Vaccinating healthcare workers and other segments of the population against COVID-19 will be the biggest public health effort of its kind in our history. Initially, there will be limited supply compared to the immediate, high demand. And distributing, storing, scheduling, vaccinating, and tracking is a huge task.

Early Access for Healthcare Workers

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel made recommendations in early December to give healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents the first vaccine doses.

There’s no question about the need to provide the nearly 21 million healthcare workers early access to the vaccine based on their exposure. The duty of communicating to them about the immunization process at your health system will fall to you as your organization’s communication team.

The CDC and its partners are already planning the vaccines’ delivery operations and recommended timelines. The government’s preplanning means the vaccine will roll out very quickly after FDA approval.

Is Your Internal Communication Plan Ready?

Reduce confusion and stop the inadvertent spread of misinformation with a solid internal communication plan about the vaccine. Make your organization the hub for accurate, timely messages.

Prepare communications now to:

• Deliver messages of assurance about the availability of vaccines for your healthcare workers. Make sure staff know your organization is laying the groundwork to be able to vaccinate them quickly. Address questions like:
  • When you’ll receive doses
  • Which workers get priority
  • Will vaccination be required to work at your organization, or can they wait, or not get the vaccine at all
• Educate staff about the vaccine you’ll offer, as well as the value and need to get vaccinated. Don’t assume just because your audience is healthcare workers that they trust the COVID-19 vaccine and want to get inoculated. Healthcare workers have the same concerns as the general population – see our tips for addressing vaccine objections.
• Communicate how to get vaccinated at your organization. Share logistics, such as:
  • Location
  • Appointment scheduling
  • What to expect
  • Possible side effects
  • When and how to receive the second dose
• Monitor the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine through
  • Internal monitoring and adverse events systems
  • Reporting vaccine safety and effectiveness to the CDC

Support Your Internal Team

As you know, this is a stressful time for healthcare professionals. Your staff will appreciate reminders about support and assistance in place to help them cope, such as:

• Employee assistance program for short-term counseling, referrals, and follow-up services
• Wellness programs
• Community well-being resources

Plan for Quick, Reliable Communications

Throughout the pandemic, you’ve been able to identify the best channels to communicate with your internal audiences. Perhaps it’s your employee intranet, weekly publications, staff meetings, or regular emails. Many of our healthcare clients favor using their intranet for timely, cost-effective messaging.

Keep your messaging simple and easy to understand. Simple messaging helps stop misinformation from spreading. Timestamp your communications to allow people to easily identify the most current information.

Now is the time to start moving important vaccine information out quickly and effectively to your internal team. See additional tips for communicating to internal audiences during a public health crisis from March 2020.

Flexibility is Key

Creating and following a plan is hard when news about the vaccine approval and delivery changes day-by-day. Flexibility is key to reducing chaos. Arm your organization with accurate and timely information and ways to adjust messaging rapidly and delivery channels when needed.

Curate Your Messages

Anticipate the information your internal teams want to know about COVID-19 vaccines and communicate it proactively. Start with the CDC’s Frequently Asked Questions about COVID-19 Vaccination page.

If you need more insight, ask your front-line clinical leaders what questions or concerns they’ve heard from their teams about the COVID-19 vaccination. You could also use keyword research to guide your question development. Possible questions include:

• If you’ve had the coronavirus and recovered, do you still need to get the vaccine?
• Can I get COVID-19 from the vaccine?
• Is the vaccine safe for pregnant or breastfeeding women, or women planning to become pregnant?
• How long after vaccination before you develop immunity?

Evolving Action Plans & Updates

As vaccine information evolves, continue to update your internal team on topics such as:

• Action plans – Detail what your organization is doing to ensure easy access to the vaccine, timing, and other measures to keep staff safe. Remember to update staff about your successes to build support and compliance.
• Supply status – Communicate your vaccine supply status, so people know what is available and when. Clarify how you’re working with the government or suppliers to get the vaccine.
• Staffing updates – Continue to inform your team on what they can expect regarding staffing during the inoculation period and your staff expectations.

Open the Door to Questions

Questions will arise even with the most informative communication plan. Listen and try to understand concerns about the vaccines. Use your intranet or a dedicated email to allow employees to submit vaccine questions and get answers promptly.

To save your team from answering questions more than once, create informative content on your intranet with answers to the most common questions. Most of the time, we favor this approach over creating Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages. However, a prioritized list of fewer than 20 questions and answers could be useful for your staff.

Inform Staff About Your Public Messaging

Be transparent about the messages your organization is releasing to patients, the community, and the media. This helps your internal team share correct information with the public. Your internal teams will value hearing from you first, not from news stations or social media.

As your plan for providing vaccines to the public firms up, update your staff about their involvement. This will prepare them for their participation in your plans. Vaccination education might be necessary to train staff to answer questions from people receiving the vaccine.

Contact Us to Help Your Team

Reach out to Geonetric for content services to support your team’s response to the coronavirus. And explore our COVID-19 resources hub.

Local health systems have a major role to play in not only providing Coronavirus vaccinations but also in combatting misinformation. In May, the Associated Press and the University of Chicago released a study showing that 50% of Americans were either hesitant or unwilling to take a COVID-19 vaccine. Couple that with the fact that Americans trust their local healthcare organizations more than ever before, and your hospital is poised to be a key player in answering your community’s top vaccine-related concerns.

Join David Sturtz, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, along with experts Stella Hart, Web Content Strategist & Writer, and Tim Lane, Director, Digital Marketing, for a timely discussion to help your marketing team hit the ground running. You’ll walk away with expert advice on battling general mistrust around COVID-19 and vaccinations and effectively sharing accurate information with your community.

Attend this webinar and learn how to:

• Develop the most effective messaging for your target audiences, including internal
• Keep empathy at the forefront of your vaccine-related messaging
• Write compelling web content and FAQs to aid site visitors in vaccine research
• Identify different communication vehicles and channels to reach different audiences, including blogs, email newsletters, and social media
• Utilize organic and paid search to connect with health consumers and get answers to them when they need it most

You probably remember a time when SEO wasn’t focused on human readers. But as search algorithms become more complex and sophisticated, optimizing content for search engines has become more about creating findable, quality content that real people value. When you’re trying to deliver the information your audience wants and understands, SEO is an essential tool for success.

Consider this your guide for writing a page that competes in online searches and provides relevant information to your users.

1. Narrow Down Your Topic

Choose one specific topic to explore on your page. This will help you optimize the page later for search terms. Focusing your topic also lets you provide the depth needed to answer users’ questions and fully communicate what your organization needs audiences to know.

To give your content direction, try to sum up in a sentence:

• What message you want users to leave with
• What action you want users to take

Then, you can determine what information you need on the page to support that message or call to action.

2. Give Your Content a Home

It’s important to determine early where your content will live on your site, especially if you write your pages directly in your content management system (CMS).

The Importance of Your Content’s Home

When you choose a place for your content to live on your site, you’re giving Google and other search engines clues about that page’s topic and its relationship to other site content. You should group related information and place content where it fits best for the user journey, but be aware that your decision can impact where the page ranks in search engine results.

The site structure is what web crawlers, like Googlebot, look at when indexing a site in order to return it in search results. Having an intentional site structure improves the user experience and also allows search engines to better understand your content. Another pro of a strong site structure is site links in search engine results pages, giving you more real estate and giving users a clear understanding of related links to what they are searching for.

Make sure your content is reachable through at least one link. Orphans, or pages that don’t have any inbound links, can be hard to find and hard for search engines to categorize.

Use Redirects to Your Advantage

Finally, if you move or delete a page, redirects are key. Think of a redirect as letting the post office know that you’re moving — it makes sure things don’t get lost in the shuffle. It also helps search engines pass the authority you built up on your previous pages onto your new pages. So if a page moves somewhere else on your site, set up a redirect from the old URL to the new address. If you delete a page, try to find a relevant page on your site to redirect the old URL.

3. Do Keyword Research

This is one of the most valuable steps you can take for SEO. You can put your term or topic into a keyword research tool and find out what related terms or phrases people search for online and how often they search. That means you don’t have to speculate about what people are searching for, what questions they’re asking, or even what words they use to describe what they want.

Use the results of keyword research as one factor to help you determine what to cover on a page and what specific terms to use. Doing so can boost your pages ranking in results for common queries.

Tools for Keyword Research

Some of the most commonly used keyword research tools are:

• Google Ads Keyword Planner
• KWFinder
• Moz’s Keyword Explorer
• SEMrush
• Keyword Tool
• Google Trends

Any of those tools can help you better understand your users’ search habits. Most require payment to access all their features, but if you use them regularly and apply what you learn, they’re worth the investment.

Narrowing Down Your Keywords

With any of those great tools, you’ll likely find lots of keywords to consider. But you probably can’t (and shouldn’t) use all of them. When you’re choosing which ones to use in your writing, consider:

• Relevance to your topic and to your organization — don’t try to force a term that doesn’t fit
• Search volume
• User search intent. If you’re writing foundational website content (about your services or providers), you’re probably more interested in terms that suggest a user is interested in converting, such as “knee pain appointment.” If you’re writing for content marketing, which is less focused on the moment of conversion or decision, it’s more appropriate to focus on queries made at an early stage of seeking information, such as “knee pain running.”
• Difficulty of ranking for a term, which you can see on some keyword research tools — let it inform you, but not stop you from writing information that needs to be shared

4. Optimize the Metadata

One important place to include keywords is in the metadata you write. Metadata briefly describes the content of the page and helps search engines determine when to display it to people searching online. There are two main types of metadata to consider: HTML page titles and meta descriptions.

Writing an HTML Page Title

When you write your HTML title, include a keyword (preferably high-volume) that accurately describes the topic of your page. Make sure your site doesn’t have another page with the same title — that will confuse search engines and make your pages compete against each other for rankings.

Most search engines will display about 60 characters in results listings, so make sure your page title is around 65-75 characters with spaces. If the title needs to go a little over, that’s okay — search engines won’t penalize you, they just may not show the full title. Instead, make sure to frontload the most important information in your page title.

Try This HTML Page Title Formula

Consider this formula when writing your HTML page titles:

Page Topic/Keyword | Geographic Location | Organization Name

For example, Chemotherapy | Cedar Rapids, IA | Benefit Cancer Center

Writing a Meta Description

Use this your chance to “sell” your content. Although Google doesn’t consider the content of the description as a ranking factor, this metadata may entice users to click on your page in search results, and Google does look at the click-through-rates of results in their ranking formula.

It’s valuable to include keywords in your meta descriptions. If your keywords match a user’s query, they will often be bolded in search results. That emphasis can help catch a user’s attention as they skim results.

Usually, Google results pages will display up to about 175 characters, including spaces. Try to write within this limit.

Try This Meta Description Formula

Meta descriptions can also benefit from a simple formula. Consider using this formula when writing your meta descriptions:

For example: “Reach your health goals at Benefit Health Fitness in Cedar Rapids, IA, where you’ll find support from certified athletic trainers to stay in shape.”

5. Optimize On-Page Content

Getting users to your content is only the first step — you also need to keep users on your page. Search engines pay attention when users click and then quickly bounce back to search results.

So follow these tips to keep users engaged and encourage them to stay on your site:

• Make it informative: Answer your users’ questions in ways that is easy to read and understand
• Localize it: Highlight your geographic area in your copy, so users know you can serve them
• Make it unique: Google doesn’t want to show users multiple pages with the same content
• Use keywords strategically: Focus on integrating them naturally into content in 2-3 places, especially in headers, body text, and metadata, as relevant
• Look for crosslinking opportunities: Adding strategic links to other relevant pages to boost the SEO of both the page you’re writing and the ones you’re linking to, while also providing additional content for your users

For even more information on optimizing your content, make sure to check out our writing for the web video — which offers in-depth training on making your content readable and accessible.

6. Measure the Results

After you publish your page, you want evidence that people are finding it through search. Consider monitoring:

• Pageviews resulting from organic search
• Page’s ranking in search engine results for certain queries
• Organic impressions (number of times your URL appears in search results)

Keep in mind that it’ll take time before you start to see the SEO boost that you’re trying to achieve — Google has said that it can take months. You can always request a Google crawl to make sure Google is taking your new page content into account.

Get Started

The time to get started on SEO improvements to your copy is now. Remember, your SEO work is never done — but if you keep your audience in mind as you approach your content, you will be building an excellent foundation for content that search engines like.

If the idea of making or measuring changes seems a little tricky, get an expert’s advice — contact us today! Our SEO and content specialists handle these matters every day, and they’re excited to help you get your search rankings where they need to be.

A rebrand – or, at minimum, a brand refresh. Some organizations just want a more modern look, others need to update their name, logo, or color palette due to a merger or acquisition. While full rebrands tend to only happen every 7-10 years, refreshes happen more frequently, with updates to typography or colors happening every 3-5 years.

The user experience has become more fragmented as users move from device to device and medium to medium. With most patient journeys beginning and ending with digital, it’s essential to have a sound, all-encompassing design guide that provides governance for bringing your brand to life and delivering one seamless brand experience to all users.

Evaluate Your Web Strategy

From a strategic perspective, take stock of your core business, the audience you’re trying to reach, your competitive environment, and your differentiators. Armed with this 360-degree view of what your site needs to accomplish, you’re ready to think through some of the ways your site can support patients.

Understand the Patient Journey

Learn how to create a clear picture of the end-to-end patient journey for your most important services. At the end of the day, your website must focus on the healthcare consumer journeys that drive your business.

Plan for Change

When you know it’s time for a change, you still have many options. Should you refresh, redesign, or re-platform? It’s important to understand what each of these efforts can accomplish and what would work best for your medical group. You’ll also get tips for getting buy-in from other stakeholders.