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Googled: How One Hospital Boosted Its Search Results

Anna Webster, for HealthLeaders Media, April 6, 2011

"To show up in organic searches you really need to concentrate on a strategy that will allow you to own a niche such as a sub service line, a highly specialized procedure, a unique success story, or an innovation that isn't common among hospitals---otherwise you will be buried under tons of cookie-cutter service line and general hospital information," says Scott.

Social media seems like the obvious choice for a health facility to demonstrate a unique voice and offerings. A national Capstrat-Public Policy Polling survey, however,  has found that more than 85% of respondents would not use social media for medical communication if their docs offered it.

A step to making your hospital's Twitter account relevant could be tapping in to popular conversation treads. Hashtags, or Twitter search terms, start with the "#" symbol and a keyword for the discussion. The most popular healthcare hashtags are ones centered on healthcare reform. Some of the most popular healthcare hashtags by total views according to Healthcare Hashtag Project include the following:

  • #hcsm --- healthcare communications and social media
  • #opnhealth – A reform hashtag, related to #hcr (healthcare reform) and #healthreform
  • #hpm – Conversations on hospice and palliative care, related to hashtags #hospice and #palliative.
  • #MDchat – A Twitter Chat term for physicians. The term is related to others like #physician and #doctors.
  • #eldercarechat – A Twitter Chat hashtag focused on issues of importance to elder care professionals and caregivers.
  • #HealthIT – Discussions on health information technology, related terms include #HIT and #eprescribing. Influencers include @ONC_HealthIT, the Office National Coordinator of Health IT.
  • #mHealth – A tag for mobile health and telemedicine discussions, related to #eHealth

Staying niche-specific and encouraging the conversion is key to boosting patient volume, says Scott.  We forget to encourage sharing. Phrases like 'please past this along' or 'post this to your page' are powerful, communal calls to action," she said.

Word choice can make or break a hospital marketing campaign. Does your healthcare facility have a blog or Twitter account? How do you make your marketing campaigns more 'Google-friendly'?

Discuss in our comments section bellow.

Questions? Comments? Story ideas? Anna Webster, Online Content Coordinator for HealthLeaders Media, can be reached at awebster@hcpro.com.
Follow Anna Webster on Twitter

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2 comments on "Googled: How One Hospital Boosted Its Search Results"


Bill Lindsay (4/7/2011 at 6:04 PM)
Anna, your tip about using social media as a way to increase website traffic is a good one. And there's certainly growing attention in the industry regarding better integration of social and traditional media (incl. websites). At UbiCare, we've seen firsthand the effectiveness of using Twitter and hastags to increase conversation and drive traffic to our website. And, further to Andrew's comment, quality of content trumps all, but type and frequency of content posting is also crucial to engaging fans/followers and encouraging conversation.

Andrew Billmann (4/6/2011 at 4:02 PM)
Good article! In working with many healthcare organizations and studying way too many SEO "flavor of the day" techniques that have since flopped, I've found the most important thing about SEO strategy is to make sure your content is current, relevant, well-written and helpful. After that, it's best to let the organic search chips fall where they may. Google search algorithms are constantly changing and inherently complex. Spending too much time gaming the system may not only be ineffective, it could end up HURTING your rank. It unquestionably hurts the quality of your writing. Remember not all that long ago when EVERYONE was jamming every possible keyword onto their home page or into their meta tags? Today, that won't get you a better rating, it will only make your copy hard to read. Instead, if we return to our true purposes[INVALID]being helpful, being clear, being accurate, being timely, being a resource[INVALID]the SEO beast tends to tame itself.