There are 5 core elements to a healthcare SEO funnel. Each has its own considerations in healthcare marketing. When implemented correctly the ensure dependable predictable patient flow for your organization.
Transcript
Hello, this is Roger from Enfusen and I wanted to go through our healthcare SEO funnel in order to help you understand the proper approach to healthcare SEO, both from the perspective of what it takes to rank with Google as well as what provides the best user experience for those that are searching for solutions to their healthcare problems online.
You’ll see that we’ve broken this down into a five step process. Now the speed at which you go through this process will vary based on where your healthcare organization is in this journey. For example, some enterprise organizations may have great brand visibility and great brand presence on Google, which would allow you to drop right down to the second one when you start working with them. Or if you are a an internal team member of a healthcare organization, you can look at where you need to start based on where you are. That’s an important factor with healthcare SEO, is to always start where you are instead of start with where you want to be.
Step one is really about ranking the primary service lines in relation to the brand. So if somebody was to search for your hospital name, would you be the number one result if they’re in your geographical area, the number one search result? Or at the very least in the top three? If you’re not, then before you start working on any type of service oriented keywords, geographical based keywords, you’ve really got to have brand recognition and brand dominance. This is part of Google’s ranking algorithm. They want to make sure that you as an organization have brand credibility and that people are searching for your brand in order to show Google that you are relative to the industry that you want to be in. This is often overlooked and it’s often a reason why people or organizations struggle to get the rankings that they want. So concentrate on brand visibility first. And it shouldn’t take you that long, especially if you’re a larger organization, in order to get that in place.
Now, how do you take care of brand visibility? There’s a couple of different ways. There’s great social presence with a lot of traffic flowing from your social media to your website is a great way to do that. A lot of direct traffic, people typing in your domain name either because they’re referrals or previous customers. Another way is to go out and seek some press. Now that can be done through just general press releases. It can also be done through reach out to local publications or news organizations in order to get stories going about you. But you’ve got to take care of that first.
The reason this is a funnel is that if you perform your healthcare SEO strategies in this manner, you’re going to have a lot more success each time that you go out and you try to do other things. So we’ve got brand dominance now. We’re the number one, two or three surgeries all every time somebody goes and looks for our brand name.
Now we want to get location visibility. So really what that means if you’re a multi location facility, if somebody searches for your brand in specific city, so say Hospital XYZ in Washington DC. Again, do you have the top three spots? Notice we haven’t gotten into those money keywords yet. We’re making it easy for people to find us and we’re showing Google that we are a prominent player not only from a brand recognition standpoint but also from a geographical standpoint. That’s going to build momentum into getting into those more commercial intent oriented keywords. So we’re dominating our brand, we’re dominating our location visibility.
Now we want to work on our service line visibility. So what’s an example of a service side? Well, most hospital organizations or healthcare organizations are going to serve multiple things. These can be things as primary care, urgent care, assisted living. You could dive into your cancer department, your orthopedics department, your heart and vascular department. We consider those to be service lines. This is a larger piece of the overall umbrella and what it’s doing, again, is it’s showing credibility through visibility with Google that you are a trusted source of information at a high level for these types of pieces of content.
Now you don’t have to be the number one spot. Number one, two or three will definitely work. It’s what we always target. It’ll at least be on the first page for service line visibility before you start getting into treatment and conditions.
Now what would treatment and condition content look like? Well, that could be people searching for something like how to cure breast cancer or breast cancer treatment ideas or lower back pain treatment. Now you’re starting to get into, okay those are part of a service line, but they’re more specific. You’re trying to meet the searcher or the buyer where they are in their journey. If they’re in that research phase and they’re looking for the best place to get these types of treatments or they’re looking for solutions to problems and they’re looking up their conditions you’ve got to be able to be found for that if you’re going to expect to generate revenue from SEO, which of course is the ultimate purpose of doing this.
Step five then is we really like to look at provider by service. So we’re of course already going to be working on Dr. Bob Smith, MD to make sure that if people are looking specifically for a doctor as it relates to a brand by their name. So hospital XYZ, Dr. Bob Smith, we’ve got to make sure that were found for that.
Now if we want to go a little bit higher, we can be looking at things like surgeon, best orthopedic surgeon. That’s really a high intent search where people are like okay, I know I need an orthopedic surgeon but I want the best. Or they may know hey, my health insurance is Hospital XYZ or Brand XYZ and I need an orthopedic surgeon, so I’m going to look at Brand XYZ orthopedic surgeon. If you’re not found for that, what that means is your competitors could be. Someone could have the intent looking for you, but if you don’t have brand visibility and provider by service visibility, your consumer could accidentally find someone else and it can cost you money.
Following this funnel in order is extremely important in order to give Google what it wants, to give the consumer what it wants and also to make your job as an SEO professional easier. We’ve proven this time and time again over the years with large scale organizations, multi billion dollar hospitals that have 27 locations, to much smaller nonprofit based hospital organizations or healthcare organizations that serve a specific type of service, treatment and condition. And it works every single time when followed in this order.
So the question becomes, where are you on this journey? Feel free to comment below this video if you have any questions as it relates to this content. Or if you have an organization that we’d like to help you with or take a look at in order to tell you where we believe you are on this journey and what exactly you should do next, you can comment below, we’ll reach out to you directly or you can post your URL before and we’re happy to give you those results directly through this.
Now you’ve worked on your SEO and you understand where you are. But now you need to answer a couple of different questions that are a big part of a healthcare consumer’s needs. And what we found through surveys, these are the four most important elements for content creation in healthcare marketing that you need to answer in your content. You’ll see in it that it plays into the SEO funnel from before this. So do you take my insurance? Now in some cases, this is going to be brand oriented based on your healthcare organization, meaning the insurance is going to tell them that hey, we, you can go to Hospital XYZ so they’re going to go search for health care provider XYZ by brand, and you need to be able to be found.
The reverse of that is is that if you’re going to list treatment and condition pages, or at least location pages, you might want to have an outline of some of the insurances that you take as an organization so that Google will see that and it’ll create the correlation for searchers that are looking for who takes ABC insurance. And if you are successfully optimizing your content relative to that question, you have a much higher probability of gaining that consumers trust and IE, turning them into a customer.
And the next is, are you located near me? This is the second most important question. People need to know that your facility is within a driving radius that they will accept. That’s why that location based SEO really falls right before brand recognition. You can see how these follow in line. Brand recognition for insurance, which could be your brand or it could be the insurance company’s brand, are you located near me, which is location based SEO to make sure that you’re able to be found based on your geographical location.
Number three, can you solve my pain or do you treat my issue? That could relate to someone that’s searching for say a facility to do some type of physical for their child for sports. So if your urgent care location or your primary care location does youth tests to make sure, youth physicals so that parents can get exactly what they need then let them know that view your content so that Google can find that and it can help populate you for the searches that individuals are making.
The last thing is, and this is a newer one and it really trends towards a younger demographic, when can you see me? We’re starting to see more hospital organizations, especially with urgent care and hospitals putting right on their website what the wait times are for their facilities. This is a great tool to help meet buyers where they are. If they were able to find you via Google search and they get to your website, it is an amazing conversion piece in order to say hey, the wait time, here is 30 minutes. Here’s a button, save your place in line and we’ll see you when you get here. Those type of conversion optimization tactics, which directly relate to organic traffic and SEO, will really help you drive more revenue from your efforts.
All of this is designed in order to make your healthcare marketing and your healthcare SEO efforts more successful. Do you have any questions about this short training? Feel free to reach out to us directly, enfusen.com or leave a comment below this video wherever you’re seeing it, and we’ll be happy to discuss this with you one on one. Appreciate your time and good luck in your healthcare marketing and your healthcare SEO efforts. Thank you.
