Editor

Why and How You Should Optimise Your Medical Website For Local Search

Posted on June 5, 2020June 11, 2020 by Editor

“Near me” searches have grown consistently since 2013, according to Think With Google,

Your website is the hub of your digital efforts. You want your site to be optimized for search keywords, usability, and content. Doing so will help your website appear further up Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for the services you offer, and help increase the likelihood that users will remain on your site and get to know you better.

In the current digital age, most people find the services they are looking for, including healthcare, through search engines. If you want more people to find you online, you need to optimize your website through good search engine optimization practices.

And if you want to attract new patients, your website also needs to be optimized for your local area. When someone uses the internet to locate a Medical Practice nearby, it’s critical that your website appears in those results (searches on mobile devices containing the phrase “near me” has skyrocketed in recent years).

In recent research carried out by BrightLocal, consumers were asked how they used voice assistants and voice search for local business. The top three most demanded voice search functions involve finding restaurants, grocery stores, and food delivery, with clothing, accommodation, and medicine following closely behind.

The Voice Search for Local Business Study also revealed that 46% of voice search users use voice search to find local businesses daily.

There are a few ways you can drive local engagement via digital channels. Here are a few tactics you should consider integrating into your local marketing strategy:

1. Create targeted advertising campaigns

Digital search or display ads offer you an excellent opportunity to target your audience using various parameters. You can leverage digital ad networks, such as Google Ads, and serve ads only to people within a specific geographic location, such as your town/city.

2. Develop a local SEO strategy

When creating content for your website, it’s useful to include long-tail keywords with your geographic location. Make sure your meta descriptions and keywords include location information. Include your location information on every page of your website, either in the header, footer, or elsewhere on the page. If you have more than one office location, have a separate webpage for each site and include the address and location for each. Finally, include Google maps and/or directions to your office

2. Claim Your Google My Business Listing

Google My Business (GMB) is a free, simple to use tool that allows small business owners to increase their online visibility and promote their business information on Google Search.According to Google “Providing and updating business information in Google My Business can help your business’s local ranking on Google and enhance your presence in Search and Maps.”

GMB appears on desktop – just to the right of the organic and paid search results. If you’re on mobile, it appears as a top result before the organic results. If you haven’t set up your GMB listing, it’s time to do so. Follow these step-by-step instructions to get started right away.

Once you’ve set up your account, it’s time to optimise it. An optimised page helps Google understand more about your business: who you are, what services/products you sell, where you’re located, etc. The more Google knows about you, the more types of searches your GMB listing can appear in.

Conclusion

Your website is pivotal to your digital marketing strategy. And with more patients than ever searching online for you via mobile devices, it’s imperative that your website is optimized for them to find you. It takes time and resources to optimize your site to deliver the best experience possible, but if you are serious about how your business performs, you need to get serious about the performance of your website too.

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Further Reading:

Thursday Tip

#ThursdayTip: How To Find The Best Keywords For Your Website

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Editor

Welcome to this week’s social media tip. Today I want you to think about choosing the best keywords to rank higher on search engines.

93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.

It makes search the second biggest online activity, after email.

If you want your website to rank higher in Google you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords. Keyword research is vital because identifying the terms people are searching for will determine the kind of content you create and the way you will optimize it.

One of the biggest mistakes I come across is trying to rank for generic keywords with a high search volume.

Instead, try long tail keywords. 50% of search queries are four words or longer.

Long tail keywords are keywords or key phrases that are more specific — and usually longer — than more commonly searched for keywords. They get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific.

Long tail keywords allow you gradually to get more traffic and to be found by new and motivated audiences.

Here is an example of a list of long-tail keywords based on the keyword “pdf”

How to figure out what your target keywords or phrases should be.

I’m borrowing this from PR consultant Gini Dietrich‘s playbook so you may need to adapt it to your own business.

Write down all of the questions you are asked in new business, or sales, meetings.
Write down all of the questions your customer service department is asked.
Go to your website or your internal server/Dropbox/Google Drive and grab your most recent frequently asked questions sheet.
Go into your sent mail and scroll through to see what kinds of questions your clients are asking you that you’re writing long answers to … everyday. Write those down.

Now you have a nice list of content as a starting point. If you are being asked these questions, this is what people are also searching. And, if you have the answers and you’re the best suited to provide the solutions, they should be finding you when they search these things.

I use the following tools to help me find long tail keywords.

1. Google Adwords Keyword Planner

This is a free Google tool that gives you insight into the volume of monthly searches for a particular keyword, and how much competition there is, based on advertising spend for sponsored links. It also returns suggested terms you could use instead or alongside your original keyword.

You will need to sign up for an Adwords account with a Gmail account but you don’t have to add any credit card details or create any ads to use the tool.

Pro Tip! Use Google Related Searches

Google displays related search results at the bottom of the first page when you type in your Google search query. This is a super-helpful resource as it returns ideas that are relevant to your topic based on user interest and contextual words.

2. Keywords Everywhere

I’ve installed this tool as a Chrome extension and I find it super helpful. It returns a host of long-tail phrases based on what people are searching for using specific keywords.

There are other long-tail keyword tools out there which you also might like to try – including Keyword Clarity (a free keyword grouping tool that makes it easy to identify keyword clusters) Answer The Public (an automated autocomplete tool that will populate relevant topics based on your search), and KWFinder.

Further Reading How to move from keyword research to intent research

Thursday Tip

#ThursdayTip: How To Ensure Your Website Is Mobile Compatible

Posted on May 28, 2020May 28, 2020 by Editor

Welcome to this week’s social media quick tip. This week I want you to take a closer look at your website.

Check how your website looks on a mobile device. If you need a magnifying glass to read it then your website is most likely not mobile responsive.

In the online world, your website is a virtual office location. It showcases who you are and what you do. Your website has seven seconds to make an impression and your patients are making snap judgments based on what they see and read.

Why You Need A Mobile Responsive Website

Firstly most people aren’t looking at your website on a desktop or laptop anymore. They are looking at it on a phone or tablet.

Secondly, Google now gives ranking priority to those sites that are mobile friendly. In fact, Google has stated that it will penalize websites that aren’t mobile-responsive, so if your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’ll likely lose out significantly in the organic search rankings. To check if your site’s design is responsive, enter its URL into this Google tool.

How To Check If Your Website Is Mobile Compatible

Check how your website looks on a mobile device. If you need a magnifying glass to read it then your website is most likely not mobile responsive.

Below are some tips from Search Engine Watch to ensure your website is mobile compatible:

Use a responsive website design that adapts to mobile devices or create a mobile version of your website that is properly redirected for mobile users.
Use Google Search Console to add and verify the mobile version of your website.
Make sure that all the content formats used on your mobile site can be crawled and indexed (check using the txt testing tool ).
Ensure that content is consistent across your mobile site and desktop site.
Test your page speed using PageSpeed Insights. If your page is slow, use an auditing tool to find and fix uncompressed content, page errors, and other elements slowing your website down.

Here’s to your digital marketing success!

Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Related Words

Posted on May 25, 2020May 25, 2020 by Editor

I love learning about new tools to make social media marketing more creative and effective, so I’ve decided to share some of my favourite tools with you at the start of each week.

This week’s cool tool recommendation is Related Words – a tool to help you find words that are related to a specific word or phrase.

Here’s how it works using the search term “social media” to illustrate.

Use this tool to help brainstorm content ideas and keywords for your social media marketing.

#HCSM, Thursday Tip

#ThursdayTip: How To Assign Admin Roles on Facebook

Posted on May 21, 2020May 21, 2020 by Editor

Welcome to this week’s social media tip. Today I want you to show you how to assign admin roles on your Facebook Page.

Facebook allows five different administrator roles: admin, editor, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. Each role has different capabilities.

Admin can manage all aspects of the Page. They can publish and send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, post from Instagram to Facebook, create ads, see who created a post or comment, view insights, and assign Page roles. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to and delete comments, send Direct messages, sync business contact info and create ads.

Editor can publish content and send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, create ads, see who created a post or comment, post from Instagram to Facebook, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to and delete comments, send Direct messages, sync business contact info and create ads.

Moderator can send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, create ads, see who created a post or comment, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to Instagram comments, send Direct messages and create ads.

Advertiser can create ads, see who created a post or comment, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can create ads.

Analyst can create ads, see who created a post or comment, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can create ads.

To assign a role go to Settings on your Page, and click on Page Roles. Scroll down through the options above to choose which roles you wish to assign to your team members.

Here’s to your social media success!

#HCSM

How Social Media Can Inform Public Health Education and Outreach During COVID-19

Posted on May 20, 2020July 7, 2020 by Editor

A machine learning scan of popular social media platforms could help inform public health education and outreach during Covid-19, according to a new study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

The study measured daily changes in the frequency of topics of discussion across 94,467 COVID-19-related comments on Reddit* in March, 2020 to test the following hypotheses:

The pandemic has been accompanied by an “infodemic,” an overabundance of information and misinformation.
Public response to the pandemic and infodemic is important, but undermeasured.
Real-time analysis of public response could lead to earlier recognition of changing public priorities, fluctuations in wellness, and uptake of public health measures, all of which carry implications for individual- and population-level health.

*Reddit is the 19th most popular website in the world with 420 million monthly active users.

The study identified topics that fell into three categories of interest, tracking daily variations in the average prevalence of topics across all comments.

response to public health measures
impact on daily life
sense of pandemic severity.

Results

This analysis indicates that longitudinal topic modeling of Reddit content is effective in identifying patterns of public dialogue and could be used to guide targeted interventions.

Early recognition of this reality could have led to more specific information dissemination campaigns and earlier public acknowledgment of disease severity.

Questions about safely spending time outdoors peaked in mid-March, representing a missed opportunity for public guidance.

Tracking and responding proactively to common questions, such as what material is best used for a homemade mask, may minimize the spread of misinformation.

Notably missing from these Reddit topics were discussions of contact tracing, a growing area of public concern.

Stokes, D.C., Andy, A., Guntuku, S.C. et al. Public Priorities and Concerns Regarding COVID-19 in an Online Discussion Forum: Longitudinal Topic Modeling. J GEN INTERN MED (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-020-05889-w

Notes

Limitations of this study include that Reddit users are not representative of all segments of the population, and that Reddit data is not associated with a geographic location. Real-time monitoring of online COVID-19 dialogue holds promise for more dynamically understanding and responding to needs in public health emergencies.

Further Reading

Infodemic investigation: Facebook is biggest source of false claims about coronavirus

NUI Galway Study Finds the Sharing of COVID-19 Misinformation linked to Social Media Overload and Trust in Online Information

Disinformation, Misinformation and Inequality-Driven Mistrust in the Time of COVID-19: Lessons Unlearned from AIDS Denialism