Having a strong online presence can help your practice reach more patients. However, it’s one thing to know you need a strong online presence and another to actually have one. There are some techniques that can help boost your online presence so you can rank better in search engines and attract new leads.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your online presence and attract more potential patients, you should try these health care marketing techniques:
Create and share informative content
Many health care providers like to use pay-per-click (PPC) marketing to reach their potential audience, but this has its limits. As of 2020, 26.4% of internet users make use of an ad blocker. This means that they are not likely to see paid display ads or banner ads. However, with content marketing, you can attract organic traffic from a target audience who is interested in your services.
To do this, you need to create and post helpful, entertaining or otherwise useful content related to your target audience’s interests. For example, you may want to write blog posts about how to stay healthy during a pandemic or how to improve your diet to reduce inflammation. The audience who is likely to encounter and read these articles is more likely to explore your site and make a conversion decision.
The more content you create, the better. Companies that post regularly receive 70% more web traffic than companies in their fields that don’t. Health care is no exception.
Explore the potentials of video
Posting and sharing short videos with information about your services, a particular treatment or testimonials from patients can positively impact your online presence in two main ways:
- Video helps improve your SEO ranking — SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of optimizing your site for displaying in search engine results pages (SERPs) of search giants like Google or Bing. When these search engines crawl your site and see videos on your pages, they register it as quality, multimedia content, which counts toward how they rank your site as relevant and helpful to their users.
- Video itself has incredible search potential — Specifically through YouTube, videos you post can be found organically. According to Youtube, more than 2 billion users visit YouTube every month.
There is the potential that YouTube users who have never heard of your brand may come across one of your videos if it is relevant to their search queries. You can provide links or information in or below your video to direct users to your site if they need more information or would like to talk about treatment for their needs.
Make sure your site is mobile-responsive
Mobile internet usage was once a small part of overall internet usage across the globe. Now, it accounts for slightly more than half of all internet traffic. What this means for you is that you need to make sure your site is mobile-responsive. A site that loads slow on mobile or doesn’t convert to a mobile format is going to rank lower in SERPs than a site that loads quickly or has a clean mobile format.
Many website hosting platforms, like WordPress or GoDaddy, automatically convert your site into a mobile format for mobile users. However, they often require some fine-tuning to make sure that images or videos load quickly or that the content is spaced out evenly.
Pay attention to your site and make necessary corrections to help keep it mobile-responsive so you can rank better in SERPs.
Gather reviews
Reviews are more than a nice add-on to your web presence. They are a significant factor in your ability to attract and convert new patients. Fully 75% of web users don’t trust advertisements, but 62% trust consumer reviews. If you want potential patients to trust your health care organization with their needs, you need to work on collecting online reviews from your existing patients.
Positive reviews on reputable platforms also helps improve your ranking in SERPS. Ask your patients if they are willing to leave a review on Google My Business, Yelp, Yellow Pages and social media platforms like Facebook. You can make this easy for them by including links to these platforms in a follow-up email after their appointment or by having a computer or tablet in your facility that patients can access after their appointment.
Manage your social media
You and your staff members spend many hours per week seeing patients and handling paperwork. It’s easy to overlook your social media when you already have so much on your plate. However, it’s worth your time to dedicate at least a couple of hours to responding to comments or sharing helpful or entertaining content that your followers will like.
That’s just the minimum you should be doing. A comprehensive social media marketing plan goes much further, including:
- Maintaining a consistent posting schedule
- Sharing videos, infographics and other multimedia
- Sharing photos of your facilities and your staff in action or having fun
- Responding to feedback and offering solutions for negative feedback
- Replying to comments
By being active on your social media, you can further establish yourself as a thought leader in the health care field. This helps build trust with your followers and can lead to an increase in leads and conversions.
Burg & Co. will be your partner to take your digital health care marketing to the next level
You might see the benefits of improving your digital health care marketing techniques, but acting on them is a whole different endeavor that takes time and expertise you probably don’t have. Fortunately, we do.
Our team at Burg & Co. has years of experience in partnering with health care providers like yourself to take their online presence to the next level. We can develop and manage a digital marketing strategy customized for the goals of your organization. Would you like to learn more about improving your online presence? Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and find out how we can help you.
