Rather than amplifying the message that the end is nigh, I’d like to cut through the noise, describe the pending change and share some of the concrete steps I’m taking to figure out what sites are well poised for the change, and which ones need to be worked on.

Google’s April 21 Algorithm Change

Over the last few years Google has been constantly advising webmasters to provide optimal experiences for users across mobile devices. At first these were mere recommendations, but over time Google has increasingly changed its motivational tactics from wielding carrots to wielding sticks. And now, it seems, Google is ready to use a stick that’s going to pack an epic wallop for sites that aren’t optimized for mobile.

This is the pending April 21 algorithm update. On social media, you might know it as #mobilegeddon, or the coming mobile searchpocalypse.

If we peel back the layers of clever hype and wordplay, here’s what’s actually changing:

Starting April 21, we [Google] will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. (source)

“Impacts mobile searches in all languages, worldwide.” “Significant impact in search results.” So, just how big will this algorithm update be?

Well, one of Google’s very own revealed at SMX Munich that it will impact more sites than Panda or Penguin (source). In other words, it’s BIG…and if you’re responsible for a website, you can’t ignore it.

But it’s far from the end of the world.

Rather than prepare for Armageddon, here’s how you can invest some time to understand your exposure to the upcoming algorithm change.

Check Your Mobile Traffic in Google Analytics

The first thing you want to do is dive in to GA check your mobile search traffic. Not only do you want to understand this month’s number, but you want to understand the slope of the traffic growth over time. Even if you don’t have many mobile visitors today, the slope of the growth curve can give you an indicator of what to expect tomorrow.

It’s fair to say that for the sites I look at, mobile search and mobile visits are already a significant and growing portion of site traffic. So much so, in fact, that I’d be clearly negligent if I were to ignore the mobile experience. Regardless of Google’s upcoming algorithm change. So take a few minutes and pull the numbers for your sites. You’ll gain an understanding of the scope of your visitors that could be affected after April 21.

Look for the “Mobile-friendly” Tag in Search Results

Now that you understand the relative size of your mobile traffic (and have a rough understanding of how it’s expected to grow), take a look at how your website is currently performing in Google search.

Doing this is easy. Just pick up your smartphone and perform a few Google searches that include your organization in the results. Look for the presence or absence of the Mobile-friendly tag in the results pages. If you’re missing it, you know you likely have a problem.

And remember, while the presence of the Mobile-friendly tag is a good sign, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of the woods.

As you test, make sure you query for results beyond your website’s home page. Check the deeper pages that drive significant search volume on your site. If you’re in a competitive market, look for the Mobile-friendly tag on the competition’s pages. If they are all Mobile-friendly and you are not, you’re going to be giving them the advantage in the days and weeks that follow April 21. If they aren’t yet Mobile-friendly, but you are… congratulations! You’re setting yourself up for success in the post #mobilegeddon world! But you aren’t done with your preparation work yet. There’s still more to do…

Check Your Pages With Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a natural analogue to the raw search testing recommended above. If you saw the Mobile-friendly tag in search results for your website, you should expect to see the pages you test here pass. If you didn’t see the Mobile-friendly tag in search results, this tool can help you understand some of the issues that Google thinks are causing problems.

If you’re in a competitive market, this is also a useful tool for doing research on the other organizations vying for your traffic. Go ahead and plug in your competition’s URLs to see what, if anything, is holding them up.

As you do your testing, there are some important points you’ll need to remember:

• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test only checks the specific page URL you enter. It will not reveal issues on other pages of your site. For that reason, even if you appear to pass the Mobile-Friendly Test for the URLs you enter, you need to continue reading and check Webmaster Tools for issues. More on this in the next section.
• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can report results inconsistently. Two tests against the same page URL can return both passing and failing results. Make sure that if you see a failure, you read the page carefully. Sometimes Google indicates that “a temporary error occurred” and your results are likely incorrect…but this text is not prominently displayed and can lead unfamiliar webmasters to panic and despair when everything is actually fine.
• A failure in Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test doesn’t always mean there’s a real problem for mobile users. In addition to the “temporary” issues described above, there are a range of technical reasons why a page might fail this test, but actually provide a passing mobile user experience. Sometimes this is due to robots.txt settings and other technical issues that prevent Google’s Mobile Testing service from reaching or seeing your pages correctly.

At this point you should see that as the preparation for #mobilegeddon becomes more sophisticated, so too does the skill required to interpret the results and figure out the next steps for your websites. It’s important that you persevere now to make sure you aren’t dealing with big problems after April 21.

Review the Webmaster Tools Mobile Usability Report

Almost a year and a half ago I urged healthcare webmasters to stop ignoring Google Webmaster Tools, and if you heeded that advice, this step is likely old hat. But if you’ve been remiss and haven’t checked regularly, it’s time to reacquaint yourself with this essential tool.

As you prepare for Google’s upcoming algorithm change, your first stop in Webmaster Tools is the Mobile Usability Report. This helpful report has a much wider scope than the Mobile-Friendly Test discussed above. But because it reveals issues across all pages of your site (with some caveats), the results can seem overwhelming if your site has problems.

Hopefully your experience is like that pictured above: “No mobile usability errors detected.” Anything else warrants investigation.

As long as you are in Google Webmaster Tools, take a moment to glance at the Crawl Errors for Smartphones, Site Messages log, Manual Actions notifications and Security Issues list. While these are not all directly related to mobile usability and the coming Google algorithm update, they are all important and it’s a good habit to check these areas for problems whenever you’re in Google Webmaster Tools.

Check PageSpeed Insights

And the last stop on our journey is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. While not just a mobile-usability testing tool, it offers a valuable report on the mobile experience for healthcare webmasters, and can quickly highlight mobile issues that need to be addressed.

In addition to the User Experience score, Page SpeedInsights can also reveal issues that might be slowing down the rendering of your website pages. These are important to keep in mind, but are generally not directly related to the issues you’ll need to focus on for April 21.

Next Steps

By now you should have a greater sense of what you need to do as you prepare for the April 21 Google algorithm update. However, not all the information you’ve gathered may be easy to interpret. In fact, some of it may seem downright contradictory…or beyond the scope of what you’re experienced in. If you feel anything less than confident that your website is well positioned for the pending Google algorithm change, it’s time to reach out to the experts.

We’ve already started having conversations about it with existing clients. If you don’t yet have expertise on call to help you understand and improve your exposure, why not get in touch today?

As a product owner (PO), I work hard to ensure that VitalSite is the best content management system on the market. Prioritizing which features and enhancements make it into the product each release requires thoughtful decision making – you have to give attention to shifts in the healthcare market, technology advancements and of course, the feedback of clients.

It’s fun to talk about the big, sexy stuff the team accomplishes: new modules, major new features and strategic integrations.

The reality is that we have a wide range of requests coming from many different stakeholders and sometimes it’s the little things that make clients (and coworkers!) really happy.

That’s why I’m excited about our most recent product release. VitalSite 16 consists of some great little advancements that are the result of feedback from our clients. Two enhancements in particular have been well received: multi-file upload and an updated WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

Improved Productivity with Multi-File Upload

Multi-file upload is already saving our clients and our Geonetric team a lot of time, particularly during initial website implementations. Uploading multiple files seems straightforward enough, but this process was more than just dropping files into a directory since VitalSite has a pretty sophisticated taxonomy and workflow.

Enhanced WYSIWYG Editor

Like most CMS solutions, VitalSite uses a third party content editor component as the base of our editor – albeit with significant modifications. For a while, this was OK, but our clients weren’t able to enjoy the benefit of new capabilities and bug fixes. So we rebuilt all of our smartlinking capabilities, integrated the editor with VitalSite templates and worked with some of our heaviest end users to rebuild the user interface in a way that works particularly well for our clients.

A Better User Experience

As you know, we survey our customers several times every year. In our most recent customer satisfaction survey we had the highest ratings increase for our VitalSite product in this history of VitalSite survey taking.

The difference? We’re experimenting with new ways of actively working with our clients in the development of new capabilities and listening to them as a primary driver of our engineering priorities.

The result? A CMS that continues to improve and a client community that knows we’re committed to building enhancements – big and small – that make managing their hospitals’ websites easier and more intuitive.

And that’s a pretty great story to tell as PO.

Want to learn more about VitalSite? Schedule a demo today!

Attend this webinar and learn how to successfully translate your organization’s strategic goals into digital goals, making your website a revenue-generating and volume-driving machine. You’ll discover how to define value for your online tactics, and how to communicate that value to key stakeholders. We’ll also cover what effective digital plans look like, and provide actionable guidance to help make your digital marketing strategy deliver real results.

As the old adage says, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Google Analytics (GA) gives you lots of data and ways to evaluate usage patterns and user trends on your website. So much data, in fact, that it can be overwhelming. But if you have a sophisticated content management system and you’re just using GA “out of the box,” you’re missing important parts of the online experience.

That’s why Geonetric’s CMS, VitalSite, can be set up to track a number of extra components automatically! For example:

• Outbound: Ordinarily, you simply lose track of visitors when they click on a link that leaves the site. You can’t follow visitors off the site, but you can capture when a visitor clicks an outbound link.
• MailTo: If you have links to trigger email, wouldn’t it be nice to know how often?
• Download: File downloads are notoriously difficult to track. The file doesn’t run any JavaScript and doesn’t trigger any tracking in Google Analytics. VitalSite can track when someone clicks a link on a page in your site, even a link to download a document.
• Error: Errors, particularly bad inbound links, are inevitable. VitalSite can effectively track where these bad links originate and where they’re going.
• Google Translate: Google Translate is an interesting but controversial feature to add to your website. Does anyone actually use it? Analytics is the only way to truly know.

Customized Reporting with Script Manager

VitalSite’s Script Manager was created initially to support the transition to Google’s new Universal Analytics – allowing us to coordinate changes to code and analytics without adding stacks of outside calls to third-party tag management tools.

But the benefits go beyond just supporting Universal Analytics. This capability allows a wide range of customized code to be added to different pages on client sites, including these custom Google Analytics tracking behaviors. It’s just another way we give our clients even more insight and help arm them with the information they need to make decisions.

You’ll discover how to leverage current content resources and identify gaps in your content strategy to deliver the right content at the right time to your potential patients. We also cover search engine optimization topics such as schema.org markup, local search, third party content platforms, placed content, back linking, syndicated content and video. But most importantly you’ll gain the understanding that the true value of SEO doesn’t lie in mastering the little details, but realizing how everything interconnects.

Picture it: you’re on a website. You’re looking for a specific piece of information and you’re in a hurry. After looking at the navigation, you find it isn’t clear where the information is. What are you supposed to do? You look around and there, you see it, the solution to all your problems: the search box, of course! You type in your request and press the submit button.

Behind the scenes an entire world of logic, computer processing power, and data spins to life to read your mind and deliver exactly the piece of information you’re looking for. If you misspell a word, it guesses the correct word. If the target of your search is a difficult or unusually spelled word, it uses a phoneme dictionary to identify similar sounding words or names. Search is one of the most complex and data intensive parts of any website. The denser the data, the harder the challenge to identify what the user means — not just what they say — and provide results that satisfy that need.

Using context to enhance VitalSite’s search

Providing the right search results requires more than just a lot of processing power. The logic underlying the search process must strive to understand the context of the user experience. The goal is not to just provide a bunch of things the user could be looking for, but the right thing.

Within a hospital website, there is a lot of context we can glean from the visitor’s actions. If the visitor is looking at birthing plans and from that page searches for a provider, we can expect they are looking for an OB/GYN. Knowing about the visitor’s intent allows us to sort the results to provide the most relevant providers first.

This context drives us to continue to evaluate and update our search logic. In the release of VitalSite 15, we updated the way that provider search works to prioritize results based on the match to the taxonomy term on the page. In other words, results now take the context of the search into account first, as seen in the chart below.

Highest term weight compares the taxonomy of the visitor’s page with the taxonomy of the provider so that providers more like that service line are seen in the result list first.

It’s all about user experience

These small tweaks to the way we think about providing data to a website visitor not only means we are constantly reviewing how the website is used, but also ensuring that our client’s website becomes more relevant to visitors. We want to reduce the sense that visitors often have on websites: feeling like they are lost. Small changes like this make a big difference in the visitor’s experience.

How can you use these changes to make the most out of your search? See another recent post to learn from a specific example: Physician-Seeking Behavior.

For instance, when shopping for a physician, consumers use your physician directory’s search capabilities to practice the same winnowing behavior to help them identify and choose the best physician for their needs. Consumers may filter for potential physicians who:

• Treat their specific conditions.
• Specialize in certain areas of care.
• Speak their native language.
• Practice in a location near their homes.

Because this filtering behavior is so prevalent among consumers, it’s important that your online provider directory supports it. It’s also why we’ve designed VitalSite Provider Directory to support this type of behavior. When visitors look for physicians on a VitalSite-powered website, they have the ability to search, sort, and filter providers in a way that quickly surfaces physicians relevant to them from all the providers in an organization.

Let’s walk through an example of how this works using Abington Health’s website. The visitor behavior we describe in this example is informed by data from across many healthcare websites.

In this first image, we see that the website visitor has made it to the Find a Physician page (1). The visitor conducted an empty search without filters (2) in order to list all physicians at the organization. We can see that there 1092 potential physicians to choose from (3):

That’s too many to make sense of without some sort of refinement. And so the visitor engages in the first of a series of search refinements that continually narrow the pool of potential physicians.

In this first search refinement, the site visitor has specified the Obstetrics & Gynecology specialty filter (4) that focuses the number of potential physicians to 73 (5):

The next refinement is to filter physicians by gender (6). And this establishes a tighter focus still, with 43 potential physicians (7):

And the last step is to filter physicians by city (8). Note how with a few clicks, the visitor is easily able to focus in on three potential physicians (9) from an initial pool of over a thousand:

At this point, there’s a manageable number of likely candidates to work with, and visitors typically begin reviewing their profiles to determine which provider to select.

Though some of the discreet steps represented above may be consolidated, and the actual filters used can vary from one organization to the next, the pattern of behavior is one we see over and over again as visitors look for physicians. That’s why VitalSite’s Provider Directory is intentionally designed to help users quickly hone in on the best physicians for their needs.

If you’re not yet using VitalSite to power your hospital website, or you’re curious to know if you could be doing more to visitors as they search for physicians, contact us.

As a healthcare marketer, helping health consumers make that connection with a doctor is important – but far from easy! And doing it on a website can be even more difficult. How do you showcase a doctor’s personality online in an authentic way? The key is to humanize the doctor.

Humanize the doctor

Just thinking about physicians makes a person envision white coats and sterile environments. Your mind is flooded with images of cold metal tables, getting poked and prodded, and you might even experience the feelings of being scared or anxious.

These are the exact thoughts and feelings you don’t want your health consumers to feel when looking for a new family doctor or specialist! The notion of humanizing medicine has been around for a while and works to combat that sterile, clinical feeling. The concept focuses on compassionate care and creating a real partnership between the doctor and patient. Instead of a business relationship, it’s a personal relationship and one that plays an important role through any health journey.

With so much of the condition and doctor research taking place online today, it’s important to take steps to humanize your doctors on your website.

Create powerful online provider profiles

Offering compelling and engaging online provider profiles is one of the best ways to showcase your doctors in a unique and genuine way.

PIH Health in Whittier, CA, does an excellent job using its online doctor profiles to create a compelling snapshot of its providers, helping site visitors get a real feel for what it would be like to partner with that doctor.

The key to success for PIH Health’s profiles is the way it shares useful information while still providing a personal touch.

As you can see in this example, site visitors are greeted with a smiling, professional image and immediately get a sense of the doctor. An engaging biography shares relevant educational and specialty information, while also providing personal details that help a site visitor identify and connect with the doctor.

A health consumer may or may not choose a doctor based on where they did their residency. But knowing that doctor also has two kids and likes the Lakers – well now those are things a potential patient can relate to! PIH Health’s profile also includes important office and location information, helping the site visitors determine if this doctor’s office is in the right part of the city for them.

As you scroll down, the profile shares more relevant information – like specialties, languages spoken, education, and certifications – and also includes a video, the pièce de résistance.

Bring the profile to life with video

Nothing brings a doctor to life online better than a well done video. PIH Health has recorded videos of its doctors sharing their practice philosophies. The videos are short in length – only two or three minutes, but go a long way to showcasing the doctor and his or her bedside manner.

So far 64 of the organization’s doctors have recorded videos and those videos average 1,150 views a month.

Now not every doctor wants to be in front of the camera, but every doctor does want to fill their schedules, so you can make the case why this is a great investment. Plus, the content marketing opportunities with a great doctor video are endless.

Have the right provider directory as your foundation

Compelling profiles are key to connecting doctors and site visitors, but having a sophisticated provider directory running behind those profiles is key to managing and presenting all that doctor data online.

Check out how PIH Health uses our VitalSite Provider Directory to deliver detailed profiles, offer impressive search capabilities, and effectively cross-promote doctors across the site.

In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

• Put yourself in the minds of your site visitors and patients
• Get past marketing-speak and provide helpful details
• Revise current website copy to emphasize benefits users receive from your services
• Streamline content and quickly get to the point
• Create strong calls to action that focus on users and benefits

Promoting multiple brands and facilities on one website can be difficult.

If you’re ready to trade in silos of web content for a strategy that balances a regional brand while still highlighting individual facilities, this webinar is for you. Using healthcare examples, we explain how to build a website that makes it easy for consumers to access services across a system. You’ll learn how to manage multiple online brands in a way that meets organizational goals while providing a seamless user experience every step of the way.

In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

• Develop a content strategy that promotes multiple web presences in a way that meets organizational goals while still making sense to consumers
• Communicate the value of a centralized system-wide site and still showcase facilities’ core competencies
• Create a seamless online experience for site visitors
• Go beyond social media as a content marketing strategy