That’s why Cone Health Medical Group decided to change the focus of their website and put the spotlight on their star players: their doctors and providers.

Building relationships between patients and providers

Taking a card-based design approach, they reinvented their provider search, connecting visitors with a more expansive business card-like view of physicians and providers, all while dispensing with the typical scrolling list.

Choose a provider (such as James David Allred, MD) and you’ll see a custom profile with elements that may include a biography, areas of interest, professional memberships, board certifications, and more. Many providers also include a high-quality image in their profile.

Connecting with users through content

Along with stunning provider profiles, Cone Health Medical Group also invested in a content strategy and development project with Geonetric, receiving engaging, patient-focused content that spoke not only to the medical services they offer, but the quality of care they provide.

Through the redesign, the organization continued to lay stepping stones to bring individual clinic websites under the Cone Health Medical Group umbrella.

Improving provider profiles leads to success

Investing in a quality physician directory is not only essential for effective physician marketing, but it can be a significant contributor to an organization’s bottom line. One need look no further than Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare (another Geonetric client). This forward-thinking organization recently invested in their provider directory and added user-friendly appointment forms as part of the project. The results? Their numbers soared.

With 140 primary care doctors offering online appointment requests, over 740 requests were brought in through the new system. Four hundred of those requests were new patients. This has resulted in outstanding downstream revenue for the organization.

If you’re ready to connect your providers and patients with an improved online experience, Geonetric can help. Reach out to us today and let us help you create a blueprint and a website for success.

Wrong. An intranet, like your external website, has a very specific audience and purpose. But it’s easy to fall into the trap of having your intranet be an online filing cabinet, where every department stores every bit of information.

To make sure your intranet stays valuable, here are a few tips to guide you when building or redesigning your intranet.

• Analyze the value of your content: Is the content on your intranet easy to find? Are you keeping decades old meeting minutes on your intranet? Think about the ROT approach to auditing your content. Is it redundant, outdated or trivial? If it’s one or more of those things, it’s time to find a home elsewhere than your intranet.
• Question what might be missing: You might throw out a lot of pages when doing a content audit, but you might also find content gaps. How are your employees using the intranet today? Common answers might be training, emergency preparedness, policy updates, and more. Are these items clearly labeled on your intranet, and is the information useful?
• Ask your audience: When thinking about how to organize your content assets, talking to your employees, executives and administrative teams is a great place to start. How are different groups using the intranet today, and what content matters most to them? Gathering input from your internal stakeholders with online surveys or face-to-face interviews is a great way to get this information.
• Write better, more engaging content: Great content is definitely important for your external website but you also need to ensure your employees are engaged with your intranet by making sure the content speaks to them. The same rules apply: Break up long text, consider bulleted lists to get points across, and if there’s an action to be taken, make sure it’s clear on the page.
• Integrate images and multimedia: To boost engagement on your intranet, consider adding images and videos of your organization and employees on relevant pages. Whether it’s a page about a wellness initiative, or information about patient care, images, videos and media can help strengthen the page purpose and message.

Of course, making your intranet responsive for all devices is always a plus, too. With more than 60% of American adults owning smart phones, it’s a great chance to ask your employees how a responsive intranet might help them when they’re working remotely or on the go.

To ensure you’re keeping track of your intranet’s use, add Google Analytics tracking code if possible. You’ll be able to track device usage, duration, events and engagement. Understanding how your employees are using the intranet gives you great insights as you plan improvements for the future.

If you’re thinking about taking your intranet to the next level, Geonetric can help. From content strategy to design, you’ll have an expert team to help you create an intranet that’s both engaging and informative. Let’s talk about the future of your organization’s intranet.

Seventy-two percent of Internet users say they look online for health information. Ensure your hospital’s website is a go-to resource by offering engaging health content that not only educates site visitors, but also converts them into patients. Join Ben Dillon from Geonetric and Rachelle Montano from StayWell and learn proven strategies to help you get the most value from your health library. You’ll see real examples of organizations that are delivering valuable health content across multiple channels to educate and engage health consumers.

Let’s set aside the technical aspect of creating and maintaining a WordPress blog for now and focus on the strategy of writing great content, getting physicians on board, and putting that content to work for your marketing goals.

Writing Great Content

While it may seem like finding the perfect design and setting up hosting for your blog are the main hurdles, the real work is consistently creating great content. In fact, some of the internet’s most popular blogs are lacking a strong design, but because of their content, they have become thought leaders in their market. Think of websites like Daring Fireball and even Seth Godin’s blog.

Great content does several things:

• It creates instant value for the audience by providing actionable information or an “Ah ha!” moment that makes the reader take the next step.
• It encourages (and seemingly demands) sharing. From Facebook to Twitter and even other related blogs, a single post or entire blog that gets shared can do more for your brand than paid advertising could ever hope.
• It is timely and matches what your audience is searching for at any given time. A post about spring allergies as winter comes to a close may be one example.

It’s also important to remember that content can take many forms. While a blog post is the most common, you can also include video, audio, photo galleries, infographics, and more on your blog.

In fact, a good blog includes some diversity to keep readers engaged. Keep your blog fresh with a variety of different content pieces.

Encouraging Physicians to Contribute

Helping physicians understand the importance of an activity like blogging can be a challenge, but many physicians are also savvy and understand the importance of this type of marketing. Finding those advocates in your organization is an important step towards making your blog a reality.

Help your physicians realize how the blog will position them as the expert. It’s their opportunity to showcase their expertise and be a helpful voice in the community. This alone could bring patients to their door or your organization as a whole.

The most critical step may be to set a publishing schedule and develop a schedule for your content. In addition to helping your physicians know when new content is needed (and who’s on deck to write), it also helps your audience know when to expect new content.

This structure will likely help you “sell” the idea to potential authors.

Setting Internal Expectations & Measuring Results

Building a blog is a longer-term project, to be sure. It’s important to set expectations with your physicians and internal contacts as it will take time for the blog to build an audience and begin delivering results.

Utilizing tools such as Google Analytics, you’ll be able to report back on traffic being generated by the blog. Plan to report back at least on a monthly basis.

From this important data, you may be able to tell your physicians which content is resonating the most, or take note of which websites send you the most traffic. All of this data will be useful in determining which content to create on a regular basis.

Remember, while it’s great to see traffic growth, also report on the impact their efforts are having on appointment requests and general awareness. You can measure these items through goals and funnels in Google Analytics or even using Event Tracking, another feature of Google Analytics.

An Example: Rush-Copley Pediatrics Blog

One example of an organization that built a blog and encouraged physicians to rally around the project is Rush-Copley. Their Kids Blog is written by multiple physicians who contribute to the content pile and building a strong brand for their pediatrics service line through content marketing.

Once a new post is created, Rush-Copley utilizes their various social channels to promote that post and gain some traction. Additionally, their posts are aligned with keyword research so users searching for help on common pediatrics questions will find their content.

If you spend some time on their blog (and you should!), you’ll find posts on various topics important to parents including dental care, flu season information, strep throat symptoms, and more.

You’ll notice several things about the Rush-Copley Kids Blog:

• The content on the blog is timely and answers questions for parents on many popular topics. It also doesn’t ask much of the visitor, but seeks to inform and build thought-leadership for the Rush-Copley physicians and brand.
• Each physician is featured prominently to showcase their expertise. Posts also include their biography and a link to all of their posts.
• They’ve tackled several topics, both large and small. If you think your physicians can provide value, there is no minimum or maximum when it comes to content creation.
• The blog is featured in the pediatrics section of their website. If users don’t necessarily need pediatric care right now, they’ll at least have a great resource available to them.

Next Steps

Now that you have some ideas for creating an awesome blog for your physicians, what is the first step?

Begin by talking to your web vendor about getting your blog set up, designed, and ready to add content. Be sure it is branded correctly and author profiles are added.

But don’t wait for these pieces to be done and ready. Start building your team of authors, including physicians, and have them begin brainstorming topics to write about.

Once all of the technical pieces are in place, begin adding content. As your posts go live, give them publicity on your social channels and encourage users to share the content with their networks as well. You may even feature your new blog on your homepage or relevant sections of your website.

You may also want to promote this new resource to patients in your own hospital and clinic buildings with signage. Take advantage of your new resource for patients and make it well-known whenever it makes sense to do so.

More Physician Promotion Ideas

Want more ideas for generating buzz around your physicians? Our Online Physician Promotion eBook features tactics for creating stronger online physician profiles, utilizing online paid advertising, and much more.

It’s free to download, and you can grab yours today.

Adding a health library on your website is an investment. But if it’s leveraged well and properly integrated into your website content, it can be a very powerful tool that acquires patients and provides a positive return on your investment.

The key is to make sure visitors are able to find your health library content at the exact moment that they want it.

For a great analogy, think about the product placement strategy at grocery stores.

Let’s say you and your family plan to go on a weekend camping trip. You have a million things to pull together and a list of “to do’s” running through your head. When the clock hits 5:00 p.m. on Friday, you race out of work to your local grocery store. You need two meals, snacks, firewood, sunscreen and bug spray. You have your shopping route planned, with a goal of making it a 15-minute stop.

First thing’s first: grab hotdogs. Great — right next to the hotdogs is a stand holding ketchup and mustard. You forgot you needed those. In the bread aisle, there’s a handy, plastic loaf-of-bread holder. Perfect for preventing smashed bread. You throw that in the cart, too. And the snacks are easy to find. Right at the end-cap, you grab marshmallows, graham crackers, chocolate bars and even roasting sticks. Cross that off the list. It’s like the store was ready for busy parents preparing for a camping trip!

The point of this analogy is that grocery stores are proactively putting their customer’s needs first — they place items together in an easy and convenient way. That’s how you should think about your health library.

Reaching Users at Perfect Places

How do you start? There are many places throughout your site that you can leverage your health library content.

• “Conditions We Treat” pages. Often, these pages have a bulleted list of conditions you treat. You can link each of these conditions to the correct topic or page in your health library to quickly give your site visitors more information about the services they seek.
• Service-line pages. Let’s say your heart section has a cardiac rehabilitation page, and your health library has articles about managing high blood pressure and ways to reduce stress — two things you learn about during cardiac rehab. You can link directly to those articles in your health library. Or, you may be able pull relevant information right onto your web page and display it in a right-column panel or below the text. (Geonetric clients who use VitalSite can do this using our content management system’s integration with Staywell.)
• Wellness resources. Is your organization shifting focus to a proactive wellness approach? In your wellness section, include links to health library recipes, healthy living tips or ways to stay active when you work at a desk.

(For more ideas, see our post “The Eight Steps of a Successful Health Content Library Integration.”)

The more you integrate your library, the better the experience for your site visitors.

How to Implement Health Library Integration

1. Identify places on your website to provide users with helpful information. Start by using Google Analytics to identify sections that get the most traffic, as well as pages that have low time-on-page results. Also find opportunities to provide content that aligns with your organization’s priorities, or content that connects with your current campaigns. A review of your site pages will help you determine content gaps and opportunities to integrate health library information.
2. Find related or supporting content in your health library. Search through the library so your site visitors don’t have to.
3. Determine how to integrate your health library content. You could link to your health library page from your CMS page. Or you could pull health library content directly onto your page. Depending on your ability to integrate, the health library content can look like it belongs right on the page, or it can direct site visitors to a new page or new section.
4. Track your efforts. Watch for patterns in user behavior. Use that data to make incremental changes to improve your content integration.

Interested in learning more about how to get the most value from your health library? View our webinar “Unleash the Power of Your Website’s Health Library” to see best practices in use at hospitals and learn integration tips and from Ben Dillon, our Chief Strategy Officer, and Rachelle Montano from Staywell.

Filling physician schedules is one of your top priorities. And with the majority of health consumers turning to the Web to find doctors and research treatments, promoting your doctors online is more important than ever. Watch this video and learn how to develop and implement effective tactics to engage potential patients online. You’ll learn tips for driving qualified visitors to your online provider directory, as well as how to create effective physician profiles, complete with engaging bios and strategic calls to action. Throughout this video you’ll see examples of successful online physician promotion and leave armed with ideas you can start implementing right away.

From Amazon to Netflix and beyond, consumers are increasingly accustomed to seeing evaluations of the goods and services they shop for. Often these take the form of an iconic star rating system that’s become the internet’s at-a-glance method of conveying user satisfaction (or other subjective measure) with the product at hand. But it’s not just for shoes and movies anymore. It’s also for your physicians.

Like it or not, the fact is that your physicians are already being rated and reviewed. In many cases, it’s off your website and on third-party sites where you have little to no control over what gets published. To add insult to injury, these third-party physician rating sites divert organic search traffic away from your own website and physician profile pages. That’s because Google knows that consumers value this information, and it rewards sites that provide it.

If your own website doesn’t publish physician ratings, you shouldn’t be surprised that others are earning your organic search traffic.

Clearly, ignoring the physician ratings trend is not an option. It’s time to embrace it and make ratings and reviews a prominent piece of your physician profiles. Doing this can have a number of benefits for organic SEO:

• Providing you use the correct semantic markup in your ratings, you may start to see your rating and review information appear in Google’s search results.
• As you collect more and more ratings and reviews and publish them to your profiles, Google may begin to rank your physician profiles higher in search results than the profiles on third-party websites that have fewer reviews.
• Updating your content — even if it’s just adding new reviews and ratings to your physician profiles as they become available — is a quality signal that can independently raise your search rank.

The result? Improved traffic from organic search. Increased engagement on your site. More appointments with your physicians.

How big of an SEO boost can you expect? Well, there are no guarantees, but after University of Utah Health Care implemented ratings and reviews they reported a significant increase in traffic from organic search and a near 280% increase in physician profile pageviews.

Remember, the research reveals that 77% of patients use search prior to booking an online appointment. It’s clear that because physician ratings can increase organic search performance and on-page engagement, they are a potent means of promoting physicians and converting site visitors into scheduled patients.

A Unique Opportunity

Now is the opportune time to implement physician ratings on your website. Innovators have paved the way, running the experiments, finding the solutions, and demonstrating the returns. But it’s still new enough that an investment here canconvey a first-mover advantage in many markets — an advantage that once earned, is difficult to counter.

Though you may have the opportunity to be the first in your market, implementing physician reviews and ratings now means you aren’t inventing from scratch. You can easily reference the solutions developed by the innovators or, if you are reluctant to take on the work yourself, partner with a vendor that can help you place physician ratings on your website. Some solutions even go beyond just placing ratings by providing the workflows necessary to survey patients, evaluate results, and publish reviews to your website according to your specific editorial criteria.

Learn More

Contact us if you’d like to learn how Geonetric can help implement physician ratings on your website. Or, check out our physician promotion webinar to learn more about this and other ways to enhance your patient acquisition with effective physician promotion. You can also download our comprehensive Online Physician Promotion eBook.

While most healthcare organizations are relatively good at using social media to build brand awareness, there’s still tremendous opportunity to use social media to promote physicians and fill their schedules. But doing this requires the active participation of your physicians. If you have physicians in your organization with a passion and commitment to use social media, it’s worth cultivating their skills to bring new patients in the door.

Not sure where to begin? Just want to make sure you’re on the right track? Check out our top ten tips for getting physicians involved and making sure their efforts deliver value.

Top Ten Social Media Tips for Physician Promotion

1. Don’t try to be on every social network. We all see it — that lengthy line-up of social media icons on a hospital website. Find the social media networks that work for your patients and physicians. Then focus on creating great content for that audience.
2. Provide useful content. Social media isn’t a vanity presence. It’s about your users and what they can use today. Can you provide content with quick health tips that demonstrates a physician’s expertise or personality? If you are a source of great information and project the type of warm personality that patients seek, your following will grow, and so will your potential patients.
3. Post frequently, but don’t flood users. Choose your content carefully and provide value with each post. If you have nothing to share, wait until you have a great post you know your patients and potential patients will love.
4. Reuse content across networks. Get the most value out of your efforts to create content. Whether it’s a video, a blog post, or some other content, cross-promoting on multiple social media
   channels and accounts is a great way to get more followers and more traction from that content.
5. Don’t fear negative criticism. Embrace the fact that users are engaging with you on social media and respond accordingly. Often a negative comment can be turned into a positive experience by listening to your commenter’s concerns and addressing them in a timely manner.
6. Remember, this is not just another “marketing channel.” While you need to keep your brand (both professional and organizational) in mind, social media is about direct contact with prospective patients. Keep it conversational and engaging.
7. Encourage physicians to separate private from personal accounts. The content shared socially by physicians as part of their professional identity is not the same content shared with close friends and family.
8. Encourage providers who use social media to be themselves. Consumers engage more readily when the account feels like a real person. A distinct professional account that’s separate from a personal account does not mean the content should be dry and uninviting.
9. Proactively educate your physicians on your organization’s social media policies, guidelines, and best practices. Not only can this improve the effectiveness of using social media for physician promotion, but it can avoid potential problems.
10. Stay committed! If you’re going to take the plunge and encourage physicians to become active on social media, be sure to remind them that there are no awards given for just having an account. In fact, having an account that has gone stagnant is almost worse that not having an account at all! Your doctors and your organization are unlikely to realize the full potential of social media without the committed involvement of physicians.

Online Physician Promotion

Want to learn more great tips for using social media to promote your doctors? Be sure to check out our webinar on How to Promote Your Physicians Online. You can also download our comprehensive Online Physician Promotion eBook. You’ll not only learn more about using social media effectively, you’ll also hear ideas to improve physician profiles and tips for driving qualified visitors to your website’s provider directory.

Whether you’re shopping for a new pair of shoes, streaming music or seeking healthcare services in your community, you’re often starting with a search engine. And so are your patients, visitors, donors and other target audiences. We’re all doing it – at a rate of about 40,000 searches per second.

So how do you stand out from the pack? It’s not as difficult as you probably think.

1. Keep the clutter out with a solid site organization

Organizing your content isn’t just having a great site structure. Auditing your content regularly for ROT – redundant, outdated or trivial – will ensure your content isn’t only fresh but that it’s relevant to your audience.

While you’re auditing content, consider microsites you have or want to have in the future. For existing microsites, analyze the traffic they’re getting and the freshness of the content. Before you decide to build a microsite, consider if they’re really necessary.

Whenever you tackle site organization, ask your audience about what is valuable to them. Through great tools like online surveys or stakeholder interviews, you can learn a lot about how your audience – internal and external – is using your website.

2. Write search-friendly content

You can learn oodles from Geonetric about how to write quality content that converts, and fortunately for you, those same principles apply to search engines. Quality content matters to your users, and it matters to Google, too.

But while you’re writing great content, don’t forget to write great page titles and descriptions. Page titles and descriptions are displayed in the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP. You’ve seen them plenty of times. They look like this:

Page titles (< 60 characters) are the words and phrases Google uses to index your site, while descriptions (< 155 characters) tell search users what the page is about, hopefully enticing them to click into your site. Each page title and description should be unique, just like every page of your website.

And while keyword frequency mattered much more five years ago, keyword strategy in 2015 is all about weaving keywords naturally throughout unique, user-focused content. With tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Rank Tracker or Geonetric’s SEO Retainer, you can get the most common words your users are entering to find you and your competitors.

3. Spread your links and let them fly

Getting your links out to the world doesn’t have to be done with a megaphone on a mountain, or even a billboard. If your organization uses social media, welcome to your best platform.

Take a look at Mary Greeley Medical Center, based in Ames, Iowa, which recently celebrated the eighth anniversary of its pet therapy program. Sure, cute animals on Facebook are always a win, but why stop there? They decided to link back to the page of their site that describes what the program offers, and how local Ames citizens can get involved.

Backlinking to your website helps Google see traffic coming from other channels, boosting your relevance and your ranking results.

Other ways you can backlink? Claim your listings. This includes Google, Dex, Yellowbook and any others floating out there. Google and search engines appreciate correct, consistent information so if you find a listing with your organization’s name on it, claim it, correct it, and slap that website URL on it.

Take your website marketing to the next level

From search engine optimization and user-focused content to stunning designs for a responsive, multi-screen world, Geonetric is here to help. Get in touch with us today to learn more about services that will meet and surpass your organization’s web goals.

Flat design. Card design. Multimedia storytelling. The world of website design is evolving. New technology is changing the way site visitors interact with your site, creating endless design opportunities. Join us for this webinar and learn the latest in website design concepts, like flat design and card design. You’ll also learn about multimedia storytelling, an approach to combining design and content that will help you tell your organization’s story through stunning and interactive design. You’ll walk away with new ideas to engage site visitors with your design and stand out in a crowded market. Throughout the webinar, you’ll see examples that will provide inspiration for your next project.