As healthcare organizations continue to increase their investments in online marketing, the question remains of how effective is that investment and what is the ROI. Additionally, as the competitive landscape continues to intensify and market share shifts, understanding the tactics being used by your competitors is becoming increasingly more important. To help you understand how individual service lines are performing in your geographic region, we have done a deep analysis to see which sites are performing the best.
We have spent the last several months researching 19 service lines across the country to determine which organizations are winning at Search Engine Marketing. We have analyzed the organic results which falls under Search Engine Optimization, Google Maps results, and Paid Search results to create a report that will help you very clearly understand how you are performing in your market and exactly how your competitors are performing. Most importantly, we provide some recommendations for adjustments to tactics and strategy that you might consider that will help you win the race.
Why Is This Important?
The Search Engine Results Pages have changed significantly in the last 2–3 years. Largely driven by the increase in usage of mobile devices and the push by Google to keep you on their sites longer (think maps and local listings) the significance of SEO has changed as well as paid listing have become more prominent.
With up to four paid listings and the three-pack of map listings above the first organic results, the ROI on investment in SEO has changed as well as the need to adopt new tactics to meet the changing search engine landscape.
With the changes to Google, organic rank has dropped in importance because there are so many listings above the organic results. It used to be admirable to be ranked 7th in the organic results, but with four paid listings and three maps listings, being ranked 7th in the organic listings puts you at the 14th listing on the page. As a searcher, how often do you get down to the 14th rank listing? When you do scroll that far and will that ranking regularly bring you new patients?
To conduct this research and determine the keywords for each service line that are most important, we combined two tools: Google Keyword Planner3 & Bing Keyword Planner4. These are tools provided by the two largest search engines to help select keywords to target in your SEO and paid search marketing efforts. These tools provide keyword search volume estimates, the competitiveness of a keyword, and the estimated cost for a paid advertisement on that search term.
For healthcare, we focused on those actionable keywords where a searcher is close to deciding to select a provider. For example, a person searching for “Orthopedic Surgeon Near Me” or “Knee Specialist Chicago IL” is ready to decide on a provider or at least receive more information versus someone simply searching for “knee pain” or “ankle swelling.” Our goal was to analyze keywords that, if the top ranking was achieved, would not only produce more traffic to the site, but quality traffic that would lead to increased patients, appointments, and revenue. Traffic without those three results are mostly meaningless. They are vanity metrics like visits and pageviews. The keywords that were selected are a mix of short tail and long tail keywords, but indicate a desire to take action by the searcher in the very near future.
To provide you with insight into our analysis, below is a table of our results where you can select the service line and geography that you are most interested in. The results will show how your site ranks across the most relevant, high volume searched keywords for your service line.
As healthcare organizations continue to increase their investments in online marketing, questions remain about how effective is that investment and what is the ROI?
What about the Paid Search Results & Google Maps Listings?
While we have our findings from the organic listings above because that is where a huge part of the online marketing investment has been spent by most companies, there are also many interesting findings in the paid listings and maps listings that are important to your business and digital strategy. We dove deep into those elements of the search results to analyze the map listings, paid results, and competitor site metrics to determine what is working and not working.
If you are interested in our more detailed report for your geographic market and service line to see how you are performing in the organic listings, paid listings, and the 3-pack maps section and where the biggest opportunities lie within you geographic market, visit our Service Line Market Analysis page for more details.
Our market Analysis reports are specific to a geographic region and a service line and includes:
- Organic search results and recommendations for the Top 100 Domains in that geographic market.
- Google Maps results with clear indicators of how to rank more effectively for high volume keywords as well as how your competition is performing
- Google Paid Search results where we provide exact ad copy, keywords, and landing pages that are being used by your competitors. This information can be used to improve your paid search strategy and improve the ROI of your efforts.
- Competitive site analytics where you can see the amount of traffic that your competitors are receiving, but also the sources of the traffic.
To order a report today and get started improving your organizations performance in the search engine results, Click here.
