Learn top trends – both inside and outside of healthcare – you should focus on in 2018. You’ll learn which optimization techniques will set you apart from competitors and help you rank well for patients using voice search. Understand why you should invest in paid advertising if you want to stand out in the ever-shrinking search results page. We’ll also discuss the latest in hyper-localization techniques, content personalization tactics, enhanced mobile user experience (UX) strategies, MarTech ecosystems, and data analytics. We’ll also discuss bigger shifts we’re seeing in hospital website usage as well as trends in how health systems are branding online.

Attend this free webinar and learn how to:

• Enhance the user experience across your digital platforms based on changes in consumer behavior
• Invest in optimization and paid advertising techniques that will help you stand out in the market
• Capitalize on emerging tactics, such as voice search and personalized content
• Understand broader changes in the healthcare and digital landscapes that could impact your overarching strategy
• And more

Content & User Experience

A good user experience depends on quality content. Content is the reason users come to your website. Count anything on your website—text, images, audio, and video—that communicates a message to your audience as content.

When you let content guide your website redesign, you give users valuable information and improve the overall user experience. This strategic approach can help your brand and website stand out. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, a leader in user experience research, “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

Take advantage of your healthcare website redesign process to deliver a better digital user experience. Content plays an important role in your user experience and informs design and functionality by presenting text that is:

• Organized with meaningful messages
• Easy to read and scannable
• User focused and benefit driven
• Optimized for conversion with calls to action

When you get the user experience right, you’re building a relationship and becoming a trusted source of information and services. That means your users will turn to your website instead of a competitor’s site.

What’s Driving Your Website Redesign?

Start your planning process with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your redesign. Your website objectives may include:

• Improving user experience
• Establishing governance
• Aligning with changing business goals
• Implementing a new content management system
• Shifting from locations focus to a system-wide approach

Craft a Core Strategy Statement

Once you understand the purpose of your redesign, write a core strategy statement for your project to keep you focused throughout the process. Your statement will help you define the purpose of your website and explain it to others in your organization.

Use your core strategy statement to support the content strategy and development choices you make. Refer to your statement to discourage requests that don’t match your purpose and could sidetrack your project.

Figure Out the Goals for Your Redesign

Invite your stakeholders to give you feedback on your current website content and site structure. Ask:

• What’s working well?
• What needs improvement?
• Who’s the target audience? Are there other audiences?
• What are the top tasks for your audiences?
• What are our organizational strengths or competitive advantages?
• What goals do you have for a redesigned website?
• How will you know if the website redesign is a success?

The insights you gain from your stakeholders should influence your site structure, content strategy, and content development. Whatever the reasons for your redesign, developing good content is critical to achieving success.

When you identify new goals for your website redesign, make sure your content strategy and development address them. For example, if your healthcare system is integrating its medical group into the organization’s main website, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy for how to add the medical group information and create content about the medical group and doctor profiles.

Evaluate Your Current Content

Run an inventory and audit of your current website’s content. After you have a good understanding of your existing content, decide if it content aligns with your redesign goals and speaks to your target audience. Review:

• Calls to action
• Page structure and linking
• Relevance
• Search engine optimization (SEO) and metadata
• Use of videos, PDFs, and images
• Voice and tone

After your content audit, you’ll be able to identify content gaps and opportunities for streamlining or creating content during your redesign. For example, if some content is old or outdated, archive it. Or if medical service lines are missing, add them.

Analyze Your Website Data

Dig into the data from your current website to determine which content and calls to action are engaging your site users. What are the most popular pages? What are users searching for on your site? How do users find your website? Google Analytics or similar tools can help you track this information. Tools like heat maps, scroll maps, user testing, and more can help you understand user behavior.

Apply what you learn from your analysis to your content strategy. When you make decisions based on data, not hunches, you can meet your organization’s goals and provide users with easy access to the content they need.

For example, if you find that urgent care has a high number of page views, consider this data and your other marketing goals to help determine if your urgent care service line and locations need a larger presence on your website. Focusing your content strategy and aligning it with your business goals can help increase conversions and revenue.

Organize Your Content

Content strategy ensures your website has a structure that supports your goals, addresses the needs of your target audiences, and supports user tasks.

Make your website navigation straightforward and easy for users to follow. Label navigation items clearly, using terms your target audience understands. Group related items together in a navigation structure so the users can see the relationships and make the correct choices.

Prioritize the needs of your users by organizing content in a way that makes sense to a patient, instead of following your internal department structure. And make high-priority content easy to find.

Plan & Create the Right Content

A content-heavy website doesn’t always translate into useful information to your user. Just because you can publish pages of information doesn’t mean you should. Before you create any content, determine its purpose and target audience, as well as the message you want to convey. Make sure your content is compatible with your site’s core strategy statement and goals.

Consider whether you need to rewrite, revise, or create new content for your redesign. You may need a combination of these approaches. At a minimum, you’ll want to update and refresh your content for:

• Voice and tone
• Writing quality
• Readability
• Relevance and accuracy
• Proper page metadata
• SEO and keyword usage

If you don’t have the time, web expertise, or resources to tackle comprehensive content strategy and content development during your website redesign, collaborate with Geonetric.

What’s Health Literacy?

Health literacy is the ability to understand and use health information to make informed choices and access medical services.

A person who struggles to read or comprehend medical information may have trouble:

• Finding a provider and scheduling or attending appointments
• Sharing their health history or explaining symptoms
• Filling out complex medical forms
• Following discharge instructions, including dietary recommendations
• Taking medications as prescribed
• Practicing self-care and managing chronic conditions

Someone with communication barriers may feel embarrassed to admit they can’t understand. They may be too intimidated to ask questions. Experiencing stress during a health situation—like after a diagnosis or during a visit to the emergency department—also can reduce your ability to understand information and make choices.

Low Health Literacy in the U.S.

Only 12 percent of adults have proficient health literacy according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). Those who struggle most are typically adults over age 65 without a high school diploma who have no insurance or receive Medicare/Medicaid.

Lifetime Impact of Low Health Literacy

Poor health literacy is linked to:

• Higher hospitalization rates
• Higher risk of complications
• Longer recovery times
• Poorer health outcomes
• Shorter lifespan

A person’s health literacy level may also affect their satisfaction with the care they receive.

What This Means for Healthcare Marketers

Common goals for professional healthcare communicators—like guiding patients to make appointments, advertising available treatment options, and building a brand that’s seen as a trusted, compassionate source of information and care—can be impacted by health literacy barriers.

Write for Readability

The first step to understandable content is researching the health literacy levels and demographic information of your target audience. Then, content can be tailored accordingly using a combination of tools and strategies.

Use Grade-Level Calculators

Readability calculators (such as the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level tests, which are built into Microsoft Word) use algorithms to estimate the grade level of a piece of writing. These algorithms consider:

• Word length
• Number of syllables in a word
• Sentence length
• Use of contractions
• Punctuation

You can also take advantage of free, online readability tools like Hemingway editor. It not only calculates the grade level of your content, but also points out complex sentences and instances of passive voice.

Where Readability Calculators Come Up Short

Grade-level calculators can help you evaluate the readability of your content. But, keep in mind that readability test results can be skewed by certain healthcare vocabulary. Medical terms—like “radiofrequency ablation” and “catheterization”—increase the grade level of your writing, but if you’re describing these procedures, it’s necessary to include their names. Don’t sacrifice the technical term for a word that has a lower readability level but doesn’t accurately describe the subject.

Write with Clarity

Writing clearly with plain language makes you a strong, effective communicator. When your readers have barriers to comprehension, writing simply makes it easier for them to understand—and take action.

To simplify your content:

• Write with a conversational, user-focused approach. Speak directly to the reader. (“Your doctor will ask questions about your health history and your current symptoms during your first visit.”)
• Use common terms instead of medical terms (i.e., write “cancer doctor” instead of, or along with, “oncologist”) or provide context clues (“Your oncologist is a doctor with training and experience to diagnose and treat cancer”).
• Break down complex medical concepts into short words and sentences. Add definitions or provide examples after complex terms. (“Your doctor may recommend a bone density scan. This is an imaging test that measures the strength of your bones.”)
• Avoid clichés and idioms that aren’t familiar across cultures (such as “clean bill of health”).
• Write in active voice (“Your doctor will help you find the best hearing aid for you.”) instead of passive voice (“The best hearing aid for you will be selected by your doctor.”).

When you organize information, start with the simplest concepts and build up to the complex.

Use Person-First Language

Use People-First Language [PDF] to show that you view your readers as people, not medical conditions. For example, say “a person with diabetes,” instead of “a diabetic.”

When possible, include ways your audience can be active in their own care. Tell them to bring a loved one to their appointment to help them remember all of the information they receive. Or, suggest patients write down all of their questions before their consultation.

Web Writing for Everyone

Do readers with high literacy levels and specialized knowledge, like your physicians or administrators, prefer more complex writing? The answer, according to a study by the Nielsen Norman Group, is no. Everyone appreciates simplicity and scannability on the web. Feel confident you’re representing your organization in a professional manner—and reaching the widest audience when you make your content as straightforward as possible.

Learn more about ensuring the accessibility of your web content

This has big implications on the design, structure, and security of your intranet, and a redesign may be in your future if you want to make your intranet the go-to place for important information.

Join Geonetric and Patrick Moody, Director of Marketing and Public Relations at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, as he shares his recent intranet redesign story. With enhanced functionality, engaging content, and a responsive design, Henry Mayo’s new intranet has improved the user experience and user adoption.

Watch this webinar and learn how to:

• Prepare for an upcoming intranet redesign and use employee feedback to improve intranet features
• Meet the informational needs of various internal audiences
• Prioritize must-have functionality for your intranet, like calendar of events and employee recognition features
• Use the intranet to share important information with employees and reduce ignored emails
• Use real-life hospital intranet examples to guide your next redesign

Although healthcare organizations have different motivations for initiating a redesign, every marketer knows the importance of having a fresh design, adding new functionality, and ensuring the best user experience possible. Join Geonetric for a redesign roundtable featuring marketing leaders from UNM Health System (Albuquerque, NM), Tower Health (Reading, PA), and Firelands Regional Medical Center (Sandusky, OH). From bringing a new brand to market, to going responsive, to moving to a system approach online, each organization offers unique perspectives on the healthcare website redesign process. You’ll walk away armed with proven tips to make your next redesign a success.

Watch this webinar and learn how to:

• Prepare for an upcoming redesign, including how to evaluate different CMS platforms and potential partners
• Identify must have features and functionality for the next iteration of your site
• Avoid common obstacles that can derail even the most well-planned redesign
• Create a strategy to ensure multiple locations of the same health system don’t compete with each other in search results.
• Use real-life healthcare website redesign examples as a guide for your next project

If you’re in Springville and looking online for urgent care, Google wants to show you urgent care locations in Springville. The search engine will look for content optimized for that particular location – and may prioritize it over content that describes urgent care services across a health system.

That means webpages describing your healthcare system’s locations are more important than ever. Certainly, web content about your healthcare system as a whole is still vital. But maintaining and optimizing content for your system’s location profiles is key to competing in search and meeting user needs. One of the last things you want is for potential patients to land on a location page and quickly leave because they found little valuable information, no conversion opportunity, and no links to additional relevant content. Or, worse yet, for potential patients to never make it to your website because their Google search didn’t turn up any pages about the location they want.

Getting Started

Before you expand or create content for specific locations, you need to strategize. Start by prioritizing certain locations or types of locations for content development. Then, think about the following:

Stakeholder Goals

Find out what the stakeholders for each location on your list want to accomplish for their facility or medical practice. Who are their audiences? What should they do and learn after visiting a certain location’s webpages? How will stakeholders judge whether online marketing efforts succeed?

As with almost any marketing project, it’s essential to get stakeholders’ feedback and give them a voice. But to get the most benefit from locations content, you must balance individual stakeholders’ priorities with those of your overall health system and your website users.

User Behavior

User behavior analysis can help you discover how website visitors engage with your locations content – how they arrive, where they go next, what other pages they visit during a session, etc. You’ll likely find that user behavior varies by location type. Expect to see different results for an urgent care facility vs. a wellness center vs. a hospital, for example, because of different user needs and goals.

Learn about your users’ behavior with Google Analytics or other tools. If doing so starts to feel complicated or time consuming, don’t be afraid to call a professional for help collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the results.

Competition

You already know your business competitors, but have you considered certain locations’ SEO competition as well? A particular medical practice or provider might not compete much for your location’s patients or consumers, but it could rank before your facility’s webpages in Google search results. Consider where organic search engine optimization or paid digital advertising could boost your standing.

Your health system’s locations also might compete with each other for online visitors. This happens most often when your health system has multiple similar facilities – like primary care practices – in a single metro area. To address this internal competition, find out what’s different and beneficial about each particular location. Ask stakeholders about the advantages of their facility’s:

• Unique provider team (if applicable)
• Amenities
• Awards, recognitions, or certifications
• Approach to care
• Physical location

You also can use keyword research to ease internal competition by directing the copy of a particular location’s pages to a narrow geographic area. For example, when planning the content for a couple of urgent care facilities, you might find that Google users in one city search most often for getting stitches, and people in a neighboring city search most often for removing stitches. Even though your urgent care locations in both cities insert and remove stitches, you might write about the service in a slightly different way to appeal to a particular audience. Doing so also helps prevents you from having the exact same content on both pages, and it can boost their SEO.

Other Relevant Online Content

Locations strategy involves more than just locations. You also have to consider what content related to your facilities already appears elsewhere on the website. If a certain webpage applies to multiple clinics or hospitals, try to link to it instead of repeating that content in your location pages. That way, you’ll spare yourself content maintenance headaches.

This is especially important when it comes to service-line content. Location webpages need to describe the services offered at that facility, but those pages should also link to sections of content describing relevant service lines from a system-wide perspective. Those links help users learn about all the relevant services your health system offers – including services at locations they might not have known about.

Again, don’t hesitate to give your efforts a boost with help from someone who has experience in locations content strategy.

SEO for Healthcare Locations

Once you make a plan for locations content, you’re ready to write informative, valuable, user-focused pages that Google values. Start with these SEO tips:

• Optimize HTML page titles using a formula such as: Location Name | Key Services | City.
• Include basic details for local search, including the address and brief wayfinding description, phone number, hours, and embedded Google Map.
• Use schema markup. Adding this code to your site helps search engines understand what your page is about and makes pages eligible to appear in features such as Knowledge Graph cards and rich snippets.
• Earn outside links. Where possible, try to get your locations’ listings on directory sites or Google My Business to link to the relevant location landing page, rather than your home page.

Want to know more? Watch our free October webinar, Local SEO Strategy for Healthcare Organizations.

Accomplishing this requires providing search engines with the kind of detailed, structured data that help to build the information and relationships within the knowledge graph. Schema.org is a standardized format for doing just that.

In this white paper, you’ll learn:

• The trends that are reshaping search engines
• The information that you can classify with Schema.org
• The Schema.org entities that apply to health information
• The three metadata formats you can use to implement Schema.org
• And more