You have probably heard about internet marketing for physicians in one form or another, whether it’s all the talk about social media--Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, or whether it’s all the talk about SEO, Organic Search, Landing Pages, Conversions, and Blogs.
It’s easy to get confused about all the different terms associated with this phenomenon, and we’re sure you probably have questions about why – and whether—this all applies to you as a physician.
We’ll start with a short glossary of what all these terms mean, and then try to give an explanation of why an inbound marketing program (the industry name given to this whole phenomenon) is a good idea for your practice.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the process by which a website can be coded to maximize exposure in popular search engines like Google, Bing, MSN or Yahoo. When a prospective patient types a search into one of these search engines, the search results will include a list of web pages that have content relating to the search term. The goal is to “rank” on the first page of results in any of these search engines in hopes that the prospective patient will see your practice among the results and click on the link to take them to your website. Once on the website, your stellar and engaging content and blog will wow them into making an appointment for a consultation or office visit.
Blog: Short for “weblog,” a blog is a short article or essay on a given topic that is posted to your website by you to impart useful information to the reader. Blogs can be very short (like a Q&A format) or long and published in multiple installments. Hubspot (a web-based inbound marketing software program and content management system) recommends blog articles be 200 to 800 words. Apparently, this is the length of information that Google will “index” when its “spiders” “crawl” your site, updating their search engine algorithms. “Spiders” are electronic robots that “crawl” sites looking for new content to be indexed into the vast universe of electronic information available on the web. The goal is to publish new content—blog articles—two to five times weekly to keep the spiders coming back to your site, looking for even more new content. In a large practice, it shouldn’t be hard to get publication frequency like this, but for the smaller practice, don’t be discouraged, even blogging once per week will ensure the spiders crawl you that often. The point is that the more often you’re crawled, the higher you’ll rank in search engines for specific terms found within the text of your website. Google’s search algorithms reward sites that publish useful, relevant content regularly with higher rankings in the search results—and that’s how you get on the first page of results for given search terms.
The process a prospect goes through when typing a search into a search engine is called organic search, and the resulting traffic to your site is called “organic traffic,” because the web user found your site organically by typing in search terms completely unrelated to your specific website’s name. When a prospect or current patient goes directly to your site by typing in the web address, it is called “direct traffic”--because they came to your site directly without engaging the search engine’s help.
Increasing organic traffic to your site is the goal, and this is done by embedding what are called “long-tail keywords” into your blog articles’ titles and bodies. Because it can be nearly impossible to rank on the first page of Google results for a search term like “family physician,” you would want to use a longer search term to narrow down the results, and that increases your chances of ranking for the keyword—something like “family physician inFarmington Hills.” This significantly narrows the results that searcher is going to find, and if you’ve optimized your site to have this phrase embedded in the text, you’re likely to rank for that long-tail keyword.
So why is it important to incorporate a website and inbound marketing into your practice’s marketing portfolio? Because that’s where your patients are spending their time. WebMD and other diagnostic and informational sites like it are surfed by your patients often before they even make the decision to see a doctor about their illness or infirmity. Your prospective clients are discussing their symptoms with friends and family members before they ever involve you, and they’re researching conditions on the internet. You want to make sure that your name pops up in results when someone searches for information about chronic gastritis or chest pain.
In the next installment of this blog post, we’ll discuss Social Media—Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube as places you want to establish your presence as a means of increasing your organic and direct traffic by posting blogs and engaging in pertinent conversation on forums available on these websites.
