In the first two installments of this blog post about internet marketing for physicians, or inbound marketing as it’s called (SEO & Blogs, Social Media), we discussed the basics surrounding social media—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+—and the importance of blogging and social media engagement in boosting the selling power of your website. We also discussed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the importance of having your website optimized so you rank on the first page of search results for specific keywords designed to attract your ideal patient.
In this installment, we will discuss the three pillars of inbound marketing and the blessings and curses of white hat and black hat SEO. There are three “pillars” in the structure of inbound marketing for physicians: Attract, Convert, & Analyze. Mastery of each of these three pillars will ensure you have the proper foundation for building a successful inbound marketing program.
Attract: The key to attracting visitors to your site is to show up in searches with pertinent content that will answer questions and concerns of people who are looking for the information. You do this by optimizing your site for certain keywords designed to attract your ideal patient. If you are a dermatologist, for example, you might want to try to rank for “acne treatment in Farmington Hills,” or “rosacea solutions for adults.” The idea is to figure out what your most likely patients are searching for, and then blog and create other web content (contests, forums, etc.) that contain keywords you can rank on.
Convert: There should be offers for information or services that will be of interest to the average person visiting, like for a free paper describing a malady or condition, or for a free consultation relating to the content they found. These offers are placed behind “calls to action” — buttons placed on the site that prospective patients can click on that take them to a “landing page” where they fill out a form giving you information about them in order to be permitted to download the information or sign up for the offer they want. These buttons are essentially “internal links” to another page on your own site (landing pages), where the visitor will be given more information about the download or offer, and then also given an opportunity to provide valuable contact information about themselves in order to receive the offer. You can then use this “lead,” to enter into an email or phone conversation with the prospective patient geared toward wooing them into becoming an active patient.
Analyze: It’s crucial to analyze the performance of your web marketing to ensure you’re getting a good return on investment from your efforts. The final analysis should be that you improve your patient base through leads from the web and social media, but what to do if that’s not obviously happening? There are multiple components you want to analyze, including the amount of traffic your site is receiving from organic search, the performance of your calls to action and your landing pages, and your lead nurturing campaigns. (A lead nurturing campaign is a set of emails written to “leads” with offers of more information or consultations that are designed to gradually move them closer to the “sale,” or to making an appointment.). If people are not clicking on your calls to action, it could be either because the offer is not compelling enough, or it could simply be that the design of the button itself is not prominent or inviting enough to make them want to click on it. Try redesigning one component of the button with each test. Try creating two versions of a call to action for a single offer and A/B testing them to see which is the most effective. The same is true for your landing pages. If people are not converting on your landing pages, try some similar testing with these pages and see what bumps up those conversion rates. Use action-oriented language in CTAs (calls to action) and on landing pages to instill a sense of desire and urgency in the visitor. Partnering with a content management system provider like HubSpot (www.hubspot.com) will provide you with tools and education to best help you perform these analytics. Their web-based software is a content management system (so you can edit your site yourself without knowing html – the web coding language) and marketing analytics platform that is reasonably priced and very easy to use even for the computer-illiterate.
One of the best bits of advice I got from Hubspot is to “Fail Fast.” If one or more of the changes you’ve made to your CTAs or landing pages isn’t having the desired effect, move on to changing another component and then another until you start to see the results you want. There is no sense leaving an offer out there that people don’t want or leaving a button on your site that people won’t click on.
As for ranking on search engines, there is a whole science to this aspect of SEO that you’ll want to study. Perform searches for “Black Hat SEO” and “White Hat SEO” to find out what practices are included in each model, and learn why it’s crucial to your internet marketing success that you not engage in black hat activities. Doing so can get your site blacklisted from the search engine results and completely ruin your web presence for a long time—a scenario you can’t afford if you’re trying to grow your patient base. You want to foster an environment on the web where other sites will produce links to your site (called inbound links). But these links should be from pertinent content on the originating site to pertinent content on your site that makes sense in the context of where the link is coming from. Link farms (sites that feature virtually no pertinent content but are just a list of links to related or unrelated websites) are one example of black hat SEO tactics; you want to build links into your site from other sites organically, by offering good content that people can use. The number of inbound links your site has will affect your ranking in search engine results.
Another black hat tactic is link purchasing or link exchanging, which you don’t want to do unless it makes sense in the context of both websites. It’s important that your inbound links are placed on sites with valuable content—remember, content is king—so the search engines will be able to index the links as part of something they deem “valuable.”
Like I said, there’s a whole science to this, and you’ll want to study it to make sure you’re staying on the right side of the search engines’ spiders. Hubspot’s website and forums feature a wealth of information on all aspects of inbound marketing that can help you dial up your internet marketing program so you’re getting the results you want from the web.
For more information about this series of blog posts, feel free to call me at 248-932-2607. Remember, Medical Billing Resources is a billing company, not a web marketing company, so I will offer what limited help I can to answer any questions you may have about the series, or to point you in the right direction for finding the answers I know you need.
