We hope you enjoy this guest post from John Morgan, SEO Manager at Team SI.

Search engine optimization is one of the most forgotten or poorly implemented parts of children’s hospital digital planning strategy. With a little work and adherence to a solid strategy, your organization can benefit from the amazing benefits of top rankings for well-trafficked keywords.

Use Your AdWords Data to Your Advantage

If you have an AdWords campaign as a part of your children’s hospital digital plan, you have a wealth of knowledge at your disposal. Here’s how to milk it for your SEO campaign:

Usually, when you are running a paid media campaign, you’re bidding on keywords that are of value to your organization, right? There are a few metrics that are monitored to keep a finger on the pulse of the campaign: impressions, clicks, click through rate and average cost per click.

After your campaign has been running and it’s been optimized, you can use that data to find out what keywords it is best to optimize for. Look at what keywords have the highest click through rate, but also have a substantial search volume, number of impressions and clicks. Also, the average cost per click can give insight as to how valuable (in dollars) the keyword is.

Monitor Your Backlinks

Websites are always changing, so it is important to keep an eye on other sites and organizations linking to your children’s hospital website at any given time. Look for -

• A significant drop in backlinks
• Links from spammy directory sites
• Links that you don’t have that could be useful

Link to Authoritative Sites

When you link to a few authoritative sites within your page copy, Google is more inclined to view that page as a hub for information on that topic. Google loves it when your site is helpful, and linking out to authoritative sites is a signal of helpfulness.

Deep Linking

If your children’s hospital website is anything like the healthcare organizations we’ve worked on, there can be many, many layers of parent-child pages. For example, you may have a broad topic page that drills down to a very specific treatment:

• Musculoskeletal
  • Orthopedics
    • Spine
      • Spinal surgery
        • Vertebral Fracture Repair
          • Vertebroplasty

That’s quite a journey! What is important to remember is the opportunity to help search engines and users find the treatments you want them to. This can be achieved by deep linking on a higher-level page.

Use YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine, right behind Google. The beauty (and opportunity) here is that YouTube videos are often displayed in Google search engine results.

If you see a query where YouTube videos show up, that’s an opportunity for your organization to create a unique, compelling video that can introduce people to your healthcare organization in a powerful way.

Monitor Your Rankings

If you don’t know where you stand in the rankings for the hundreds of keywords relevant to the services your hospital offers, odds are your digital plan execution may not be as efficient as it could be. By monitoring your rankings, you can find content gaps and address them quickly and efficiently. You can find opportunities where you rank on the second page, but the content needs just a little help to reach the first page, where there is significant increase in visibility.

Monitor Your Competitors

Monitoring your website’s rankings is an obvious win, but taking it a step further and keeping an eye on your competitors can give you a serious step up. One of my favorite strategies is keeping tabs on competitor market share to see where other players stand in the rankings game. By doing this, you can usually identify what techniques the stronger sites are employing to rank highly, then outdo them.