Well-built blog catalogs are time-consuming. They’re also essential if you want your audiology website to stand out. Patients looking for an audiologist in their area need to know you’re knowledgeable and attuned to their needs. A thoughtful, high-quality blog instills trust, empowers readers, and inspires them to act. If you’re trying to improve your hearing aid marketing efforts, a blog is a great place to start. 

Below are five blog topics to help potential patients see you as a trusted professional in your field. These topics can also encourage readers to take the next step in their hearing aid journey. Whether they’re trying to decide if a hearing aid is right for them or they need to choose the best type to fit their lifestyle, the following blog ideas will help them feel equipped to make the right decision. 

The Benefits of Bluetooth Hearing Aids

Whether someone is getting their first hearing aid or they’re looking to replace the one they have, patients have plenty of questions. One common question is whether a Bluetooth hearing aid is right for them. A blog about the benefits of Bluetooth hearing aids can help a patient decide once and for all to take the plunge with a new device. Be sure to have a clear call-to-action in the blog so people can reach out right away for an appointment. 

Hearing Aids for Tinnitus

Not all individuals with Tinnitus realize a hearing aid can help. When searching for Tinnitus relief online, a prospective patient who comes across this topic is going to be highly interested in what a hearing aid can do for them. An important component of hearing aid marketing is helping people understand how the device can improve their quality of life, so Tinnitus is an important topic.

The American Tinnitus Association  recommends hearing aids for some Tinnitus sufferers, noting that, “Hearing aids can be classified as a type of sound therapy because they augment external noise as a way of increasing auditory stimuli and diverting attention from the perception of tinnitus.” In this blog article, make suggestions as to what hearing aids might work best for someone with Tinnitus.

Face Masks and Hearing Aids

These days, many elderly folks continue to wear facemasks in crowded public spaces and during cold/flu/COVID season. Although it might sound obvious, people should be reminded that hastily removing a mask can knock their hearing aid loose and onto the ground, potentially causing it to break. 

In this blog, you can include photos or diagrams of the proper way to remove a mask without interfering with your hearing aid. It’s a simple but needed reminder, as it only takes one wrong mask removal to damage an expensive hearing aid. Be sure to close the article by reminding the reader that if they have a damaged or underperforming hearing aid, you can get them into a new one.

Hearing Aids and Memory Loss

According to the National Institute of Health, hearing aids reduce the rate of cognitive decline in older adults at high risk of dementia by almost 50% over a three-year period. Any intervention that helps slow age-related cognitive decline will be of great interest to potential patients in your area. 

In this blog, hone in on research conducted by the National Health Institute. By drawing from science-backed studies and sharing hopeful statistics, you can encourage people to take action to protect their health. Be sure to include examples of hearing aids that might help with cognitive decline and a number where they can reach you to learn more.  

In-Canal VS. Behind-the-Ear Hearing Aids

Patients who need their first hearing aid or are looking to upgrade can get easily overwhelmed by their options. They might feel hesitant to reach out and discuss things with an audiologist because they don’t want to experience a sales push. Fortunately, hearing aid marketing doesn’t have to be about hard selling people on a product – it can be about offering valuable information and empowering patients to take the next step.

If patients can find high-quality blogs that help empower them to make informed decisions, they’re more likely to reach out for an appointment. In this blog, cover the benefits of in-canal and behind-the-ear hearing aids, highlight the differences, and provide examples of each. 

Boost Appointments With An Attention-Grabbing Blog

If you’re ready to take your website to the next level, a well-written blog catalog is essential. A collection of SEO blog articles that speak to patient needs will not only keep people coming back to your site, it will also cause them to see you as a trusted expert in your field. Writing engaging blog articles is time-consuming, but the team at MedPB can help! Call us today to get your blog growing.

If you’re just starting on your plastic surgery website design project or simply shopping design agencies, some of the first things to consider are the assets that will be included in your new website design. Primary assets are website content (including stock photos, before & after photos) and anything else that the site will be based around.

To use stock or not to use stock—let’s get right to the point and provide the answer to the question right here (at the very top of the blog so you don’t have to go looking for it). And that answer is, “maybe.”

Using stock photos on your plastic surgery website depends on your particular practice, resources, timeframe, budget, and level of investment that you are able to make in your brand and your website. Whether you choose to use stock photos or not will impact your overall marketing results—which we’ll dive into in this blog post!

So, the general answer is maybe, but if you stick around and read the whole blog post, we give away a semi-custom approach to getting high-quality images without expensive in-house photoshoots!

Let’s dig in and discuss the specifics so you can determine the best way to go about your plastic surgery website design project (or any elective healthcare website design project, for that matter).

Learn more by reading on, or get in touch with us to schedule your complementary consultation with ABM today. We are industry experts in plastic surgery website design and marketing. See what we’ve done for others by checking out our website portfolio.

Pros & Cons of Using Stock Photos on Your Practice Website

Since our official advice is maybe, let’s discuss the benefits and the drawbacks of using stock photos on your practice website so you can figure out which side of the fence to fall on. Some of the pros and cons will be obvious, but hopefully, you’ll learn a few new points that will help you decide.

Pros of Using Stock Photos For a Plastic Surgery Practice Website

• Cost Effective:You can skip the photo session, editing, scheduling, delays, etc. and simply purchase stock photos at low prices or take advantage of royalty-free stock photo websites
• Quantity:There are a lot of stock photo repositories out there with a wide variety of backgrounds, colors, models, etc.
• Speed:You can get your website built without delays as all of the stock photo licenses are available for an immediate download

Popular Stock Photo Websites – Free & Paid

Here are some of the most popular stock photo websites where you can search for stock photos:

• https://www.shutterstock.com
• https://www.istockphoto.com
• https://pixabay.com (*free, but check the terms carefully)
• https://stock.adobe.com
• https://unsplash.com/ (*free, but check the terms carefully)
• https://www.pexels.com/ (*free and paid, but check the terms carefully)

For legal reasons, please ensure you understand the license and usage rights that you purchase, as the stock website owners will pursue you for illegally using a copyrighted image without proper permissions.

Cons of Using Stock Photos For a Plastic Surgery Practice

• Legal:It’s sometimes tricky to ensure that you are using the stock correctly and in compliance with the usage rights. Some stock photos require different license levels to use in print versus digital. Some require attribution (a reference to the image’s creator on your website), and some do not. Not only do you have to understand and purchase/use the stock correctly, but you must also track your license and ensure you have a copy of it to prove that you have the right to use the photo in case you’re challenged.
• SEO:While it’s not something that will penalize your website or significantly reduce your search engine rankings, it’s a missed opportunity. We’ll expand on this in the next section below.
• Reduced Conversion Rates:If you’re using the same photo that other plastic surgeons or medical spas are using to depict similar procedures, you are simply blending in. When people see the same stock photo on various medical practice websites, it loses impact on them, and the provider appears to be a “me too” type provider.

Do Stock Photos Impact Your Plastic Surgery SEO?

Google’s primary goal is to help searchers find high-quality and accurate information via keyword searches on their search engine. If you think about it with that framework in mind, it makes much more sense that repeatedly used photos do not have the same value as unique, original photos.

Google indexes images and knows which images are seen on more than one website (as in the case of stock seen on many websites). If this is the case, it considers it a form of duplicate content. Google has stated that using stock photos won’t necessarily penalize you, but creating your own images is considered unique content and may be more favorable to your website’s overall SEO.

So it’s not necessarily a bad thing for your overall SEO it’s just a missed opportunity.

How To Source Non-Stock Photos For Your Plastic Surgery Website

At the beginning of the blog post, we mentioned that if you stuck with us and read the whole thing, we’d let you in on a little secret that can help you source high-quality photos that are not the same old stock photos you see on every other plastic surgery website.

To do this, you can utilize one of the following approaches:

• Custom stock photos
• Boutique stock photos
• Semi-custom stock photos

Custom Stock Photo Approach

You create beautiful images that depict the surgeries and procedures that you offer by creating your own. If you have actual patients willing to do this, that’s the ideal approach. Simply schedule the shoot and hire a photographer, and you’re good to go. You’ll want to find a photographer familiar with these types of photoshoots. Just ensure the actual patients participating represent the different procedures you offer and have them sign release and consent forms so that you own the usage rights!

Most plastic surgeons will have a tough time getting actual patients to do this, but consider hiring a photoshoot model if you’re really dedicated to custom stock. You can source a model from a modeling agency website like modelmayhem.com or other similar modeling agencies in your local area. However, be prepared for the cost, as you will have to pay for the model, the agency fee, the photographer, the editing, etc. Costs add up fast.

Not that dedicated to custom stock photos for your plastic surgery practice? Here’s how you go about it using our other approaches.

Boutique Stock Photo Approach

As stated, most practices will have a challenging time getting actual patients to participate, and if you go down the route of hiring a model, it will get pricey very fast. Boutique stock photos are another option. There are some stock photo websites out there that are not as well-known and cost a little bit more, which is why the photos are not plastered all over every other plastic surgery website. Most of our clients typically choose this route as it can give you the feel of custom stock photos without the costs or burdens of actually having to create them.

Here are a few boutique stock photo websites for you to search through:

• https://www.photocase.com/
• https://jumpstory.com/
• https://www.stocksy.com/

Semi-Custom Stock: Create Custom Stock Photos WITHOUT The Hassle or Cost

Instead of a modeling agency, there are online services marketplaces available that will allow you to commission a freelance model/photographer to take the exact images you’re looking for.  These types of services don’t require them to be in your local area and can save quite a bit of budget versus the full custom stock photo route.

Here’s an example from one of the listings to give you an idea:

You would simply communicate with the model, explain what you are trying to accomplish, work out the payment details, and let them go to work!

Stock Photos & Your Plastic Surgery Website – Final Thoughts

As you plan to build your new practice website, just understand the choices that you have as far as the imagery is concerned and how those choices will impact the total performance of the website. Your practice website should be a marketing tool designed to portray your brand honestly and correctly—a brand that you are proud of. The website should be built in a way that attracts new patients to you from the internet by using best practices for SEO. Your choices are to use standard stock photos, create your own stock via custom stock photos, find lesser-used and slightly more expensive boutique stock photos, or create semi-custom stock photos. Semi-custom stock photos can save you a lot of money while portraying your brand the right way.

Interested in learning more about stock photos or plastic surgery marketing in general? Contact Aesthetic Brand Marketing today for a complimentary consultation with our industry experts.

Let me start out by saying, the title of this blog post is a question, you opened it and hopefully are reading it carefully right?  Questions are what the internet has evolved into.  Google’s algorithms are advanced, Alexa is right there to answer questions you speak aloud, the internet is chocked full of all kinds of information; too much in fact to sift through manually.  It’s much easier to simply ask a question and that’s what the majority of internet users do.

Think about it, do you speak in keywords in real life? How weird would that be if a patient showed up for a consultation and said to you, ‘Liposuction Los Angeles’ and expected an answer?  The goal of technology is to seamlessly fit into our real-world lives and the search engines are now advanced enough to parse questions and figure out intent.  In other words, you can ‘talk to Google’ the way you would talk to a person and that’s how people search in today’s world.

That’s the goal with all of your plastic surgery SEO efforts, to employ tactics that emulate real world interactions.  So let me ask the question again, does your medical practice website have FAQ pages?  Let’s discuss why you should and then how to do it.

Spoiler Alert:  We’ll do this for you for free just for reading this, read all the way through to find out how!

Why Your Medical Practice Website Should Have FAQ Pages

The obvious answer is that you want an educated potential patient and not one who is a tire kicker or one that has unrealistic expectations about outcomes, price, or anything else.  People viewing your practice website looking for plastic surgery or a cosmetic procedure have questions that they are seeking out information for.  Sure, your procedure pages or doctor bio page can provide some great information but remember how people use the internet, they ask questions.  Why not feed them information in the exact format that they’re seeking it out?

Here at ABM, we’ve seen through our client’s Google Analytics that these FAQ pages or even FAQ sections on various procedure pages perform quite well.  We’ve dubbed these FAQ sections on procedure pages ‘scroll stoppers’ as they immediately stop people from scrolling down the page to consume the FAQ content as they recognize that they have the exact same question that you have answered on the page.

As valuable as that may be to have a well-informed potential patient, that’s simply only the beginning as we’ll show you how these FAQ pages can be extremely valuable for your SEO.

Medical Practice SEO & FAQ Pages

Your FAQ pages or FAQ sections on procedure pages can be extremely valuable for your medical practice SEO for a number of reasons.

• These FAQs have great keywords, great keyword phrases, and typically are worded in human-spoken language sentences which are considered high-quality content by Google. It’s not keyword-stuffed spammy SEO just to attempt to game the system.
• Google includes these FAQs (if done properly) in their fairly new, “People Also Ask” (PAA) section in the search engine results pages (SERPS). The PAA section is, you guessed it, other questions similar to the one you just Googled.  It’s a sneaky way to get more Google traffic and rank higher for information about the surgeries and procedures you offer.
• They require clean, fast-loading website coding and a certain format in order to work. Creating the on-page improvements that these require will help your entire website and medical practice SEO.

Take a look at the coding format and styling needed from one of our client’s FAQ sections on a breast augmentation procedure page:

In the image above, notice how the format has the questions showing and requires the visitor to click the down arrow to reveal the answer to the question?  This provides a better user experience as they don’t have to scroll down past content that they don’t have a question about.  They can immediately identify which question they want to know the answer to and simply hit the down arrow to find out the answer.  The backend website coding that does this also tells Google that this is an FAQ and makes this content eligible to be included in the coveted ‘People Also Ask’ section of the search engine results pages.

Now let’s take a look at what this looks like on Google when you search for the first question, “are silicone breast implants safe?” Take a look at the SERP page when you look that question up:

So not only did we show up as an answer to the question Google lumped that answer below our organic listing making the plastic surgery practice stand out even more and take up much more real estate on the search engine results page!

Potential patients that just Googled the question see your practice featured along with the associated answers to their questions (your FAQ’s) and can click the down arrow on Google to reveal the answer:

This gives you premier placement, additional opportunities to gain traffic relevant to the procedures offered and improves your overall SEO.

How To Implement FAQ’s On Your Medical Website

There are a few things to do to successfully pull this off.

Compile a List of Questions Asked

The first is to research the most common questions potential patients ask about the plastic surgery procedure that you would like to show up for.  Ask your front desk staff and anyone else who speaks with brand new patient inquiries to compile a list of the most common questions asked.  Look for more than just the obvious questions about price and recovery.  Is there anything unique to your geography?  Maybe your practice is located in Alaska and patients typically ask if surgery should only be done during the warmer months?  You get the idea but get a list of all the questions potential patients ask about the various procedures that you offer.  Next, search these questions on Google.

Google These Questions & Review What’s Already There

What we’re looking for when we search Google for each question on your list is to see what source Google is currently using as “the answer” to this question.  You’ll want to look at the page and see what format the page is using to display the answer.  By format, I mean what is the content format… is it an unordered list (ie…  bullets)?  Is it an ordered list (Numerical)?  Is it straight paragraph format, etc…?  Is it FAQs on a procedure page or is it a standalone FAQ page with lots of various questions on the same page?  You need to figure out the format Google wants to present for this answer to the question and implement that format on your page(s).

Add The Content To Your Page in the Proper Format

The final step is to pull it all together and add the content to your page in the proper format with the correct coding so that it emulates what’s already there.  If you need to create a separate FAQ page for breast augmentation then do that with all of your questions and answers on it.  If the format Google wants is the FAQs added to the breast augmentation procedure page then do that.

Capitalizing on Your Medical FAQ Pages

Wrapping this up let’s talk about ensuring all of these efforts result in new patients and increased website traffic to your practice website.  After you do your research, compile your list of questions, perform the necessary website coding and implementation make sure you make a strong effort to get in touch with people that the added Google traffic brought to your website.  Have strong calls to action and incentives for them to get in touch with the doctor.  If you are able to offer a compelling reason why they should give you their contact information it will translate into significant practice growth.

Here’s the formula;

Increase Google traffic (through various methods with this being 1 of them) + strong, compelling offers that encourage people to contact you = $$ to the practice.

Let ABM Do This For You For Free

If you’ve made it this far you are on the right track to growing your practice.  You understand the importance of the internet, SEO, and getting traffic from search engines.  This discussion was just one of many strategies and tactics that we can employ on your behalf to help you capitalize on the internet better than you currently are.  We would love to opportunity to have a conversation with you and see if a partnership makes sense.  In fact, if you call or email us today, we’ll offer you something for free with no obligation.  Just let us know you read this blog post and we’ll game plan with you about how to set up a simple FAQ page on your existing website for free.  If you find value in our free help maybe you will consider us for more work, but no obligation at all we’ll offer this to you for free just for reading!

Our team at Aesthetic Brand Marketing knows the investment you made in your education, skills, and training can make a huge difference in many people’s lives, and we want to help connect you with the people who need help making that emotional decision. That starts with establishing and promoting your brand. A well-established brand helps tell the story you want to tell and sends the reassuring signals you need to get patients to choose your practice for their plastic surgery procedures.

This post is all about video marketing, which is one of our favorite plastic surgery marketing tools. It’s a powerful way for you to deliver your brand promise to patients and meet them at the right place in their emotional journey to the perfect look.

First, let’s talk about why video marketing is such a powerful storytelling platform and why that’s so important to your business.

Video Marketing Helps You Show off What Your Patients Love about You

At ABM, we know people love a good story. It’s why we people all over the world use them to teach lessons, share news, and relate to each other. As a business owner, there are few things more important than telling your unique story. It’s one of the biggest reasons people will pick you out of a crowd of other highly-skilled plastic surgeons. Thankfully, we’ve also learned over the years that video marketing can be one of the best ways to get your story out there.

According to HubSpot, a leading company that designs marketing software, 90% of customers say a video would help them make a purchasing decision. Additionally, the company’s research indicates a video in your marketing emails may boost clickthrough rates, which is the number of times people actually click on and open your email, by as much as 300%.

Our clients usually tell us they have great reviews and their patients love them, but they can’t figure out how to let others know about their great customer care. Video marketing works so well for this, and it’s a great way to offer potential patients reassurance and trust by really showing off your personality and expertise in a way good writing and even flashy web pages can’t.

Leverage Video Marketing to Get More Traffic from Search Engines

Plastic surgeons get in touch with us because they want to stand out from their peers in search engine results. A well-optimized site with an ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) strategy works wonders for steering all that organic traffic your way, and investing in video content marketing is a good addition to any SEO plan.

First, high-quality video gets in front of your potential patients no matter how they’re finding you online. It doesn’t matter if they’re browsing on their mobile phone, tablet, or desktop computer; a great video will look good and be impactful on any device. In addition to capitalizing on technology to deliver your story in a beautiful format, video content is also more likely to be shared, which helps your practice and brand be seen in more places on the web.

From years of experience in online marketing, we’ve also learned that Google, other major search engines, and social media platforms are prioritizing video content for a variety of reasons. Because of this trend, the sooner you invest in video marketing, the easier it will be to keep pushing your video content to the top of search results.

Here’s is an example of Dr. Amy Alderman’s video content:

Ready to Really Launch Your Brand with Video Marketing?

It’s easy to see why video marketing helps answer two of the most frequently asked questions we get at ABM:

• How do I tell my story and let people know I’m a great plastic surgeon?
• How can I get my plastic surgery practice found more in search engine results?

If you’re ready to see what video marketing can do to get you found and start establishing trust with patients, please contact us to talk about what we think it could do for you.

But driving new patients to your website can be frustrating. If only it were as simple as a keystroke! There are many details to understand and it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is simply the process of increasing a website’s traffic and ranking on the search engine results page (ex. Google, Yahoo, Bing). Using Google as the example, here is how SEO works in an ideal world for the patient, the medical practice, and the search engine.

The patient searches for health information on a specific topic, often targeting a specific location, like “hearing aids in Boston.” The search results provide relevant, useful, credible, and timely information to satisfy the patient’s intent of the search.

The medical practice is optimized to appear at the top of search results for the keywords the patient is searching for—searches that the practice knows will result in new patients.

Google provides search results that best match between the patient and the medical practice. Using complex algorithms (programmed based on many different variables), search results provide the most useful and relevant information to users.

Google’s mission is to match search intent to the best available web pages, and it has developed complex algorithms to accomplish this. Google ranks web pages based on hundreds of factors, and has been constantly modifying its ranking algorithm for years. This means 1) the ranking system works pretty well, and 2) you’re not going to outsmart the collective intelligence of Google with cheap tricks like “keyword stuffing” and similar tactics.

The path to optimization is simply to give Google what it wants: the ideal scenario above where you are satisfying the intent of your patient’s searches, providing useful and relevant information.

We created this Medical SEO cheat sheet to make it easy for you. Use these steps to build your practice’s search engine optimization and appear at the top of the search engine results to attract more new patients.

1. Fast Site Speed

If your medical practice website loads slowly, it will negatively impact your search rankings—so it’s important that your site load quickly. In fact, nearly half of potential new patients expect your site to load in two seconds or less. And the longer the page takes to load, the more visitors will abandon it altogether.

Using a speed test tool, such as Pingdom, can help you determine your website’s page load time. Another good way to improve your medical SEO is by checking the load time of a few competitor websites; there are free tools you can use to do this. You want to make sure your page load time at least matches—and preferably beats—your competitors.

2. Proper Coding

Meta tags have always been important in SEO, but now their role is changing. Google can now read your entire site and determine what it’s about. So not only does your entire site need to provide quality information and contain the trust indicators search engines look for, but your site also needs to have additional coding and structure that matches the copy on the page. In addition, accessibility has become more important, and a site that is accessible is more likely to show up in search results.

3. High-Quality Content

Quality content is one of Google’s most significant ranking factors. Google can detect low-quality writing, errors in grammar, and copied or plagiarized content, so you’ll only get credit for well-written, original content. In other words, producing relevant, well-written and insightful content is crucial to success with medical SEO—and will help your site climb the search rankings. In fact, up to 81% of marketers plan to produce more original written content in the future.

Comprehensive content drives traffic from long-tail keyword searches—that is, longer search terms that include more than just the keyword—to your medical practice website. In addition to being well-crafted and useful, this content must be:

• Targeted to the specific audience you’re trying to reach
• Easily shareable by email and social media
• Optimized for a keyword with a high search volume
• Optimized to provide the best user experience, so users can easily find the most important information and answers to their search queries
• Responsive across all types of devices, including smartphones and tablets
• Well-researched, and providing sufficient detail
• Valuable and engaging to readers
• “Fresh,” meaning updated regularly and, when possible, about current events and trending topics

4. Easily Crawlable by Search Engines

The term “crawlability” describes how well a search engine can navigate all the pages of your site and crawl your text content. That means:

• Your site architecture must be logical and easy to navigate
• Internal pages and blog articles must be interlinked
• None of your links should be broken

Another important part of improving crawlability is having a proper URL and page structure. This involves:

• Using real words, not IP addresses or binary numbers
• Not changing old URLs (this will break the links)
• Including dates for articles and blog posts
• Using keywords
• Looking at how other notable practices in your specialty are structuring their URLs, and modeling yours after them

5. Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Design

Today, over 31 million Internet users in the U.S. go online exclusively using a smartphone. That means your medical practice website needs to be optimized for mobile. Make sure the online marketing company you hire to design your website creates it using responsive design, which allows your site to display the same way regardless of what type of device it’s accessed on.

Sites that aren’t mobile-optimized can suffer in the search rankings, as Google’s algorithm favors more accessible sites. In fact, Google offers a free tool you can use to check the mobile-friendliness of your medical practice website.

6. Local Listings

Medical practices are made for local SEO. In local SEO, the goal is to rank for keywords localized to the area you serve. It presents the easier task of ranking higher for keywords in a specific region, and it offers the benefit of targeted searches. The patient searching for “hearing aids in Hartford,” for example, is probably ready to buy from your Hartford practice.

In addition to optimizing your website for local search, you’ll want to get listed on local directories like Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Yellow Pages. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of local directories that “spider” the web and pick up business names, addresses and phone numbers. Sounds great, right? Free exposure! The problem for you is that many of these directories don’t verify that the information they find is correct. Make sure to keep your info consistent on all local sites and directories.

7. Online Reviews

Online reviews can boost your SEO results. Let’s face it, in today’s digital world many people have replaced getting referrals by talking to friends and neighbors with reading online reviews. We’re now experiencing a review economy.

Patients looking for a new physician or hearing aid specialist, are concerned first and foremost with finding someone they can trust. The first thing they look for in search results is the practice with the most reviews and the best rating. Google does the same thing, rewarding top-rated practices with higher listings. To establish your credibility quickly online, an automated system for collecting reviews is essential.

SEO for doctors involves a lot of moving parts. By following this cheat sheet, you can ensure your site climbs the search rankings, gain more organic traffic, and can be easily found and accessed by everyone—especially new patients, who will contact your practice to book appointments.

But keep in mind, we’ve only scratched the surface of SEO. Growing with SEO does take time and effort. If you need more help driving traffic to your site and attracting new patients, we can do it all for you.

Achieve more. Talk to us.

It’s rankings. Most people want to be the first practice listed when someone does a search on Google or Bing.

Tracking rankings can be addictive, especially if you’re near the top. But as SEO guru Neil Patel recently pointed out, this obsession can lead you astray. He regularly gets more than 2 million visits through organic traffic a month. (And his traffic has grown more than 140 percent over the previous year.) Want to guess how many keywords he tracks?

None!

In fact, ranking as number one isn’t even part of his strategy.

Instead, he focuses on user experience, overall growth, and conversion rates. What a coincidence…so do we. In fact, getting new patient calls for our clients is our number one priority at MedPB.

Patients Aren’t Focused on Rankings

Consider how the patient sees the typical search results page:

• It’s hard to tell which listings are organic and which are ads. They kind of blur together.
• Some of the most obvious things on the page (like local listings) are often ads. In fact, there are less organic listings now than ever before. They’ve been replaced by…more ads.
• Most patients searching for a practice find what they’re looking for at the top of the page–where the paid ads are.
• Organic results have been pushed down significantly on the page.

So where are patients most likely to look? Here’s a heat map that gives you an idea.

Don’t get us wrong, SEO and organic traffic are still an important part of your strategy (after all, just consider the millions of visitors Neil gets through organic alone).

But rankings shift constantly and being number one doesn’t guarantee people will click on it.

In fact, more than half the time people are clicking on the second through tenth listings.

Because PPC dominates the search results and are the first thing patients see, it can really help drive new patients to your site. Plus, PPC ads can indirectly help improve your organic rankings as well (though there are no guarantees).

How PPC Can Get You More Patients

Kyle is a longtime SEO client. With a 500% increase in new patient calls as compared to before he worked with MedPB, he’s also a happy customer. But Kyle still had bandwidth for more patients. So on our monthly consultation call, we brainstormed ways he could push the envelope even further. PPC was an obvious choice, and with no long-term contracts on any of our services, there was no risk to Kyle to give it a try.

Google ads started working right away. Not only did Kyle see an 83% bump in traffic, he saw a 54% increase in new patient leads in the first few months. He also saw his rankings jump to the top 3 for all the keywords he was trying to rank for. More importantly, his business overall grew.

We’ve seen this with other clients too. Sandy, one of our clients in Florida, saw a 300% bump in new patient calls after starting PPC, not to mention a 400% increase in traffic to her site.

The bottom line?

A patient-focused approach works better than obsessively following the rankings.

Want more new patients?
Find out how to get the most from your marketing budget.
Talk to us.

What’s the fastest way to get more appointments?

It’s to attract more patients to your website, which is obvious, but the real question is how do you do it. What actually works?

You may have gotten a few if not a hundred calls from so-called SEO firms which claim to have a magic formula for helping your website get more visitors, but the truth is it’s not magic but content, expert articles, that makes the difference.

Why Your Medical SEO Efforts Aren’t Working

Most SEO tactics are focused on keywords and technical issues, and ignore the key element that works to attract more patients. It’s true that in decades past you could just stuff your site with the keywords patients search for but that no longer works.

Google has started to pay attention to whether you’ve got great content on your site. How do they do this? Google looks at time on site and on page. If it’s low, and people aren’t sticking around to read your copy, then Google gives your site a lousy ranking.

Keywords Alone Won’t Cut It

Now don’t get me wrong, paying attention to things like keywords is important (and we’ll talk about that in a minute). But they shouldn’t be your focus. SEO strategies, especially for doctors, need to have a different approach. The difference lies in how the articles and content are written.

Articles work, because they give you a chance to have a conversation, albeit a virtual one, with your patients and potential new patients. When you use your articles to entertain your patients, you’ll capture their attention. Then, when you describe one of their key concerns and present one brilliant insight, you’ll have established your credibility.

Do this right, and you create a perception of need and a hunger to resolve their medical concerns.

If you’ve never written an article like this before, what you’re writing is an advertorial. While your goal is to generate an appointment, that’s not how you want to begin. First, you need to create the context by defining the problem, so that your medical services are the logical conclusion.

Sound complicated?

Here’s the simple formula we use, and you can use too.

1. Write Articles Your Patients Want to Read

The goal of any article you write is to get as many people in your target market as possible to read it and contact you. With this in mind, spend up to 50% of your time picking a topic and title that will grab readers’ interest.

Then spend 25% of your time writing the lead paragraph and the remaining 25% of your time on your article.

That’s the suggested rule. I usually spend a half hour picking a topic from a list I’ve prepared in advance plus a title and an hour writing the article. That’s just an hour and a half a week. The more people who read your article, the better your overall SEO will be.

2. Focus on Patients’ Problems

If you want to get the attention of your patients—start by writing about the common problems your clients experience. Think of the biggest problems your patients have, and write an article about how to solve them.

If you’re an ENT, you could write about common signs of a thyroid problem. If you are an audiologist, you could write about how to manage tinnitus.

If you’re still stuck and can’t come up with an idea for an article, let your patients tell you what to write about. When you talk to them on the phone or in an email, ask them, “What’s your biggest health concern?” Then, take their responses and use them as the basis for your articles.

To generate ideas for articles, jot down your observations and reactions after every patient meeting or conversation. Cull your list of ideas and start with the ones that will be of the most help to prospects. If you can’t come up with any ideas at all, use a survey to ask questions that will generate more information for articles.

Imagine the questions your prospects and clients ask themselves or should be asking. These are the questions people tend to Google. Use these as the topic for an article.

3. Then Optimize for Medical SEO

Put the patients first and not only will your organic traffic grow organically, more of those visitors will decide to call you and set an appointment. You’ll also improve your SEO because your writing will use natural phrases (instead of “keyword stuffing”), which is favored in Google’s latest algorithm. Once you have your content focused on your patient’s concerns, it’s time to think about SEO best practices for doctors. We’ve put together a Medical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Cheat Sheet to help you keep track of all the details.

Sound like a lot of work?

Coming up with expert content to write each week and taking the time off from seeing patients to write it and post it is a HUGE job. Which is why at MedPB we do it for you.

Ready to attract more patients with SEO?

Get help from the experts. Talk to us.

I think you already know the answer. It’s why you’ve got a website up and running, to get the word out and attract new patients.

So why isn’t your waiting room as full as it could be? What more can you do to tweak your website to get that phone ringing? Glad you asked. While Google updates its algorithm regularly, there are a few big developments you are going to want to know about.

First Things First: Get Mobile-Friendly

Did you know every year, more and more people will use the internet on mobile devices like phones and tablets—instead of on their computers? The way your website works on mobile devices can differ drastically from the way it does on a computer screen. You want to be sure your website is ready for the mobile revolution that is happening right now. You could miss out on connecting with new patients otherwise. And just in case you don’t feel especially motivated to make sure your website is what’s called “mobile-friendly,” hear this: Google’s algorithm favors these websites.

This isn’t new, of course. Since 2013, Google has been warning that if pages on your site aren’t “mobile-friendly” people using mobile devices will no longer find them in searches on Google. Which simply means if your site isn’t “mobile-friendly” it will likely disappear from view for the 35% of people who search for it on their mobile device (phone or tablet).

This means that your online leads could decrease by a minimum of 35%. For the average practice you’re looking at a decrease in sales of $250,000. Can you afford that, a loss in revenue this year of $250,000?

Are you mobile-friendly? Talk to us today about our audiology website designs.

Next: Get Ready for Better, More Intelligent Searches

In the old days (read: last year), search engines like Google would look for certain keywords in your pages, so stuffing your site full of those keywords was the way to get noticed. Now, however, those search engines are employing more powerful programs, ones that learn and improve their understanding of language, so the public can ask real questions. They are going to be looking for real answers and that’s going to mean that the quality of your information—and your marketing copy—will matter hugely.

Are you happy with your ranking in the search results? Are you writing for people…or computers? We can help with your SEO strategy!

Mind (and Mine) Your Reputation!

“You are only as good as your reputation.” You’ve probably heard that before, but it is even more important now. Your online reputation is like a flower that needs constant care. Especially now that search results not only provide names and addresses but customer reviews as well. Luckily, those reviews can cut both ways. Bad ones can break you, but good ones can really help you stand out from the pack.

Fine-Tune That Online Advertising

Recent changes to Google Ads make the top text ads more prominent, and that’s where you’ll want to be. That means constant testing to make sure your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are working, your landing page looks great, and the information you provide targeted, clear, and concise.

Are your PPC campaigns working for you? Find out how to get more patients calling with PPC.

Prepare for the Future

So what can you do about these changes right away to position your practice for success going forward?

Make sure your online marketing efforts include:

1. A website that is mobile-friendly.
2. A direct response website and blog that speaks directly to your patients and written in words they understand. Offer useful information that your patients will be searching for.
3. Strong online reviews to show up and stand out in local listings.
4. PPC ad campaigns that are targeted, inviting, and concise.

Questions? Ask any marketing question you have. Talk to us today.

The meteoric rise of the internet, social networks and mobile browsing has changed how healthcare consumers seek out information. For healthcare marketers to reach audiences with meaningful, helpful information when and where people are looking for it, it’s critical to have a content strategy. Besides providing information consumers want and need, your online content should aim to boost search engine optimization (SEO) and enhance the user experience by providing answers to questions people are asking.

The good news: online health information is in high demand. According to the Pew Research Internet Project, 72 percent of internet users say they’ve searched for medical information online. Among them, 77 percent started with a search engine as opposed to a specific website. To boost your search rankings, make sure your website provides helpful, patient-centric information, and integrate your online content across multiple channels. While practice details and information about your services are valuable, content that answers patient questions will attract higher search engine traffic. To further enhance your online presence, create pay-per-click and other digital ad campaigns that link to topic-specific (and keyword-driven) web pages, or to campaign landing pages with clear calls to action like schedule an appointment, sign up for a class or newsletter, take a tour, or attend an event.

Online videos are also very popular in the healthcare space, so they’ve become a must-have for many successful web and social content strategies. Videos are so popular and highly regarded among consumers seeking information that YouTube is the second largest online search engine. In fact, according to Google, YouTube traffic to hospital websites increases 119 percent year over year. Simply put, videos offer a great opportunity to improve SEO and expand your reach.

In short, your content should fulfill your customers’ needs. If you’re not sure what information your customers want, check back next week when we discuss how to learn about your audience by listening and engaging with them on social media.

We encourage you to check out our other topics in this series:

• Living your healthcare brand
• Listening and engaging through social media
• Aligning your marketing budget with strategic initiatives
• Stepping outside your comfort zone

To discuss how we can we deliver content marketing excellence across all channels, contact us today.

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At their most basic level, word clouds make text on a page look more exciting than, well, text on a page. You can use them to convey data and information in a way that breaks the mold of standard presentation formats like slides, spreadsheets and pie charts.

Looking for a creative way to share marketplace feedback to your executive and board leaders? Instead of a report with lengthy quotes and testimonials, consider presenting a word cloud that displays what consumers are saying in one quick, easily digestible image. Information that’s easy to absorb at a glance resonates more with readers.

Word clouds can also help you take a keen look at the content on your website, particularly if you’re not employing search engine optimization tactics. In seconds you’ll know exactly what words appear most frequently on key pages. You can use the results to assess whether or not you’re communicating what you want—and don’t want—to say. Try the same thing with key pages from your competitors’ sites to compare and contrast key messages.

And speaking of your Internet presence, do you know what’s being said about your organization online? Word clouds are a great way to determine if your online press is positive and aligns with your key messages. Google your organization or a specific topic, then enter text from the search results into a word cloud app. You’ll get an instant visual representation of your online image and what it says about you.

Your consumers and employees have suggestions for improvement – do you know what they are? Word clouds can help you figure it out. Just as they can be used to draw attention to your strengths, they can also uncover weaknesses. Without making it public, try making a word cloud to zero in on specific areas needing improvement.

There’s no shortage of word cloud generators available online. Look around on sites like Wordle, Tagxedo and Word It Out (to name just a few). Pick the app you like the most and discover what it can reveal about your marketing and communication efforts. Why not start right now? It’s easy, it’s creative, and it’s fun.