Understanding and using the customer/patient journey to develop key messages and materials has been a major part of the healthcare marketing field for years. But as David Edelman and Marc Singer of McKinsey and Company point out in their Harvard Business Review article, Shaping the Digital Customer Journey, marketers must take a more active role in shaping the journeys that our customers take online, rather than merely following customers along their consumer decision-making process and hoping for the best.
One of the most effective ways to shape the path consumers take is content marketing. Content marketing uses high-quality, valuable content to attract the attention of your target audience, provide them with new or important information, engage them with your brand, and lead them down key conversion funnels like requesting an appointment or finding a physician. Marketo has a great intro to content marketing if you’d like to learn more.
To say that content marketing is growing is an understatement. According to MarketingProfs, 2 million blog posts are pumped out every day and in their 2017 Digital Marketing Trends in Healthcare Report, Geonetric found that 68% of 164 healthcare organizations surveyed believed they were ahead of the competition in content marketing.
But it’s not just enough to do content marketing – you need to use it effectively to grow qualified leads.
As Neil Patel argues, content marketing and SEO are like peanut butter and jelly. If you’re trying to grow qualified site traffic and conversions you need not only engaging content – but content that has been developed with SEO techniques in mind, so users can find it when they need it.
Start with a strong technical foundation
Before you begin infusing SEO best practices with your content marketing strategies, you must have a consumer-friendly website foundation. UX (user experience) and the usability of your website have a major impact on Google rankings, how customers interact with your content, and the success of your content marketing efforts.
Technical considerations that impact the success of your content marketing/SEO strategies include:
- Site load speed
- Mobile friendliness
- Key content pages are listed on XML sitemaps
- URLs are as short as possible
- Relevant internal links used throughout
Capture content ideas that are hot
The next step is to start infusing SEO best practices into your content planning.
At Tufts Medical Center, we do this by using free keyword research tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner and keywordtool.io. These tools help us better understand how consumers in our market are talking about and searching for key services. By knowing what consumers want and need, we can develop content that meets those needs – grabbing their attention and moving them further down the customer journey. Developing content based on language used commonly in search will only grow in importance as the rise of voice search continues to impact how healthcare consumers find and choose providers.
Side note: these tools are also amazingly helpful when assisting a service line in naming a new program or center.
In addition to doing keyword research, good old-fashioned manual research is also helpful in identifying content and organic search opportunities. You can do this via your news clipping service or by using detailed search features on sites like Google News and Reddit to keep an eye on relevant topics.
At Tufts MC, the media relations/social media team works closely with the service line and digital marketing leads to identify content development priorities. We meet for 30 minutes two times a week to go through our strategic priorities, current news topics and trends we’re seeing in the hospital, in Boston and across the country.
When our team is evaluating a topic for content development we typically ask ourselves a few key questions:
- Is it unique or timely?
- Is it relevant to and useful for a general audience?
- Does the service line we’re promoting have availability? Good patient experience scores?
- Do we have a relevant photograph or illustration? Or can we create or buy one?
Create SERP-friendly content
Once you’ve identified a keyword-friendly, relevant topic, you can begin writing. Here are a few tips that take SEO and content marketing best practices into account:
- The best thing you can do to improve your search engine ranking for key topics is to develop clear, unique, relevant content.
- Use your keyword research to write targeted content using terms that your audience is familiar with. Don’t be awkward – infuse these keywords naturally and avoid keyword stuffing (using key words so many times it interferes with the meaning of the content).
- Make sure your content is highly scannable. Use strong titles, H1s and H2s (in the correct order) to break up the content into manageable sections. Bullet points and lists also help to organize information.
Baby got backlinks
Now that your content has been developed and posted on your website, it’s important to think about finding authoritative and relevant backlinks (a link from an external website back to yours), which increase your chances of ranking higher for that content in organic search. A few tips on backlinks:
- Focus on getting backlinks from sites with real traffic. Check out Paddy Moogan’s What Makes a Good (and Bad) Link article on the importance of having trustworthy, diverse and relevant backlinks. One suggestion I’ve seen but find slightly overwhelming without a tool like Yext or SIM Partners is to grow your backlinks by claiming your profiles on niche listings sites like Vitals and Healthgrades.
- Partner with local bloggers and media partners. You can do this by engaging in native content programs or by developing relationships with local media and bloggers by providing them with quality, relevant, newsworthy content. The key here is to ensure that any content shared with these sites is backlinked to specific pages on your site so you can further engage the user and count those interactions.
- Avoid and remove spammy backlinks. If a large number of spammy sites backlink to your site your website’s PageRank will be negatively impacted. I use WebMaster Tools to evaluate where our referral traffic is coming from and keep an eye out for sites that look like they could be spam. Google provides instructions on how to disavow spammy links but notes that the disavow tool is an advanced feature and should be used with caution.
- There is some argument in our field on whether social links may or may not be credible backlinks. Kissmetrics’ 5 Think You Need to Know About Social Media and SEO post argues that while (per Google’s Matt Cutts) the authority of a social account doesn’t impact search rank, links that you post to your social media accounts could be marked as credible backlinks. The post also notes that today social media channels also serve as search engines as consumers use Twitter and Facebook to learn about brands and read through hash-tagged posts on topics that they’re interested in.
Share the power of SEO with team members
Because content marketing is relatively new, especially to the healthcare, many hospital marketing teams are struggling with determining who owns content planning, development, SEO review and distribution work.
Depending on the size and current structure of your marketing team, you should look for ways to break down silos and share knowledge on both content and SEO best practices across disciplines. Our team members have found this collaboration to not only be great for career development but to have a major impact on web traffic, audience engagement and conversions.
By Allison Wendorf | Posted June 27, 2017
SHSMD Digital Engagement Taskforce Member
Manager of Marketing and Web
Tufts Medical Center