Five Key Mobile Website Design Tips for Hospitals and Clinics Written by SQHealth-admin on January 5, 2018. Posted in Connect. Now is the Perfect Time to Get Ready for Google Mobile-First Indexing Late last year, we talked about the importance for healthcare Websites to be ready for Google mobile-first indexing to roll out in 2018, which can happen any day now! If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to review some mobile Website design tips that can help your hospital or clinic improve the quality of your mobile users’ experience, which in turn should lead to improved search engine rankings and more conversions. Analyze and Test Your Website Before you can improve your healthcare mobile Website design, you need to be positive it is ready for mobile-first indexing, which we discussed in “Google Mobile-First Indexing: Is Your Healthcare or Hospital Website Ready?” Once you’ve confirmed you are ready, the next step is to analyze its performance with Google Analytics. (If you’ve had to make some significant changes to get ready, allow a couple of weeks for new data to accumulate). Are there any pages that have unusually low traffic volumes? Or are there any calls to action that are demonstrating unusually high bounce rates? Looking at these types of metrics can quickly let you know the areas in which you’ll first want to improve. Provide a Link to the Desktop Version Always let your mobile visitors have the option to link to a complete desktop version of your healthcare Website. This may seem to contradict the whole purpose of having an optimized mobile Website, but some visitors may prefer to browse your desktop version on their mobile devices. Use Simple Menus Whether you choose to use collapsable “hamburger” menus, the most important mobile website design tip for menus (and submenus) is to keep them as simple as possible. Links to downloadable clinical trial report PDFs are an perfect example of what to prune from your menus. Healthcare mobile users are not likely to download or read such documents on their phones. If you must provide these types of links, consider asking users for their e-mail addresses so a link can be sent to them for downloading later. Make Searches Fast and Intuitive Mobile users heavily rely upon in-site searches, especially since menus are not as easy to navigate as they are on desktops—no matter how much you’ve simplified them for your mobile Website. Here are three key mobile Website design tips for making searches fast and intuitive: • Don’t bury your search in a menu. Experiment with different types of searches that can can be initiated and completed without going into a menu. Explicit (visible) search bars are one of the best ways to start experimenting with what will work best for you, as are filters and questions to guide search queries. • Optimize search result relevance. The better your search tools can provide relevant results, the faster users can find what they need. • Make search results easy to view. Always remember your users are not on larger desktop screens, and therefore, it’s crucial they can quickly understand and navigate search results. Be Selective with Calls to Action and Forms This final healthcare Website design tip continues the theme for speed and simplicity, especially if your hospital or clinic heavily depends on your Website for patient acquisition. On your desktop Website, you have the luxury of asking prospects for information well beyond their names and contact information. But for mobile users, every extra field they’ll need to complete (even if optional) can make a form seem long and difficult to complete. If you find it difficult to reduce the scale of your conversion tools, consider running A/B tests with Google Analytics. Set your test to randomly display a shorter or longer version of a form and then measure their performance. Tonni Islam is a Senior Designer at Sequence Health. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
HIPAA Compliant Texting: Are You Doing It Right? Written by web_developers on December 12, 2017. Posted in Connect. Simple Ways to Ensure Your Hospital or Clinic’s SMS Text Messages are Satisfying HIPAA and PHI Compliance Most healthcare providers are aware that the best intentions can occasionally result in disaster. Sending SMS text messages—with colleagues or patients—is a prime example. Did you know that violating rules for HIPAA compliant texting can result in fines of $50,000 to $1.5 million per occurrence? Yes, that’s per occurrence. And think about it: How easy is it have multiple SMS conversations that include multiple text messages? How can you take advantage of using text messaging to provide better healthcare but still be HIPAA compliant? Here are some guidelines. No Texting Means No PHI or HIPAA Violations The easiest way to ensure you are sending HIPAA compliant text messages is to just not send non-personal text messages to patients or colleagues. More specifically, that means refrain from sending anything that would be considered protected health information (PHI) by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA’s complete list of what makes something PHI is lengthy, but the general idea is it includes any written or visual information an unauthorized third-party could use to identify a patient, including: • Names (including family members) • Addresses • Dates • Phone and fax numbers • E-mail addresses • Website and IP addresses • Social Security numbers • Medical record numbers • Photographs • Biometrics (such as fingerprints) Not accepting or discouraging text messages from patients is another way to ensure HIPAA compliance. This guidance may be overstating the obvious, but the reality is our mobile phones have become such common and convenient parts of our personal and professional lives, it’s tempting to use them. That desire might be even greater at smaller clinics where staff and patients may feel more comfortable exchanging their mobile phone numbers. Use HIPAA-Compliant Communication Platforms for Texts…and e-Mail, too If your hospital or clinic is compelled to use text messaging to improve patient engagement and outcomes—either to communicate with patients or for staff to communicate internally—it’s crucial that you are using a secure, HIPAA-compliant text message platforms and servers from providers. The same rules and penalties for HIPAA compliant texting apply for e-mail too, which is another convenient way to communicate with smartphones. Your hospital or clinic can take advantage of using e-mail to engage with patients if you are using secure, HIPAA-compliant technologies and protocols. As Sequence Health’s Central/Western Regional Director, Chris Stearns is one of our key healthcare IT experts. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Google Mobile-First Indexing: Is Your Healthcare or Hospital Website Ready? Written by SQHealth-admin on November 22, 2017. Posted in Connect. The Long-Awaited Change in How Google Will Rank Healthcare and Hospital Websites is Just About Here Since 2016, my colleagues in the SEO blogosphere have been regularly waxing about the importance of being prepared for Google to roll out its “mobile-first indexing.” Although it hasn’t yet to be launched, it is coming—and when it does, it is expected to have significant impacts on how healthcare and hospital Websites are ranked. In recent months, several of our healthcare SEO and hospital Website design customers have asked us about mobile-first indexing. Here are some of their most frequently asked questions. As you read on, ask yourself: Is your hospital’s Website and SEO ready? What is Google Mobile-First Indexing? Google’s mobile-first indexing is the search engine’s conversion to using a mobile Website (rather than its desktop version) for ranking Web pages. As to why they are doing this, Google offered this explanation on its Official google Webmaster Central Blog: “Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user. This can cause issues when the mobile page has less content than the desktop page because our algorithms are not evaluating the actual page that is seen by a mobile searcher.” How Will Mobile-First Indexing Affect My Healthcare SEO? If your mobile Website provides the same information as your desktop Website, you probably won’t notice any difference in your SEO rankings. Actually, you might even see a boost in your rankings if you are competing against hospitals whose Websites are not ready for mobile-first indexing. You might now be thinking, “What do you mean by ‘the same information?’” Why would it be different on a desktop or mobile Website? The short answer is: It mostly depends on how your desktop and mobile Websites were design. This means: • If you have a newer Website that was built with responsive design — meaning the site automatically adjusts its layout based on whether your visitors are using desktop or mobile browsers — you probably don’t need to worry. • If your Website isn’t “responsive” but sends the same layout no matter the browser, you also probably don’t need to worry. (Note: Because responsive Websites generally deliver better user experiences, comparable Websites with responsive design will likely have better rankings.) • If your Website uses different URLs for canonical and mobile browsers, you might not be sending the same information. This could range from minor inconsistencies between what is on the desktop and mobile pages to significantly abridged content on a mobile page. • If your mobile Website uses AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), you might not be sending the same information. A typical example of different information would be when an AMP shows a snippet of a desktop page with a link to read it in its entirety. These types of AMPs will hurt your SEO because it’s not supporting what Google considers to be a positive user experience. If your Website is not ready for mobile-first indexing, it’s probably best to update or overhaul your Website to a responsive design. But, if budgetary or time constraints prohibit that, your best bet is to prioritize the Web pages that can’t afford to be dinged by mobile-first indexing and start analyzing/updating them. When Does My Hospital Website Need to be Ready for Mobile-First Indexing? For all the chatter there’s been the past year about mobile-first indexing and the need to be ready for it, there’s still no set date for when Google will enact it. There is a good possibility that Google has been testing this new indexing strategy over the past year and we won’t see an exact date for its final roll-out. Our recommendation is to be proactive now before you see a drop in visitors to your Website. As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Will Chrome 62 TLS/SSL Requirements Affect Your Users’ Experiences or Your Online Rankings? Written by SQHealth-admin on October 13, 2017. Posted in Connect. Now is the Time to Update Your Hospital Website Encryption to Avoid the Dreaded Chrome 62 ‘Not Secure’ Label As 2016 came to a close, we published a blog with a title that asked a simple but important question: “Is Your Hospital Website Secure Enough for Google in 2017?” Now in October 2017, the Chrome SSL Warning question is more relevant than ever. This month, Google is expected to release Chrome 62, which will mark Website pages without TLS/SSL encryption as “Not Secure”. It’s never too late to get your Website’s security up to spec for Chrome or all other browsers. But because this update may also impact your healthcare search engine optimization (SEO) and digital healthcare marketing results, there is no time like the present to make sure you are compliant for Chrome 62 and beyond. Is Your Hospital Website ‘Secure’ for Chrome? First, test your hospital Website’s security on Chrome: • Open your Chrome browser • Type in your hospital Website address • Let the page load • Look for the icon that appears in the address bar to the left of the URL Do you see a green lock icon in the address bar? • Yes! Hooray, your hospital Website is secure! • No! Sorry, but your Website is not what Chrome considers “secure.” Chrome 62’s Greatest Threat: Your Conversions and Patient Acquisition for All Web Browsers It’s no secret that Google wants you to use TLS/SSL security. Along with the implications of its upcoming Chrome 62 update, even as early as 2014, Google has been clear it would give more SEO juice to secured Websites. There continues to be no hard evidence that not having a secure hospital Website will hurt your Page rank, SERP positions, etc. What is certain is that not having a TLS/SSL will very like hurt your Website conversions—and thus, your patient acquisition rates. This cuts across all Web browsers, too. There are two reasons for this. • You Must Respect Chrome’s Popularity: Chrome’s status as the most widely used Web browser (estimated to be used by at least 55 percent of all Internet users) means anything that keeps you from using it for patient acquisition is a major disadvantage. If your Website is not secure, you are potentially discouraging more than half of your entire Website visitor traffic to complete an online form. • Poor User Experiences Hurts SEO: If Chrome users suddenly start abandoning your Website because they are scared off by “Not Secure” warnings, sooner or later, it will drag your SEO down—which could result in lower traffic, and thus, lower conversions, regardless of browser. Patient Confidence: A Lesser Threat, but a Threat All the Same If you need one more reason to improve your Website security, let it be patient confidence in your brand. Although Website and internal EMR/EHR data (and their security) are usually two entirely separate things, with growing public awareness about healthcare cybersecurity risks, your visitors and patients may presume that if your Website is not secure, then the rest of your digital medical information isn’t either. As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Easy Patient Engagement Tips for Women’s Health Clinics During National Breast Cancer Month, October 2017 Written by web_developers on October 3, 2017. Posted in Connect, Women's Health. If you are responsible for patient engagement or marketing at a women’s health clinic, there are two things that are probably true: 1. You spend a lot of time with finding creative ways to get your patients to schedule appointments for breast cancer screenings. 2. You are among the very last people that need be reminded October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM). Because NBCAM is among the most successful of the many national health awareness months, it may be reminding some of your women’s health patients to schedule breast cancer screenings—especially if it’s been awhile since they’ve had one. For your other patients that are not getting the NBCAM message, now is the ideal time to take advantage of some excellent resources to improve your women’s health patient engagement now and throughout the year! Get Free Content and Marketing Ideas from Breast Cancer Awareness Organizations NBCAM’s supported by multiple organizations is one of the reasons why it is so effective at creative awareness. Many offer free content and resources to easily integrate into your women’s health patient engagement and marketing strategies. Among them are: • American Cancer Society: The ACS offers some useful PDF downloads that provide statistics, information about causes, risks, prevention, detection, diagnosis and more. You can use this highly-qualified information to supplement other content you use to engage patients. • Susan G. Komen Foundation: The Foundation’s Tools & Resources page lists more than a dozen links to resources that give you serious food for thought. • National Breast Cancer Foundation: If your women’s health clinic has the financial capabilities, the NBCF National Mammography Program can partner with you to provide free mammograms and diagnostic breast care services to underserved women. This is an excellent public relations opportunity to create exposure for your clinic. • U.S. Department of Health & Human Services: The HHS’ Healthfinder.gov page for NBCAM serves up superb free content for your newsletter and social media feeds. [poll id=”16″] Use Social Media for Women’s Health Patient Engagement If you aren’t yet using some of the more popular social media technologies—such as Twitter and Facebook—to engage with your patients, let NBCAM be your introduction! As mentioned previously, Healthfinder.gov’s page for NBCAM gives you free content to use in Tweets. Another way to engage your women’s health patients (and to attract other followers to your social media accounts) is to share or retweet interesting content. Start with following Twitter accounts for the same organizations mentioned earlier: • @AmericanCancer (American Cancer Society) • @SusanGKomen (Susan G. Komen Foundation) • @NBCF (National Breast Cancer Foundation) • @healthfinder (HHS Healthfinder.gov) Finally, don’t forget the hashtags for both adding to your Tweets and to find other relevant content! • #nationalbreastcancerawareness • #nationalbreastcancerawarenessmonth As Sequence Health’s Central/Western Regional Director, Chris Stearns is not only one of our healthcare IT experts, but he also provides specialized focus on Orthopedic Surgery and Women’s Health. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Google Tips for Medical & Healthcare SEO and PPC: August 2017 Written by SQHealth-admin on August 11, 2017. Posted in Connect. The New Google Search Console is Here As with so many things related to Google and healthcare SEO, this announcement may be a bit binary. It’s likely that you either already are aware of the Google Search Console (which has been around for more than a decade with various names, including “Google Webmaster Central” and “Google Webmaster Tools) and use it, or you don’t. If you are in the first camp, then you should be excited about the new features shared about the Console at the Google Webmaster Central blog. If you are in the latter, you will also likely find it exciting, not only because this free product “includes more than two dozen reports and tools covering AMP [Accelerated Mobile Pages], structured data, and live testing tools, all designed to help improve your site’s performance on Google Search,” but for a very important new report: Index Coverage. The other exciting and potentially related feature is better organizational workflow support. As Google explains, “multiple people are typically involved in implementing, diagnosing, and fixing issues,” which is why it is “introducing sharing functionality that allows you to pick-up an action item and share it with other people in your group.” The Takeaways If you know what search engine indexing is, then there’s no need to explain its importance to your hospital Website SEO. If you don’t know what indexing is, here’s a simple explanation: It’s the process of a search engine discovering (known as “crawling”) the contents of your Website (which is learned from a “site map”). Have you ever heard the philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?” Well, there’s no debate about indexing: If your hospital Website is not indexed, the search engines won’t crawl it, and nobody can search for it. Thus, the Index Coverage report is a very convenient tool to discover which of your hospital Website pages are (or more importantly, aren’t) being indexed—and what you can probably do to quickly fix problems. For that matter, the Console’s improved workflow capabilities should be beneficial no matter how experienced you are with the Console. For instance, if you handle your organization’s healthcare SEO and find an indexing problem but don’t know how to get a sitemap generated or submitted to search engines, you can now task this to the appropriate IT person/people. Google AdWords Express Rolls Out New “Goals” No matter whether your monthly healthcare PPC budgets are in the hundreds or the ten of thousands, demonstrating ROI (return-on-investment) is always crucial to ensuring the ongoing support for this type of digital healthcare marketing tactic. One of the best ways to achieve that is to be able to report “conversions,” which can now be measured as “goals” for Google AdWords Express users. In that context, this more likely is of interest to the healthcare PPC marketing with smaller campaigns—either in terms of budgets or ad volumes. That is because AdWords Express is Google’s comparatively leaner PPC tool that is “aimed to make it easy to set up ads on Google,” as compared to its more complex, full-scale AdWords service. AdWords Express now makes it possible to easily get performance metrics for goals that include: • Calls to Your Business • Visits to Your Storefront • Actions Taken on Your Website The Takeaways For more casual or smaller-scale healthcare PPC marketers, being able to track these goals can be very useful not only for your own edification about how well your campaigns are performing, but also to others in your organization involved with its marketing. For instance, hospital PPC ads that lead visitors to your hospital’s Website may earn you a “point” for your efforts, but getting visitors to your Website is only half the battle. The bigger goal for your organization should be to strategically drive those visitors to another conversion/goal/call-to-action, which you may improve by sharing your PPC goal metrics with whomever develops your hospital Website marketing objectives. Furthermore, more actively engaging with your healthcare PPC metrics may encourage you to expand the scope of your campaigns—including budgets and volumes (which may further inspire you to explore the potential of using the full-scale AdWords service). As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Healthcare SEO: Google Tips for June 2017 Written by SQHealth-admin on June 29, 2017. Posted in Connect. A Look at the Latest Google Tips That Affect SEO for Hospitals and Medical Practices With just one more week before Independence Day, some might be entering the lazy days of summer—which, unfortunately, does not apply for healthcare SEO marketers! As we do each month, we have gathered the latest healthcare SEO Google tips that affect SEO hospitals and medical practices. And as always, the emphasis is on information for healthcare digital marketers that don’t monitor every event related to medical SEO. Google SERP Snippets No Longer Use DMOZ Snippets are the content that appear under the title in a search engine results page (SERP). As the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog explained, until recently, Google got that information from one of three sources—one of which, DMOZ.org, no longer exists, and thus, is no longer a source. The takeaway: If your hospital’s Website has been relying on DMOZ for snippets—or for that matter, another of the sources, page content—now is the time to explore the third source which gives you complete control of what appears in a snippet: description metadata. This is particularly true for high-volume pages or pages for which you heavily compete with other hospitals. Google’s “Create Good Titles and Snippets” is a solid place to start if you have never explored the description metadata—as well as providing instructions for how to prevent displaying a Snippet. [poll id=”13″] Google My Business Introduces New “Posts” Feature Although a small announcement, there are some massive possibilities for hospitals to take advantage of the new Posts feature on Google My Business. As the Google Small Business Blog explains, you can: “…publish your events, products, and services directly to Google Search and Maps. By creating posts, you can place your timely content in front of customers when they find your business listing on Google.” The takeaway: Google has been routinely improving My Business, which we’ve been following for months. In fact, along with frequent mentions in my monthly blog, we published “Top 2016 Google My Business Listing Changes for Online Healthcare Marketers” last December. So, if you have not yet established a My Business page (or pages, for matter) for your hospital, it might be worth your while since Google is clearly interested in making it a productive marketing tool. But, if you have already started exploring My Business, it could be an excellent way to engage new patients, especially if your analytics are demonstrating any type of traction for views but are not getting solid clickthroughs. Google AdWords Launches New “Smart Bidding” Option to Maximize Conversions If you use Google AdWords for your hospital pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, you likely have campaigns with Google AdWords—which means you are probably familiar with its various Smart Bidding options (i.e., “Target CPA,” “Target ROAS” and “Enhanced CPC”). There is now a new option, “Maximize Conversions,” that can be very useful for building hospital brand awareness. The takeaway: Usually, conversion-driven PPC campaigns have relatively higher budgets because they can be tied to metrics that demonstrate a campaign’s value and ROI. Therefore, this new Smart Bidding feature can be tremendously advantageous for healthcare PPC strategies that are designed to not only increase hospital Website traffic, but to leverage that traffic with conversions that ideally move visitors into the so-called “sales funnel.” As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Bariatric Patient Acquisition Strategies: How to Get More Patients Written by SQHealth-admin on June 15, 2017. Posted in Bariatric Surgery, Connect. One question we are always asked is about how to get more bariatric patients, which naturally leads into discussions about bariatric patient acquisition strategies. Any discussion about acquiring new bariatric patients needs to address the “sales funnel process of finding leads, turning them into prospects, and then turning them into “customers” (or, put more accurately/appropriately, “patients”). What often surprises many people is the first part—finding leads and prospects—isn’t as difficult as it may seem. On the contrary, there’s no shortage of them; the challenge is advancing them through the final into the final stage. According to information presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Texas Association for Bariatric Surgery (which we attended), an estimated 85 percent of potential bariatric patients that express interest in weight-loss surgery fail to follow through and never receive the surgery. Consequently, they continue to experience morbid obesity, diabetes, sleep apnea, high blood pressure and a host of other medical issues—and your bariatric surgery center may fail to meet its goals for bariatric patient acquisitions. Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why a candidate for bariatric surgery may not follow through. For example, medical insurance verification is often one hurdle, and patients must also make the mental, emotional and physical commitment involved (which speaks to the need to nurture them with patient engagement campaigns). How a Bariatric Patient Acquisition Strategy Can Make a Difference Without a bariatric patient acquisition strategy, the potential patients who investigate bariatric surgery via your Website are likely to slip away unnoticed—which emphasizes the importance of a strategy that includes new bariatric patient lead and tracking. Since most patients take at least a year to commit to bariatric surgery, your strategy must help them progress from one step to the next by providing the needed bariatric patient education, interacting with them to keep them engaged, and following-up as appropriate. Your strategy should also involve everything from checking your Website’s bariatric and weight-loss surgery SEO to make sure potential patients are finding you when they conduct online searches to using well-designed software to track patient engagement. Take a look at some specific tactics that should be part of your strategy to attract new bariatric patients. Top Tips to Improve Bariatric Patient Acquisition Rates If everyone in your bariatric surgery option is on the same digital page regarding patient acquisition, your efforts can team up to help you make a better connection to curious visitors. Try some of these tactics to increase your patient acquisition rates and engage your weight-loss surgery Website visitors. • Add menus and internal links to your Website pages. If visitors are learning about bariatric surgery options on one page of your Website, make it easy for them to click to your contact page or to a page where they can ask for more information, participate in a live chat or sign-up for an appointment. • Feature useful content. Add content to your site that your visitors will consider entertaining and valuable, including bariatric-friendly recipe videos, downloadable and printable recipe cards, and videos of testimonials from happy patients. • Offer online bariatric surgery seminars. Bariatric surgery seminars are often considered a requirement by insurance companies before they will authorize the procedure. More recently, online bariatric surgery seminars have been offered as an alternative to in-house seminars. Not only does this enable bariatric surgery centers to offer more options for new weight loss surgery patients to attend seminars at times and locations that are more convenient, but it also improves efficiency for busy bariatric surgeons and staff. • Capture visitor contact information. Give your site visitors every possible opportunity to share their e-mail addresses with you. Offer to e-mail free content to them to capture contact information. • Don’t forget the call to action. Every page on your Website should include a call to action, inviting the visitor to ask for more information or to make an appointment. This tactic is also valuable on your social media pages. Speaking of which… • Don’t neglect social media. Younger patients are more likely to find you on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter than they are to seek out your site. Stay fully engaged on social media to encourage interaction with your office. Kris Altiere is Sequence Health’s Director of Marketing and Creative. Sequence Health is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Sequence Health to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.
Let’s Talk: Virtual Personal Assistants and Medical SEO Written by SQHealth-admin on June 6, 2017. Posted in Connect. “Hey, Siri!” “”Hey Alexa!” Even if you don’t use these commands to interact with virtual personal assistants like Apple’s Siri mobile app and Amazon’s Echo “smart speaker,” you likely have heard them on their respective TV commercials or have personally witnessed people uttering those and similar phrases into their “knowledge navigator” devices to get information. Although not yet a universal best practice for healthcare marketers—even for those actively involved with in hospital Website’s search engine optimization (SEO)—the continued adoption of intelligent personal assistant technologies ensure that medical SEO techniques will soon merge with personal assistant search optimization (PASO) as part of healthcare digital marketing strategy best practices. [poll id=”8″] A 2014 Google blog, “OMG! Mobile Voice Survey Reveals Teens Love to Talk,” noted 41 percent of adults rely on voice searches at least once per day—with more than half of all teens reportedly turning to personal digital assistants daily for help with locating information. Presumably, as smartphones (and the virtual personal assistant technologies they provide) have become even more commoditized, it’s a safe assumption that voice search rates have grown too. Another safe presumption is users will use increasingly rely upon virtual personal assistants for finding healthcare information. For instance, a person driving to work that suddenly remembers they haven’t had a physical in years might ask Siri about available physicians. Or, someone out with friends that experiences an injury might turn to Google Assistant to locate an urgent care facility. Or, a mother worried about her child at night might turn to the mobile device on the bedside table to ask about symptoms. But no matter who (or what) is doing the knowledge navigation, the location of that data remains the same: on the Internet. And thus, the advantages of search optimization also remain the same. Therefore, the time is now to start understanding how healthcare SEO and PASO can help healthcare organizations improve their online efforts for patient acquisition and patient engagement. Additional Advantages of Medical SEO for Virtual Personal Assistants So, there’s no doubt that implementing your existing medical SEO strategies for the new virtual personal assistant audience is an opportunity to find new patients (and for them to find you!). However, those that embrace this sooner than later will likely reap additional rewards. Here are a few reasons why: • Currently, virtual personal assistant search results tend only yield a few links—as compared to traditional Web-browser searches that can produce hundreds—if not thousands — of results. (For example Siri on average returns one to four links per search.) This indicates the current competition to preferred rankings is not very fierce, which naturally suggests it can be very easy to achieve top medical SEO rankings. • Intelligent personal assistant searches are often filtered through additional artificial intelligence technologies, which mean the results are more likely to be custom tailored to the user. As such, the opportunity to develop highly personalized results may likely result in impressive click-through rates. This is likely to become even more true as the technologies improve. • Because search engine algorithms are routinely adjusted to embrace new ways for users to find relevant information—not to mention the potential boosts in a hospital Website’s traffic and engagement— it’s entirely possible that early adopters of medical SEO for virtual personal assistants may see overall increases in their Website’s search engine result page rankings. Challenges of Healthcare SEO for Intelligent Personal Assistants • Keyword and result strategies: Unfortunately, healthcare SEO for intelligent personal assistants does not mean a simple transfer of keywords and calls to action. This is primarily due to the differences in how a browser-based search will return search results in comparison to a virtual personal assistant. The easiest way to describe this is the balance of quality versus quantity. Of course, all search engines strive to provide quality results, but virtual personal assistants will make additional pressure to provide a limited quantity. After all, a Web-browser user can quickly scan results on page, open multiple links, conduct another search, etc. the voice-based results from a virtual personal assistant will not have that luxury. For instance, if a user asks Siri where to find an ENT, preferred results will verbally provide one or two resources, rather than a recital of a full Internet scour. • Terminology and nomenclature: Most search engines are “smart” enough to detect misspellings and suggest appropriate searches. However, this may be a problem for the still-not-perfect accuracy of voice recognition when coupled with the demanding language requirements for some medical searches. • Voice inflections: Finally, medical providers must also keep up with the capabilities of current search technologies so they know how best to leverage it for patient engagement and assistance. As explained in an mHealth Intellgence article, “mHealth Takes a Closer Look at Digital Assistant,” there are concerns about the technology’s current inability to recognize emotional distress and respond accordingly. Consequently, patients might query with symptoms and be provided with completely irrelevant—and sometimes irreverent — responses, which could exacerbate emergencies. As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Please contact us to learn more about how Sequence Health can partner with you to develop a custom healthcare search engine marketing solution.
Healthcare SEO: Google Tips for May 2017 Written by SQHealth-admin on May 4, 2017. Posted in Connect. A Look at the Latest Google Tips That Affect SEO for Hospitals and Medical Practices We hope your hospital or medical practice is having a wonderful Spring! As we do each month, we have gathered the latest healthcare SEO Google tips that affect SEO hospitals and medical practices. And as always, the emphasis is on information for healthcare digital marketers that don’t monitor every event related to medical SEO. Google Analytics Home and Google Data Studio If your healthcare SEO strategy only looks at Website performance metrics on a limited basis—perhaps because you don’t have time or because you find analytics to be tedious and difficult—Google has recently upgraded and expanded two of its analytics tools that may encourage or enable you to use data to improve your medical SEO. First, Google Analytics: Last month, Google published “The New Google Analytics Home: Know Your Data,” in which it announced a redesigned “Home” page intended to provide “an overview of key aspects of your business’ online presence.” Second, Google Data Studio: In March, Google published “Data Studio now globally available,” in which it announced unlimited reports (instead of the previous limit of five) for its new “beta” analytics tool. This innovative tool collects data from multiple sources (e.g., your Website, Facebook page, YouTube page) and lets the user create customizable dashboards for presentations or reports. The takeaway: It’s very easy to slip into “analysis paralysis” with Google Analytics—a testament to the depth and complexity of data it can provide. The simplified Google Analytics Home page’s simple dashboard may be a blessing for the aforementioned digital healthcare marketers that need quick and easy-to-digest information or for the more advanced medical SEO’er prone to unproductive analysis paralysis. Likewise, the continued development of Google Data Studio may also be a blessing for digital healthcare marketers in either the “inexperienced or too busy” or “experienced over-thinker” camps of healthcare SEO. This is particularly true in the age of healthcare content marketing and healthcare social media marketing, which, like a hospital Website’s SEO, can be improved with performance data analysis. New “How Google Search Works” Search Engine Roundtable.com recently published “Google Updates Their ‘How Search Works’ Site,” which links to a redesigned guide that may be of interest to anybody involved in SEO for hospitals, but particularly anybody new to healthcare SEO. The takeaway: It could be argued that knowing how Google search works is worth knowing just for the intellectual curiosity about one of the most important technologies ever created and that affects virtually everybody’s lives. But for the novice digital healthcare marketer that wants to improve their medical SEO acumen, there may be tremendous advantage to having a better understanding of how search engines (especially Google’s) work. Improved Granular Review in Google Local Listings Search Engine Roundtable.com also published “Google Adds More Granular Review Filtering In Local Listings” in which it explained that rather than “full star” ratings (e.g., four stars), Google now lets users filter with “half stars” (e.g., 4.5 stars). However, what made this article so compelling was what one reader wrote in the comments: “The main problem remains and that is that Google’s reviews are filled with fakes written either by marketers stuffing their client’s with raving reviews (or negatives for their competitors) or reviews written by the business owner themselves. This problem undermines the rating process as a whole and will only get worse before Google comes up with some sort of solution, if one exists…” The takeaway: Call it what you want—cheating, unethical, “black hat”—there will always be people that want to game the system. Here, it’s with fake reviews…and yes, it does undermine the rating process. However, it is arguable that the problem “will only get worse before Google comes up with some sort of solution.” The only certain “solution” would be to eliminate review filtering, which benefits nobody. Instead, a more appropriate suggestion would be to not engage in such practices to market your hospital online. Although there might be some short-term gains—especially if your hospital is in very competitive market and may rely upon comparatively higher ratings to attract new patients—eventually, the heightened expectations will result in negative reviews. As Sequence Health’s Associate Director of Search Engine Marketing, Susan Gullion is one of our most knowledgeable resources for enhancing our healthcare clients’ search engine marketing strategies with SEO, PPC and social media. Please contact us to learn more about how Sequence Health can partner with you to develop a custom healthcare search engine marketing solution.