How Will You Ensure Your Site Ranks on Google in 2020?

If your competition has more of the 17+ features listed above, it is likely they will rank higher than you.

That’s it, plain and simple. But how do you do these things and have time to run the business and see or help patients?

Google has released hundreds of updates to its algorithms for search engine ranking since 1993. By now, you may have learned some of them, but are you really up to date?  Is your marketing consultant up to date? Is your webmaster up to date? … and is your competitor up to date?

My name is Dr Maria Todd and I have expertise with full stack marketing for healthcare business. I am a “unicorn”. You don’t find many like me who have clinical training and experience, healthcare administration experience, training in advertising and marketing consumer protection compliance and certification in digital marketing from Google. I help clients meet their marketing and business development objectives. I work with healthcare business development projects every day of the week, for my employer and for my private consulting clients. I achieve results or they wouldn’t continue to work with me. That’s the litmus test. Results and the interpretation of the results.

A part of my responsibilities is to make sure that every related action of marketing and advertising connects on a “super-pathway” and works in tandem to produce returns on investment. That means, for one thing, remaining informed about Google’s updates as they are released. No matter if they do this three times in a week. 

But I am also responsible for print and mailing and publication deadlines, demographic targeting, psychographics, mailing list filters, outcomes, and refinements.  I oversee several millions of dollars in advertising campaign development, graphics and content creation, video production, audio production, publicity, advertising placement, for my employer and my clients – every day. Google is but one of these outlets for which I am responsible. And I cannot risk my clients’ or my employer’s reputation and good name by allowing or being the source of scandal, errors, compliance infractions, unsubstantiated marketing and advertising promises, or miscommunications. 

I am paid a fee by the hour for my time spent to read blogs, research, test, and review and interpret and report results and changes or modifications to strategy. A part of that fee covers the incremental costs of the subscriptions to high-value news sources and services to help me winnow down search engine optimization (SEO) research on keywords and key phrases and learn what consumers and others search for and the syntaxes they use when search. SEO research is part tactical and part empathy of your targeted seeker. So if your target is from the USA, they will use different words than a Turk or a Brit or a Mexican or a Spaniard or a Panamanian or a Filipino person entering words in a search engine.  If your target is from West Africa, they may use different words than an East African or a person searching from India or the Middle East. 

To know, empathize or search using the syntax of these languages and cultures, you must know or study the languages and cultures and how they will translate their question from their language to English if your posts are in English. Along the same lines, you must work backwards with SEO to think like your targeted visitor and use words and phrases your targeted visitor might use – and their frames of reference to enable Google to classify your content as relevant to the seekers’ requests. This is one reason why I don’t hire SEO services that pitch me from India and other countries if my targeted reader or viewer is not from there. It isn’t better or worse, it’s just culturally and linguistically different. And the ones pitching are often lead sources hired blindly who don’t know better, so don’t get upset with them. They were hired to do a job and directed to accomplish a task that – at least with me – won’t happen.

Wrong keywords work – they just don’t deliver the results you want

One thing I’ve witnessed time and time again is that website owners and their consulting firms often position and compete for the wrong keywords. If you rank highly for the wrong keywords and phrases, you spend time and money on AdWords only to discover that the keywords you targeted don’t receive “the right” traffic. Oops!

One client spent USD $575 a month on AdWord spend chasing the wrong keywords out of ignorance. They hired an agency who also didn’t know better. This went on for 3 years at a cost of over $20,000 – $20,700 for the Adword spend and more for the agency tech who set things up. What’s that old saying, “even a broken clock is right twice a day”? Yes, you may get lucky and someone may click, but what’s the drop off rate? What is time on page. Google is watching all of that from a powerful vantage point. You may get two points for the click, (because Google makes money when the click occurs) but you then also get penalized and go to the bottom of the page or lower on the page because of the lack of relevance (the one thing Google stakes its reputation) on arrival such that the visitor leaves as quickly as they arrived. 

You may have a new orthopedic robot system you want to advertise and attract visitors to teach them more about how it can help them have a better knee replacement with better consistency and precision. But if you use the wrong keywords and the visitor has no idea that such robots exist or how they work, the visitor using Google isn’t going to connect with your content. 

Many people define medical tourism improperly – syndicating the myth that it requires travel to another country. It does not. Likewise, people mistakenly define a keyword as any phrase you would like your site to rank for in Google’s search results. You don’t really care about ranking as much as you care about connecting relevantly to the searchers’ intentions, right? If you try to rank for a single term or single word such as medical tourism, or Canadian medical tourism, you may rank someplace. But would a Canadian search for “Canadian medical tourism”? Of course not! So you won’t attract Canadians with that tactic. What would a Canadian search for instead?

Different categories of Keywords

Despite high traffic numbers, most head terms and navigational keywords will fail to lead to any revenues. Long tail, information and transactional keywords match customer intention and search term entry. They are the money shot! 

Relevance to what the searching human has entered is they key to success with Google SEO and SERP. Another mistake is targeting search words for webcrawlers. Simply stated, webcrawlers don’t buy healthcare services. why target them?

Emulate your competitors – but only if they are successful doing what you want to achieve

A better approach is to define your ideal client or visitor. Then think like them. Empathize. Leverage data you own about past customers or patients. Leverage profitability data. Target their needs that intersect with your best and most profitable service lines or products – not your whole service catalog or portfolio. 

Focus like a laser beam. Do you want to rank for procedures that sell for $1900 with a 15% margin, or procedures that sell for $15,000 with a 42% margin? After all, it’s your business and your choice. Conversions count, yes. But they aren’t equal.

Marketing for general products and services and SEO tactics that work are very different from SEO tactics for healthcare services procurement