Keeping your website content up-to-date is a never-ending task. Between creating engaging copy that accurately and appealingly promotes ever-changing services, providers, and locations, tweaking content so it’s optimized for search engines and users, and maintaining a steady stream of content marketing collateral, being a health system or hospital web writer is easily a full-time job.
Writers’ skills and abilities come in all shapes and sizes. While your writers may be experts on your brand, there may still be gaps when it comes to the expertise needed for excellent web writing for healthcare. Maybe your staff is made up of digital gurus with little healthcare experience, or maybe they are healthcare insiders with a huge print portfolio but very few digital projects under their belt.
At Geonetric, we’ve been delivering online and in-person training for healthcare organizations for years, putting marketing teams on the path to success. Here are just a few of the benefits your organization could enjoy when you get expert training for your team on web writing for healthcare.
1. Understanding Content’s Impact on SEO
It’s been said that content is king and it seems that Google agrees. In your training, make sure everyone understands the impact that content can have on your SEO. You can also learn tools and formulas to make things like page titles, meta-descriptions, and keyword usage a breeze.
Your team will benefit from training that’s customized not only for your team’s interests and skills, but tailored to your organization and target audiences. For example, we can create a keyword portfolio for your hospital or health system before the training and then teach your team how to naturally integrate those keywords into your content. This helps your staff make the most use out of your portfolio so you get the most out of your SEO efforts.
2. Come Together on Voice, Tone, and Governance
Your voice and tone are your brand’s personality and governance helps you make sure your content is meaningful and beneficial for your users. Writing training helps to unify your team on these topics and provide an agreed-upon single approach, making it easier to wade through the tricky conversations that arise out of voice, tone, and content governance questions.
It also means that, while your content may be written by a team of writers, your users will have a more cohesive web experience. That’s because even if five writers work on a page if they all have the same understanding of your editorial voice, it will seem like it’s all been written by one person.
3. Greater Empathy for Your Audience
Great web writing training should give you the tools to help you better understand your audience and what they’re doing online. Understanding data — like how users search for information on your site, how they navigate your site, and your audience’s health literacy reading levels — will help your team make sure you’re providing your users the information they need when and how they need it.
Learning about reading patterns will help you understand how your users see your content, and understanding readability and accessibility are crucial to finding and addressing barriers you may be unintentionally creating in your website experience.
For example, if your content is written at a 12th-grade reading level but users in your area read at a 6th-grade reading level, you’re not going to be delivering a very good experience. Your readers may not understand your content and because of that, they won’t feel confident making a choice. That may result in your users might not take your desired action or they may even go to your competitor’s website instead. Creating an online experience that’s empathetic and helpful enables your users to take the next step in their patient journey!
4. Stay Up-To-Date on Best Practices
In the world of the web, best practices are constantly evolving. Team training means you can all learn the current best practices and implement them together. Ensure your team knows how to add local elements into content to help with location searches, write effective calls to action, and create content that addresses your users’ needs. Another important facet of this is creating accessible web content, which should be at the forefront of best practices not just because it’s the right thing to do, it’s also the law!
5. Get Your Team on the Same Page
The best part of any training is that it’s time to revisit your team’s foundation. By learning together, you can move forward from a shared starting place and keep everything in check with what you’ve learned. This has the double benefit of creating a stronger team — and learning in a group setting means that everyone can help each other grow in their skills.
Once you’ve got all these new skills in your back pocket, you’ll be ready to tackle any and all writing projects. Whether your project calls for a light refresh or a full-blown rewrite, you’ll be ready!
Need Help Training Your Team?
Whether you’re looking for a one-hour virtual training or an intensive multi-day workshop with ongoing editing support, Geonetric’s expert team of writers would love to help. We work exclusively with healthcare organizations and we’ve supported numerous approaches for handling content development and upkeep, from writing full sites to training and providing guidance as your team manages the work — and taught a wide range of writing skills. Regardless of your team structure, equipping your on-staff writers with the tools and knowledge they need to write the best possible web content gives your organization a competitive edge. We’ll provide tools and training your team needs to become more competent and confident web writers. Our web writing trainings are personalized for your health system and designed to meet your needs.
Check out our guidelines for writing healthcare web content to get started. Reach out if you’d like to talk with us about your writing training needs!