The healthcare industry has seen its fair share of the spotlight, but no more so than recently. If you’re one of the many employees working with a medical office, you know a thing or two about competition. With an endless number of specialties and services vying for the same patients in a geographical area, communicating your unique benefits over your competitors can sometimes feel impossible. The good news is that with the right digital marketing strategy, building awareness for your specialty clinic is well within your grasp. This article is written with the understanding that the tactics below are the best fit for executing toward your business’ goals and the Digital Strategy.
SEO
The proper SEO strategy is the bread and butter of any business. This is true no matter how large or small a company may be, regardless of its industry. Without the right SEO strategy, no one will organically find your business. If your specialty clinic is in a particularly competitive niche, SEO becomes exponentially more important. Say you offer urgent care to those in the area in effort to treat patients faster than a full hospital, you’ll be competing with every other “quick” medical care provider in the area. Proper SEO strategy will ensure that your clinic appears before any others, attracting patients before competing clinics have a chance.
If you go to a restaurant, and the food makes you sick, you’ll likely seek nourishment at a competing establishment the next time you’re in the area. In medical situations however, patients have infinitely more to lose by seeking services at the wrong business. Time permitting, depending on the urgency of the medical situation, patients can and will do everything they can to make sure that the specialty clinic they choose is a reputable one. Proper SEO communicates trust, professionalism, and know-how to your patients. A poorly optimized website feels off to both search engines and human users alike. A thin content strategy might say that you don’t have enough knowledge in that particular area to offer expert advice.
Your SEO strategy needs to bring your clinic to the top of the search engine results page while displaying you as a trusted and knowledgeable name in medical care.
Rich Snippets
One way to make it easier and faster to communicate valuable information is through rich snippets. These are the lines of text that appear below a page’s title in search results. Rich snippets pull important information from your website and showcase it in the search result. Specialty clinics today are using rich snippets to showcase a preview of their services under the guise of offering a shortcut for potential patients to navigate straight to important pages most relevant to them.
Rich snippets also medical care providers from hospitals to individual doctors are showcasing their reviews as a part of their search result in an effort to win patients over from nearby doctors with lower reviews.
Emphasize Local
When it comes to building awareness for a specialty clinic, local SEO is likely the most important asset to use in your marketing strategy. Optimizing correctly based on your address is strongly correlated with a first page spot in search results for local search queries. A white paper published by localvox.com, local SEO experts, found that a whopping 70% of appointments begin with a search query. Of those, 90% have no one brand in mind when searching for health care. This means that when a new patient is searching for a specialty health service it’s anyone’s game, and you want your clinic to be in the running. If all other information checks out, patients will likely go to the specialty clinic that’s closest to them.
This means including locally optimized landing pages in your SEO strategy to earn patients living right in your backyard. If you’re located in St. Louis Park, don’t only mention “Minneapolis” in your website’s content. Optimizing for your specific location will earn visits from the patients located right in your own backyard.
Making sure that your Google+ page is locally optimized, getting reviews, and regularly monitored is the first step in a successful local SEO strategy. Then, ensure that your information is both present and accurate on local search directories. These two factors are instrumental in building awareness for your clinic.
Responsive Website
While a responsive website itself doesn’t necessarily increase awareness, it’s important to have a site that’s optimized for mobile users. For those who don’t know, a responsive website is one that automatically adjusts to fit the size of your screen. Rather than have an entirely separate mobile site for your brand, a responsive website allows one site to seamlessly flow across multiple devices.
If someone is in need of urgent medical attention, they’ll likely use the browsing device that’s closest to them. These days, that’s usually a tablet or cell phone. If the website is difficult to navigate on one of these devices, that potential customer will likely move onto the next website.
SEM (Paid Search)
In many industries, paid advertising doesn’t always pay off. This is not one of them. When building awareness is your goal, ads are a sure way to get your brand name in front of new patients. And if you only pay when they visit your website, it’s sure to pay off, right?
The biggest challenge with paid ads to your website is to execute the campaign properly. We’ve all heard of those individuals who are so immunized to ads that they don’t even look at the first three results on a page anymore. Though this is true to some percent of Internet users, the majority still absorb and interact with Paid Ads.
For starters, purchase the appropriate keywords for your campaign. You may think you want to cast a bigger net, and purchase “health clinic in minneapolis,” but it’s important to remember pros and cons of short-tail and long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords represent search queries that are generally 3-4 words or longer, and are more specific than This is especially relevant to a specialty clinic. There may be fewer people searching for your unique service, but they’ll be more likely to convert after seeing your website. Purchasing more popular keywords is not only more expensive, but almost always results in a high bounce rate and nearly no conversions.
Speaking of bouncing, it’s also extremely important to have someone regularly monitoring your PPC campaign. If it’s not worth the money you’re spending, put it on hold and reevaluate why it’s not converting.
If you’re hiring an digital marketing agency to build awareness for your specialty clinic, it’s important that the agency you choose has the expertise to properly execute these tactics. Building awareness among your consumer base is the first step in any clinic’s success. When done right, it’ll make all the difference.
You may have guessed, but here at Snap we pride ourselves on growing brands both for users and search engines. If you’re interested in growing your specialty clinic’s digital presence, please contact us at 763.548.2297 or click below.
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