1. You create or update content only when someone in your organization asks.

A reactive approach to copywriting may placate the squeaky wheels in your organization. But it leaves behind audiences — who don’t have a direct line to your team — as well as departments with less-vocal stakeholders. Good content results from a proactive approach that answers questions before they’re asked. It makes your website as useful as possible, putting it in a stronger competitive position.

Solutions

To guide content development:

• Do user research to learn what information target audiences want and need
• Interview subject-matter experts to get that information
• Check in regularly with stakeholders across departments, uncovering problems copywriting (and other digital marketing tactics) may help solve

If content gets neglected due to lack of time or staff, explore options for outside help. When evaluating agencies and freelance writers, ask targeted questions to find the right partner for your specific needs. Even if your budget is limited, you should be able to find help with key pieces of the copywriting process, such as prioritizing content, writing a few core sections, or providing editing and feedback.

2. Organic traffic is low.

Organic search is usually the largest driver of traffic to the websites of hospitals and healthcare systems. If you’re not seeing much of it to webpages that should perform competitively in search, there could be problems related to on-page, off-page, or technical SEO. Ask your digital marketing agency or web vendor for help pinpointing possible causes.

Solutions

If it turns out that on-page copy needs work, you may want to:

• Make the page content more informative
• Write in an engaging way that answers questions users search for
• Add high-volume keywords targeted to your region and user intent
• Optimize metadata to help users understand the purpose of your page and the benefit of reading it before they leave a search engine results page

3. Different pages sound like they were written by different people.

Content tone and reading level naturally vary by topic and audience. But if some of your patient-focused webpages read like excerpts from a medical journal, while others sound like they’d fit in a health guide for middle-schoolers, it may be time to reevaluate your messaging.

Inconsistency can pose problems for both your organization and your readers. From a marketing perspective, it means you’re not conveying a singular brand. Users may have trouble understanding content that uses long, complex sentences or is filled with medical jargon. Or they may be turned off by copy that doesn’t sound like it was meant for them. All these scenarios can translate into lost opportunities for your organization and your audiences to connect.

Solutions

If you don’t have an established voice, tone, and style guide, now’s the time to develop them.

If you do have writing guidelines, but people don’t consistently follow them, consider a training or refresher course for your internal team and any contract writers. Group exercises and peer editing activities can be great ways to help all writers develop the same “sound” to represent your organization.

Once your writers have thorough documentation and training, maintain control of the process with a solid content governance plan.

4. Your competitors’ websites have much more content about their services and programs than your site.

Healthcare decisions are big. That’s why almost half of patients take more than two weeks to research options before booking an appointment, according to a 2012 Google/Compete, Inc. hospital study.

Patients want to be convinced you’re their best choice and understand what to expect when they visit you for care. If your website doesn’t give them enough information to feel confident choosing your organization, they may go to a competitor who does.

Solution

Cover the who, what, where, how, and especially why of getting treatment at your clinic or hospital. When highlighting your organization’s strengths, consider:

• Approach to care
• Ease of access
• Quality measures
• Staff experience and qualifications
• Support services
• Technology
• Typical outcomes

Most importantly, explain how patients benefit from anything you promote. Maybe a new surgical technique means they’ll recover sooner. Or care navigation services mean patients can focus on getting well instead of figuring out how to schedule their next test.

Contact Us

Need help getting started? Reach out. Geonetric’s writers have crafted copy for many healthcare organizations like yours and can help you make the most of your content.

With a heightened focus on access to care initiatives over the last few months, your organization’s online provider directory is more important than ever. It also can be one of the most challenging parts of your web strategy to get right, especially as care options become more varied and complex. But it’s also one of the most important tools for providing your current and prospective patients the access they need.

Watch this video and learn:

• Current digital consumer trends shaping access to care initiatives
• Key patient access touchpoints and how they fit into the consumer journey
• Top features and functionality you need in a provider directory
• Tips for managing and simplifying physician data

Maybe your intranet is stuck in the SharePoint stone age. Untenable lists of links lead to missing or outdated documents and send people down rabbit holes that just add time and frustration to their already over-capacity days.

Maybe your intranet is built on an outdated, homegrown platform developed by a tech wiz 15 years ago. It’s hard to update and you need to make it easier to govern among distributed authors and department managers.

No matter what is driving your need to upgrade your intranet, seeking the input from real users – your colleagues and employees – is essential.

Step 1: Initiate the Change

Before you go on a search for healthcare intranet platforms and vendor partners, start the conversation internally about the wish to improve your organization’s employee intranet or internal communication platform.

First, gather a small steering committee of dedicated stakeholders. Often, the best choices for these committees are people who have regular interaction with the intranet, or whose teams rely on it daily for their work.

Use the steering committee to create an employee survey. By reaching out to employees for their feedback in the intranet redesign, they’ll feel included and crucial to the process. And they are!

Pro tip: If emails are hard to dig through, include a call-to-action or prominent link on your current intranet homepage along with details about the project. Transparency is key when updating an employee tool like an intranet or communication platform, so ensure you’re being thorough with the details so everyone knows what’s around the corner.

Let the survey begin.

Step 2: Put a Feedback Loop in Place

The great thing about online surveys is…everything. They intake information in a structured way, based on the questions you ask. Often, they allow for visual representation of the data you get back.

An employee survey about the intranet is a crucial first-step to planning for the best possible intranet experience you want to build.

Case in Point: Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital

Before rebuilding their intranet, Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital and the director of marketing, Patrick Moody, decided to ask target users – the employees – about how they use the intranet.

The survey was a resounding success. More than 300 responses helped Patrick and his team ideate a priority list for the next intranet, which also helped them narrow down vendors and platforms that would suit their needs.

Your survey doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start with just a few questions that can start gathering helpful responses, such as:

• How often do you visit the intranet each day?
• What tasks do you perform from the intranet most often?
• Why do you visit our intranet?
• What do you like about our intranet? What would you like to improve?

The variety of answers you get in return can help you not only shape the design and navigation of the intranet, but may help you plan for functionality that you need but hadn’t yet considered.

Pro tip: Don’t lead the witness. Keep questions open-ended and try not to give away features or functionality that you already have in mind. See what the employees have to say and reflect on trending responses as a way to build your goals and platform selection.

Step 3: Promote Your Survey

Once your survey is built, it’s time to send it into the world. If you have regular email newsletters or communications to your employees and staff, promote the survey there.

Or, include a call-to-action or promotion on your current intranet homepage, where people can quickly access it when they have time. You can even promote it in your breakrooms and lounges, or if you have mobile text messaging, send a link that way for quick access.

You’ll want to leave your survey open for a week or two to give ample opportunity for people to participate. When the deadline is looming, send reminders to your staff to remind them to participate if they haven’t yet.

Pro tip: Set goals for how many people you want to fill out the survey before you move to the next step. For example, if you want a healthy dataset, aim for a specific fraction of your employee pool, such as 40 or 50%, if possible. If emails are easy to lose, consider highlighting prizes or drawings for their participation to engage and excite them in the process.

Step 4: Follow Up as Needed

As you review the feedback from employees, whether clinical or facility support roles, dig deeper into comments and feedback that spark an interest.

Employees who comment things such as, “It would be nice to be able to do more on the intranet,” might have specifics in mind – but you don’t know what they mean if you don’t follow-up. Don’t hesitate to reach out to those with vague but curious answers to let them expand on what they have in mind.

Pro tip: If you find some responses are particularly passionate and detailed, consider inviting those individuals to be part of an intranet steering committee. Steering committees, especially for intranet projects, help keep projects on-track with weekly touchpoints, design and functionality testing, and internal training.

Step 5: Keep the Feedback Loop Open

Fast forward several weeks or months: Your intranet is live, people are using it, and you feel you launched a great tool that can serve your healthcare organization into the future.

The work doesn’t stop there. Intranets, like your public-facing website, are a living piece of your organization, which means they are never truly “done.”

The survey you used to get initial feedback for the re-platform or redesign can be retrofitted into an ongoing tool for continual feedback.  Keep a link available on your new intranet that leads to a survey where they can send feedback at their leisure.

Pro tip: On your new intranet, make sure there’s a quick and easy way to access the core intranet governance team, so employees can send feedback by email, if they prefer.  Creating a line of communication from your users to your intranet gives employees and staff a voice into a very important tool they use to do their jobs well.

It’s Time to Get Started

It’s easy to push off intranet redesigns. While they’re not as revenue-driving as a public-facing website, they’re still vital to the morale and effeciency of your staff and colleagues.

If you’re ready to take your intranet to the next level but need some help getting started, contact Geonetric to learn about our platform and intranet design services. Or, explore Formulate, our HIPAA-compliant online form builder that’s perfect for building and managing surveys.

How Google’s Crawl Budget Impacts SEO on Your Website

If you include new content or an optimized landing page, Google may not be index it right away. That can be frustrating on many levels as you have spent time and energy improving your website. Luckily, there are several ways you can plan for your crawl budget to get the biggest impact on your site.

What is a Crawl Budget?

Simply put, crawl budget is a certain number of pages Google crawls a website in a given time frame. If you have more pages than your website’s crawl budget, there will pages on your website that aren’t indexed. If Google doesn’t index a page, it won’t rank in search results.

Do I Need to Worry about Crawl Budget?

There are a few instances where you need to pay attention to your crawl budget:

• The size of the website: Large website with several thousand pages can sometimes wait several days for Google to notices any changes or updates.
• Errors on the pages: If your website slows down or responds to Google with several errors, it lowers the number of pages that are crawled to avoid overloading your server.
• Be direct: When several redirects go from one URL to another, it takes Google longer to crawl your site and can limit your crawl budget.

Industry Best Practices for Crawl Budget

There are several best practices to follow to improve the number of pages Google crawls.

Address Errors

Reducing the number of errors you have on your website is a great first step. Use Google Search Console or your website’s server logs to view errors that have not returned with a 200 (meaning ‘OK’) and 301 (redirects) and fix them. The less number of errors Google sees, the more pages it crawls.

Review Redirects

When you have several 301 redirects, Google will see each individual URL and include them all in the list to crawl. In addition, if there are redirect chains on your website (for example if you direct a non-www to a www, then an http to an https website) it takes Google even longer to crawl your pages. Reducing the number of redirects will help Google put a greater emphasis on crawling pages with fresh content.

Not Crawling Sections

You can also control sections of your website that don’t need to be crawled. By utilizing the robots.txt rule on your site, you are able to block pages that will be crawled by Google. Simply marking a page as ‘nofollow’ on your pages is not a guarantee that the page will not be crawled by Google.

Link Strategy

Another best practice is to get more links on your website. Google has a tendency to prioritize pages that have lots of internal and external links pointing to them. Internal linking is also key as it sends Google to different pages that you want indexed on your site. This option is more difficult, as it is a slower and more manual method of increasing your crawl budget.

Keep Everything Up To Date

If you are keeping up with your website’s maintenance well and the best practices listed above, then you are well on your way to maximizing the results of Google’s crawl budget. If you have any questions about the information here or need help on where to being, reach out to our team of SEO experts today. We can help you focus your efforts on the aspects of your website that matter most to you and your visitors.

Though Google continuously works to improve their search results based on user intent, the core algorithm updates tend to be larger and more disruptive than any of these other ongoing efforts, which is why they only occur a few times a year. The May 2020 Core Update was especially disruptive, causing the most volatile changes in SERP rankings since 2018.

Many SEO experts and online business owners criticized Google for rolling out the new update in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic – during which search patterns have shifted drastically, which businesses of every size have felt. Many have been dissatisfied with the core update, stating that big brands, like Amazon, and social media platforms – most predominately Pinterest – are now dominating SERP results.

Others have said that the latest core update was an E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) update. This is in line with Google’s recommendations for weathering core update volatility, which focuses on pages providing robust, quality content.

How the May 2020 Core Update Affected Healthcare

This update seems to impact healthcare websites across the board quite differently. Though the healthcare industry appeared to be a “winner” of the core update, the most significant increases tended to be seen in bigger names in the healthcare industry. For example, WebMD saw a 22% increase in their ranking in May, the largest since 2020 began.

Though some Healthcare sites may have experienced large ranking fluxes, overall, our clients experienced no significant changes from the update. Organic search traffic has declined since the spike at the beginning of the pandemic in March. However, the decline appears to be traffic resetting to pre-pandemic totals.

What to Do if You’ve Been Negatively Affected by the May 2020 Core Update

Google is all about finding the “best possible content” to display for searchers. If your traffic has been negatively impacted by the latest update, the first thing you should do is review your content and ask:

• Is your content answering your audience’s questions?
• Are you offering quality content that follows SEO best practices?
• Does your content demonstrate E-A-T?

Improving Your E-A-T

Proving your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to Google and site visitors is crucial. You can do this by making sure you are producing original, well-honed content that focuses on user intent and user experience.

Using Keywords to Improve SEO

The best way to ensure your focus stays on user intent is to conduct extensive keyword research. Knowing what – and how – people are searching in your treatment area can provide you with the insights you need to enhance the quality of your content and improve SEO.

Need Help Addressing the Core Update?

If you’ve seen a drop in your Google rankings or organic search traffic, don’t hesitate to reach out. Our SEO and content strategy experts are here to help you optimize your efforts around users so Google —  and your visitors — will continue loving your site no matter what the next update brings.

Content hubs are strategized, branded editorial spaces to share unique, audience-focused content marketing, such as blogs, infographics, videos, and more. They’re often used on external healthcare websites to reach patients and visitors.

In a digital workplace experience, such as an intranet, content hubs are a great way to:

• Connect employees to departments, teams, and levels of the organization they may not encounter every day
• Empower conversations and storytelling from your colleagues
• Engage all people and roles across the organization
• Give team members a sense of pride in their work and workplace
• Inspire training, recruiting, and job fulfillment

Maybe you’re doing this with a PDF or print newsletter today. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, your employees need more engaging, interactive ways to stay connected.

Why Should You Move Newsletters Online?

Way back in the 1990s, a blog was just a place to put your thoughts online – a diary of sorts. But now in 2020, blogs are so much more.

They’re a place for experts to wax poetic on their favorite topics. They’re a place to learn new things about your favorite subjects. And as we know, they come in many formats, from listicles (5 ways to stay safe this summer) to infographics.

And there’s no sign of blogs slowing down. As of this publishing, there are over 152 million blogs (blogs, not posts). In fact, a quarter of the internet’s websites are blogs.

Storytelling matters. So does speed and access. Healthcare organizations are finding that in addition to emails and printed newsletters, a content hub is another accessible channel to reach your colleagues and employees. Not only can you connect your employee emails directly to stories in the hub, but you also create another accessible route for people to read stories at home, or use assistive technology if they prefer. It’s a more inclusive way to share information.

You also create a more trackable experience that lets you see what stories and topics are resonating with employees.

Start Planning an Internal Content Hub

If you’re ready to invest in an employee content hub, start with these four tips:

#1: Get Employee Feedback

Before you decide to ditch the print newsletter, ask employees how they feel about the current emails or printed newsletters (or both!) and how engaged they are with them. Do they enjoy the news, or are there other topics they’d like covered? How does impact their work and outlook?

Consider using a rating scale to get more quantitative results. Include open fields for people to share their personal feelings about internal storytelling.

Don’t forget to ask about new topics employees would like to see. Even if you don’t move your newsletter online, it’s valuable to hear what interests your audience.

#2: Create a Steering Committee

Who owns the newsletter today? Gather a small team or assemble a steering committee to help outline the goals of the project, such as:

• Build a content hub for internal audiences that provides a comparable experience to our print newsletter
• Establish a reliable publication schedule
• Enable a feedback loop for employees and staff to comment, send story ideas, and more
• Identify authors and contributors who are interested in writing or creating stories
• Put governance rules in place, including an internal style guide, so content maintains a consistent voice and tone

If you’re inviting employees outside your team to author articles, think about a blog policy that helps keep everyone on the same page.

#3: Review Your Existing Newsletter

If you’re evolving an existing employee newsletter, review it with your committee. Does your newsletter have sections or themes, such as:

• Benefits & Culture
• Celebrations
• Community Happenings
• Expert Advice
• Leadership & CEO Corner
• Job Openings
• Patient Stories

Work with your steering committee or team on how these sections or themes could be easy-to-browse categories for your content marketing hub.

Functionality like that is a helpful option that allows you to create email newsletter “round up” of recent posts grouped by that category. It also lets employees control the types of stories they’re most interested in reading or digesting in the moment.

#4: Get Technical Help

If you’ve checked all the boxes to prepare for an intranet content hub, don’t be afraid to ask for help when it comes to the technical setup.

Your team might not have the design, development, or content strategy resources to launch your new newsletter approach. In that case, work with a partner or vendor who can help set it up and get you started.

If you’re ready to take your employee newsletter to the next level, contact Geonetric to get started. Our healthcare content marketing strategy and design and development expertise is here to help you launch a hub that engages and inspires employees across your organization.

Created in partnership with eHealthcare Strategy & Trends, this research helps healthcare marketers:

• Benchmark your organization against almost 200 of your peers
• Get the data you need to make decisions
• See how digital leaders in healthcare invest differently in everything from staff to tactics