Buzz e-sante

ny business within any industry has the opportunity to be successful on the internet. However creating an effective strategy for digital marketing in healthcare includes using Local SEO techniques to help local patients find you.

Professional healthcare businesses such as GP’s, Dentists and Cosmetic Surgeons need to consider using Local SEO to allow people to find their healthcare practice easily by appearing in localised search results. This can also help to build their brand.

Here are some great tips for professionals within the healthcare industry on how to make the most of Local SEO:

1. Get Added to Business Directories and Create Local Citations

Ensuring that your healthcare business is listed within local and creditable business directories such as Yell, is an ideal start to help people in your local area who are actively seeking your services. This will also help search engines such as Google determine your physical location too and can boost your rankings in search results. Just make sure that your citations in online directories match the information on your website and are consistent throughout.

You can also use BrightLocal  to keep track of the citations you have created, as well as to identify what citations your local competitors have. This will allow you to identify further credible sites to get listed on.

2. Make sure you are listed on Google My Business

Formally know as Google Places, Google My Business allows your practice to further improve your visibility in Google search results, Maps and the social network Google+. You can sign up for free www.google.co.uk/business and it’s important to make sure you fill in all the sections to make a complete profile. Make sure that the contact details exactly match what’s on your website and you have a rel=publisher tag added to your website. Google My Business also allows you to fully verify your healthcare business’ address, which is essential.

3. On-Page Optimisation

For great digital marketing in healthcare you also need make sure that the pages on your website targets keywords that patients in the local area are actually searching for. This includes making sure they are within the on-page elements including Title Tags, Headings, body content on those pages as well as in the Meta Descriptions.

Images such as logos also need to be optimised because these will appear in local search results. You also need to make sure that the NAP (Company Name, Address and Phone numbers) are clearly visible in areas of your website, particularly within a ‘Contact us’ page. Talk a look at our Essential SEO Checklist which can be applied to create a powerful strategy for digital marketing in healthcare.

If you have multiple practices, create separate pages for those practices with their own specific contact details. This will allow Google to identify where your local practices are and will help you to target these locations. Below is an example of Oasis Dental Care creating individual pages for their practices around Nottingham.

4. Add a Reviews Page to your Website

Allowing your patients to add a review on your website is another important tool to improve your practice’s visibility on the internet. If you want to make sure you are listed within local search results, allowing patients to add honest and creditable reviews will add value to your website so be sure encourage your patients to provide you with some good feedback.

5.  Build Links with other Local Businesses and Websites

Obtaining links to your site from other local websites can improve your local visibility in search results. Links are a critical element to Local SEO because each website linking back to yours (using a hyperlink) acts as a ‘vote’ of quality and can boost your rankings in search engines. Good examples of local websites you can obtain links from include local government websites and news websites. If you’ve issued a press release to your local paper and it appears on their website, be sure to request a link on that article back to your website.

It’s also important to get links back from professional bodies such as the Royal College of General Practitioners and the British Dental Association. Make sure that you have include their logos on your website and link to you page on the site as this will act a great trust signal for website visitors too.

Read more: http://www.hallaminternet.com/2014/digital-marketing-in-healthcare/#ixzz3J4NcVhsg

With advances in healthcare IT, healthcare providers will have access to a broad ecosystem of digital ways to collect, store, and perform tasks with clinical information and could potentially be overwhelmed by the abundance of data they have to deal with. Without data mining it will be difficult to make any meaningful decisions for the benefits of patients.

How do we engage these new digitally-empowered health care consumers?

At a recent health conference, doctors Danny Sands and Ted Eytan said the answer was simple.

If you want people to participate more in their health care, you have to start by finding physicians who actually want them to do so.

What Sands and Eytan uncovered is a new divide in health care. It’s not the haves and have nots; not the sick and the well; or even the digitally-connected and unconnected. Instead, it’s in the culture of the providers we choose.

It’s the divide between the companies, individuals and practices that invest in very human experiences around the moment of care and those that do not. It’s the gap between the ones that build the new interactions people want and those that do not.

Think about that question way beyond the exam room: