How Healthcare Providers Can Attract More Website Visitors

Marketing in healthcare has greatly evolved over the past couple of decades. Digital content creation has largely taken over public relations and can be greatly useful to healthcare organizations of all sizes.  

Healthcare companies can gain more attention on the web and attract a wider audience online through their website content. By leveraging content creation and social media, healthcare companies can better connect to their communities and attract more visitors to their website. Once there, the visitors may decide to use the company’s sources.

Content can help boost your healthcare company’s visibility, increase online engagement, and establish it as an expert online resource. Quality, engaging, and sharable articles are crucial to any healthcare company’s marketing campaign. Here’s how you can optimize content to drive more visitors to your healthcare site.

Make Content Creation a Priority

Created website content is a relatively new form of marketing. Before, public relations was the most common way to engage with the public. Now, however, every company has the potential to own its own website, complete with a blog for publishing content. Content creation is therefore uniquely useful.

As stated by George Washington University, the extensive control of content creation compared to PR does the following:

By prioritizing content creation, PR teams can broadly respond to two related pressures on their operations: The desire, from their clients and firms, for a coherent content marketing strategy that intersects with PR, and the demand, from prospective audiences, for easily accessible articles, videos, and infographics, especially on the internet.

By taking advantage of this control, digital marketers can tap into a whole new way of marketing. The first step for healthcare companies to do this is to create a blog where they can publish company-owned and created content to boost their marketing.

On the blog, healthcare companies will be able to post strategic content that can help attract more visitors to their website — including potential patients. In fact, content creation can help connect patients to your doctor’s office. Research on the importance of medical organizations and content optimization found that patients looking for doctors often find them in one of three ways:

• Generic healthcare and/or doctor searches
• Doctors specializing in specific ailments
• Doctors specializing in different treatments

Additionally, the research found that 79 percent of patients do their research using search engines. This illustrates the importance of a well-rounded content marketing campaign for healthcare companies.

Boost Organic Traffic

Image Source

Creating the right content for healthcare company websites is important because it can make the difference between attracting the right people to your website and the wrong ones. The people you want to attract will be interested in healthcare and will potentially choose your company for health services. As a healthcare company, your content should brand you as an expert to provide the best care for your patients.

To achieve this, digital marketing experts advise companies to develop a robust marketing strategy. This includes optimizing your content to make sure it’s engaging and valuable to your target audience. Here are three easy ways you can do this:

• Make Your Content Easy to Read

Unless your target audience is composed of scholarly readers or other professionals, making your content easy to read is key in your strategy. Shorter sentences and paragraphs can break down your content so that your readers can skim it. This will help keep the attention of readers who are easily distracted.

• Write List Posts

List posts are easy to read, can sum up important information, and are a great way to connect with your target audience. If your target audience is composed of potential patients, then relaying information to them in a way they can understand should be a priority.

• Write Longer Articles

Writing longer articles can benefit your site. Site engine experts have found that Google often prioritizes content that is longer, more in-depth, and filled with quality research. For that reason, writing longer articles can make your site more visible online and help attract more visitors. Most search engine experts agree that articles should be at least 750-1000 words long to be valuable and effective for SEO.

• Prioritize Content Quality

Additionally, experts advise sites to focus on consistent, diverse, and quality content. If you can provide your users with the information they won’t find anywhere else, you will make your site more valuable. While longer articles can be beneficial, it’s imperative that they remain valuable to your readers. Creating long articles for the sake of content and forcing an article to be short may not be worth the time or effort in some cases, but by prioritizing quality, you can strive to write in-depth articles for the benefit of your site.

Understand Healthcare SEO 

Writing great articles is the perfect start to your marketing strategy, but to drive up your traffic, you need to do a lot more than that. Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any traffic-driven content marketing strategy. Knowing basic components of SEO can boost your content strategy immensely, and here are some ways how:

• Healthcare Keywords

SEO is all about giving search engines the best signals so they rank you higher and make your site more visible to your target audience. Every article should have a specific set of target keywords related to healthcare. This helps search engines such as Google to know what your site and articles are about, and can help them connect them to questions people type into the search engines.

• Article Structure

Article structure is important to SEO and has mostly to do with headings. Headings can be used to indicate to Google what each article is about, signaling to them what is most important in an article. For example, Heading 1 should be the title of the article, Heading 2 should be the sections of your article. These headings will send Google the strongest signals in descending order. Thirdly, Heading 3 can be used to break up information further, but won’t send as strong signals.

• Internal and External Linking

Linking is another key component to SEO strategy. The links you include in your article will also send signals to Google. Linking to trusted news sites and healthcare journals will help send strong, positive signals to search engines. For healthcare, these sites will include journals such as The Journal of Healthcare Management, The Health Researchers Journal, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Utilize Analytics

Learning to use the basic functions in SEO programs, such as keyword analytics, can help digital marketers find the best strategies to use for their articles. Keywords can help identify opportunities to drive traffic to healthcare websites and should be used as much as possible.

Keyword analytics are especially useful in finding the right topics to write for in content strategy. Keyword analytics can show marketers what users are searching for, what competitor’s traffic looks like, and what gaps in their current content need to be filled.

A useful resource to figure this information out is SEMRush. SEMRush offers an array of SEO metrics for its users, including keyword analytics. Here, users can look at organic traffic data to assess what keywords related to healthcare users are looking for. Users can also look at related keywords to help them find similar keywords that may potentially have a better chance of success.

When looking at keyword analytics, two of the most important variables to look at are the volume of traffic and the rate of competition for that keyword. The volume of traffic lets you know how many people are searching for the keyword on a monthly basis, useful for choosing the highest traffic keywords and not wasting time on low-volume ones.

The competition for a keyword helps give users an estimate of the level of difficulty to rank for that specific keyword. By pairing a high-volume keyword with a low rate of competition, marketers can have the best strategy for ranking with search engines.

Develop Healthcare Content Strategies

SEO-driven content strategies are not only an effective marketing strategy, but they can also help strengthen doctor-patient relationships. In their blogs, healthcare organizations have the chance to show potential patients more about them. Highlighting desirable qualities for doctors, such as trustworthiness, quality, and care can be illustrated using the right content.

Additionally, content can help doctors connect to a younger audience. According to Forbes, millennials tend to seek medical information from online articles rather than doctors. If doctor’s offices have quality articles on their websites, it can help attract millennial patients and encourage them to pay the doctor a visit.

So writing articles that are informative, easy to understand, and well-written will benefit your site. The audience is a key component in any marketing campaign, so knowing and delivering what your customers want will help your campaign succeed.

Plus, to optimize the success of their marketing strategy, companies should continually publish strategic articles. Good SEO takes months to accomplish and will only be worthwhile if publishing is kept up. Search engines continually review websites for their information, and providing new articles to rank is vital for a site’s SEO.