Healthcare Marketing that Builds New Patient Relationships

Healthcare Marketing that Builds New Patient Relationships

Healthcare Marketing that Builds New Patient Relationships

Updated 9.28.2022

Medical practices need effective marketing to attract new patients and build relationships in the digital medical marketing space.

Global market shifts and emerging challenges in the healthcare environment make SEO an increasingly important channel for sustaining business growth and acquiring new market reach. COVID-19 accelerated that need, which has not reversed as people increasingly spend more time online. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) refers to a controlled and hierarchically organized vocabulary; for example, there are specific dental marketing best practices and more advanced strategies that can give you a competitive edge. Your topic cluster should align with official cataloging methods. It is used for indexing, the cataloging of topics, and facilitating the searching of biomedical and health-related information.

Table of Contents

Let’s start with basics.

What is healthcare marketing?

Health marketing involves strategy to public health promotion that leverages both traditional marketing principles and modern SEO tactics alongside science-based strategies to protect and promote the health of diverse populations. It is a planned outreach process involving communications and content designed to attract healthcare consumers. Its goal is to guide them through their healthcare journey, and keep them engaged with the health system or healthcare business entity.

“Health Marketing involves creating, communicating, and delivering health information and interventions using customer-centered and science-based strategies to protect and promote the health of diverse populations.” – CDC*

 

The application of digital marketing within the healthcare field is complicated by society’s health problems. Consider all the false information that needs to be sorted out when answering COVID-19 queries. Search engines are challenged with how to surface accurate and trusted information that ill people rely on before, during, and after treatment.

Trends, algorithms, and marketing techniques in other fields don’t commonly face the same level of change and scrutiny as those in the healthcare services. Meaning, healthcare businesses providing direct patient services or healthcare-related products need their own approach.

This article will help your healthcare organization align its healthcare marketing strategies to gain more visibility in search engine result pages, clicks, and conversions.

This affects healthcare companies of all types, including medical service providers, insurers, device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical communications. Medical SEO and healthcare marketing success rely in part on understanding health-related Information Retrieval processes to gain a competitive edge.

It is naïve to think that SEO is a magic bullet. It’s a lot of work and requires consistent implementation of search marketing improvement strategies.

People often rely on Google and other search engines to conduct research on health-related topics. They type in a search query or increasingly using voice commands to get semantic answers. When it comes to people’s well-being, they deserve accurate advice. That is the challenge. How can your business be more visible and be trusted?

What are the top Healthcare Marketing Challenges?

Healthcare Organizations face stiff algorithms, competition, and the following additional marketing challenges:

  1. Creating quality content that reaches prospective patients with medical needs.
  2. Understanding evolving ranking factors specific to the healthcare industry.
  3. Creating compelling page title tags and meta descriptions.
  4. Publishing pages and blog posts on a healthcare website by authorize and top expert authors.
  5. Insufficient marketing budget.
  6. Overcoming internal resistance to change.
  7. Helping decision-makers understand how SEO benefits their revenue streams.
  8. Helping content writers understand the need to meet YMYL and E-A-T criteria.

This article will help your healthcare organization align it’s healthcare marketing strategies to gain more visibility in search engine result pages, clicks and conversions. You will discover how to make your efforts effective, provide value, and give your business a competitive edge.

12 Strategies to Improve your Healthcare Marketing

1. Plan Your Healthcare Content Writing and SEO Strategies

2. Provide Valuable Answers to Your Audience’s Questions

3. Understand how Patients Search the Web for Medical Information

4. Leverage the Semantic Web and Effective UX Taxonomy

5. Use Audits to Inform Healthcare Marketers, Writers, and SEOs

6. Have a Clear Strategy to Manage Reviews

7. Use Health-related Information Retrieval to Learn Semantic Similarities Between Concepts

8. Create an Effective Video Marketing Strategy

9. Be Honest, Transparent, and Provide Sufficient Information

10. Identify Gap YMYL Content and Add Valuable Information

11. Use Curated Healthcare Ontologies for Advanced B2B Marketing

12. Understand the Unique Challenges of Health Care Marketing

1. Plan Your Healthcare Content Writing and SEO Strategies

Finding and matching the right healthcare information for a specific need can be a real challenge for search engines. They rely on well-optimized web pages that leverage schema markup to help them understand the content.

Healthcare is an incredibly broad field with lots of jargon, acronyms and technical terms that mean different things in different contexts. Your content writing needs to align with how your audience searches and how they consume medical information. By using the most essential healthcare schema markup types, your content has a change to stand out in featured snippets.

Setting your SEO priorities to align with the companies business goals and KPIs is the first step. However, there is more.

Aadditional elements to an effective healthcare SEO strategy:

  • Discover what the competition is doing and how to do it better.
  • Agree on search priorities across all involved marketing team leads.
  • Establish a defined budget.
  • Identify what resources are available (owned media, support staff, etc).
  • Understand the company’s limitations, strengths, and weaknesses.

Establish an effective content model:

Websites that are classified in the healthcare niche, more than most, need a working content model. Because your content answers questions about people’s well-being, this framework should help your organization arrange your content assets into systematic code with modular and connected structure.

The benefits of content modeling:

  • Inform how your content is organized across your website.
  • Increase predictable and how easy it is for search engines and patients to understand your content.
  • Simplifies the process of reusing your content on different channels.
  • Makes it easier to think of your content structure with an overall approach versus on a page-by-page level.
  • Content modeling can meaningfully shape your evergreen content tree.
  • In-depth content can be easily consumed by breaking out the page’s content into small meaningful chunks.
  • Helps during content creation to best match different search intents.

Healthcare industry marketing success demands high quality content,

Content is only one element of your marketing funnel – but it is foundational. Your healthcare website can reach prospective patients by providing quality content that influences your ranking factors. Your healthcare content marketing blueprint should define both the best content types and formats to support customer journeys. Reach your ideal audiences better via content distribution.

– Blog posts

Write supportive articles that go deeper into your healthcare topics. You can provide both current and prospective patient’s more value by providing specific content they are searching for.

– Title tags

Well-written title tags help readers know what each content piece if about. Google now rewrites Meta titles when it considers that the current title tag lacks a sufficient summary of your health-related content.

– Meta descriptions

Creating more useful Meta descriptions for several webpages is easier when leveraging Google’s new natural language processor, BERT. Informative healthcare articles can use NLP applications can retrieve entities for topical information needs. A page’s Meta description can give incredible insight into what that page is about.

– Strategic content flow

Strategic healthcare content marketing is complex and evolving. Know what health-related topic trends are influencing your rankings. Patients are more informed and empowered in the treatment decision-making process because they can find and take action on specific content that answers their question. Take for example, “best mouth guard for TMJ?” and create a page with the correct, in-depth answers. People perform extensive research about their medical condition to identify some of the potential products available for treatment before their consultation. A professional SERP analysis will help shape your strategic content creation planning.

– Repurposing content

Once you’ve created content that best defines your brand’s digital footprint, repurpose it in online advertising, social media, PR, and other channels that your potential patients are using. This can effectively create tremendous efficiency and increased market reach.

2. Provide Valuable Answers to Your Audience’s Questions

The ability to provide answers is a ranking factor that affects every healthcare organization.

Finding the best information for patients’ medical questions is hard. From people’s personal health history to suggestions for treatments, solutions, and more – it’s not easy for many patients to find exactly what they’re looking for. Google seeks to help by applying its various and deeply complex algorithms to decide which answer-rich content gets displayed and in which order.

The sheer volume of information that comes up in general search is impossible to process manually. With an ever-growing amount of reports, journals, textbooks, and more medical articles, traditional search techniques are far from efficient.

Healthcare niche marketing research is behind successful strategies that enable users to ask questions in natural language, and quickly obtain a response based on search engines’ understanding of those questions. (This relies on deep learning.) Your business can then use those harvested answers as input for subsequent content to increasingly meet the searcher’s intent.

Content with question-answering capabilities dramatically improves search marketing efficiency.

It’s the 2020’s, and accessing up-to-date information for health concerns has never been easier. The problem is that people face is navigating their way through the millions of documents available online. Both patients and artificial intelligence agents, like search engines, want to know what sites they can trust. So whether someone is looking for a specific symptom or in need of advice about a particular disease, they want to find the most relevant, and accurate pieces of knowledge out there in record time.

3. Understand how Patients Search the Web for Medical Information

Searching the web for medical information can be frustrating when patients need trusted information and worry about misinformation. With such a huge amount of information available, how do they find what they’re looking for? Finding accurate, relevant answers to questions about health can be difficult. Your search strategies can turn up lots of helpful and correct answers.

Healthcare businesses need an advanced healthcare search strategist to lead your search marketing techniques and strategies. They must know what it takes to provide content that meets E-A-T criteria for YMYL sites. This is core to content that gets found when people look for healthcare information online. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • How much time does your audience waste searching for meaningful information about healthcare?
  • Do you have the answers? Are you a niche health expert?
  • How can you make your content more accessible and aligned to their search intent?
  • Does it works on natural language processing combined with artificial intelligence to try to help people only get relevant results that are useful to their needs – the first time around?

Be aware of what Google states in its guidelines. (More details follow.)

“We have very high Page Quality rating standards for YMYL pages because low-quality YMYL pages could potentially negatively impact a person’s happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”

 

Meeting patient needs when they conduct online search queries.

Looking for healthcare information online can be time-consuming and fruitless. Need to find a doctor? Or learn all about a certain medical condition? Searchers don’t always get straightforward and relevant solutions. Trusted and intelligent information retrieval for healthcare-related queries no longer means scouring the web for hours on end. Especially not if your medical company is visible when someone searches for a specific piece of information that you are the expert on.

4. Leverage Both the Semantic Web and Effective UX Taxonomy

Your site’s ontology helps define the semantics of your data, houses a uniform content structure, and communicates to different entities and content needs. For the Semantic Web, your healthcare marketing plan should include the establishment of systems that apply the structure of your ontology and its logic.

More healthcare companies are recognizing the value of data-centric architecture, in which a knowledge graph or “data fabric”, contextualizes data and supports multiple contexts. With layers of abstraction built into a site’s ontology, or semantic graph data model, a more flexible means of interfaces are better understood.

A strong UX taxonomy organized subject-specific concepts, and creates a vocabulary for those entities. This organizes your content, services, and products as they relate to those concepts and makes them easier to find and take useful action on.

It’s not sufficient to just understand the words shoppers and patients use. To publish better semantic marketing materials, marketers need to also understand the medical treatments and health conditions at a much deeper level. Organize and present them in a way that offers a good user experience.

5. Use Audits to Inform Healthcare Marketers, Content Writers, and SEOs

Your website consists of a network of web pages that should meet viewer’s needs and that shape your brand’s data footprint. It consists of multiple structural elements that are uniquely applied to your domain.

Just like any kind of health and fitness routine Check-Up, a deep-dive technical SEO Audit should be budgeted for. We recommend that it is initially performed when a website is created or redesigned, as well as following adjustments in composition, and periodically. The healthcare niche is very competitive, meaning, you also need to know to take a lead presence in People Also Ask answers, Knowledge Cards, Knowledge Graphs, and healthcare product SERP carousels (when they apply to your business).

General, basic Search Engine Optimization audits are commonly free but miss the most efficient and accurate insights. Rather, a prioritized list of steps and justifications that specifies advanced technical SEO techniques and current search opportunities will improve organic performance.

Great SEO implementation is slow-and-steady progress that involves select, repetitive, and purposeful decisions that are nearly incomprehensible to casual observers but that have an incredible long-term impact on those who want to remain competitive in the healthcare niche. Additionally, it means optimizing your Google My Business profile with the best healthcare features.

Future advancements will enable different types of search for healthcare-related queries. Today, you can get ready rather than wait and be behind. When hiring a Search Marketing Strategist, request that they showcase some future ideas related to semantic search techniques for finding information on the Web. Your business deserves someone who understands the context of applied natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence aspects of information retrieval.

6. Have a Clear Marketing Strategy to Manage Healthcare Reviews

Incorporate Healthcare patient reviews into your content. This needs to be implemented in a way that adds value to the reader and meets review guidelines. Positive review mentions are a major boost for when people are looking for specific healthcare specialists in their geographical area.

A potential patient commonly reads 2-6 reviews to shape their opinion of your practice or company before ever booking an appointment or adding a product to their shopping cart. Most patients go online to research and find a practitioner or product based on reviews. This applies even more to a specialty physician or expensive purchase.

They seek online resources to read reviews and learn about the overall reputation of a healthcare practice, product, or provider. Therefore it is essential to focus on gaining control of your reputation management and your review generation process.

This aspect of your healthcare marketing strategy cannot be ignored. It is best to start implementing a dedicated program to garner new reviews on Google, Healthgrades, Yelp, and healthcare-related review sites. Google’s algorithm can read the content of third-party review sites and pulls related keywords out of the reviews that are posted. This can help your company show up for searches you want to rank for.

Since most reviews are left by people using mobile devices, make it easy for them. Additionally, when your content strategy effectively focuses on mobile users, they can find your services, products, and solutions easier.

Why are reviews important in the healthcare niche?

Reviews are a two-way street. While it is easy to see how they help inform other patients, partners, and search engines, reviews also help the business.

They offer critical information to healthcare providers and function as a well-designed patient feedback system. Patient and consumer feedback helps you to improve the quality of your care or products, identifies gaps in care or product details, increases patient and buyer engagement, and ultimately drives revenue.

A solid reputation is an important asset for every healthcare provider and vendor. In addition to gaining credible market positioning, reviews are vital for attracting self-reliant, quality-focused, and cost-informed patient groups. Qualified and informed employees support positive patient experiences with answers and your brand’s tone that build your reputation.

7. Use Health-related Information Retrieval to Learn Semantic Similarities Between Concepts

An information retrieval system (IRS) is used by search engines to retrieve documents based on an information need triggered by a searcher. Retail distributors of medical supplies and medical device suppliers are challenged to come up with good descriptive content for product pages. Typically, manufacturers provide product descriptions that you can use – but everyone has the same ones.

From an SEO perspective, this lacks unique copy that sells client products more effectively than the competition. Google recognizes repeat product descriptions across multiple sites and it fails to set a business apart. A superb SEO knows that your site needs to be viewed as exceptional. They can apply semantic search logic to better explain the concepts in your content.

Since people ask a lot of questions before buying a product, identify these top questions and provide answers on your product pages. This not only helps them move through a purchase decision faster, but it also helps your business gain visibility in Related Questions on the SERP.

New ways of storing datasets, processing, and healthcare information retrieval are emerging. Your website can build upon existing technologies with AI and machine learning for providing intelligent search query answers. There are lots of sources where you can look for missing answers to your audience’s questions. You can make your content valuable, understood, findable, and more relevant to viewers’ needs.

While patients may lack the understanding of how health-related internet searches work, you can support patients by focusing particularly on how you want your information cataloged, matched, and displayed. Determine the best way to implement schema markup to get your content found.

Data Mapping and Schema Mapping may include specific details for:

  • MedicalScholarlyArticle
  • Hospital
  • Drug
  • MedicalGuideline
  • MedicalClinic
  • MedicalCondition
  • MedicalProcedure
  • MedicalTherapy
  • Physician

There is a lot of high-quality health and medical information on the worldwide web. Many more healthcare schema types are surfacing. This should help make it less challenging for people to find and navigate this information. Search engines and other applications are advancing from a keyword-based approach to accessing medical content. Information retrieval systems can better decipher the underlying structure of the medical knowledge contained in your content.

The result of Data Mapping can be integrated data that is findable, iqueryable, easy to understand, and encourages the informed reader actions. It should lead your business to valuable insights that lead to better marketing decisions and provide a competitive advantage. Schema mapping is useful for effective SEO.

8. Create a Effective Video Marketing Strategy

Video marketing is a useful content format for healthcare marketers. Video content is great for providing easy-to-understand answers. It requires less energy than reading text, builds brand equity, and increases awareness of your healthcare business. Gaining a video of a patient review is highly valuable owned media content.

Options for using YouTube for video marketing vary from creating a 10-second ad to creating a channel to promote your company’s vision, physicians, or healthcare products. We like creating a series of related 10-second video clips that tell a story.

Or consider creating a page of video interviews where your doctors, nurses, and medical staff discuss who they are, their work experiences, and how they help your patients. Create videos that explain how different medical conditions are treated in your office. They’re a fabulous example of health video marketing done right.

Videos are ideal for healthcare education and QandA.

Consider how helpful video can be for a medical device company during the development phase. To gain final ‘approvals’ video is valuable to explain to doctors, funders, and partners what the possibilities and benefits are of the upcoming product. This content-type provides worldwide reach. It is also an excellent opportunity to deliver an in-depth understanding of the scientific underpinnings of your health solution. It lets you give reviews by renowned doctors who contributed to its development.

This can also be used within medical organizations such as hospitals. By launching a video series that offers scientific information, or use cases, busy professionals may be quick to buy and adopt your product.

9. Be Honest, Transparent, and Provide Sufficient Information

People who find you on the web shouldn’t have to wonder about things like which physician, staff member, freelancer, or third party actually created your main content. Rarely is anonymity necessary; it’s best to make it clear who authors each page. By providing author bio pages, it is clear why that author is a trusted topic expert.

Recognizable Internet alias or pen names may also work to identify the main content creator. The need for disclosure about who wrote the page varies depending on the purpose of the specific page. On your contact page, for example, an email address, physical location, or phone number alone may be sufficient

Healthcare retailers that process financial transactions while someone makes a purchase require a high level of user trust to feel secure. Make it easy for a person on your site or shopping cart to reach for help if they have questions or difficulties.

Google states: “Important: For YMYL pages and other pages that require a high level of user trust, an unsatisfying amount of any of the following is a reason to give a page a Low-quality rating: customer service information, contact information, information about who is responsible for the website or information about who created the content.”

10. Identify Gap YMYL Content and Add Valuable Information

Identify a YMYL topic where there is a gap in your content or where answers are missing on the Web. Avoid publishing content that offers little benefit to someone. Write in a manner that makes sure garbled information is avoided. Display E-A-T on your head topics and support documents.

Check that your content provides accurate and meaningful information. Use factual data and provide the source. Once you know that your quotes and statistical details come from someone who is trusted, add Fact Check schema to let the search engines quickly recognize that. A fact is a statement that can be verified and there are lots of tools people can use to check. A statement of opinion is not a fact. Make it clear when you are stating an opinion versus factual statements.

Build credibility and a sense of professionalism by double and triple checking for poor spelling and grammar before publishing.

Write for your readers and provide a good user experience. Every sentence in your content should add value. If people are spending time reading it, they should gain a benefit. Quality healthcare articles are much in demand by people seeing information on the web.

Derek Andersen’s June 25, 2021, 29 Statistics Healthcare Marketers Need to Know in 2021 article demonstrates the demand for trusted healthcare articles. People with medical needs or B2B healthcare providers often research for the best medical devices, physical therapists, health-related questions and answers, and wellness tips. Both B2C and B2B are most likely to use search engines. “In most major healthcare verticals, over 60% of consumers run a search before scheduling an appointment”, Invoca reports.

11. Use Curated Healthcare Ontologies for Advanced B2B Marketing

The B2B industry more commonly involves ‘professional search’. This refers to a searcher seeking information in a work context which often involves more complex information needs. Your website may use multiple repositories and the incorporation of domain-specific taxonomies or vocabularies to answer these unique search queries.

Advancing online search systems are transforming digital marketers’ search strategies for healthcare-related clients. There are many tailored to meet businesses in the healthcare sphere at a more advanced level.

Available manually curated Healthcare ontologies:

Query suggestions can be generated by querying manually curated ontological resources to identify related terms that support semantic search. Many resources are hosted on the web as Linked Open Data; you can gain support access by using structured query languages such as SPARQL. We like Sage Journal’s suggestions of the following (the first one may be considered general-purpose, and 2-5 are specific to healthcare):

1. DBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured content from Wikipedia. The DBpedia data set describes 4.58 million entities, out of which 4.22 million are classified in a consistent ontology.

2. Medical Subject Headings is a controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing documents in the life sciences. It contains a total of 25,186 subject headings, which are accompanied by a short description or definition, links to related descriptors, and a list of synonyms or very similar terms.

3. RxNorm is a terminology that contains all medications available on the US market. It has concepts for drug ingredients, clinical drugs, and dose forms.

4. The British National Formulary is a pharmaceutical reference that contains information about medicines available on the UK National Health Service.

5. The DrugBank database is an online database containing information on drugs and drug targets.

”Ontologies are more useful for query expansion when they are specific to the task domain. Some ontologies offer an additional source of related terms in the form of words occurring in the term definitions. In the biomedical domain, expanding queries with related MeSH terms has been shown to be useful. An interactive approach allows the user to exercise a more informed judgment regarding both term selection and application within a structured search strategy. – Interactive query expansion for healthcare professional search applications **

 

Health care companies and medical practices share several unique marketing challenges.

These challenges are unlike any other industry. Effective health care marketing requires a keen understanding of how to face and overcome them.

12. Understand the Unique Challenges of Health Care Marketing

a. Targeting limitations in paid search

Perhaps the biggest hurdle in paid health care marketing is targeting. Using Google Ads, for example, involves stiff privacy regulations. These often exclude targeting medical conditions. Some platforms have even forbidden remarketing ads to brands in the health industry due to privacy concerns.

One work-a-round health care marketing strategy is to craft creative messaging that appeals to the right patients. Some health care marketers rely on programmatic networks where anonymized, privacy-safe data sets permit advanced targeting such as lookalike based on conditions.

b. Meeting HIPAA requirements

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act regulations need consideration during medical marketing. It may impact the manner in which marketing and leads are managed. It may shape your marketing stack, how your site is hosted, which vendors you use, and more.

HIPAA is also challenged to keep up with technology. Marketers need to identify which healthcare technologies are effective, compliant and where hidden risks exist.

c. The Health care insurance landscape

Being successful in health care marketing involves an understanding of medical coverage. To create effective marketing messaging and creatives, you need to understand how different insurance entities — such as PPOs, HMOs, Medicare and Medicaid cover certain medical conditions. Every healthcare entity will likely be asked what insurance company or companies they work with. Understanding costs and coverage is a big concern for most people seeking help for their health needs.

d. KPIs

Unlike other industries, medical marketing’s key performance indicators are extremely clear. Medical practices typically have a singular focus on driving new patient office visits. Efforts must focus on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that best predict new appointments and revenue growth.

e. Balance physicians’ authority and empathy for the patient

Patients do their best to make the right healthcare decisions – often in the midst of experiencing extreme emotions. Marketers must offer balanced communications that both establish the physician’s authority and demonstrate the empathy of the physician. Typically, doctor visits have time constraints. The tone used on web pages and within print materials needs to create a connection that offers knowledge, hope, and confidence that they will get the right treatment.

What are the Best Healthcare Marketing KPIs?

Recommended health care marketing KPIs:

1. Leads By Type – content downloads, referrals, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.

2. Cost Per Lead – identify how many leads your marketing efforts are generating – paid and organic

3. Website Visitor To Lead Conversion Rate – the percentage of site traffic that converts into leads (Google My Business clicks, calls, scheduling an appointment, Contact form submission, etc.)

4. Lead Conversion Rate By Channel or Source

5. Cost Per New Patient – This metric matters most at the end of the day.

6. New Patient Conversion Rate

Track your KPIs and glean from them to regularly tweak and improve your marketing efforts.

What is the Google Search Health Knowledge Team?The Google Search Health Knowledge base produces knowledge panels, the “Ask a doctor” answer SERP, and other similar featured snippets, to source information about their symptoms.

The Google Search Health Knowledge Team is behind its Knowledge Graphs’ knowledge base used by Google to enhance the search results with relevant health information displayed in an “infobox” on its SERPs. Patients often rely on Google SERPs that provide features related to healthcare answers. The Google Search Health Knowledge base produces knowledge panels, the “Ask a doctor” answer SERP, and other similar featured snippets, to source information about their symptoms.

AI is already changing how physicians practice medicine and how patients find healthcare-related answers. Understandably, the wrong medical advice could potentially result in a life-threatening outcome.

Google Search started displaying a ‘specialists’ tab in health condition knowledge cards on mobile. This helps searchers find the medical specialist that they need. Like the tech giant’s mission statement, the goal of its Google Health Knowledge team is to “Make health information universally accessible and useful. Allow anyone in the world to receive key, top-quality health info in a fluid and intuitive fashion.”

Chat AI and Gemini AI have already seen millions of medical cases and try to provide factual, trusted answers.

Healthcare Marketing that Addresses Multiple Audiences

Often a pharmaceutical company or a medical device product provider asks about the challenges of marketing to multiple audiences. For example, if you provide a device that helps TMJ jaw pain, a B2C customer may use “help for jaw pain” to conduct a search, whereas an oral surgeon’s office manager would more likely search for “temporomandibular dysfunction device”.

Google and major search engines identify differences in search behaviors around search terms and search intent like these. They understand unique audiences’ needs and the use of different terms. For common search terms, try to address both audiences. At times, search engines may have a preference for content answers that serve both audiences.

How do you decipher the best approach? One way to research Google’s immediate search results and identify which types of pages are currently displayed in the top positions. Study if pages comprehensively talk about multiple variants of the same term. By uncovering what is behind their success, you can then adapt and test a similar approach. In other words, if your target is nurses, to rank for “TMJ devices,” you may need to include both “help for jaw pain” and “temporomandibular dysfunction device” within one product page.

If your business operates in a B2B healthcare space (example: healthcare products, device manufacturers, and medical supply distributors) and some products are only for directly to consumers, it requires a deeper marketing strategy. It may be challenging to avoid competing with your B2B customers.

You may have one registered B2C business entity that operates as a separate entity on a unique domain. Another registered business for B2B buyers may provide the level of separation to target that unique audience more easily and operate independently.

The key to this working effectively, or the use of a subdomain, is to focus your content creation and communications in a natural way based on the nuances in each target audience.

Core strategies when marketing to multiple audiences:

  • Avoid publishing the same content on multiple sites.
  • Rely on unique content writers for each site, each specialized in reaching that unique audience.
  • Conduct early research and identify the difference in search terminology that the various target audiences use.
  • Craft a plan to target each audiences’ content needs with a personalized approach.

Advanced eCommerce Healthcare SEO Leverages a Catalog of Images

To sell health care products successfully, use consistent pricing, intelligent images, and Product Schema

Information and transactional content do overlap. You can tie them together Search engines look for consistency to trust your content and brand. This is accomplished by using the same @id, or linked data URI across all entities. Your editorial pages, video media, product reviews, audio clips, and images should all connect. Structured data markup can link these entities together and define the relationships.

Try using Jina to build a text-to-image search workflow based on OpenAI CLIP. We recommend preparing today for how Product Knowledge Panels and carousels are – and will be – using meta-rich images more. You need to use the correct image size for maximum visibility in SERPs.

It is important to note that Google Merchant Feed and the use of Product structured data on your site need to match for re-ranking purposes. For example, if you have one price listed in your Google Merchant Feed and another on your landing page and within it schema, you have created confusion. This translates into uncertainty when you want to publish clear, consistent, and trusted data.

Straight from Google:

Some types of pages could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users. We call such pages “Your Money or Your Life” pages, or YMYL. The following are examples of YMYL pages:
● Medical information pages: webpages that provide advice or information about health, drugs, specific diseases or conditions, mental health, nutrition, etc.
● Legal information pages: webpages that provide legal advice or information on topics such as divorce, child custody, creating a will, becoming a citizen, etc.
Here are the most important factors to consider when selecting an overall Page Quality rating:
● The Purpose of the Page
● Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness: This is an important quality characteristic. Use your research on the additional factors below to inform your rating.
● Main Content Quality and Amount: The rating should be based on the landing page of the task URL.
● Website Information/information about who is responsible for the main content: Find information about the website as well as the creator of the main content.
● Website Reputation/reputation about who is responsible for the main content: Links to help with reputation research will be provided.
For all other pages that have a beneficial purpose, the amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
is very important. Please consider:
● The expertise of the creator of the main content.
● The authoritativeness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself, and the website.
● The trustworthiness of the creator of the main content, the main content itself, and the website.
● High E-A-T medical advice should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation. High E-A-T medical advice or information should be written or produced in a professional style and should be edited, reviewed, and updated on a regular basis.

– Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines*

Health care marketing is extremely rewarding and vital. It helps get critical messages out to the right people to assist their well-being.

Your digital content can boost positive brand impressions. As new digital marketing strategies emerge, you can maximize the efficiency of your marketing expenses and generate higher return rates. By embracing innovative health marketing principles, we can help you reinvigorate your organization’s marketing initiatives and be in a better position to service your customers.

SUMMARY: Healthcare SEO and Marketing Integration

Learn more about how we can partner together to give your audience the best healthcare-related search results and marketing solutions. With proven skills and client success stories, we’ll help you reduce endless hours otherwise spent searching for the help you need.

Physicians and healthcare operation can now reach their ideal audience with patient education. Both healthcare professionals and brands can become industry thought leaders. As more patients turn to online

Contact Hill Web Marketing at 651-206-2410 to capture new leads and grow your business.

 

* https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf

** https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02663821211034079