Today, most individuals rely on the internet for the information they need including healthcare information. According to Jupiter Research, a Forrester Research Company, 81 percent of the users find their desired destination through search engines. It has therefore become important for all businesses including medical entities to optimize their websites to improve online presence and drive more customers. Healthcare businesses meet this requirement with medical SEO services. Among the solutions available are – search engine optimization (SEO) and pay per click (PPC). Both techniques help you to get on the front page of search engines for targeted audiences. However, each of these has its respective pros and cons.
SEO is indispensable for start-up businesses to establish authority, develop a good online reputation, and increase organic traffic. This strategy is also good to obtain back links and returning visitors. SEO is a long-term activity, and results don’t show up overnight. But when it starts showing results, you are ensured consistent and quality traffic. Experts consider it a more reliable digital marketing strategy because you achieve a high rank on Google via “natural” strategies with Google recognizing your website as reputable and trustworthy. The disadvantage of PPC strategy is that internet users often ignore sponsored ads and paid advertisements. Studies show that organic results are more likely to be clicked on than paid results. PPC requires heavy investment on your part to obtain advertising space for specific keywords. To be successful with PPC, you do need some basic search engine optimization to be performed on your website.
Let us look at these two strategies and the advantages they offer.
Search Engine Optimization
There are various methods available that help to increase the usability of the website and make it appear higher in organic search results and it is a combination of technical expertise, creative elements and strategic planning to increase traffic, rankings and conversions. Although search engines are intelligent, they require some assistance to understand what the website is about and to verify its credibility. With the help of some SEO tactics you can eliminate any confusion search engines may have at the time of positioning your website for success.
SEO Advantages
Increase organic traffic: One of the main reasons for web traffic across all sites is organic traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. Designing an appropriate healthcare digital marketing strategy and optimizing your medical website helps search engines to determine the value of your website. This will improve website traffic and allow the site to be found quickly.
Trust and Credibility: Having your website at the top of organic search results significantly increases your credibility in the perception of users searching for a business like yours. When you are on Page 1 of the search results, it will portray legitimacy and trust over a business showing up on Page 3.
Long-term strategy: This strategy is different from PPC campaign, because the efforts do not stop the moment you stop paying. Instead, SEO efforts will continue to generate traffic and help your website to grow and flourish.
Position advantage: Once you have gained a good position in the organic search results, your competitors cannot simply pay more to rank above you. What matters are quality, usability and credibility of your website.
Pay-per-Click Advantages
Pay-per-click helps you to be on the first page for targeted keywords within a day. In this strategy, you run online ads and pay a fee when someone clicks on your ad. This is also known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid Search. Google is the primary provider of paid search advertising via Google AdWords. It also offers Search and Display advertising where search advertising means ads seen in the search results and display refers to the ads you see when you visit other websites on the Internet.
Prominence for your ads in search results: PPC campaigns helps to display your ads prominently on search results for specific keywords related to your business. Usually ads take up the first four slots on the search results page and the first three slots on a mobile device. Getting the first slot on search results depends on your quality score and bid amount. The quality score is based on three factors – the expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page.
Customize your target audience: PPC allows you to customize the audience of your ads. The audience can be targeted using location, language, device, time or day of the week, websites visited earlier etc.
Control your budget: Budget can be controlled because of the flexibility PPC offers. This form of advertising can be a low-cost option for your business if you have a high quality score.
Data and flexibility: PPC advertising helps you to create reports and find out which strategy or techniques are working and which are not. The techniques that are not performing or performing poorly can be turned off. You can also increase budgets on campaigns that are doing well. The information in these reports can be used to obtain additional information regarding user search behaviour, which can be used in organic search efforts.
2017 PPC and SEO Statistics from Webpage FX
SEO Statistics
93 percent of online experiences start with search engines
70 percent of clicked search results are organic
Google fields more than one trillion searches per year
89% of marketers say SEO is successful
6 percent of all SEO leads close (as opposed to 1.7 percent of outbound leads)
2017 PPC Stats
Search ads increase brand awareness by as much as 80 percent
32 percent of companies use PPC to sell products directly to customers
PPC visitors are 50 percent more likely to buy than organic visitors
65 percent of all high-intent searches result in an ad click
On average, businesses earn $3 for every $1.60 spent on AdWords
PPC and SEO are two tactics used for online marketing, but it is difficult to say which one is better. If you own a small medical practice or business with little competition, then sticking to SEO is the best option whereas if you own a large business or medical practice with strong competition then SEO alone may not be enough. A proper combination of both PPC and SEO is required for any business. This will enable the two strategies to work better by strengthening and supporting each other. These measures can help medical businesses enhance their value, improve online presence and increase revenue. A reliable healthcare digital marketing agency would stay abreast of the latest SEO trends, and ensure that their clients rank high in all leading search engines and improve traffic. They would develop the right internet marketing strategy for your healthcare website considering key factors such as business goals, target audience, and budget.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) involves optimizing your landing pages, sponsored search ads, and overall website design to increase your conversion rate. This is something a digital marketing company can help you achieve. CRO is considered a good strategy because it helps increase profits from sales without raising your investment in advertising. The conversion rates are industry- and business model-dependent. Your goal should be to persuade the highest possible percentage of visitors to your website to convert or complete your desired action.
With Conversion Rate Optimization, you can evaluate your website’s sales funnel to identify different ways you can improve your website in order to get a higher percentage of people to sign up for your products or services. Websites are no longer just about driving more traffic to your website.
Typically, CRO process considers usability of the website and psychological factors holding back sales such as anxiety, risk reversal, friction and so on. However, while these things are important, the healthcare market requires more. Apart from the standard conversion rate optimization techniques, the healthcare market requires a focus on trust and belief. Education and choice are very important in the healthcare sector with the stiff competition prevailing online.
Tools for Measuring Conversion Rate
A web analytics tool: This the most basic and essential tool that helps you to track, report and monitor your current website conversion rate. This tool will help in creating better test ideas and help prioritize which pages need optimizing the most to gain more visitors.
A website testing tool: This tool will help in testing different versions of your content to see which version increases the conversion rate. You can start with a low-cost testing tool like Visual Website. There are many other advanced tools as well.
Visitor feedback tool: Getting feedback form visitors helps in understanding their needs, and also gaining new ideas on improving your website and conversion rates.
How to Ensure Maximum Conversion Rate
Run A/B split testing: Test your headline, page layout and navigation, your offer, call to action etc.
Create a good value proposition: Your value proposition must be distinctive and stand apart from your competition. Make sure that it is communicated effectively to your customers.
Build a sales funnel: Build a sales funnel to build trust, develop relationships and prove your expertise.
Ensure clarity of communication: Your message should be clearly communicated to your customers.
Focus on your call to action: A call to action is a link or button that directs your visitors to take a certain action such as “call us now,” or “send an email” or “ask for a free consultation”; “add to cart,” or “register now.” You can experiment with different calls to action, apart from varying their position on the page.
Focus on your landing page: You can experiment with the layout, content, style and functionality of your landing page to increase the conversion rate. Your landing page is very important because it tells the user what your company has to offer, gain their attention by explaining how your company is different from others; and make it easy and clear how the user can follow through on your offer (convert).
Test the right visitors: Organic visitors typically spend more time on websites, browse more pages, and have lower bounce rates than visitors that come from paid campaigns. Returning visitors tend to view sites differently from new visitors. Your testing parameters should reflect these behavioral differences. Make it a point to design tests that are aimed at the right people.
Enhance website usability: Optimizing your website with best practices like easy navigation menus, good options for sorting and filtering or browsing etc.
A CRO expert who can help: A CRO expert can help in increasing the chances of success. You can either hire experts from an outside agency or have CRO experts in-house for optimum results.
Support from others who are part of your online business: Make sure that you have the support of other key people in your organization. Educate them as regards the benefits of conversion rates optimization and its positive impact on revenue.
To ensure the best conversions, you need to be testing your website always. This challenging task can be successfully done with the help of a website development company. Some tests may prove successful and some may fail, but both present opportunities for growth. These tests may be used to investigate new website design possibilities that are more appealing and effective.
Consistent high rankings in the search results pages ensure constant visibility online, which increases the chances for people visiting your site. That’s organic search performance, and search engine optimization (SEO) is a collection of strategies to ensure high rankings. It requires websites to be made quick loading, more user-friendly, and easily navigable – these are all the more important for medical and healthcare manufacturer websites.
Organic search, much of which is from the mobile phone, makes up around 64% of the traffic of a website and that’s what you need to target. The following SEO steps could help in improving your organic search performance:
Racking up the Backlinks
Links from other healthcare or related websites to your site really work to bring in users to your site – and your website gets more popular with the search engines too. Backlinks improve credibility, and here’s how to accumulate them:
Submitting content such as articles and press releases to sites frequently visited by audiences
Generating content with specific platforms in mind, in order to secure more links from them
Guest blogging on popular sites belonging to your niche
Building broken links
Influencing users to mention you in their blogs, social media posts, reviews, etc
Useful, Relevant and Engaging Content
Valuable content can never be overemphasized for quality websites, particularly medical sites. Useful and quality content can lead to more backlinks, more recommendations on social media networks, higher rankings on the search results pages, and improved reputation. Content should be informative and relevant on your web pages, and the articles and blogs submitted to other sites. Content should also be interactive and include videos, Flash animation, slide decks, infographics, etc which would engage readers and also motivate them to share the content.
Keyword Optimization
This is a no-brainer, but apparently many website owners still do not realize how important it is to use appropriate keywords. All it takes is keyword research with smart tools, and you can identify relevant keywords for improving your search rankings.
The idea is to select keywords that are among the most popular but also those that do not have too many competitors using them. Use these keywords in your content, but we don’t mean senselessly flooding with keywords which would brand your site a spam in no time. Judicious use of keywords in content helps. It is also important that you continue keyword research and refresh your keyword list to continue ensuring good ranking.
Here’s a research page from WordTracker:
On-page SEO
We mentioned content first, but before you do that you must spruce up your on-page SEO. It doesn’t take much effort, yet webmasters so easily overlook this aspect which can bring about significant improvements in search rankings.
Meta titles must indicate the page content, include – but not be stuffed with – primary keywords, and ideally consist of 55 characters and an important keyword.
Create XML sitemap to provide information about your site, so search engines will know the kind of content you post.
Ensure that meta descriptions appearing beneath your URL in the search result pages contain secondary keywords so that they are persuasive to users.
Social Media Optimization
If you need to get your presence felt quickly you need to embrace social media. You need to engage with users through the social networks, and this does lead to better search rankings. You would have seen that Twitter interactions are now directly integrated into Google SERP – it makes Twitter quite important, with estimates that a minimum of two tweets each day of the week is necessary to secure at least 30% of the amazing organic reach Twitter has.
For a healthcare organization there surely is some health tip, disease prevention information, or healthy lifestyle thought you could tweet on, or post on Facebook. Get a thought-provoking photo on Instagram, and post a useful health tip video on your YouTube channel – there are so many possibilities out there and many more social networks too.
Reviews by Users
With social networking, the users, who could be your existing or prospective customers, take over the promotion of your brand with good intentions. One of the ways they do it is through reviews. Reviews play a significant part in user decision and conversions. Obviously, positive reviews about the care and treatment you provide at your hospital or practice or about the healthcare products you manufacture or sell can positively influence the average user. The more you encourage users to post reviews on your site and in their social media interactions, blogs, etc the greater is the credibility you earn – very important for an organization dealing with healthcare.
Tactics of Market Leaders
Sometimes, merely observing the market leaders can do you more good than doing anything yourself. Your niche has market leaders who may be there because of the SEO techniques they employ. It’s time to do some research, discover the kind of content that works better, the keywords that get ranked well, and the backlinks that are used. A digital marketing company would be using tools such as SimilarWeb and other powerful tools to gauge competitor strategy.
These steps are foundations for your medical website to:
Get conspicuous
Build authority, and
Drive traffic consistently
These will eventually translate to greater conversions and improved ROI. For busy hospitals, physician clinics and medical equipment & service providers, outsourcing these processes to a reliable search engine optimization company can bring about great results thanks to experienced professionals devoted to getting their client’s website performing well.
Click through rate (CTR) refers to the number of people who click a link against the total number of people who had the opportunity to do so. Optimizing your website using relevant keywords, tags, links and quality content is necessary; at the same time CTR is also important for higher search engine ranking of your medical website. In Paid Search, Google uses CTR as an important determining factor when it calculates the “Quality Score” of a website, which is a crucial factor in its AdWords ad auctions. A high CTR is an indication that searchers find your ads helpful and relevant. If you replace “ads” with “organic results”, the definition would still hold true for results within the top ten on Google. Experts are divided in their views regarding the impact of CTR on ranking. However, it would be good to work towards increasing your CTR anyway.
To boost your organic CTR you need to use SEO tools and techniques. With medical SEO services, your website will be ensured more online visibility and increased click through rate. Patients looking for your specific services can find you easily.
Following are some tips to increase your CTR.
Using relevant content as search engines prefer content- rich websites. Relevant content will help visitors to easily understand the flow of your website and also makes it easy for them to find what they are searching for.
Structured snippets comprise text given underneath the search results that draws the attention of the users. It helps you to stand out among the competition.
Call to action button will improve conversion rates and increase user interaction.
A relevant website URL with keyword incorporated is important for any website to rank high.
One of the most important techniques is to optimize your website with the right keywords. It helps connect searchers to your website and improves your visibility. But make sure that you don’t stuff your content with keywords which can affect your website negatively.
Using a creative title can drive more traffic to your site. A title with relevant keyword can grab the attention of users and also encourage them to click through. Using news or curiosity based words will boost your CTR quickly.
If you have your title and relevant keywords ready, then focus on good Meta description. Meta descriptions are concise explanations of the contents of web pages. It should have keywords used intelligently and make the description compelling that a searcher will want to click.
Sitelinks are powerful way to dominate the SERPs, increase trust and direct targeted traffic to your site’s internal pages. For acquiring site links, maintaining a clean and clear navigation is also important.
Keep testing your Meta description, titles etc. constantly and always track your ranking regularly.
If you wish to improve the CTR for your website, consult a reliable digital marketing company. It will increase the volume and quality of traffic to your medical website, make your services available to a wider patient base and improve your revenue.
