversion rate, reducing bounce rate, or improving the service for your customers.
According to recent industry surveys, most online shoppers will not complete a purchase if a website is too slow. Most users expect your web page to load in under 2 seconds. At peak traffic times, online customers will opt for a competitor’s site instead of waiting. Google studies indicate that if you improve a page’s load time by just one second, your conversion rate can go up 10 – 20%. However, it’s not an easy task to speed up your website as it’s often hard to diagnose what it causes your website’s slow down.
As a first step, you should take a baseline reading of your website’s speed. Google and other sites have tools that will perform this task. Next, page load times can be improved through a variety of different methods such as:
Remove unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons: Having unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons can reduce your website speed a lot. You need to address this issue, especially if you use blogging CMSs like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. In order to increase your page speed, avoid plug-ins that load a lot of scripts and styles, perform lots of remote requests. Add extra database queries to every page on your website.
Optimize Caches: Avoid unnecessary server requests by ensuring that your mobile browser uses local memory to cache resources in order. Optimizing caches improve page load time a lot.
Compress images: Large images are the biggest reason for slow page loading. To fix this issue, compression is the top optimization technique that can be used.
Reduce redirects: Even though redirects are necessary especially when you move and delete pages and are the best way to eliminate issues with broken links, having too many of them can create additional HTTP requests, which can negatively impact speed, particularly on mobile devices. To identify all of unnecessary redirects on your site, you can use any SEO spider tool or crawler software such as Screaming Frog, Spotibo and many more.
Minimize JavaScript & style sheets: Carry out minification, the process of removing all needless characters from source code without changing its functionality to speed up your website. The same process is applicable to mobile sites also, as it helps to reduce the overall bandwidth consumption and improve mobile caching.
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN): To improve average page load time you may use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a system of distributed servers that deliver web pages and other web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user. Another benefit of CDN is that they consist of multiple networks, which each make a copy of the website, stored into multiple geographical data centers and then provide users with quicker and more consistent access to your site.
Improve server response time: When reviewing your server response time, you should aim approximately for a time under 200ms by reviewing different performance metrics and looking out for things like slow routing, lack of memory or slow database requests.
Reduce wasted white spaces: White space, line returns or even comment tags can build up and increase your page size by 10 – 20%, which might negatively impact your page load time. So, review your pages and examine each line of code to make the suitable change required to maximize performance.
In conclusion, website speed optimization should be one of your main priorities. Visitors and the search engine crawlers expect websites to be lightning fast and if you fail to deliver on their expectations, you will risk losing rankings, website traffic and ultimately revenue.
Researching and understanding how to speed up your website effectively can often be a tricky and time-consuming task. The SEO, Web Design, IT and Search Marketing team here at MedResponsive can help you with any of your SEO, Google advertising, web design or internet marketing needs. Please contact us via phone or email with any questions. Have a great day or evening!
Infographics are one of the key digital marketing strategies now for any business to establish brand authority in their niche. An infographic can be defined as visualization of data to convey complex information that can be easily understood. With this story-telling tool, any information can be presented in a logical manner using data visualizations, text and pictures. Digital marketing in healthcare and other businesses focuses on infographics that are simple, clean, concise, and clear, ensuring that the information being conveyed is well-organized. It should be visually simple to make it easy for readers to comprehend.
The most popular types of infographics are based on
Statistics
Information
Timeline
Process
Geography
Comparison
Hierarchical
List
Resume
Creating infographics could be a complicated and time-consuming process for business office staff. Several infographic creator tools are now available to design infographics with various templates available. Professional digital marketing agencies provide the services of skilled designers to create easy-to-understand infographics that can convert more visitors into customers with compelling visuals and data-driven results.
Role of infographic content in healthcare marketing
An infographic can provide data, numbers, statistics and similar information in healthcare in an attractive and structured way. The visual format adds to the positive impact the content createson target audience. Infographics can make information more appealing and even complex data can be communicated in an easy way.
Infographics can make healthcare content
Compelling and attractive
Easily viewable and shareable
Engage the audience and be relevant for many audiences
Have increased opportunity to be repeated over many sites
A study published in Science Direct suggests that infographics could play a role in summarizing medical research literature. Based on this report, infographics were also associated with higher reader preference and lower cognitive load during summary review.
Key platforms for infographic designers
Have an idea of these infographic creator tools
Piktochart
This cloud-based infographic solution is easy to use and provides simple graphics tools to build or edit infographics. Users can choose a template from a library of over 800 professionally designed infographic, presentation, and print templates.
You can also choose from 1000s of free icons and images inside the infographics editor, or upload your own. There’s no concern about licensing fees, attribution or hassle. Using Piktochart, users can learn how to create an infographic and other visual projects in five minutes.
For the healthcare sector, Piktochart provides an easy way to communicate complex topics within the organization and also with health centers, to make sure everyone is in the loop. Based on the reports in Piktochart, 37,961 healthcare professionals use Piktochart to get better results. And 78% say that this platform helps communicate complex healthcare information more effectively. Clear designs can also help the public make informed health decisions.
Venngage
With this infographic maker, businesses and organizations can choose from more than a hundred infographic templates, charts, reports, flyers, brochures and social media images.
With the Business Plan you can choose from hundreds of professionally designed business and premium infographic templates. Save over 20 hours of design time with ready-to-use templates and create an unlimited amount of visualizations.
Choose from 100+ infographic templates on Venngage and follow these steps to create your own infographics.
You can create a beautiful infographic in just three steps –
Choose one from the professionally designed infographic templates
Add charts and visuals to visualize your data and information. You can also enhance the infographic by adding icons and images from the library.
Finally customize the design by changing the fonts and colors with the infographic maker. Apply your own style to make your infographic unique.
Users can also share infographics and templates among members within their account to make communication and editing flow seamlessly.
Visme
With this tool, anyone can create professional shareable infographics in minutes, without any design experience. You can get stunning presentations or infographics right in your browser.
You can either choose an infographic template or use content blocks to quickly create custom designs from scratch. Then you can add charts, maps, video or audio to the design based on your unique requirement. After customizing, the infographic can be shared or downloaded in one click. You can publish it online or download for offline use.
This tool comes with over 500,000 beautiful custom HD quality photos, a complete library of icons and graphics with editable colors and dynamic shapes and lines to complement any design. You can also select from over 20 beautiful charts and add diagrams, flowcharts and interactive maps based on the design.
Infogram
This easy-to-use infographic and chart maker helps create and share beautiful infographics, online reports, and interactive maps.
This intuitive visualization tool empowers people and teams to create attractive content. Visual storytelling with infographics can be easily done with Infogram.
Infogram’s drag-and-drop editor, interactive charts, and beautiful designs are guaranteed to set you up for success.
With this tool’s collection of infographic templates, users can quickly create historical timelines, step-by-step processes, how to guidelines, and data-centric infographics. These fully responsive infographics can be shared across all devices. You can also add them to Facebook Instant Articles, publish on Medium, or use Infogram WordPress plugin.
Healthcare entities or professionals can consider partnering with a medical website design company to get their website design and SEO goals efficiently met with effective infographics and other types of content.
