There are a number of key elements to building and optimizing landing pages that convert visitors into patients. All elements – including content, design, calls to action, and forms – can affect your conversion rates. Put them together well and you can generate more qualified conversions than your average web page.

In this webinar, we’ll share the secrets to building effective landing pages. You’ll learn how to maximize conversion rates and will leave armed with simple tips ready to put into practice.

That’s why many of our clients seek our SEO services. They often have so many things on their plates that they’re not able to set aside the time needed to make large changes to their organization’s SEO strategy.

If you’re not yet ready or able to seek help, here are five things to keep in mind as you execute your SEO strategy.

1. You can’t guarantee specific search engine results. Even if you optimize content in the best way possible, you can’t assume your competitors aren’t doing the same. Going after top rankings is a constant battle. Sometimes, through no fault of your own, you’ll lose. Other times, you’ll win. And it’ll feel pretty cool when you do.
2. Choosing to optimize for certain keywords means not focusing on others. This may lead to a drop in rank for certain keywords or key phrases. But as long as you’re working to optimize your content to rank for your top priorities—the keywords users employ most when searching for your content—there’s no need for concern.
3. Focus your efforts locally. It doesn’t matter if a particular keyword or key phrase has a higher search volume at the national level if the people who search for you locally aren’t using it. Make sure to put your primary focus on the behavior of your key audiences.
4. It’s OK if your priorities change. Midway through a project, you may realize it’s actually more important than you thought to focus in one area and less important to focus in others. Target your efforts where you think they’ll have the greatest impact on your site, even if that means adapting your strategy midway through a project. The beauty of the Web is that it’s always changing, adapting, growing. Use that to your advantage.
5. SEO is an ongoing process, and one project won’t cement your place at the top of a search engine results list. You have to update and optimize your content constantly with a focus on best practices and a great user experience. Google rewards good content, and it should always be top of mind when you think about improving your search engine rankings.

Interested in learning more? Check our recent webinar, Support SEO Efforts with a Cohesive Patient Journey, where we cover search engine optimization topics such as schema.org markup, local search, third party content platforms, placed content, back linking, syndicated content and video.

“People in the industry operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.” – Michael Lewis, Moneyball

In the session, John Marazone and Simon Yohe, both of Orlando Health’s marketing team, talked through their journey of moving from a cost center to revenue generator. And although they admit they’re not done, they are in their second year of a well-planned execution with interesting insights to report.

Marazone began the story when an interim CEO took over Orlando Health two years ago and promised the marketing department no increase in budget, but the trust and leeway to do what they do well. As fans of the ‘moneyball’ philosophy in baseball, John’s team believed the only way they could improve was to implement accountability. Their guiding principles are as follows:

• Healthcare marketing has to be accountable
• Shift to a more integrated digital, social, mobile multi-channel marketing strategy
• Align physician outreach with consumer marketing
• Precision marketing – using data to engage both current and future patients

The Importance of CRM & Finance

An important part of making this transformation included limiting untraceable spending. Advertising spending is shifting from traditional to digital channels. The organization’s CRM has become the central point for the marketing team, and is admittedly the most valuable tool.

Another key part of success for Orlando Health was engaging other departments in the organization, most importantly finance. Bringing finance into the fold helped the marketing team create corporate-wide approved ROI formulas.

And since then, every campaign has had an understood need, baseline numbers (including revenue and cost), and an execution plan All campaigns include downstream revenue tracking. All campaigns have lead generation as part of the strategy. So far, all campaigns have met their goals.

Impressive Results

Although still early in the transformation, Marazone and his team are reporting impressive numbers. From FY ’14 to FY ’15, the team has recorded a 200% increase in landing page unique visitors, a 100% increase in web-based appointment requests, and a 317% increase in marketing campaign call center volume.

Overall, since making the move Orlando Health’s marketing team has tracked $17 million in gross charges and $4 million in net revenue.

Talk about impressive. And those numbers are even more amazing if you stop and recall they successfully made this shift without a budget increase.

The Takeaway

A lot of Orlando Health’s success hinged on the fact they realized driving traffic to digital spaces was critical, and that they agreed on the outset that the only real way to say with certainty that a campaign succeeded or failed was with data.

These are conversations we have every day with our clients, and it’s refreshing to see so many healthcare marketers embrace digital and the improved tracking capabilities it offers. If you’d like to talk to a partner that isn’t scared of ROI, contact us. We love to help our clients prove the value of marketing campaigns and digital efforts.

As healthcare organizations develop or expand joint ventures with medical groups and independent physicians, representing that collaboration on the web requires thoughtful strategy. It’s a challenge, but when you’re successful, the result is a web presence that connects with your visitors and provides a deep understanding of the breadth and value of your services.

Through this in-depth case-study presentation, you’ll learn the secrets behind our multifaceted strategic process that led to a cohesive and intuitive web presence for this medical group.

The front door to your healthcare organization is not your flagship hospital. It’s not your emergency room or your wellness center. It’s not your most well-known community event. Your front door—the place most of your patients first and most regularly experience your brand—is your primary care practices.

Your primary care practices tell a patient who you are. They display your logo, advertise your network and demonstrate your brand values. They make referrals to other specialists in your organization. From your primary care practices, all roads lead directly into your network.

Why not create the same experience online? Why not coordinate the efforts, messages, and visual designs across not only your hospitals, but also your medical groups? Why not make those same connections on the web that your physicians are already making in real life?

Make Connections on the Web

It makes sense to broaden your reach by having physical locations conveniently spread across your service area. But in a non-tangible space, like the web, it’s more convenient—and more effective— to aggregate all your “locations.”

When you coordinate your medical group and system-level websites, site visitors benefit from a central place to find all the information they need. Your physicians benefit from the strength and resources of your brand.

And you, as a healthcare marketer, have a web presence that’s easier to manage—especially with a healthcare-specific CMS like VitalSite that dynamically displays relevant information where patients want it and need it.

The end result? Your site visitors increasingly become engaged members of your health network.

A Case Study: Cone Health and Cone Health Medical Group

Cone Health and Cone Health Medical Group in North Carolina made the commitment to create coordinated, interrelated websites that provide their audiences with the right information, at the right place, at the right time.

To learn about their efforts to create a medical group website that builds and enhances relationships between patients and providers, view our webinar Website Strategy & Content for Medical Groups.

You’ll find out how a strategic approach to content structure and patient-focused content development helped Cone Health overcome organizational challenges to create a unified, distinctive web presence for more than 100 front doors to their organizations.

Good content strategy is more than words on a page. Consider a blueprint when you start planning a page of your site. Who is your audience? What is the main message of this page? What should a reader do next?

From there, think about the layout of the page. Page architecture is the support for what you want the content to say.

Using your Google Analytics and keyword research can also tell you what users are searching for and landing on, which can help you decide what content can live together and what might need its own page.

Subheads, Accordions and Tabs – Oh My!

Headings, subheadings, accordions and tabs are styled by your designer, so why not use them? Geonetric’s content experts offer guidelines for elements of page architecture:

1. Subheads are best used when changing topic or voice. Subheads help ease the transition and summarize the paragraphs that follow, making it easy for a user to scan the page.
2. Paragraphs should be kept relatively short for easy reading, perhaps three or four sentences. Large blocks of text can turn readers away, especially on mobile devices. Add variety to paragraphs of text by using bulleted lists to elaborate on conditions, treatments, symptoms and more.
3. Accordions should be used when you have too much copy for a bulleted list, but not enough copy for a new page. They’re great for explaining a test or medical treatment. Generally, keep accordions light on a page. More than seven can look daunting to a user, especially on mobile devices.
4. Tabs should be used when comparing information or providing chronological data. Ideally, stick to no more than five tabs on a page. And remember, some tabs can become accordions on mobile devices.

Point Your User in the Right Direction

Now that you gave your user such great information, what should he or she do next? Adding a call to action (or CTA) to the page should direct that user to the next action – make a call, send an e-mail, schedule an appointment, etc. A few helpful tips:

• Keep CTAs high on the page so they don’t get buried when the site displays on a mobile device.
• Make your CTAs stand out by placing them in callout boxes or panels.
• Don’t bury CTAs in accordions or tabs. Since those are user-triggered, there’s always a chance the reader won’t find them.

Page Architecture Matters, So Don’t Skimp

Avoid the temptation to just plop words on a page and hit “publish.” Page architecture might take extra time, but it’s time well spent. Sound page architecture and content results in not only a better user experience, but longer page-viewing duration, higher return visits and a higher likelihood of conversion.

If you need help planning and writing your site content, contact us to find out about our content strategy and development services. From strategy to in-depth writing and analysis, our team can help you share meaningful content with your target audiences.

Imagine that you’re on a business trip in a different state. After arriving in this foreign town, you begin to feel under the weather. What do you do? Most likely, you take out your smartphone and begin searching for “urgent cares.”

Immediately Google displays results of local urgent cares. The closest urgent care that appears in the search results is half an hour away. You think that seems pretty far away, but end up biting the bullet and head to what you hope is relief.

Now what if you, as a healthcare marketer, know that in reality the closest urgent care to that person is only 10 minutes away – but you just haven’t had time to create a listing yet.

As both a provider of healthcare and a marketer of healthcare, it’s frustrating to miss that opportunity.

Now, maybe you’re thinking: “But the locals, the ones who actually live in my community and are the main consumers of our health services, know where our facilities are.” But what if those locals do a Google search for your urgent care and you appear, but your phone number is wrong? Now you have a local health consumer that is frustrated with your service and might go to a competitor.

Four Reasons Google My Business Is Worth the Time Investment

Having an up-to-date listing would be beneficial in lots of scenarios. But if you’re in charge of promoting 20 urgent cares, two hospitals, six family practices as well as a handful of specialty clinics you’re probably thinking this is quite the time investment.

And it is. But it’s so worth it. If you’re not convinced yet, here’s four reasons why investing in local listings, specifically Google My Business, is worth the work:

1. Claim Your Business – Before Someone Else Does: This is more common than you might think. Maybe a previous ad agency or employee claimed your listings and now you can’t make changes. Maybe a competitor claimed the listing and is holding it hostage. The process to reclaim your listing can be tedious or smooth as butter depending on who has possession. Either way, not having control over your listing is a pretty big deal.
2. Provide Your Patients with Up-To-Date Information: Keeping your listings up-to-date and accurate is just good business. You want to make it as easy as possible for your patients and potential patients to do business with you – this means keeping addresses, hours of operation and phone numbers current. As Google tends to be a consumers first place to begin a search, if you don’t have the most recent information there consumers can easily become frustrated with your brand.
3. Manage Your Organization’s Reputation: Another important part of business listings are the ratings. By having a local listing, you’re allowing your patients and consumers the ability to rate and review your facilities and your services. Giving happy – and unhappy – consumers Google as a platform to share their thoughts and experiences can be scary. But by having your listing claimed, you’re able to respond to those reviews and take the necessary steps to maintain the reputation you work so hard to protect.
4. Outshine Your Competitors: Who doesn’t want a chance to look better than competitors? When you claim your listing, respond to your reviews, provide your listing with up-to-date information, and include great photos of your locations it will be easy to look better than your competitor’s search listing.

Getting Started With Google My Business

Now, after reading all those great points you’re probably thinking it’s time to attack this! But, you’re also thinking that you have lots of locations to update and lots of edits to make – and a lot of other to-dos! No problem. Geonetric can help. Drop us a line and let’s talk about getting your listings claimed and up-to-date today!

Email is the most popular channel in terms of daily use and consumer preference for both marketing and personal communication. And, according to Salesforce, 73% of marketers agree that email marketing is core to their business. That’s because emails are easy to produce and distribute, and more cost effective than traditional marketing. Plus, emails allow you to target specific audiences and link visitors to relevant information on your website, driving engagement and achieving a higher return on investment.

Watch this video to learn how you can use email marketing for everything from educating patients on health topics to driving service line volume. We’ll also show real examples and offer tips for improvement.

That said, I spend lots of time researching and testing provider directories and I’ve noticed two things that the most successful ones tend to have in common.

1. Successful provider directories use search strategically.

The way your organization uses search in your provider directory should have a lot to do with the size of your organization. In fact, creating the optimal provider directory is as much art as it is science and varies a great deal based on the size of your organization, the number of providers represented, the geographic footprint served, and the data you have available.

Let’s look at how size makes a difference when it comes to provider directory search.

Smaller medical groups like Midwest Orthopedic Specialty Hospital offer an opportunity to streamline the experience by eliminating the need to search and making it easy to “dive deep” into the provider’s information.

Whereas the smaller groups can streamline and even eliminate search, large medical groups need options.

Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare offers three different ways to search depending on what a site visitor needs. While a health system with fewer providers should keep it simple, having a large medical staff means offering ways to focus and drill down.

You may want to include ways to filter the search results you receive like they do at Abington Jefferson Health.

In addition to size, it’s important to consider the different ways visitors use your provider directory. When someone searches for a provider by name, they likely have a relationship with that provider, so take them right to the profile.

When a visitor searches by specialty, they are probably looking for a new provider. Help them evaluate options by including lots of information in the search results page.

Wheaton Franciscan does a great job showcasing what providers offer night and weekend hours.

2. Successful provider directories invest in doctor profiles.

The provider profile is a great place to humanize your doctors.

In fact, offering compelling and engaging online provider profiles is one of the best ways to showcase your doctors in a unique and genuine way. A great place to invest: doctors’ biographies.

Bios should be more than just a name and a degree. You want to give health consumers the kind information that will allow them to make a good choice.

This example from Bronson Healthcare does a great job of building out the doctor’s profile, and showcases his approach to care, credentials, and videos.

Midwest Orthopedic includes videos and other elements to showcase the doctor’s passions and skills.

One size does not fit all.

There’s no one way to build the perfect provider directory and it may take some experimentation to find the one that’s right for you. But if you focus on the two key areas of search and provider profiles, you’ll be well on your way to building a provider directory that works for your site visitors.

To learn more about promoting your physicians’ online and see more examples of great provider directories in practice, check out our eBook or learn more about how we’ve solved these challenges with our provider directory software.

If you plan to implement physician ratings and reviews on your website, there are some things you need to make sure you have in place before you go live. Getting these things taken care of will ensure that your physician ratings and reviews are trusted by site visitors and provide tangible value to your organization.

1. Link to the description of how the ratings and reviews are collected

Despite legislative mandates to publish it, consumers don’t necessarily trust the quality information provided on many hospital and government websites. For this reason, it’s imperative that if you’re considering adding ratings and reviews to your physician profiles, you provide a prominent means for visitors to access a description of how these ratings are solicited, acquired and published.

A quick survey of some of the better implementations shows how this is accommodated right on the physician profiles. Don’t forget to do this on your own!

2. Determine the threshold for publishing ratings and reviews

There’s nothing stopping you from publishing ratings as they come in, but try to avoid publishing a low number to a physician’s profile. Most organizations choose to start publishing ratings for a given physician only when they have accumulated a suitable number of ratings and reviews. For instance, The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) recently announced that they would start publishing physician ratings on their website and have decided that a given physician will need 30 reviews within 18 months before they will appear on the site. And they are not alone.

There are a number of reasons to do this, but two important ones stand out:

1. Having a physician with only one or two ratings can suggest to consumers that s/he is not popular with patients. Waiting to publish until their are a sufficient number of reviews avoids this.
2. Having only a few reviews can present a distorted view of the physician. A couple of low or high ratings (or positive/negative reviews) can skew the results significantly. Waiting for a statistically valid number of ratings and reviews ensures site visitors have a clearer, more useful and valid picture of the physicians.

3. Do not filter negative reviews

One of the largest issues hospitals, health systems, and physicians struggle with is the “What if?” scenario involving negative reviews. The fear about publishing negative reviews is often palpable. And it’s understandable. Most marketers have an instinctive drive to protect the brand, and are worried about publishing a negative review that reflects poorly on the physician, the organization, the system, etc…

Get over it.

If you are publishing physician ratings and reviews on your website, you have ethical and moral obligations to include the negative ones as well. There may even be legal implications to cherry-picking only the best ratings and reviews for publication.

Lets face it, negative reviews happen. And to some extent, consumers even expect to see a distribution of positive and negative reviews. But if you fear a huge deluge of negativity, you may be overreacting. As the Harvard Health Blog put it, “Studies suggest that most – between 65% and 90% – of online patient reviews are positive.” And it’s not just one study. A famous study from 2012 looked at third-party physician ratings websites and supports the same conclusion:

The study found that, on average, physicians received a quality rating of 3.93 out of 5. Nearly half received a perfect 5 rating.
–The Washington Post

If you do implement physician ratings only to discover that some physician reviews are overwhelmingly negative, it’s your opportunity to investigate, understand, and improve. That’s a much less frightening prospect for most marketers than letting negative reviews continue to spread by word of mouth or on third party websites, where they fester and damage the brand. At the end of the day, negative reviews may be your opportunity to identify and fix problems.

And of course, don’t forget to include some verbiage about publishing all your reviews, including negative ones, in your description about how ratings and reviews are collected and published.

4. Determine your response policy prior to having a problem

As touched on above, you should expect to get some amount of negative reviews…and it’s important to plan for how you’re going to handle these prior to launching ratings and reviews on your site. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to figure this out even if you aren’t launching ratings and reviews on your website. The fact is that your physicians are being reviewed elsewhere, and it’s a good idea to stay on top of this (see the Physician Promotion eBook for more on this).

I usually recommend organizations start by determining whether or not to let a negative rating or review stand on its own. Not every negative review deserves a response, but if it’s a path you want or need to tread, make sure you staff appropriately and figure out your approach before you have a problem. Some things you’ll want to figure out include:

• Identify who a response will come from. Consider patient advocates (or others in similar roles). Avoid having physicians personally respond. They need to focus on the work of healing and not on personally responding to negative reviews. Additionally, they are likely not experts in this domain and can easily make a bad situation worse.
• Be clear about what you want to accomplish in your responses. Be cautious if your goal is to counter and disprove every negative review. I recommend a touch-and-turn approach that reassures the audience that you’ve heard the problem and are invested in learning more about it offline. Be careful of language that seems to deny patients their own experience. Consider something like the following:
  • I’m sorry you did not have a positive experience at our hospital/office/clinic. I’d like to learn more about what happened and how we can better serve our patients. Would you mind contacting me at our patient advocate office so we can discuss? You can reach me at 555.555.5555. -Mary

Such verbiage lets the patient own his or her experience, shows readers that you’re listening and want to learn more, and moves the conversation offline and out of the public theater. These are all wins for your organization, and not just from a reputation management perspective. This type of follow-through can surface important opportunities for improvement that you might otherwise miss.

5. Establish a publication policy for reviews that contain PHI

Earlier in this post I covered the importance of not censoring negative reviews, and I suggested that once you go down the path of publishing ratings and reviews, you have an obligation to publish ALL reviews. While I stand by this advice, there is one important exception we need to allow for: reviews that contain personally identifiable health information (PHI).

When it comes to these, you have two options: editing out any PHI from reviews, or withholding such reviews from publication.

Both options come with complications you’ll have to work through. If you edit a review to remove PHI prior to publishing it, I submit that you have an obligation to disclose this fact when you publish the review. A simple, “This review has been edited to remove personally identifiable health information” may suffice. In your disclaimer you can even include a link to your complete explanation about how and under what conditions posts are edited.

The other option is to exclude from publication any post that contains PHI. If you go this route, you should disclose the fact that you aren’t publishing posts containing PHI. Readers deserve to know that they are getting only a subset of reviews when using them to evaluate physicians. And be warned, this approach may exclude a sizable number of reviews from your site.

Lastly, if you’re excluding reviews, you’ll need to figure out what you want to do with the corresponding ratings. If you’re removing a large number of reviews, but publishing the accompanying ratings, the ratio between ratings and reviews may look suspiciously unbalanced to prospective patients.

While there’s not one correct approach for every organization, you’ll need to plan on scrubbing personally identifying information from reviews. Some vendor solutions can even help with this through automation and workflows for your staff. And it’s really the only way to make the most out of your investment in publishing ratings and reviews on your site.

Next Steps

As you plan for physician ratings and reviews on your site, you’re going to have more questions and considerations. Check out the Physician Promotion eBook for more great resources on this. Or if you’re ready to work with someone who can help you understand your options and move forward, contact us.