How to Market Your Healthcare Services Practice Online

Website Marketing Tips for Dentists, Plastic Surgeons, Physicians, and All Healthcare Service Providers

The healthcare industry accounts for more than $2.5 trillion in spending annually. The Office of the Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services projects spending to grow by about 5.8% per year through 2020. That’s 1.1% higher than some projections for the growth of our nation’s economy! Competition will be intense – how are you going to position yourself as the best service provider in your field of practice? And how will you get the attention of prospective patients? There’s a number of ways to do both, but the highest-ROI method for doing so is through inbound marketing. There’s no other marketing technique you can use that costs you less and gets you more for your dollar. If you run a smaller healthcare practice, though, you might be so busy with daily operations that you haven’t had the time to learn about inbound marketing. You may have heard it called by other names, like “SEO,” “search engine optimization,” “website marketing,” or “digital marketing.” The Truth about Inbound Marketing We’ll level with you – there’s a lot of misinformation out there, so it’s important that you know the truth. If you choose to look at a number of companies offering “SEO services,” you’re going to hear many different opinions. In reality, SEO is the process of tweaking your website and earning links so it ranks highly in Google search. However, it’s just one key component of inbound marketing. For many companies that “market your website,” this is all they do.

When you look at the big picture of inbound marketing, these are several core components of success:

1. A sleek, modern, and organized web design. 2. Unique, compelling content that solves your website visitor’s problems and answers

their questions. 3. Technical SEO, which helps Google understand what your site’s all about and how

to rank it. 4. Social media and general promotion of your website, healthcare practice, and

services

We’ll take a look at each of these components and show you what you need to be doing to convince your website’s visitors you really are the best solution for their healthcare needs.

I. Attract the Initial Attention of Your Visitors with an Amazing Website Design

The first thing any visitor to any website notices is the design. Having an elegant, modern, and organized website design can increase the business you get from your website by 50-400% (versus an old, outdated website design)! We can’t make any specific promises here, but that statistic is quoted to show you just how important website design is in showcasing your practice – after all, first impression is the most important! Think of it this way: your website is your modern storefront. People do not drive around in their cars or look in the yellow pages for the services they need anymore. Instead, they go online, read a little bit about your services (and your competitor’s), and then decide who to call. In the past, when people shopped on foot or by driving around and looking, they would judge a business’s overall quality by the attractiveness of its physical storefront. If you had a beautiful, organized storefront, people were much more likely to enter in. If it was ugly, had cracked windows, and a door falling off the hinges, they would be very unlikely to enter. So the same idea applies with your website design. It doesn’t have to be a marvel to the eye (although that’s nice for your patients), but it should look new, be organized, and create an otherwise professional impression.

Check out this example of a simple, but very effective, website design for a plastic surgeon:

Passing the Eyeball Test

The first thing visitors to your website ask themselves is, ”Does this website appear to be for a company that’s still in business?” This website far exceeds that test. It has big, bold social media icons in the upper right. There’s a noticeable logo to the top left. It has very few square edges. Do you notice how every corner is rounded, and that the menus aren’t sitting in square boxes? That gives a more modern impression. There’s enough text, but the site is also very graphical. And the graphics have vibrant, beautiful colors, which at the same time don’t overwhelm. This sounds so simple in practice, but you’d be surprised how many websites out there don’t meet this standard. There’s plenty of local businesses, and even monstrous corporations, with websites that

make them look like they’re no longer in business. If you’re really interested, take a couple hours one day, search on a product or service you need, and click on results from page 1-10 of Google. Look closely at the website design, and you’ll find many that show exactly what we mean. Another important aspect of a website’s design to consider is whether or not it is responsive. With mobile devices accounting for nearly 50% of online searches and Google placing higher search rankings for responsive website, it is necessary to have a website that is mobile-friendly.

II. Now that You Have Captured Interest, How Do You Keep It? Content!

You might have heard the cliché, “Content is king.” Now though, it’s dated, and the new mantra for creating content is, “Quality content that solves your patient’s problems better than anyone else’s is king.” At the local business level, content of any kind is hard to find on many websites, and quality content even more difficult to stumble across. Just by writing content you’ll stand out, but by writing the most helpful content possible, you’re going even a step further ahead of the rest. What are some examples of “quality content?” If you run a dental practice, these would be some very helpful ideas for patients:

• How to Take Care of Your Teeth…After You Leave Our Office. • The Top 5 Causes of Cavities (And What You Can do to Prevent Them). • Should You Use a Soft or Stiff-Bristle Toothbrush, and Why?

It’s tempting to think this is how consumer psychology works online: “Oh wow, that’s an incredible blog post! I’m so excited I have to use this dentist’s services right now. I’m going to find their phone number and give them a call!”

But that’s not how it works at all. Inbound marketing thought leader Moz addresses this point in a video called “The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing.” This is how blogging really works in the minds of consumers:

1. You create an amazing piece of content, the very best of its kind available on the web

2. Readers think it’s awesome and share it with others in their social networks 3. They remember, “Oh, Dr. Johnson wrote that great blog post on preventing

cavities.” They have a bias to use your services in the future when they have the need, but there’s no guarantee this will happen.

Blogging does work – you do get more leads (and much higher quality ones) the more you blog. The key point to keep in mind is that it’s a long-term (but high-ROI) strategy for attracting more patients.

III. Help Google Understand What Your Website’s about with Technical SEO

Unfortunately, because of many fly-by-night companies who engaged in manipulative practices to squeeze more money out of clients, SEO gets a bad rap. Remember the company Moz from earlier? They actually changed their name from SEO Moz to Moz to avoid this negative stigma. And now they talk more about inbound marketing than SEO. The truth is SEO is a critical component of succeeding in inbound marketing. Yes, some companies use dishonest, black-hat tactics to boost your rankings. And you do have to be careful when choosing someone to do your SEO because if you do too many things Google doesn’t like, they’re going to penalize you. For smaller businesses, that can mean losing almost all of your online business overnight. Google actually encourages SEO, so it’s perfectly legitimate to do. But, you just have to go about it in a way that they approve of. Technical SEO does get very technical and dense, so we’ll just give you some of the basics:

1. Keyword Research

This is really the crux of your inbound marketing strategy. Choose keywords with too high of competition, and it’ll take years for you to rank for them (if you ever do). Choose the wrong keywords, and they won’t get you as many leads as you’d like. Take a look at a few keywords people might use to search for “dentist Dallas, TX”:

Keyword Monthly Searches According to Google Adwords

Dentist Dallas TX 260 Pediatric dentist Dallas 90 Dallas Dentist 590 Dentist in Dallas, Texas 50 Dentist Austin, TX 1300 Dentist Garland, TX 110 Dentist North Dallas 20

The one that really pops out is the “Austin, TX” keyword because of its high search volume, right? You have to be careful with that kind of thinking because a high-volume keyword like that has intense competition. It could take 18 months, or even longer, before you finally rank on page one for it. You can shoot for it, but view it more like “winning the Google lottery” than anything else. You’re better off spending your time and money on those low search-volume keywords like “dentist North Dallas” or “dentist in Dallas, Texas” or “pediatric dentist Dallas.”

But how are you going to get any real business from low search volumes like those? The truth is that with long-tail keywords (they have a total of 3 phrases or more), and lower search volumes, there’s lesser competition. And people are more likely to buy with these types of phrases. So, you get lesser traffic, but more patients actually come in the door because you don’t have to compete with other healthcare provides as much!

2. Other Aspects of Technical SEO

But technical SEO doesn’t end with keyword research. To make it easier for Google to rank you for the keywords you want, technical SEO also involves:

1. Optimizing each page for 1-4 keyphrases 2. Using those keyphrases in the right spots (title, H1/H2 tags, content) 3. Making sure URLs are clean, sensible, and include your key phrases 4. Minimizing page load times 5. Optimizing the ALT text on images 6. Ensuring usage of natural anchor text on all internal links 7. Checking for a clean, logical site architecture 8. Eliminating duplicate content 9. Submitting a sitemap to Google 10. And much, much more…

And it also includes routine website maintenance tasks, some of which Google makes very important in its rankings. Here are some of the most important ones:

1. That all the links on your website work. 2. If your website uses the simplest, most efficient coding possible. 3. Making sure your website has regular backups. 4. Updating your CMS to the most recent version, and fixing any problems

caused by plugin updates. 5. Check your coding to make sure it meets the latest WC3 standards 6. Ensuring website compatibility on all devices (tablet PCs, smartphones,

desktops, laptops). 7. Making sure all code displays properly on all major browsers (Firefox,

Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari).

Technical SEO almost never ends, but this gives you an idea of what it involves. It needs to be done on a regular basis, just like you perform routine maintenance on your car.

IV. How do People Get to Know about Your Website? Through Social Media & Outreach

The SEO of yesteryear used to involve finding as many websites as possible to slam down your links on. Some SEOs still do that, but Google has very publicly stated not to do so. Some SEOs do get away with it for a while, but eventually Google’s algorithm updates catch up with them. At the local level, what you want to do is get as many citations (mentions of your name, address, and phone number aka “NAP” information) and links as possible from quality sources. Citations and links are still the primary factor that drives your site up the search rankings. Citations most directly benefit your local search rankings, while links most directly benefit your organic/national search rankings. This is basically how getting each works:

1. Citations

The easiest way to get these is to get listed on the major business directories. Angie’s List, Yelp, Yext, Google, Bing, Yahoo are a few for starters (and there’s hundreds more!). You also want to get involved with the BBB, Chamber of Commerce, and any other organizations related to your industry. Other strategies for getting citations include writing guest blog posts, getting published in your local newspaper, or creating press releases. It’s agonizingly hard, dull, and boring work to do, but you need to keep getting these on a regular basis!

2. Links

Building links, just like getting citations, is again a tough, time-consuming process. Link-building involves creating stellar content, manually e-mailing website owners, and letting them know about the content. Some choose to link to it, while others do not. The better your content, the more likely they are to link to it. You’ll also do guest blogs, but you have to be careful to not overdo them because Google watches those very closely these days. You also cannot have over-optimized anchor text. Google even penalizes websites that don’t deserve it on occasion, so you have to watch this entire process with extreme caution.

What Role Does Social Media Play in All of This? Social media does a number of things:

• Your follower count/social shares count influences your search rankings (and may become a bigger rankings factor in the future).

• You can promote your content and earn more links/citations. • You can run your latest deals and offers and earn more business.

For healthcare practices, you’re going to want to be on Facebook for sure, and possibly also Twitter and Pinterest (great visual advertising for dentists, cosmetic surgeons, and dermatologists). As a local healthcare practice, you have a nice advantage readily available to you to help you get more followers: Patients already come in your door! So, make sure you run special offers from time to time and let your patients know about them in-person. Your Facebook page doesn’t need to be anything elaborate, just make sure it’s neat and clean with your practice’s branding like this:

A few additional pointers about social media:

• You don’t need a huge number of followers to be successful! Around 100 is a good start, and if you’ve got 300 or more, that’s a nice number to earn business from and advertise via word-of-mouth.

• 80% of your posts must offer useful information, while just 20% should promote your business and special offers.

• Switch up the types of content – video, blog articles, pictures, and infographics - to keep things interesting.

• Be as relevant to current events as possible (holidays, The World Cup, The Super Bowl etc…).

• Review your analytics regularly to see which posts get the most engagement, and strategize how to deliver more of the same to your patients in the future.

• Try out different promotions with difference incentives, but always tie the incentive to what you do (Offer a discount on your services or a free exam instead of a free gas card, for example).

• Add bullet point about FB ads/promoted posts

Putting It All Together Wow, that’s a ton of very specific, actionable information on how inbound marketing works. The reality of it is that it’s very complex, and it takes a lot of hard work from experienced specialists to successfully execute. Some business owners believe they can do it themselves. You can – but you’ll spend all your time doing inbound marketing and not running your practice. And when you’re actually doing the work, we’ll be honest with you, it’s a relentless grind. You’re an expert at the healthcare services you provide. You certainly wouldn’t ask someone else to teach themselves to do what you do, and then start doing it right away! So that’s why it makes sense to hire someone experienced at inbound marketing. You get to add your input on and approve all the work, without having to get lost in all the details. i5 web works has helped many healthcare practices in different niches achieve awesome web rankings and get more patients from their websites. Contact us online, or call 855.367.4599 to begin your journey to web success today! We’ll talk with you for FREE – there’s absolutely no obligation to purchase.