“I don’t really pay attention to our top search terms,” says one of my customers, a marketing analyst at a prestigious academic medical center. “They are mostly just a variation of our hospital’s name.” For a lot of analysts at hospitals and health systems, especially those cursed with having an easily misspelled name, I can understand why they feel this way. Top keywords are frequently filled with various versions (both correct and misspelled) of the organization’s names and hometowns. Our research shows that across all hospitals, the average is about one in four visitors who arrive at a hospital or health system’s Web site from a search engine use some version of the organization’s name as a keyword.
I truly feel sorry for any organization that has an apostrophe in its name, or is located in a town that is hard to spell. Your top 10 non-paid keywords probably look something like this:
1. St. Luke’s hospital
2. St. Lukes hospital
3. St. Luke’s hospital chattanooga
4. St. Luke’s
5. St. Lukes
6. St. Luke’s hospital jobs
7.
www.stlukestn.com
8. St. Luke’s hospital tn
9. St. Luke’s hospital chatanooga
10. St. Lukes hospital tn
Lists like the one above can be extremely frustrating, to say the least. Chances are that overworked Web analysts feel that they have far more productive things to do with their time than mining this data for useful nuggets. (Side note: please don’t get me started on the people who type the URL in as a search term instead of putting it in the address line. I’ll save my ranting about these folks for a future blog post)
However, organizations that fail to leverage their top organic keywords could be missing out on opportunities to make their Web site better. Several top hospital/health system Web sites – particularly those with licensed health content - consistently have clinical terms or interactive tools at the top of their keywords. Clinical terms are major sources of traffic for these organizations, and serve as an entryway to licensed health content and beyond. The most successful marketers create layers of useful content and links around these keywords, ultimately attempting to shepherd these new visitors towards value-added actions such as making an appointment with one of their physicians. Another bonus: those who arrive this way tend to be net new visitors to the site.
“We noticed that people were searching for information about a specific condition that we specialize in treating, and we built an entire flow on our Web site around this,“ says one marketing director whose top search term is in fact a clinical condition. “Online search (with this keyword) has become one of our best pipelines for new customers in a key service line.” Obviously, many visitors are not local and conversion rates can be low. But without savvy marketers leveraging keywords, most of this traffic would have gone somewhere else.
If you have licensed health content on your Web site and are not paying attention to your top keywords, you may want to reconsider. There can be rewards if you are patient enough to cut through the noise.