As leaders in healthcare website design, we know that healthcare marketers are forced to balance a lot of different strategic interests and tactics when it comes to creating new content, not to mention creating a new website. What we see often from marketers is that they rely heavily on the branding and messaging and lose sight of the SEO tactics that we’re trying to put into place on their new site. One of the things marketers can keep in mind when they’re working with an SEO team is to remember that the work SEO teams are doing are not meant for people to see, they’re meant for search engines to crawl.
What people see is the content on the page – that’s what’s going to engage your prospect. SEO teams put target terms where Google looks for them. Sometimes that isn’t the prettiest thing from a marketing standpoint but it is still extremely important to effective marketing because it gets people to the page. We always say, “Let us get people to the page, you can create what the experience is when they get there”.
A healthcare marketer may think they have these buzzwords in mind that they think their prospects must be typing into search engines, but when an SEO team comes in and does an analysis, they may find that the keywords you thought were right don’t have any search volume at all. So they might be well and good to be featured on the page and to involve in your content strategy because they show you are a market leader, but again, from a keyword specific perspective, your SEO team is trying to optimize your site to get people to find it. So they’re going to rely on using terms through their optimization efforts that have search volume so that people can find you. So it’s important to make sure that you don’t go too heavy on the branding and forget that you need to drive people to the content you’ve just written.
There’s always a balancing act between SEO, UX and messaging. It’s extremely important for clients to realize that SEO should have an equal, if not heavier, seat at the table than the other elements because SEO is what drives traffic to your website. It’s a completely data driven approach because we can measure what we’ve done and what people are typing.
Once your website launches, if you continue to work with your SEO firm after that, you can see how your keywords are ranking, which pages have the most organic traffic and whether your SEO strategy has worked through the analytics tools that the SEO team has at their disposal. SEO is a great way to integrate something into your marketing strategy that is completely data driven that you can continue to track, measure and tweak until you are gaining search engine visibility for the right words and your content is really working to drive the right prospects to your website.
