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How SEO Boosts Web Traffic, Patient Appointments

 |  By Marianne@example.com  
   February 29, 2012

Google your organization's name. Hopefully your homepage is the top result. Now Google the name of your city and your top service line. Are you still on top? Or visible without scrolling down? Or even on the first page of results? Unfortunately for many organizations, the answer to at least one of those questions will be "no." But this situation can be rectified by paying close attention to Search Engine Optimization—better known as SEO.

SEO is the process of improving website visibility in search engines through unpaid, or "organic," search results. Many factors contribute to SEO, such as front-end information like the website's content and links, as well as back-end information like webpage keywords, category tags, and the site's structure.

Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, OH, began an SEO program in 2009. The hospital had previously been paying for online ads, a.k.a. Search Engine Marketing (SEM), for several years with a very limited budget.

"When it came [time] to justify an increase each year to get visitors around key service lines, we quickly realized that the ‘pay to play' game was something we could not compete in as a nonprofit pediatric hospital," says Stephanie Cannon, the organization's director of web communications and e-business.

So Nationwide Children's put together a plan to improve its organic search engine results. Working with a consultant, Elizabeth Scott, head of Raven New Media, the organization embarked on an SEO improvement program that focused on four main areas: keywords, staff investment, content and links, and analytics.

Keywords
The most important step in any SEO program is a quarterly review of the best keywords and key phrases for your website, Scott says.

"Words and phrases must be chosen carefully and must be tested to ensure that your consumers will be most likely to find you," she says. "There is a method to keyword and phrase development—both an art and science. If you are in the practice of rattling off a laundry list of words that you hope a search engine will match with your site, you are wasting valuable time. Your competition has a strategy and may also understand the rules of the SEO game. You are at a distinct disadvantage."

Nationwide Children's leadership and staff worked with Scott to come up with an initial list of strategic keywords and phrases to integrate throughout the site. They also came up with a process to regularly review and update keywords.

"As a result of this process, we were able to not only have a plan in place of how to grow, but we were able to educate our staff and leadership about how search really works and how we could all play a part in gaining organic results," Cannon says.

Staff Investment
As you launch your SEO program, it's important to keep in mind that it is an investment that should pay for itself in dividends. Paid SEM is often allotted a larger portion of a hospital marketing budget, but SEO can have a better ROI.

"Most of us are woefully non-committal when it comes to finding dollars for SEO," Scott says. "If you are like most hospitals, it will be worth the dollars to have your site set up correctly."

Cannon hired an in-house SEO specialist in 2010 to guide the team's strategic direction and to provide expertise in keeping up with the latest updates.

"Having someone whose main job is to orchestrate our entire department's SEO efforts has made the biggest impact in not only seeing our traffic numbers continue to rise but to keep the staff engaged with the importance of everything we place online," Cannon says.

Content and Links
SEO should be kept in mind when writing every web page, blog post, article, and press release that goes on your site. Writing for SEO requires knowledge of how search engines work.

Page information should be written in a way that allows a search engine bot to scan it quickly and identify the keywords and phrases you want them to associate with the content. Pay close attention to page titles, headings, HTML meta tags, and ALT tags, Scott says.

"Everything that is on the Internet and identifies you, your hospital, or your services should be considered an online marketing tool," she says. "Make sure search engines can find, crawl, and index your pages. Organizing your information can provide context for search engines and explain your site in a way that a bot can understand. Make sure that every page on your site has unique content and that URLs are search-friendly."

Analytics
More metrics exist for SEO than almost any other method of marketing. This can be a blessing and a curse.

"Abundant data makes search more accountable than many ad formats," Scott says. "However, too much data tends to create an analysis paralysis. Walk away from the data and ask yourself what four to five metrics tell me whether my program is a success or if it needs improvement."

Nationwide Children's SEO efforts—regularly updating its keywords, investing in a full-time employee, writing web content for SEO, and evaluating its analytics—have resulted in a 25% increase in organic site traffic. And it has experienced an even higher traffic increase to key service line pages, which has led to patient appointment requests, Cannon says.

"SEO is an ongoing effort for Nationwide Children's Hospital—it takes discipline and someone who knows the ropes," she says. "If you partner with someone externally, you may benefit in the short term but having that person be in-house, to me, is key for long-term website success."

Marianne Aiello is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.

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