Over the past few years, digital marketing for healthcare has evolved significantly with healthcare entities utilizing innovative strategies to target specific customer groups. Healthcare patients have more options than ever before. With a wide range of information available online, patients no longer feel the need to visit a medical practice closest to their location or practice with multiple locations in the community. In fact, the competition is tough, particularly for healthcare practices like yours battling to attract patients in tight geographical areas in this constantly evolving high-tech era.
It is extremely important that healthcare organizations and medical offices find ways to meet their target patients where they are – online and through search engines. Incorporating the right digital marketing strategies can turn even a small healthcare practice into a booming business or to a number one choice within a specific geographical area. It can also help reach new as well as existing patients and keep your healthcare brand at the forefront of people’s minds.
Planning a Healthcare Marketing Strategy
In simple terms, healthcare marketing refers to the marketing strategies that healthcare providers, insurers, suppliers and advocacy groups use to attract new patients and increase awareness of their healthcare business. These strategies or techniques will provide a considerable competitive advantage. Your practice can start designing strategies by conducting an audit of their specific services and products – as this will help get a better sense of which groups of patients or customers you need to target first. In marketing terms, this is called developing a “patient persona” and this should be one of the focal points of the marketing efforts.
Just begin by taking a look at the current customer groups and their category. This knowledge will help you to craft a marketing strategy that truly resonates with the specific audience groups and gets the most return for the marketing budget. The success of healthcare digital marketing strategy, however, depends heavily on the quality of your healthcare website. Nothing will attract new patients through the door faster than a beautiful website that clearly indicates – what your practice is all about and what kind of services you offer. Reports suggest that 77 percent of patients use search engines prior to booking an appointment.
Here discussed are some top strategies that help build consumer engagement and build visibility to your local or online practice –
Use Consistent Healthcare Branding – Figure out the unique features – whether it is the brand, family-friendly atmosphere of the practice, or the approach towards the patients that differentiate your healthcare practice from other counterparts. In fact, one single feature or aspect that makes you unique would help patients to remember your organization. It may take considerable time to figure out what works best for your brand. Eventually, the healthcare marketing strategy would come together smoothly.
Optimize Your Website for Better Patient Experience – Nowadays, more than ever, prospective patients search online for local physicians and healthcare services. Google cares about user experience, and it will prioritize businesses that have an optimized website. In general, you need to focus on building a responsive website that works best for the mobile digital healthcare experience. This in turn will improve patients’ experience on the website, thereby increasing leads and retention. The website design should have customized features, must load fast, be mobile-friendly, and interactive.
Design for Mobile Devices – As most searches are done via mobile or tablet devices, having a fully responsive medical website design is crucial. Make sure the website design includes flexible images and website structures.
Website Speed Matters – Slow website speed can irritate online users and prevent them from staying on the website. Difficult-to-navigate websites with slow page speed may give visitors a negative experience and they are more likely to leave the website and go to a competitor’s site. Therefore, it is critical to evaluate and put a plan together to improve website page speed to lower bounce rates and increase lead conversion.
Make Services Visible – Describe the treatments and services you provide on your home page. If you offer a wide variety of services, select the main procedures and services you want to feature. When deciding on what treatments to promote, consider the ideal audience, key differentiators, and high revenue procedures. Use lead forms to make it easy for patients to request appointments and to create a call to action for high revenue services. Make sure to use lead forms that are accessible and straightforward as patients never want to fill out long and unnecessary forms to schedule an appointment.
Include Medical SEO keywords – A healthcare website needs to be built with proper medical SEO and keywords to stay competitive, and show up in search results. Search engine optimization will be performed page by page for all aspects of the website through image optimization, Meta descriptions, page structures, and other features. Professional medical SEO services can help build each page of the website and perform a competitive keyword research to make sure that the website stays on top of local search results.
Invest in Social Media Marketing – Regarded as an essential medical marketing strategy, social media marketing contributes significantly to driving traffic and increasing search engine rankings. However, not all social media platforms are alike or a good fit. As each social media marketing platform is different and created for a specific audience, it is always best to take the time to evaluate the social media profiles that are the best suited, based on the target audience and the framework of the audience that each platform targets.
Focus on Local SEO – Implementing an efficient local SEO strategy is an important medical marketing strategy as this helps boost online visibility in the long run. Hospitals and healthcare practices normally offer their service to a specific area or region. Invest time and energy in ranking a website in the 15-20 mile radius around each location for the practice.
To get it ranked locally, it is important to build a separate individual page for each location. For instance, if a healthcare practice is based in multiple locations, developing a landing page for each dedicated location is crucial. It is important to include Google My Business map, the City name (in the title tag and on the page several times), NAP (name, address, phone number, hours of that specific location), a short write-up about that location and healthcare providers that see patients at that location, on that specific page.
Develop Unique Content – Posting unique and valuable content increases the overall website traffic, grows organic search, improves brand awareness, and positions the healthcare practice as a thought leader within their specific specialty. A well-structured blog can generate up to 50 percent of a website’s organic traffic. Use tools like Uber suggest to punch in keywords for topics for which content need to be written. When it comes to medical marketing and content, blog posts are not the only format. You can use videos or images to attract and engage patients. For instance, when it comes to a plastic surgery practice that provides aesthetic services, sharing high-quality before and after images of actual patients can be one of the single most important medical marketing strategies.Develop a large before and after gallery showcasing before and after images for various cosmetic surgical procedures and patients’ age range.
Video content now receives substantially higher engagement rates than any other type of content, including images and blog posts. Including unique videos will help physicians promote their medical practice, discuss the medical treatments they specialize in, and their treatment approach, thereby creating a know, like and trust relationship with potential patients before they ever walk through the door.
Create Healthcare Provider Profile Listings – Business listings are the business contact information that is displayed when patients search for a healthcare practice online. Verifying and optimizing business listings across all platforms inform Google that the information displayed about a specific medical practice is accurate. However, unlike other industries, in medical marketing, providers also have profiles, and patients search for these as well. Often, physicians move several times over their careers, which can cause errors and discrepancies in their listings. Therefore, it is essential to update and unify listings for the physicians as well.
Google Ads and Social Ads – Digital advertising has revolutionized the medical marketing space with platforms like Facebook and Google Ads. Both PPC and Facebook advertising allows to customize advertisements to reach the target patient base and provide specific tracking and analytics to gain great insights into the ROI of the advertising program. Google analytics will help adjust the ads to improve results based on data received. Google Ads and Facebook advertising are considerable drivers in converting new patients, growing high revenue procedures, and increasing overall practice revenue. For instance, search-based ads help target specific keywords in search and present ads to only those people in a particular geographical area.
Email Marketing – Email is another important medical marketing strategy that helps retarget patients or reach new patients that have expressed interest in a particular procedure or treatment. When potential patients enter their email address, it shows that they are mostly interested in the type of services provided. Utilize email marketing to create touchpoints with your visitors and share new promotions, specials, blog posts, and the latest practice news. Try to build your practice patient email list by encouraging website visitors to sign up for a newsletter.
The weekly or monthly newsletter can have information about the medical practice or general healthcare information that would keep the practice fresh in the mind of patients.
In today’s changing healthcare digital landscape, it is crucial for healthcare practices to come up with innovative ideas to stand out in their digital marketing endeavors. Medical SEO is key to reaching prospective patients. Following the above-mentioned tips or strategies and investing in the right resources could benefit the medical practice. Healthcare digital marketing services provided by a reputable SEO company with expertise in the field can help grow your healthcare business.
Are you a plastic surgeon having trouble reaching potential clients to grow your business? Then consider PPC or Pay-per-Click advertising, one of the top ways to advertise your plastic surgery practice online. With many users looking for medical data on search engines like Google on a daily basis – that is, according to cardinal digital marketing, daily health-related searches total 70,000 a minute, which is more than a billion healthcare-related searches a day – having a strong online presence is more important than ever for your medical practice. By using the right strategies such as PPC advertising, you can ensure that your website is on top of the search results page instead of getting lost among millions of results. Reach out to a reliable medical SEO company that can help implement an effective strategy to reach your target audience and attract new clients.
What Is PPC Advertising?
As, today, more and more people are seeking healthcare professionals and medical data online, conventional methods of advertising simply don’t work anymore. No matter how large or small your plastic surgery practice is, you need to increase your practice’s visibility, and be at the top of the search engine rankings. And for that to happen, you can use two options: build an organic SEO strategy, or introduce your practice to PPC advertising on the most prominent search engines. Though both are feasible digital marketing strategies adopted by many plastic surgeons, SEO might take a longer time to show measurable results. But with PPC, you can expect increased site traffic, brand awareness and leads in a day.
In SERPs (search engine result pages), the top slots are reserved for ads that align with the search query, which are the first results seen by users, and often, the first options they’ll click on. These ads are examples of pay-per-click advertising. It is an internet marketing advertising system that only charges you when a potential user clicks on your online advertisement. For instance, if you have placed a PPC ad for your practice online, you’ll have to pay a small fee whenever a patient clicks on your ad. Basically, PPC ad is a way of purchasing visits to your website, rather than trying to “earn” those visits organically. There are many types of PPC ads – including local search ads, search ads, remarketing and display ads – but one of the most common types is the paid search ad.
Paid search ads appear when people search for things online using a search engine – like Google, Bing, Yahoo Search Marketing, and so on. Regardless of the search engine or your ad type, your ad post will usually look similar to other, non-paid posts. The only difference is that PPC posts will appear higher in the search engine results list and will labeled as “sponsored” or “promoted.”
What Is PPC Advertising for Plastic Surgeons and Why Should they Consider PPC for Their Practice?
PPC advertising for plastic surgeons also targets lead and click generation. However, it is not limited to search engines; digital marketers can help plastic surgeons target PPC ad campaigns across social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Apart from generating clicks and (potentially) leads rather quickly, PPC also offers some other benefits to plastic surgeons, such as:
Making the practice’s website more visible to potential patients.
Allowing the use of PPC retargeting campaigns to show ads to people who have visited particular pages on your website.
Launching highly targeted campaigns based on competitive, high-intent keywords, and audience personality.
The ability to target very specific audiences.
The availability of rich and deeper data that can be used to optimize campaigns.
However, PPC is part of a wider online marketing strategy called Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which also includes SEO. You can use PPC along with these strategies as it helps to increase traffic to your plastic surgery website and ensures that your website reaches as many prospective patients as possible.
Though PPC ads help you drive leads, doing so efficiently requires a targeted and smart strategy. Plastic surgeons should also manage their PPC strategy closely to increase its value. Let’s check out some best practices that would help to get the most out of your PPC campaigns:
Target Your Audience: For a successful and effective ad campaign, target your audience personas – ranging from age and income to physical location, gender, as well as behavioral tendencies. This is very important because, most paid search campaigns include certain components such as targeted keywords, the ad text/messaging and landing pages – that not only convey the language that your audience uses during their searches but also brings them valuable, timely, authoritative information that suits their plastic surgery needs. These components pave the way to an effective paid search campaign. So, whenever you are placing a PPC ad, ask yourself:
Who is your target audience?
What are the obstacles that prevent them from choosing a plastic surgery procedure?
What type of procedure are they looking for?
How do they search for plastic surgeons and practices?
Answers to these questions will help you refine your audience’s traits and characteristics, complete with basic demographic information, as well as their considerations, top priorities, and any obstacles that prevent them from choosing a particular plastic surgery procedure or services.
For better insights, try to talk to your actual patients and listen to them about how they navigated their patient journey.
Utilize Social Media: As we mentioned above, like search engines, many social media platforms – such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat and so on – offer PPC advertising, which is named as social PPC. There are now plenty of online advertising options to run alongside Google AdWords such as Facebook has its ever-expanding advertising options, Twitter has rolled out promoted tweets and profiles and cards, LinkedIn has its advertising and marketing solution, even Snapchat has now begun its advertising offering.Luring people from social media to your practice through social PPC ads increases your brand awareness and helps to gain trust with potential patients. This is easy with social PPC ads because your ads and practice name will follow the patients most interested in plastic surgery around the internet and they will already know your name.
Like PPC ads, social media ads often have a lower cost per click and it tends to convert more than traditional PPC.
Choose the Right Keywords: The foundation of any successful PPC campaign is keyword research. Be it a plastic surgery practice or any other business, if you are deciding to place PPC ads for your website, then choose the best keywords that are most likely to result in clicks and conversions. Ideally, a well-organized PPC campaign will include a number of different types of keywords with different levels of intent, such as brand, commercial, broader, low-intent, long-tail and competitive keywords. All of these keyword types can and should fit into your PPC advertising strategy.
Focus on Geo-Targeting: Geo-targeting, also known as local PPC, is a paid advertising strategy that is designed to target an audience within a specific area. It plays a vital role when it comes to creating highly targeted, customized campaigns. By focusing on geo-targeting PPC strategies, you can deliver your plastic surgery services to your prospective customers based on their geographical location. If the majority of your clientele reside in a specific area, you can target your campaign solely there, instead of wasting your ad budget targeting the entire city. Through this strategy you increase your ROI by targeting the people most likely to convert.Another effective geo-targeting option is “geo-conquesting”, which targets people who are at or near a competitor surgeon’s location.
Optimize Your Ads for Mobile: With more than 3 billion smartphone users worldwide (statista.com), more searches are being conducted on mobile devices these days. For instance, according to Insider Intelligence report, people spent 23 additional minutes per day on their smartphones in 2020. So, if you want to generate more leads, utilize all of the available platforms that Google Ads provides, which includes setting up PPC Ads for mobile and optimizing them. Image Source
Mobile PPC advertising is a lot easier to convert users who click on your ads than desktop PPC ads – whether on the search networks or display networks – because of the level of intimacy that a smartphone provides.
However, one of the most important things to remember while optimizing your mobile PPC ad campaigns is to optimize landing pages for mobile devices. You can’t send your PPC leads to a landing page designed for desktop leads.
Being an evolving strategy, PPC advertising will promote your website and provide a multitude of data that can be used to refine and retarget your paid search ads. Moreover, there would possibly be thousands of people within your specific target area that search online for plastic surgery options and services. This creates a great opportunity to tap into this search demand through PPC ads, get your brand and services seen, and drive highly qualified leads to your practice. Plastic surgeons also will always have the option to expand their keyword targeting strategies or to test new ad copy. You can also rely on a professional PPC marketing agency that can offer you the right PPC campaign to increase your website visibility, traffic and conversions.
Whether you are considering medical SEO or SEO for any other business in 2021, make sure you invest in the right SEO strategies. Preparing and optimizing your website for online search can improve your website’s ranking and attract your targeted audience.
Whether it’s medical SEO or SEO for other industries, creating optimized content for pages that reach the top of Google search result page is crucial to improve the SEO impact. High rankings for your health care web pages can bring consistent and relevant traffic to your website. However, to obtain the desired results, it is extremely important for people to click through to your website from the SERPs. Google sitelinks are a great way to improve your click-through rate (CTR), attract more website traffic, and strengthen your SEO. Taking up to 90 percent of the fold screen space, Google sitelinks appear below primary search results, and allow users to easily find relevant information in a website quickly.
With many users looking for medical data on search engines like Google on a daily basis, having a strong online presence is more important than ever for your medical practice to gain more traffic to your website and your medical practice. Using the right SEO strategies, you can ensure that your website is on top of the search result page instead of getting lost among millions of results. If you wish to optimize your website and improve your ranking, reach out to reliable medical SEO companies that can help implement an effective SEO strategy that can improve ranking, drive traffic, and increase ROI.
There are many SEO factors that Google uses to rank medical websites. Even though Google doesn’t provide a proper list of factors that are important for search engine ranking, we know that unique content, good loading speed, and quality back links are some of the important aspects. Out of so many factors, the most important one is the use of the right keywords. Keywords play a crucial role in SEO and choosing the right keywords and using them in quality content is the most effective way of attracting users to your medical website.
What Is Keyword Stuffing?
Keywords define your content. These are words or phrases that users type into search engines to find what they are looking for online. So, if you use quality keywords as your primary keywords then, you have higher chances of better ranking and also driving more traffic to your website. However, sometimes marketers practice keyword stuffing to get more traffic. Keyword stuffing refers to the process of purposely overusing relevant keywords or search terms repeatedly in a text on a webpage or blog in order to manipulate Google’s search engine results.
Why Is Keyword Stuffing Dangerous?
Earlier, this was a successful strategy used by many marketers in an attempt to manipulate page ranking and get more traffic. A website could easily get ranked well by using a large variety of unrelated keywords. But today, Google’s algorithm is highly advanced. With constant updates to its algorithm, Google began penalizing websites that practiced keyword stuffing. It is a black hat SEO technique that can lead to the removal of your content from the search results completely.
Keyword stuffing can be of two types, visible and invisible. Visible keyword stuffing involves repeatedly using a specific keyword multiple times in a content and this can be visible to the users. For instance, consider a medical website that wants a content page to rank high in search results for the term “affordable plastic surgeon”. So, healthcare marketers would include the term “affordable plastic surgeon” excessively in the content, even jamming the keyword where it is out of context or not relevant to the topic. Other forms of visible keyword stuffing are inserting text blocks that just repeat a keyword, and link spamming.
Invisible keyword stuffing is a process where the keywords are used excessively but not in front of the user’s eyes directly. This creates spammy and unreadable text. It includes camouflaging the text by making it in the same colour, same as the background, or you can place the text within the page’s code like meta, comment tags and alt text etc where the search bots can find it.
Both of these practices aim at fooling the algorithm that determine search ranking and attract the search engine crawlers and not for the human readers. Keyword stuffing is not meant for human readers, it is structured just to trick the algorithm and it leads to spammy and artificial content that may not be useful for the visitor. But today, Google’s algorithms are constantly updated with the aim of providing useful and high-quality content to their users. So, the search engine is designed to provide the apt results for users and use of keyword stuffing would lead to penalizing the webpage and its ranking.
Six Tips for Keyword Optimization
Focus on Search Intent: Identify what a web page is about and understand its main intent. This will help you choose single target keywords that best represent that main topic along with other related search terms. Do not assign any two of your web pages to a single issue or a single search intent. So, go for a new and unique search intent and target search term and this will prevent your web pages from fighting of the single spot.
Go for Long Content: Quality content is always a vital factor that drives traffic. This means that the longer the content, the more room there is to add various relevant keywords and lesser chances to over spam the text.
Ensure Good Keyword Density: If you have longer content, you are free to use your target keyword twice, but make sure not to over use it in your content. Use the keyword at the appropriate places, use them only where it fits in naturally. Although there is a little flexibility in the guidelines, the optimal keyword density is around 2 percent.
Utilize Secondary Keywords and Long-Tail keywords: You can inform search engines that your page is about the target keyword by using secondary keywords, synonyms and long-tail variations in your content. Using such keywords gives search engines extra context that offer proof regarding the main topic of a web page. Long-tail keywords don’t just give more content but allows the search engines to know whether the content contains any answers to questions. You can also use synonyms that helps the search giant to be sure that it’s relevant.
Add Target Keywords to Page Elements: To optimize a page for a keyword, make sure to add target keywords at all the correct places across the page like the page title, meta description, title tag, beginning and ending of text, sub heading and image alt tag. Keyword optimization lets the search engine know what the page is all about. Adding target keywords in the main body of the content as well as in metadata fields helps to send out strong signals to the search engine.
Recheck your On-Page SEO: Preventing keyword stuffing alone is not enough for better ranking. It is important to consider all vital elements. So, once you have published a new web page, make sure it’s completely optimized for the selected target keyword by using On-Page SEO Checker. This helps you focus on specific page elements, that lets you know how well each one is optimized for the target keyword.
Keyword stuffing is an age-old black hat technique. However, today it has no effect on SEO. It can also have a negative impact on your website; keyword stuffing has fallen out of favor for high-quality content. It is best to team with reliable SEO companies to ensure white-hat SEO practices, increased online presence, more targeted traffic and conversions.
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