Individual Doctor Websites and Your Health System Marketing Strategy

The strength of a system-level strategy

Before we examine how to respond to a request for individual doctor websites, it’s helpful to understand the current state of how healthcare organizations are marketing themselves. Over the last decade, there has been a shift to a more system-centric approach for health-system websites. This shift allows systems to leverage their size, reach, and depth and breadth of their services more effectively by making it easier for patients to find this information all in one place, supporting patient-first user experience (UX). It also allows systems to tell a more robust story about their service offerings.

Using multiple websites to communicate this singular story can create search engine optimization (SEO) challenges and lead to issues with the UX for site visitors, resulting in general confusion about what is offered and leading to patient attrition. It also quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare for digital teams.

Those issues, along with a focus on efficiency, are what led to the shift to a system-centric website approach, which has been the approach of choice for most multi-hospital systems for the last five years.

Although the system-centric approach has typically been well-received by site users evidenced by increased site sessions for those organizations who made the switch, internal stakeholders have been harder to convert.

Enter: doctors.

What leads doctors to want individual websites?

No matter how hard you work to ensure a cohesive brand online, you will inevitably have certain doctors or service lines asking to move their business from the main site to a separate microsite. Top reasons for this include:

Feeling under-represented or lagging the competition. There may be a legitimate mismatch between their direct competition’s online marketing and how their services are presented within the health system.
Idea of personal brand. Often providers are accustomed to having their name as the headline (or face on a billboard!) and they crave that specific attention. Especially if they were part of a group that was recently acquired or merged with another system. Beyond that, providers (along with everyone else these days) are inundated with encouragement to create a “personal brand.”
The promise of results. If a doctor’s schedule isn’t full, they may think marketing is to blame.

Once the issue is raised (or you discover a rogue microsite in the wild), the best approach is one focused on bridge-building: Take an honest look at how their individual, practice, and specialty information is presented compared to the alternatives options that health consumers would be considering and see if opportunities arise. It’s still good to be firm about your organization’s website governance policies (you have those, right?), but look at this as an opportunity to create an ally for the long term.

The risks of stand-alone sites

Often, doctors like the idea of having a stand-alone website for their practice. They often see the microsite as a way to build out more content, be more visually interesting than the health system website, or even distance themselves from the overall health system brand. In short, it gives them more control.

And they believe that, with more control, they can get more traffic, tell a more compelling story, and bring in more patients.

Unfortunately, reality rarely works out that way for a number of reasons. Here are the top three:

Fragmentation: Separating different parts of your organization’s story from your offerings makes it harder for consumers to find what they need, and when they do find it, what’s there is often less compelling. Over time the stories across these sites often diverge, creating an even more confusing experience for healthcare consumers.
Optimization: Microsites can have a variety of challenges when it comes to SEO, for one, it splits domain authority. Google uses a wide array of factors to determine domain authority — a metric used to predict the ability of a website to rank in search engines, including inbound links, content depth on a subject, click-through rates, etc. Microsites split off these features, undermining the authority of both the microsite and the health system’s main website. In addition, a new microsite will often force you to “start over” with domain/page authority, which is a very difficult score to build.
Duplicate content: When content is copied verbatim Google can penalize you, assuming that one site or the other is stealing the content or otherwise attempting to game the system to improve rankings. There are ways to avoid these penalties but they harm the SEO of one of the web properties involved, create more work, and can be a real burden for the long-term management of the sites.

How to move forward

Assuming you win the battle to keep the doctor from spinning up a new site or microsite, there are ways to keep your stakeholders, users, and search engines happy, all while protecting the system brand and system-centric approach you’ve worked so hard to build.

Reinforce the system strategy of the organization – the reason the physician is there is to make the most of her unique expertise.
Give the provider’s profile a different look and incorporate branding by having a designer create templates with unique styling that still complements the main site so as not to confuse site visitors.
Encourage the doctor to work with you to develop robust, localized, focused content around a niche topic that may have a positive effect on SEO and drive interest in their specialty. Connect that content to their official profile as well.
Understand where your competition is focusing their optimization and paid advertising efforts. Competitive analysis coupled with keyword research and user testing can put a huge spotlight on a doctor/service line while still being part of the main site.

At the end of the day, these conversations are difficult. The request from a provider can come across as de-valuing your marketing expertise or your organization’s overarching strategy. Plus, you’ve likely worked hard to get and keep a centralized marketing budget and requests to siphon some off for side projects doesn’t help your cause.

Geonetric works with growing health systems day in and day out, helping them create system-centric digital strategies – and defend them when needed. It’s all about putting the users first and being committed to that focus, even when doctors or department heads disagree. The good news is, there are many viable paths forward to keep both users – and doctors – happy. If you need a digital partner with a proven track record, contact us.

Healthcare Websites and Keyboard Interface Accessibility

It’s important to understand that making your hospital’s website work with a physical keyboard is less about using the keyboard specifically and more about allowing your website to work for all input devices, such as a keyboard, mouse, switch devices, etc.

By programming your website to work with a keyboard, you are essentially programming it to work for all input devices as those input devices usually emulate or work similarly to a keyboard. You also do your part to meet the keyboard accessibility standard for WCAG 2.1 guidelines, as well as creating a more user-friendly site, in general.

Reasons to keep keyboard navigators top of mind

Here are three use-cases for hospital website visitors that hit home the need to consider how your website interacts with physical keyboards.

One of the benefits of responsive design is that users can zoom to get the mobile view on a large screen. This is particularly helpful for people with low vision or those with certain concentration or cognitive disabilities. Zooming to the mobile view on a large screen allows users a more clear, focused, and simple layout.Because there are a large number of people with multiple disabilities who may not be able to use a mouse or touch screen, you need to make sure this mobile view also works well with a keyboard.
Some people have tablets mounted to their chairs and operate them not with touch or a mouse, but rather with a switch device or other input device. Again, by ensuring your mobile and desktop sites both work with a keyboard, you are also ensuring they work with most types of input devices.
Screen readers on touch screen devices disable the normal touch functionality. This means that swiping left and right would not advance a carousel banner, but instead reads either the next or previous element on the page, or the next or previous letter in a word, depending on the user’s settings. In this situation, you wouldn’t be using a keyboard to interact with the mobile site, you’d be using a wide variety of swipe and tap combinations. By programming your mobile site to work with a keyboard, you also ensure it will work properly with a mobile screen reader.

Inclusive design means excellent user experience

At the end of the day, designing with accessibility in mind makes the user experience better for all users, regardless of ability. If you have questions about inclusive design or are looking for answers to your accessibility questions, contact us. In addition, our team of experts would be happy to provide feedback on your healthcare website. Simply sign up for a free accessibility check-up and we’ll be in touch!

How Apple’s iOS 14 Update Impacts Digital Marketing

What happened with iOS 14?

To understand the aspects of Apple’s iOS 14 update, and how it impacts marketers, we first have to understand what IDFAs are.

What is an IDFA?

IDFA stands for “Identifier for Advertisers” and is Apple’s persistent ID that gets assigned to individual Apple devices (iPhones, Apple TV, iPad, etc.).

This identifier allowed Apple and, subsequently, advertisers within their platform to create a more personalized experience across apps based on user behaviors. For marketers, this allowed for a more optimized campaign initiative because we can target users a lot more specifically based on their actual behaviors and interests.

When coupled with cookies around the web, these IDFAs — which also allowed frequency capping, campaign performance metrics, app installs, and attribute impressions — we were able to create truly robust identity graphs which could be used for advertising.

Changes to IDFA in iOS 14

So what changed? With the iOS 14 update the IDFA technology went from opt-out and opt-in. The change seems minor on the surface but it aims to recognize a complaint we’ve been hearing for many years.
Consumers have been frustrated with data security because the conditions of their data are buried in the depths of terms and conditions and user agreements. Typically by logging into a platform you’re giving them certain permissions by default, unless you specifically opt out. The iOS 14 update will require users to opt IN to the IDFA technology, which we estimate will be very few.

This change will remove the ability to share user or device-level data with advertisers. Apple will retain full control over any attribution data passed back to ad networks and the data they will pass is minimal. Ad networks can now plan to receive:

Click-based attributes
100 Campaign IDs per ad network
Batched conversions with a latency of 24-48 hours
Removal of the date stamp parameter
A single, fixed attribution lookback window
Limited probabilistic data
Deferred deep linking
Limited demographic data

How will this impact advertising?

It’s difficult to know the exact impact this will have in the long-term, as things are still changing rapidly.

Facebook ads

One of the places that’s already seen a large impact is the Facebook advertising platform. As it stands, Facebook is unable to ask users to provide that IDFA data, even if they’ve chosen to opt in. This means that the entire iOS audience network is lost and advertisers on Facebook will no longer be able to directly target Apple users in any significant way.

You’ve likely seen changes to your reporting within Facebook already. Demographic information has been cut dramatically (maybe entirely, based upon the operating system breakdown of your audience) and conversions have gotten muddled. With the iOS 14 update only allowing click-based attributes, some landing-page specific conversions are no longer being tracked and are resulting in the appearance of campaigns tanking.

Luckily, Facebook and other platforms that have their own network have already adopted user IDs specific to their platform. Expect to tap into this data more moving forward as Apple continues to restrict the data they pass through to these networks.

Assisted metrics

The two biggest areas we can expect to see the impact fall under assisted metrics and platforms that take advantage of off-site behaviors. Assisted metrics, such as assisted conversions and assisted revenue will see a dramatic impact. These metrics are what allow us to attribute ROI to the appropriate channel. For example, a display campaign that is meant to increase awareness rather than drive conversions, uses these assisted metrics to showcase the impact these campaigns have on pushing users down the funnel into those more meaningful conversions. Without this view-through data, those initial click attributions are gone.

Off-site behavior

Off-site behavior targeting & tracking is an essential piece of digital marketing. How many times have you been startled by an ad on Facebook showing a product or service you were just talking about with friends? This is because other websites and apps share data with each other and advertisers on Facebook (and other display networks) can tap into this data and show you ads relevant o your interests. The iOS 14 update is going to severely limit, if not remove, that data from Apple devices.

On the consumer side, at least on the surface, it seems comforting that you won’t get those creepy ads that seem to be following you. However, those ads work so well because we as consumers secretly like them and click on them. I wanted new shoes, you showed me shoes I like, I bought those shoes.

Silver lining

Looking on the bright side of the iOS 14 update for marketers, those of us who keep our finger on the pulse will dominate the playing field. Across the industry there will be a swift and large drop in targeting power and control which for many advertisers will lead to poor ad placement and optimization inefficiencies. For the rest of us, those that adapt to the new standards and tap into the platform-specific data we have, we can take advantage of those inefficiencies drive down our cost-per-acquisition with competition dwindling. This is definitely not the end of digital advertising.

You also shouldn’t expect to see much of an impact on the PPC (keyword advertising) side, as that relies very little on the user data and more on keyword data. You may see a decline in some of those user-focused metrics you use to optimize PPC campaigns, but that data should still be supplemented by Google’s own behavior tracking across their platforms (Google YouTube, Google Analytics, Gmail, etc.).

What do we do now?

At Geonetric, our experts recommend sticking with your advertising and adapting to the new structure around the data you can expect, as well as the new regulations in place.

Facebook conversions

Facebook has restrictions on the number of conversions you can track. We often see where clients will end a campaign and leave the conversions in place, because they simply won’t fire anymore and you don’t have to recreate them if you were to run that campaign again in the future. Facebook is now allowing only a finite number of conversions to be tracked at a time, so it’s worth revisiting the conversions you have in place and keeping the list clean and up-to-date.

With your team

Have conversations with your team(s) and vendors to ensure everyone is aware and prepared for iOS 14. This is especially important, as outlined above, for anyone involved in Facebook advertising as well as any display advertising.
Revisit your campaign strategy and determine what changes need to be made. Are you relying on that stored off-site behavior data to place your ads? Are you taking advantage of retargeting? Do you have audience segmentation based on demographics? These things are changing and it’s vital that you shift your strategy or those campaigns could decline significantly.

Audit your efforts

Use this as an opportunity to audit your data. This marks a substantial change in the way we look at digital privacy, and other organizations are likely to follow suit. This isn’t the end of digital marketing, it won’t even necessarily make it harder, but it is going to require us to change our strategy and understand the data we have available to us. As one data stream closes, another will open, you have an opportunity to be the first one to tap into that new stream and see your initiatives flourish!

Need help?

If the idea of keeping up with the changing landscape of digital marketing sounds overwhelming, our experts are happy to help. Sign up for a free ads assessment to get started!

10 Questions to Ask Your Potential Digital Advertising Agency

Download this white paper and learn 10 important questions you should ask that will help as you vet potential partners, including:

Should the agency specialize in digital?
Should the agency specialize in healthcare?
How does the agency tackle channel strategy?
How does the agency report success?

You’ll find out the answers you should be looking for and how to use the answers to understand which type of agency is right for you. Use it to evaluate potential partners, including the pros and cons of different types of partnerships. With it, you can find the perfect match for your health system.

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4 Tips to Take the Headache Out of a Web CMS Change

For many hospitals and health systems, their CMS is out of date and the path to an upgrade is complicated. For others, their tool isn’t user-friendly and requires too much dependence on I.T. or a web vendor. Regardless, it’s a headache – and an opportunity.

Make the most of this chance to reevaluate the digital experience you want to put forward and vet new platforms and partners that can help you get there more effectively. Discover the top four things to look for in a new platform – and partner – that will help you find the right path forward

4 Tips for a smooth web CMS transition

When you entered into your current partnership and selected your current platform, you had high expectations the investment would go smoothly for years to come. Yet, here you are – on a legacy CMS with no clear upgrade path and maybe even an unsympathetic vendor.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Tip #1: Find a platform with proven upgrade history and active roadmap

CMS platforms must be continually invested in to keep up. Remember, your CMS should keep up with everything from changes in consumer behavior to algorithm updates from search engines like Google. Ask how many major and minor software upgrades there have been in the last year and a brief overview of what they were.

Also, ask to see a roadmap. It will help you to understand where the software is going and that there is a team actively working on enhancements. It’s also critical to ensure you don’t find yourself on a platform with no future.

Bonus: As you evaluate potential CMS systems, be sure future software updates aren’t an additional cost. Ask what the upgrade process looks like – will there be downtime? How does client feedback get incorporated into upgrades?

Tip #2: Confirm ease of use

If your marketing team can’t easily and quickly make edits without the help of a programmer or I.T. team, your platform can quickly become a burden. Make sure you select a platform that allows your team to easily:

Make content edits
Add videos and images
Spin up new pages
Update SEO data
Add documents
Change out banner images
And other common tasks you have to keep up for your website

If you can’t do these things on-team, you may end up spending valuable budget dollars on easy edits, or waiting for other teams to prioritize your work.

Bonus: Ask about training. With large healthcare organizations supporting dozens of content contributors – many of whom are often in different locations – it’s crucial to ensure there are training opportunities for your team and assets to help you onboard other users.

Tip #3: Make them prove their “proven” implementation process

When you sell a platform and plan of action internally, your reputation is on the line. You have a vested interest in making sure that the project gets done on-time and on-budget. The implementation phase of a platform change – and often site redesign – can take weeks, months, or even years. Know what you are getting into ahead of time by asking for a sample timeline for a project of your scope.

Some helpful questions that will help you get a sense of just how experienced they really are:

Have you done this for healthcare organizations with similar scope? (Ex: bringing microsites into the main site, building a provider directory, etc.)
Have you migrated from my current platform to this one?
Do you have experience with the type of APIs we need? (ex: credentialing systems)

Bonus: Don’t be afraid to ask for references. When you contact those references ask specific questions around implementation.

Tip #4: Ask about support – during implementation and beyond

The technology you decide to go with is obviously important, but the support around that change is a critical part of the re-platforming process. Pick a partner who will take the burden off your team and reduce stress throughout the project.

Look for a partner who will take a long-term view. Implementation partners who are only there for part of the journey might be fast to launch, but they don’t stick around for the long-term to make sure the platform actually works past go-live. They certainly won’t be there as you build on that new platform foundation to support more complex patient journeys.

Bonus: Asking for some common stats can also help you compare. For example, what’s the average client tenure? Or, are there client satisfaction scores the company can share? At Geonetric, many of our healthcare clients have been with us for over a decade. And in our last client satisfaction survey (2021) 80% of our clients gave us a 5.65 overall rating out of 6. These are numbers and stats we actively share and keep updated. Ask your potential vendor for stats like these to see what you can expect.

See a CMS change as an opportunity

Switching platforms can be a burden – but you can use the need to upgrade platforms to also advance digital strategy. At the end of the day, the technology you select is essential, but it’s also only part of the puzzle. If you can find a platform and a partner that meet your needs, you can truly build a reimagined web presence that lives up to its potential.

At Geonetric, we’re known for our healthcare-specific CMS, VitalSite. But our expert designers, developers, and project managers have proven experience implementing on multiple platforms, including Sitecore, WordPress, and Drupal – delivering the strategic support after go-live that’s key to success. Reach out if you’d like to see a demo of our CMS, learn about other platforms we support or talk about digital strategy needs.

A pair of microphones and headsets on a desk in an empty studio.

VitalSite Demo: Helping You Put Digital First

Join other healthcare marketers for this live demo and see the different ways VitalSite can help you create marketing results. This 30-minute session is packed with best practices and examples of how leading organizations are using VitalSite to manage their website, support marketing campaigns, promote providers and increase volume for their services.

3 Content Marketing Ideas to Mark COVID-19’s One Year Anniversary

Many marketers are beginning to think about planning a remembrance for lives lost, a celebration for lives saved and an event to thank healthcare staff for their dedication and sacrifices through it all. That’s a tall order and one that still needs to follow social distancing guidelines.

Content marketing ideas to remember patients and honor healthcare workers

You’re the expert when it comes to what will resonate with your organization and your community. Even though your plate is likely full promoting vaccination clinics and filling elective service line patient volumes, spending some time to observe the year-mark of the pandemic can offer the following benefits:

Shows your appreciation (and gives your community the opportunity to show their appreciation) for your healthcare workers, which supports employee engagement, retention, and recruitment
Gives your community an opportunity to engage with your brand, building on the goodwill and support they’ve shown in the last year
Provides an opportunity for your community to grieve those lost to COVID-19 after a year when public mourning rituals haven’t been possible, helping your community and team better cope

1: Share Patient Stories

Your hospital or health system likely had many patients who were critically ill with COVID-19 but recovered. Consider identifying a handful of patients that match your key personas and spotlight them through patient stories. You may even consider reuniting the patient with his or her care team and capturing the moment on camera, followed by interviews with both the patient and some of his or her care team to do a look back – and ahead. You can share the articles, videos, and photos on your content marketing hub and promote via eNewsletters and social media.

Sharing stories of patients who have passed can be hard, but also impactful. Some organizations may choose to mark each patient lost in a certain way – such as through candles or luminaries – and perhaps tell some of their stories too, especially if a provider or care team member went above and beyond to support the patient or their family. You could partner with patient families or even local schools to decorate the luminaria. If space allows, you could even plan a drive-through luminaria ceremony honoring and remembering all those who lost their battle with COVID-19.

2: Plan Acts of Appreciation

There is really no adequate way to tell your care team how much you appreciate them, but marking a historic, unprecedented year with words and acts of gratitude for their sacrifices and compassionate service to others is a great place to start. In addition to promoting the ongoing availability of employee wellness programs and mental health resources, consider doing a full week of appreciation starting March 11th for your healthcare heroes, maybe honoring a different department each day.

You could partner with local companies to deliver different items each day for the team to enjoy. Consider meals, flowers, or maybe even hire a local musician to play in the lobby. Partnering with local companies also gives them needed exposure, as many small businesses and artists have taken a hit this year.

You could even turn this week-long event into a giving program with your organization’s philanthropic arm or foundation, asking your community to show their appreciation and support through donations to employee relief or other funds.

Be sure to capture the acts of appreciation on camera, interview the care team on what it’s like looking back, and share all of it through your eNewsletters and social media channels.

3. Get Leaders Involved

The one-year anniversary is an important milestone, and your leadership team may already have some thoughts on how to mark the occasion in the context of the organization’s strategic goals. Consider doing a video recapping the year and having executive, clinical, and service line leaders make statements thanking the team for their hard work and dedication. Also, consider creating a video or blog post from your CEO reflecting on the year and sharing areas where the organization has grown. Even if this content isn’t for public consumption, sharing videos and posts from key members of the executive team on your intranet can be inspiring and boost employee morale.

In it together

Remember, your community has lived the last year right there beside you. From depending on you for facts about the virus to delivering homemade PPE to trusting you with their care – COVID-19-related or not – your entire community has ridden the same ups and downs. They will likely respond well to commemorating the milestone with you.

Counterintuitive to traditional event marketing, it’s important to think about the events you plan and be thoughtful about not attracting a crowd. That’s where content marketing and digital come in. Plan to release content on your online content hubs and through social. You can Facebook live certain interviews or events, record videos ahead of time and release the day of, or even partner with your local news stations who are likely going to be looking for this very content. Digital is a great, socially-distanced way to safely share the experience with your community and continue to build those bonds.

If you need assistance interviewing patients or care team members for articles and blog posts, our expert team of writers can help. We know you have a lot on your plate and would love to share our expertise in whatever way possible.

Answering Questions About Life After the COVID-19 Vaccine

You’ve addressed the concerns of myriad audiences, from hospital staff to expectant parents to donors and more. Now it’s time to add one more audience to your list: The newly vaccinated.

As of February 26, more than 14% of Americans had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. These people still play an important role in helping to contain the spread of the coronavirus — and they have their own distinct questions about how to keep themselves and others safe. Google Trends shows that searches for “after covid vaccine” reached an all-time high in February. As states roll out vaccines to more people, interest in the topic will likely remain strong.

Hospitals and health systems can continue being a trusted resource for COVID-19-related information in the post-vaccine phase. Here are some tips for meeting the information needs of people in your community.

Consider Local Needs

People in different areas of the country may need to hear somewhat different messages. Does your organization need to primarily educate? Change or reinforce behaviors? Consider what opportunities you have to bolster information or fill in gaps based on what local media and public health agencies are (or aren’t) communicating.

And keep track of vaccine distribution in your state through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s vaccination tracker, which shows the percentage of the population that’s gotten one dose or both doses. The data can help you understand, at any point, what stage your audiences may be at in terms of need for information.

Discover Trending Topics

Invest some time in researching common questions of those who have received a vaccine—or are looking forward to receiving a vaccine and want to know what to expect. You can certainly get some perspective from your colleagues who were among the first in the country to get the vaccine. Take time to also understand what’s top-of-mind for those with less familiarity with medicine.

Great sources for information include:

Keyword research – Check Google Trends and other keyword research tools to find common post-vaccine-related queries in your area. For example, in Iowa, “can you spread covid after vaccine” is a rising search term.
Primary care providers – Ask them what questions patients have related to safety precautions after being inoculated.
Surveys – Ask your followers on social media or add a popup survey to the COVID-19 section of your website. Ask users what questions they have about what to expect after getting the vaccine.

The media — What questions are news outlets covering? What similar concerns can you address in your own communication?

The post-vaccine questions you uncover may be the start of a helpful frequently asked questions (FAQ) page on your COVID-19 resource hub. They also may fuel story ideas for your e-newsletter, blog, or content marketing hub.

Reach Your Audience

Many people in your community have spent the last year taking in a lot of COVID-19 news, sorting through changing or conflicting public health guidance, figuring out vaccine eligibility and scheduling, and more. They may be coping with grief, burnout, or general distress. They’re probably tired. So, consider these strategies to make your messages resonate.

Keep Messaging Simple

At this point, it’s more important than ever to keep your messaging simple and straightforward.

Omit unnecessary words
Speak directly to the reader
Use an active voice
Use familiar, everyday words
Use short words, short sentences, and short paragraphs

Consider also translating vaccine communications into languages commonly spoken in your service area.

Try a New Format

If you’ve been relying mainly on text, consider a new format for this last stretch of public health guidance related to the pandemic. You’ll likely be repeating some messages people have heard for months (for example: wear a mask). Engage the audience by presenting information in a new way – like an infographic, social media graphic or short video. Research shows that novelty motivates us to explore.

Focus on ‘Do’s

Positive phrasing can be easier to understand than negative. Focus your guidance on telling people what they can do more safely in the days, weeks and months after receiving their vaccine, rather than simply stating what they shouldn’t do yet.

Find More Tips or Ask for Feedback

Read further strategic recommendations for COVID-19 vaccination communications, or contact Geonetric today if you need any help with your efforts.

Healthcare Website Design Portfolio

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Want to see more? Be sure to check out our latest design case studies.

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How to Make Sure Your PPC & Organic SEO Work in Tandem

Digital Marketing from Separate Silos

There’s a problem with how we usually think about digital marketing. It’s a widespread problem, existing regardless of organization size or industry. It’s in itself a large problem, but it can have wide-reaching effects. It’s an often-necessary problem, originating simply as a means to methodically approach the large task of marketing on the internet.

The problem is this: we often treat organic marketing and paid marketing as two separate and distinct avenues. We see, time and time again, one team responsible for SEO and another responsible for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) with neither communicating with the other. Worse, often these teams are not equipped to speak with each other, with multiple agencies accounting for PPC and social media (itself split into paid and organic) and legacy marketing and organic. Some are managed in-house, some are outsourced. Oftentimes, focus can only be made for one, and the others are ignored.

Why is this the case? A number of reasons. Bandwidth limitations and individual expertise tend to be the biggest factors. Ultimately, regardless of the reason, the effect is the same: even though there are often multiple points of overlap between organic and paid marketing, many organizations continue to keep them siloed.

What is PPC Cannibalization and Why It Matters

Why this is a problem may not be obvious. If the right hand and the left hand are competent, what difference does it make whether either knows what its counterpart does? Brass tacks, when the right hand is your SEO and your left is your PPC, the difference is this: money.

Let us assume that you bring your SEO and PPC onto the same team.

SEO Work

Consider the work often performed for SEO:

Pinpoint service lines that are critical for success.
Perform keyword research to see how your audiences search for those service lines, finding terms that you try to weave into on-page content with an eye for balance of readability and popular terms.
Write in references to your organization name and service area throughout, on-page and off.
Use these tactics and many others, all the while benchmarking and measuring the organic traffic flowing in to find success.

PPC Work

Now, you turn your attention to managing your PPC. Maybe you have a specific objective: a maternity class that you want to offer, a flu vaccine clinic that you want to schedule. Maybe you just want to advertise a service line. You do your due diligence. You do our keyword research here, as well. You write your ads. You build your audiences. You set up your tracking and define your conversions.

Bridging the Gap

Finally, consider, your SEO work is working. Organic traffic grows month over month. You perform strongly with your branded keywords and you are making headway in your priority service lines, too. Your PPC is working, too. CPCs are low. Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and Conversions exceed expectations.

However, when you look at the search terms on which you are spending the bulk of your budget, you find your organization name or brand again and again. You look at these same searches organically, and you see that these are also high-performing. The average position is high, CTR looks good, and none of your competitors are bidding against your brand in their own PPC campaigns.

You are, in effect, paying Google Ads for keywords that you have already mastered organically. The name for this, colorfully enough, is PPC Cannibalization.

Bringing Your Digital Presence into Sync

Thankfully, this problem is easy to fix. We can bring keyword lists in line with your high-performing SEO searches, reducing overlap as much as possible. The trick is finding the overlap in the first place. In order to do so, we need to be able to audit both your PPC and your SEO performance.

This can be a challenge organizationally for a number of reasons, some of which I have described in this article. However, it is critical to protect your advertising budget. Every dollar spent in advertising that you lose to PPC cannibalization is a dollar that could be used for another ad auction on a search for which you haven’t (yet) built an organic approach.

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There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. By auditing your SEO terms and PPC searches side by side, you can help your SEO and PPC work together, in sync, instead of independently. If that sounds overwhelming, request help from our experts. By keeping a holistic view of your digital presence, we can help you pivot to account for changes in the search and organic landscape. So, ensure that your advertising budget works for you more efficiently and more intentionally. Reach out to us and schedule a time with one of our experts to get the ball rolling.