Healthcare SEO E-book

Healthcare SEO:Use PR to Support Communications withPatients, Payers and Providers

Introduction

In actuality, search engines have become a target audience to be served by public relations (PR) professionals and other marketers. If you’re not factoring search into your healthcare PR strategy, you’re missing an opportunity to connect with the people you need to reach, including patients, payers, and physicians and other providers. In addition to helping these people find your organization online when PR is in tune with search, you can substantially boost the effectiveness of your inbound marketing program, which draws people to your site as a first step in engaging them in a lead-generation process.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fairly technical profession, but there are numerous things PR people can do to increase optimization by making small but intentional adjustments to the way we work. These things can support the SEO goals of hospitals, medical centers or even a local physician’s office, pharma or medical device companies, and other healthcare organizations.

1Google, the most commonly used search engine in the U.S. with 66 percent of traffic , 2considers more than 200 factors when ranking web pages, so there’s no single element that

when done “right” will conclusively improve your search situation. Even if you’ve got professional SEO people on the job to develop your online presence, you’ll want to check out these PR recommendations in order to take advantage of every avenue open to you to improve your SEO.

Every healthcare marketer today understands that having a fantastic website isn’t enough to draw in visitors. Spiffy design, carefully selected images, an executive’s smart-sounding video and meticulously written content are largely wasted if your target audiences don’t find the site when looking for information on the therapies, technologies or services the company provides.

1Experian Hitwise, “Search Engine Trends,” week ending June 23, 2012, http://www.experian.com/hitwise/online-trends-search-engine.html.2Google, “Google Basics,” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70897.

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO | Analytics | Keywords | Content creation | Sharing and social media | Measurement | Takeaways

A Tour of the Search Engine Results PageSEO is the process of making a website or just a single web page more visible to search engines and more likely to rank well in natural or organic search results. It’s important to note that SEO is a process and not a one-time activity.

Following is a look at the top portion of Google results when searching on the term “home dialysis.” We can see there are more than three and a half million results and that the #1 position was held on this particular day by Home Dialysis Central, which has the search term in question in its URL . The links in the right-hand column are listings from healthcare organizations using Google paid search (or pay-per-click advertising, PPC). Those at the top center in the pink box from , NxStage Medical and DaVita are also ads, but they weren’t randomly selected—they’re some of the best-performing ads for this particular search term.

(http://www.homedialysis.org)

Home Dialysis Central

We intuitively understand that the placement of our organization’s web page on search results matters, but it’s difficult to overstate just how significant it is to be in one of those top

3spots. A 2011 report from marketing software provider Optify shows the relationship between being king of the hill and bringing visitors to your website.

On average, of the B2B and B2C sites Optify evaluated, 36 percent of clicks from Google went to the top-ranked page. The second- and third-ranked sites received 13 and 10 percent of clicks, respectively. From there, numbers trailed off, but keep in mind that there is still very tangible value in being on that first page of results for highly competitive terms. (You also see a slight bump up for sites at the top of page two of results, which is position 11.)

3 Optify, “The Changing Face of SERPs: Organic Click Through Rate,” http://www.optify.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Changing-Face-oof-SERPS-Organic-CTR.pdf.

Organic search results: PR

supports these

Advertisements: SEO doesn’t

affect these two parts of the

search engine results page

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO | Analytics | Keywords | Content creation | Sharing and social media | Measurement | Takeaways

Optify notes in its report that “your SEO efforts should be focused on moving keywords to the first page and not necessarily to the first position” and bluntly concludes that “ranking below page two is good only for tracking and looking at trends, but has almost no business value.” We’d all much prefer to be the fifth - ranked site for a competitive term than somewhere on page three or four of results, and PR can help us get where we’d like to be.

Healthcare marketers can use search to attract and influence people who want to find information about a topic on which the company is an authority. Those people may or may not know your company, and even if they do, they may not be acquainted with the name you’ve given your therapy or device. For these audiences, favorable positioning on search engine results pages may serve to associate a name they know - that of your business-with a therapy, technology or service they do not.

While many in your target audience might have some familiarity with your organization, others who healthcare marketers want to attract have no relationship at all with your medical center, business or brand. As a result, they’ll never type your URL directly into their web browser, so search becomes a critical online marketing element.

Organic Click Thru Rate by Search Position

Clic

k Th

ru R

ate

Search Rank Position

Source: Optify

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Advantageous placement on search engine results pages can reinforce what target audiences already perceive about your brand if you’re a market leader, while introducing them to a therapy or service they may not otherwise connect with you. Or, if you’re working to challenge the market leader, placement alongside them may draw attention your medical business may not otherwise have received.

For example, a Google search on “knee replacement Boston” turns up the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital as the first organic result. This isn’t surprising—everyone in the Boston area is well aware of Mass General. But not far behind on page one, we also see South Shore Orthopedics. I’ve never heard of South Shore Orthopedics, but perhaps if I were a patient researching options, I’d be more likely to check them out when they turn up so prominently on the heels of the biggest hospital in the area.

Search engine results Analytics | Keywords | Content creation | Sharing and social media | Measurement | Takeaways Factors influencing SEO

SEO Factors Beyond PR’s ReachThere’s a lot more to SEO than the things most PR pros can control. Certainly, it’s a profession unto itself and a technical one at that; a great many factors that affect SEO are outside of our domain. Just a few of these include:

• Website technology issues, such as slow page load time and URL structure. Content management systems that produce URLs that include the same words that appear in page headers are better than those that do not. For example,

is a more useful address than one full of random letters, numbers and symbols.

• Heavy use of Flash technology can leave much of your site’s content unindexed by search engines (although there are steps your organization can take to address this

4problem ).

• Domain age, or when your site became visible to search engines, can work for or against you. Search engines tend to favor more established sites, which means that launching your healthcare start-up and expecting to achieve top rankings quickly may be unrealistic.

• PR people also have little influence over whether web design teams create XML site maps, which help search engines understand the information available on sites.

http://www.omnicell.com/Products/Medication_Dispensing.aspx

SEO Elements PR Can ControlWhile there are a variety of SEO factors that are under someone else’s control - that person is probably on your company or hospital’s IT or web design team, or may be the SEO specialist - there’s also an array of things that we as PR pros can influence. These include some on-page factors, which are internal to your website or other web properties, and off-page factors, which mostly involve gaining links from other sites. A few major categories of activities that PR can positively impact include:

• Using your organization’s keywords• Creating high-quality, fresh site content• Gaining links to your web pages from authoritative sites, such as those run by many

media outlets• Sharing your great content via social media• Paying attention to these things over time because SEO can be a long-haul proposition

We’ll take a closer look at these groups of activities and consider some specific, PR-friendly tactics to improve SEO.

4Adobe Developer Connection, “Search Engine Optimization Technology Center,” http://www.adobe.com/devnet/seo.html

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO Analytics Content creation | Sharing and social media | Measurement | Takeaways| | Keywords

Use Keywords, but Don’t Let Them Get In the Way of Good WritingKeywords and keyword phrases are terms people actually use when searching for the technology, therapies, specialties or other expertise your healthcare organization offers. If you’re a small healthcare technology company or a clinical-stage drug company, for example, your keywords are most likely not the names of your business or your products. Thinking about the words your target audiences use, not the terminology or jargon you as a marketer reflexively employ, can be difficult to get used to. After all, many of us have taken pains to invent names for products or therapies, and to dissect our markets in order to create new categories and otherwise set ourselves apart by using differentiating language.

While there are plenty of reasons to want to do such things to support some marketing goals, it’s important to remember that this isn’t how SEO works and that the more PR people use specialized medical or technical terms or invented names for categories and products, the less likely target audiences may be to find those organizations online. Why? Because the words and phrases search engines see on our websites don’t match those that people use when they fire up Google, Bing or Yahoo, so it’s not at all clear to search engines that we have the thing - the expertise, therapy or technology - those people need. Our goal as PR pros, then, should be to balance use of words and phrases that describe our organizations as executives and marketers choose to portray them with terms we know people in fact use, or keywords.

Access Website AnalyticsOne of the fantastic things about SEO is that you can measure progress. A first step is accessing your organization’s website analytics software, which may be free Google Analytics or a product that’s quite a bit more powerful. You’ll want to start by taking a look at your site analytics in order to look at the terms that people have searched on when they arrive at your website. You’ll also be able to see how much time those people stayed on your site and which pages were most (and least) interesting to them.

In short, PR people can gain tremendous insight into how site visitors, including those who are most engaged, interact with their content. Similarly, if they note that people who searched on a particular term tend not to like what they see once they arrive at the organization’s website, as demonstrated by the fact that they spent little time with it and subsequently left the site, marketers know it’s time create more compelling content.


Research Your KeywordsYour medical center or healthcare company may already have assembled a list of carefully vetted SEO keywords. If not, experiment with Google AdWords ( ) to learn more about how much competition there will be to rank as well as you’d like on search engine results pages for terms that describe the thing your organization offers. There are a range of free keyword research tools available if AdWords isn’t to your liking. A couple of others that may be more productive are Google Trends ( ) and Google Insights for Search ( ). The latter allows you to look at search volume by geography, including country, state/region and sometimes also metro areas.

If you find yourself needing to assemble your own list of keywords, be sure to visit your site analytics for guidance. In Google Analytics, look in “Traffic Sources” to see which terms are bringing visitors to your site. Exclude branded terms, reasoning that if visitors know the name of your organization or therapy, they’re going to come to your site anyway. Great organic search results aren’t necessary to reach those people.

While this part of your site analytics is still worth checking out, note that in the fall of 2011, Google changed the default security settings for anyone logged into the company’s sites (such as those who are continuously signed into their Gmail accounts) to prevent Google Analytics from displaying those people’s search queries. On its blog, Google explains that organizations can “receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the

5past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools,” but the net is that Google has made it more difficult for marketers to gather meaningful information about organic search terms directly from Google Analytics.

http://adwords.google.com

http://www.google.com/trends/

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Fine-Tune Your ListYou may discover that the keywords you most want to rank for are very competitive - they have so much search volume that you have little hope of breaking onto the first or even second page of results. To address this problem, particularly if you need relatively fast SEO

6results, consider use of “long-tail keywords.”

These are terms that aren’t general, they’re very specific and may involve relatively long search strings, yet they have enough search volume to make them well worth your while. In fact, your organization will more likely than not find occupying the long tail to be a very beneficial search strategy. SEOmoz explains that 70 percent of search traffic falls into the long tail, so as a marketer, it’s smart to avoid the most competitive terms because not only

5Google Official Blog, “Making search more secure,” .6SEOmoz, The Daily SEO Blog, “Illustrating the Long Tail,”

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure.html

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/illustrating-the-long-tail.


are you unlikely to work your healthcare organization onto a prominent spot on those search engine results pages, the terms are probably too general to accurately capture your value proposition anyway. Thus, site visitors who take the time to learn about your therapy, medical expert or technology will be unlikely to be good matches for your business.

For example, if your company markets a therapy for prostate cancer, your first instinct might be to set the goal of ranking well for the search term “prostate cancer.” After all, as any aggressive and ambitious marketer would, you’ve decided you want to educate as big a portion of the prostate cancer community as possible. However, a search on that keyword phrase turns up nearly 42 million results on Google. Your competition for the first page of results includes the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, WebMD, Wikipedia and the Mayo Clinic. Is this challenge a smart one to take on?

How about targeting a more descriptive phrase, such as “prostate cancer treatment”? That still yields nearly 33 million results and the same heavyweights in the top positions on search engine results pages.

What if you reason, however, that people searching for prostate cancer treatments are researching medical centers and physicians in their area and add a geographic dimension to your keyword phrase? If you narrow your scope to “prostate cancer treatment San Diego,” for example, you go from 33 million results to two million and come to a list of medical groups in San Diego that have expertise in serving this patient population. You might experiment with continuing to refine your search, or you might reason that a keyword phrase such as this is a decent starting point.

If your organization isn’t a medical center or physician’s practice, but a provider of a therapy, you may want to tighten the search in a different manner (e.g., “prostate cancer alternative to surgery”), but the approach remains the same. The point isn’t necessarily to optimize your content for ever longer search strings; rather, it’s to consider that thousands of people may search on seemingly niche phrases. Those could be productive contacts for your organization to make online, yet also be relatively uncompetitive and therefore areas where you can show rapid progress.

The Search Demand Curve

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO Analytics Keywords Sharing and social media | Measurement | Takeaways| | | Content creation

Create Content to Support SearchesOnce you have your list of keywords, take care to use them in content and to do so over time. You may also need to audit your current website and to create new pages that support keywords. After all, your list won’t do you any good if search engines don’t associate those terms with your web properties.

One key tactic is creating pages that use a keyword phrase in the page header, and ideally in the first few words. The content on the page need not be elaborate or take long to create - a few hundred words are ideal. Use variations on your keyword or keyword phrase a few times, but no more, in the body of the page. The goal should be to write in an ordinary manner, not to robotically and repeatedly use the same word. SEO shouldn’t supplant good writing, and in fact writing in anything other than a natural style may dissuade visitors from spending further time with your site.

An additional consideration is that in the spring of 2012, Google began to roll out a series of updates that are designed

7,8to put more emphasis on quality content. As a result, if you determine that a search term is a great match for your organization and one that you want to be sure to support over time, then you will need to commit to producing quality content around that term and to keeping it fresh. This is one reason why SEO shouldn’t be viewed as a short-term project, but a commitment over time. PR, because it’s responsible for so much of an organization’s content creation, can help by understanding the business or medical center’s keywords and tailoring content to support them.

Looking for Electronic Medical Record Software?If you sell electronic medical record (EMR) software and need to attract new customers, you will want to promote your company and product online. When you create a website to describe your electronic medical record software, you should use keyword phrases, or terms patients type into search engines to find electronic medical record software.

Understanding that “electronic medical record software” is one of those phrases is important, but what’s even more critical is knowing that you shouldn’t do the thing I’ve done here: don’t use the term so frequently that it feels artificial. You’ll annoy potential customers and search engines will penalize your website. Use the term in the headline of your page and a few times throughout, that but that’s it. Use permutations on the term, too.

7Search Engine Watch, “Google Panda Update: Say Goodbye to Low-Quality Link Building,”

8Search Engine Land, “Infographic: The Google Panda Update, One Year Later,”

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067687/Google-Panda-Update-Say-Goodbye-to-Low-Quality-Link-Building.

http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-112805.


Optimize All Content, Not Only Web Pages

Consider optimizing different kinds of content as you create it to support your public relations programs and campaigns.

- Include a keyword or two in the headline, but don’t make headlines long. Google pays attention to the first 65 characters, including spaces, so if you must extend beyond that, put your keyword

9within those 65 characters. Then use your keyword or variations on it a few times in the body of the release, including in the first and last paragraphs. The last paragraph of a release is generally your organization’s boilerplate, so you may find that it needs a little work to incorporate your top keywords. Include links, using anchortext on keywords as described in the next section, to various pages on your website. Then, at the end of the release, spell out your organization’s URL.

- Accompany text on your website with images and make them unique if possible. Name images something unique and descriptive, use captions that include a keyword and be sure to also use alternative text, or alt text. Specifically, alt text should describe the picture in a fair amount of detail in order to help search engines that can’t “read” the image understand what it portrays. This is another opportunity for you to signal to search engines that you’re offering high-quality content. Finally, if you’ve got a unique photo to share, consider tagging it with an appropriate keyword on sites such as Flickr or Photobucket.

- Pick a title that includes a keyword. Remember that this may or may not be the name of your CEO or product, for example. If those words don’t have much search volume, accompany them by terms that will give you a boost in search. Indeed, creating and posting videos can be a particularly good way to improve your performance in search results for competitive terms because Google, Bing and Yahoo all like to prominently display video results. Your website text may be competing with that of hundreds or even thousands of healthcare organizations, but you likely have far less competition to rank for video or images. In addition to picking a good title, post a transcript along with the video if possible. Search engines can’t make sense of your video, but can read the transcription. Lastly, as with images, tag your videos using keywords.

- Keep SEO in mind every time you create public relations material. Optimize the titles and content of webinars and company presentations that you plan to post online, infographics, case studies and customer profiles, survey results, newsletters, blog entries and audio content.

• News releases

• Images

• Videos

• Other PR content

“The two most important elements for optimizing a news release headline are keyword inclusion and brevity. In terms of brevity, a full release headline must be 65 characters or fewer to be fully displayed in Google.”

- “2011 News Release Headline Optimization Report,” Schwartz MSL, http://bit.ly/zICZGP

9Schwartz MSL, Crossroads Blog, “Only 19.5% of News Release Headlines are Optimized,” http://www.schwartzmsl.com/crossroads/2012/02/only_195_of_news_release_headl.php.


PATIENTSHC PROVIDERS

CAREGIVERSPAYERS

CUSTOMERS

CHANNELS

BOUGHT

OWNED

EARNED

CONTENTHEALTHCARE

ORGANIZATION

News releases Blog entries Social content Presentations Infographics Videos Illustrations Articles Case studies White papers Webinars Surveys Newsletters

We view the link between content, the array of available distribution channels and target audiences in this manner. Ideally, this becomes a closed-loop system of sorts over time as target audiences choose to interact with your organization more as they find and consume your content.


Create and Attract High-Value LinksOnce you have identified your organization’s keywords and are generating strong, unique content, you need to consider how you’re going to make that content as visible as possible to people looking for the medical treatments, services or expertise you provide and also to search engines. Creating links will not only help more people find it, but the number and sources of the links can signal to search engines that the content is authoritative and popular, thus giving it a boost on search engine results pages.

The first step in creating links is to use anchortext, or hyperlinks applied to a word or short phrase that describes information at the other end of the link. For example:

• “Protect your family by learning about the ” should take your visitor to a page with the same or nearly the same title. (This links to a page on WebMD, but you’d want to create a link to a page on your organization’s own site.)

• “Click to learn about the warning signs of asthma” is fine for people, but less helpful for search engines.

Anchortext is typically applied to a word or phrase, but not an entire sentence or paragraph, and ideally it should go to second- or third-level pages on your website, not the always the homepage. The goal is to associate specific terms with certain pages on your site and also immediately to give website visitors the information most pertinent to their search.

If your company or hospital has a blog, you should link among posts, from your website to your blog and vice versa. Particularly in cases where your website may be well established but your blog is new, you can use links to confer some of the authority that has built up in your site to your blog.

Consider asking partners and collaborators for links from their sites to your own. When issuing a press release, for example, request that the other organization’s PR team include a link from their site to yours. Don’t be shy about inquiring with your contacts at government agencies and universities in particular how you can obtain links from their site to an appropriate page on your own. Links from .gov and .edu sites are among the most valuable.

Websites and blogs run by media outlets can oftentimes also provide high-quality links. If you have contributed an article or post, ask for a link to your site with the article. If you have a particularly good blog, share links to relevant posts if you’ve been talking with a reporter about the topic. Sometimes journalists are reluctant to link, but it’s worth asking and most will agree it’s a reasonable trade-off if you have helped them with expert insight or done something particularly time-consuming, such as authoring an article for their publication.

While link-building is a central part of any SEO strategy, be sure to steer clear of consultants who promise to quickly get hundreds or even thousands of links for you. You can not only fail to help, but will damage your company’s search standing by buying links or engaging, even

10unknowingly, in questionable techniques in an effort to get links. Link building is another SEO element, like content creation and attention to use of keywords, which should be attended to over time and not viewed as a burst of activity to undertake and then cross off your to-do list.

warning signs of asthma

here

10SEOmoz, The Daily SEO Blog, “17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid,” .http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-types-of-link-spam-to-avoid

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO Analytics Keywords Content creation Measurement | Takeaways| | | | Sharing and social media

Share Content and Links on Social NetworksSocial media and search are coming together along a few different planes, making social networks worth considering, even if your organization hasn’t engaged with target audiences in this manner in the past. Of course, if your business is subject to FDA regulation, you know

11there is no clear guidance from that organization on how companies can use social media. Nevertheless, in addition to the many medical centers that are active users of social

12platforms , many drug companies with products on the market use social media, as do healthcare technology companies.

Whether use of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn or blogs is right for your company is something you must decide and periodically evaluate, but it’s worth considering that social media plays into the SEO mix more than it did a couple of years ago. Here are a few ways:

• Use of social platforms can increase your organization's reach - Social networks allow you to interact in a fairly efficient way with hundreds or thousands of people. As you build your company's network over time by sharing thoughtful insight and great content, you cultivate relationships with people who are themselves active online and who may opt to link to your content. These links have the most value when the people who assign them are perceived by search engines to be authorities on the topics at hand (e.g., if someone who posts frequently about diabetes links to a page on your site about that same condition). If your healthcare organization hadn't made the effort to engage socially, its

13content wouldn't enjoy the SEO benefits conferred by those inbound links.

11For running commentary on the issue of FDA guidance on social media, see the Pharma Marketing Blog, .

12A great resource documenting use of social networks by hospitals is Found In Cache, . 13Our focus here is the association between use of social networks and stronger search results, but there is an active debate also taking place about whether healthcare providers’ use of social media benefits their businesses. For more information, see: Pew Internet and American Life Project, “The Social Life of Health Information, 2011,”

.

http://pharmamkting.blogspot.com/2012/06/low-hanging-fruit-keeps-fda-busy-out-of.html

http://ebennett.org/

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Social-Life-of-Health-Info.aspx and Physicians Practice, “Social Media in Healthcare: Is there ROI?” http://www.physicianspractice.com/blog/content/article/1462168/1973013

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO Analytics Keywords Content creation Measurement | Takeaways| | | | Sharing and social media

•· Shares and likes can augment the perceived value of your content

• Involvement in social networks can affect personalized search results

- Search engines can't access content that's protected by a Facebook user, for example, and are still figuring out how to best work with social content even from much more open platform like Twitter. However, both Bing and Google stated well over a year ago that they're

14weighing social signals in search rankings. Many people sharing your organization's public Facebook post and link, for example, may become an SEO asset, but the influence of the people who share your material is also factored in. Similarly, the value of all Twitter retweets, for example, isn't equal. For this reason, while the size of your company's social networks may matter, trying to include influential people in those

15networks and producing material that makes them want to interact may be more critical.

- If someone has included your healthcare organization in his or her social network by following it on Twitter or liking it on Facebook, for example, content that your organization publishes or shares will appear in search results if they that person has activated personalized search. Even if your business chooses not to use social media, it's worth understanding that the people you hope to influence may see different sets of search results on topics you care about based on their own social involvement and location. So if, for instance, you're one of 100 pediatricians working in your town and one or two are using social media and have a bit of a local following, when a parent searches online for local doctors, if they or someone in one of their networks is following one of those socially active pediatricians, a link to their website will appear at the top of the search results. In this manner, information that your friends find interesting can supersede information that would otherwise receive top rankings.

Results of a 2011 survey of more than 100 SEO pros show they believed social signals at the 16site and page levels were quickly becoming more important in determining search rankings.

14Search Engine Land, “What Social Signals Do Google and Bing Really Count?” .

15YouTube, “Does Google use data from social sites in ranking?” .16SEOmoz, “Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011,” .

http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#overview

Source: SEOmoz

Decrease Stay the same Increase

0 112RESPONSE COUNT

Exact keyword match domains

The effectiveness of paid links

Anchor text in external links

Quantity of paid results on SERPs

On-Page topic modeling (e.g. LDA)

Presence + prominence of advertising vs. content

Content readability/usability/design

Usage data(CTR, bounce rate back to SERPs, etc.)

Social signals at a domain level

Social signals at a page level

Analysis of a site/page’s perceived value to users

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO Analytics Keywords Content creation Sharing and social media Takeaways| | | | | Measurement

Measure ProgressWe talked about getting access to your company’s site analytics software in order to investigate keywords. Save that password, because you want to use it from time to time to evaluate how you’re doing with SEO. As noted, SEO isn’t a project that you complete and set aside, but something that must be pursued steadily in order to have an impact. Search algorithms change, your competitors’ search strategies evolve, your web pages and other content need to be maintained, and fresh content must be developed. If you’re looking for an immediate lift in website traffic, particularly for a disease-awareness campaign, to let patients and caregivers know that a new therapy is available at your medical center or for patient recruitment, consider pay-per-

17click advertising, which can be turned on and off.

To measure SEO, consider search rankings, of course, but other metrics may also be instructive. These include:

• Improved website traffic from organic search

• More time spent on your website

• A growing number of high-quality inbound links

• Ability to hold website traffic steady or to increase it

• If social media is a part of your SEO strategy

or, if you’re managing inbound marketing work, better conversions as more people from your target audiences come to your site.

, which is readily measured. As with the metric above, time on site can be an indicator that your healthcare organization is attracting the types of visitors it wants and that those people, in turn, find your website content to be compelling enough to spend time clicking through a few pages. The flip side of this is a decreased bounce rate because your search and content strategies are well matched and mutually reinforcing.

, which are a measure of the attractiveness of your content and of people’s ability to find it. Tools such as HubSpot’s Link Grader ( ) and SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer ( ) will evaluate the quality of your links.

, while decreasing your organization’s online advertising budget.

, remember that traffic to your site from the major social platforms can be measured by your analytics software. You can also trace the paths followed by website visitors coming to understand that people coming from Facebook, for example, tend to engage with your organization more than those who come from Twitter.

http://www.hubspot.com/products/link-grader-link-analysis/http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

17Note that each of the major search engines has stringent rules around advertising medications and medical devices. To read about Google’s misstep with drug advertising, see U.S. Department of Justice, “Google Forfeits $500 Million Generated by Online Ads & Prescription Drug Sales by Canadian Online Pharmacies,” .http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/August/11-dag-1078.html

Search engine results Factors influencing SEO Analytics Keywords Content creation Sharing and social media Measurement | | | | | | Takeaways

Key Takeaways

• Set goals

• Work alongside the rest of your marketing team

• Consider SEO each time you generate content

• Don’t forget to link

• Understand that SEO doesn’t replace quality content creation

By listening to how patients, caregivers, payers and medical practitioners talk about the issues they care about and then adjusting the way we in turn address those topics, PR pros take the first step toward making our organizations more likely to be discovered online. While many of the things that affect search results are outside our purview, a multitude of other factors are within our control. To make the most of this opportunity, consider the following:

- Determine which metrics matter most to your business or hospital.

- Gather keywords if they already exist and understand your organization’s stance on social media and attending policies.

- Nearly everything PR people create can be optimized.

- Many PR people still don’t insert links into press releases. It’s an easy step to take, so remember it when you’re writing your first draft.

- Write naturally to maximize the chances that your content will be shared.

ABOUTSCHWARTZ MSLHEALTHCARESchwartz MSL is the world’s leading communications and engagement agency for technology, healthcare and cleantech innovations that save lives, conserve natural resources and transform businesses and markets. Schwartz MSL is part of MSLGROUP, which is Publicis Groupe’s strategic communications, engagement and events network and one of the five largest public relations agencies in the world with more than 3,000 employees and 83 offices.

For More Information:Web: www.schwartzmsl.comTwitter: @SchwartzMSL or @SchwartzMSLPRxBlog: www.schwartzmsl.com/prxFacebook: www.facebook.com/SchwartzMSL

Got Questions? Contact Laura Kempke at [email protected]

Healthcare SEO E-book

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Transcript of Healthcare SEO E-book