Don’t think about your hospital’s content as thousands and thousands of pages.
Instead, look at it page-by-page.
That’s the point the two presenters at “Make Your Health Content Smarter Than Google” wanted to get across at Greystone’s Healthcare Internet Conference. The presentation was led by Mike Maloney, Manager of Web Strategy at University of Vermont Medical Center and Ahava Leibtag, President of Aha Media Group.
Before discussing content, the two shared information on how people search for content. Take a look at these stats:
- Patients who book an appointment conducted 15+ searches
- Search drives nearly three times as many visitors to hospital sites, compared to non-search visitors
- 84 percent of patients use online and offline sources for hospital research
And here’s the three topics patients look for the most: diseases/conditions, treatments/procedures and doctors.
The message Leibtag told marketers? Stop trying to be like WebMD. That’s just not going to happen.
“You need to look at what makes your hospital special,” Leibtag says. “You could be writing about your expertise; patient testimonials; or what kind of care patients should expect at your hospital. Your goal should be to produce original content. That’s what’s going to help you with search engines.”
Leibtag said that each page of your content matters.
“When you write something, remember that people make quick decisions, based on the information you provide them,” Leibtag says. “Ask yourself: ‘What do you want people to do on this page?’ If you convert one patient, it’s worth the money you’re spending on content creation.”
Leibtag said the goal of content is to make sure patients feel like they’re in control of their healthcare journey.
“We believe that conditions pages should move patients quickly over to treatment pages,” Leibtag says. “A patient already knows what’s wrong with them. They want to find out: ‘How are you going to fix it?’”
Next, the University of Vermont Medical Center shared their content strategy. The goals were to:
- Develop original content
- Showcase doctors and experts
- Promote conditions and diseases
- Optimize underutilized content
One component of the content strategy centered on its blog. The team post two times a day, which has seen a 33 percent rise in organic traffic. Doctors have even started guest blogging.
“We send out a healthcare email everyday with headlines and insert blog posts into them,” Maloney says. “When other doctors see their peers are blogging, they want to blog, too. We have so many blogs — we’ve got months of content to plug in.”
The team also made a big effort to do more provider biographies and videos, nabbing a 46 percent rise in organic traffic.
“We really blew out provider bios and information,” “Maloney says. “We’re focusing on what treatments and conditions they provide. We show their academic medical experience, but also — who they are as a person.”
Leibtag says it doesn’t matter how you pull people in to read your conditions and treatment pages —whether it’s through social media or videos — but to make sure you’re giving people the full picture of what you can offer.
The two presenters have been working together for five years. Leibtag said a component of what made their relationship successful was the help of physicians from The University of Vermont Medical Center.
“It’s important to be a strategic partner with physicians,” Leibtag says. “When they understand what we’re trying to do, they become part of the process — not a roadblock.”