6 Tips to Improve the SEO of Your Healthcare Content

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:

[Action] + [Organization/Facility Name] [Geographic Location] [Benefit]

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.

Rebranding: Build a Cohesive Digital Design Experience

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.

Rethinking Your Medical Group Website White Paper

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.

Download our White Paper

State of Healthcare Intranets

Internal communications took center stage this year. Connecting with your care team became a top priority – one that likely won’t go away any time soon. For many organizations, this gave them a chance to evaluate and improve their intranets and other digital employee communication tools. As you review your platform and plan for enhancements, download the State of Healthcare Intranets white paper and learn:

Common challenges in healthcare intranets
Trends in modern intranets, including storytelling hubs and personalized content
Data on redesign and re-platforming cycles
What’s the most popular functionality on intranets across hospitals and health systems

Download our White Paper

Healthcare Digital Marketing: Staffing Outlook

Every year when we embark on our Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey, we do a deep dive into staffing. From team sizes, to team structure, to top areas for staffing investments, healthcare marketers are hungry for data on how their teams stack up.

Healthcare digital marketing teams

Understanding staffing needs and what skill sets need to be represented on a team are imperative to digital marketing success. It’s important to note as you review this data, respondents were self-selected into the roles of leader, average, and laggard, based on how they responded to the question: “Are you ahead or behind your competitors?” across 21 functional areas including website design, social media, and digital advertising.

Let’s see what this year’s data says and healthcare digital marketing teams – and how it compares to past years.

Average team size

When looking at mean team sizes, leaders have 19 full-time equivalents (FTEs), average organizations have 13 FTEs, and laggards have 8 FTEs. And, while it’s important to note leaders tend to be bigger organizations, these size differences account for only a portion of the differences in team sizes.

bar graph showing variations in team size

This is similar to 2019 results where leaders had the largest teams with 20 FTEs while average organizations reported 11 FTEs, and laggards reporting 9.25 FTEs.

Although bed size isn’t always the most meaningful way to compare organizations, it does give a basis to evaluate team sizes and it was one we used in 2019. Overall, teams had a median size of 3.5 FTEs per 100 beds.

Team structure

For the majority of respondents – 51% – digital marketing is most often integrated into a centralized marketing function. When that doesn’t happen, digital marketing is most likely to be a standalone team (32%) or live on a team that is distributed by facility or region (8%).

That question wasn’t asked in 2019, but we did ask about department ownership. Across all respondents, the person charged with guiding digital marketing tactics most likely lives in the marketing department. Outside of marketing, the percentages vary. Within the C-suite, executives from communications, I.T., and finance can play significant roles.

Top staffing areas for growth

Overall, email and marketing automation and video production have the highest planned net increase in staffing.

However, looking at each unique segment tells a different story. Leaders are investing in digital advertising, digital strategy, mobile app development, and SEO. Average organizations are investing in marketing automation, CRM, intranets, digital strategy, and content marketing. Laggards are focusing on hiring more in the areas of video production, website management, content development, and CRM.

chart showing the net increase and decrease in staffing

The single biggest area of growth for 2019 by a wide margin was digital advertising, followed by digital strategy, video production, content marketing and development, and CRM.

Outsourcing trends

When looking at areas organizations overall are most likely to outsource, web hosting and web development top the list followed by digital advertising and web design. Areas where leaders are more likely to outsource than their average and laggard counterparts include local search or business listing management and content marketing.

In 2019, efforts most likely to be outsourced were digital advertising (including paid social and search), web design, web development, and web hosting. It was also noted in 2019 that leaders tended to outsource more than their average and laggard counterparts in the areas of mobile app development, email or marketing automation, analytics, local search, and business listing management.

Download the full results

Staffing is just a small snippet of the data available in the full report. Download it today and learn more about how digital marketing in healthcare gets done.

If you’re reading this and upset your team is much smaller than your peers, we’d love to help. Many clients use us as an extension of a lean internal marketing team and our subject matter experts will make sure your digital marketing tactics are setting you up for success.

And if you have ideas on survey questions you want included next year or you want to be part of our popular Advisory Board, drop a line to hello@geonetric.com with the subject line, “Digital Marketing Survey.”

sunset with people walking along the horizon

What Makes Healthcare Digital Marketing Leaders Stand Out?

Three leadership trends emerge

Yes, digital leaders spend more and yes, they have bigger teams, but that has always been the case for this group. The bigger insights come from how they use those resources and where are they looking to invest in the future. When analyzing leading organizations in that light, three key trends emerged that illustrate how leaders approach digital differently.

Trend #1 Content is king.

When looking at performance across dozens of different functional areas, content development is an area leaders strongly outperform everyone else. They also excel in content marketing and SEO, both complementary disciplines. Leaders also have more staff dedicated to content creation than any other digital discipline. Leaders also have the most staff dedicated to content development, with almost one full-time-equivalent more than laggards.

Trend #2: Experience and engagement are more important than financial measures of success.

When looking at goals, patient acquisition has traditionally been somewhere in the top five. This year, it jumped to the number one spot for all respondents. This could be due to the timing of survey data collection – many organizations were focusing on recovering volumes from the pandemic shut down.

It’s always been in the top of the pack for leaders, but never in the top two spots. Instead, leaders top goals tend to be consumer focused, specifically consumer awareness, consumer engagement, and consumer experience. Contrast this with average performers, who are under significant pressure to justify every investment through financial metrics – ROI, revenue and profitability. This could be because leaders have made the case and earned the trust in their organization. Now that they don’t have to defend their budget spend with financial metrics, they are free to focus on consumers.

Trends #3: Leaders are ahead on the marketing technology stack.

Perhaps it’s because they have already invested in foundational pieces of their marketing technology (martech) stack, but leaders are significantly outperforming the other segments in areas like CRM, analytics, email marketing, and marketing automation. Although leaders didn’t rate themselves high in these areas, they far outranked the other segments, proving that it’s better to get started even if your start is small.

Where are leaders investing?

When looking at future staffing and where leaders plan to invest, digital advertising and digital strategy stand out. Where average and laggard organizations tend to be investing in martech elements – email, marketing automation, and CRM – leaders have already invested here from a people standpoint as they were an investment focus or in previous surveys. Likely, those positions are full and the teams are becoming more mature.

When looking at non-staff investment, digital advertising is the largest area for growth with a planned increase in spending. Leaders are investing in digital adverting internally, as well as in partnerships, outsourcing, and tools.

Most organizations are tightening belts on budgets across the board, likely to due to the pandemic and shutdowns. This is clear from the unprecedented number of healthcare organizations who are expecting cuts in their marketing and digital budgets for the coming year. However, when we look at leaders, we see very few are decreasing digital marketing budgets, and 45% are actually increasing, perhaps from the belief that these investments will help fill schedules and assist in the organization’s recovery.

A year like no other

Even during a pandemic, leaders have leveraged their impressive digital foundations to find continued success. Investing in content enabled many leaders to quickly spin up COVID-19 content hubs with writers and processes already in place. Projected digital advertising investments make it likely leaders will focus on attracting consumers throughout the rest of 2020 and into 2021 to rebuild volumes. In a year like no other, leaders still find ways to use digital to meet their goals. Be sure to download a copy of the full 2020 Healthcare Digital Marketing Survey Report and see where your organization stands and use the data to help plan for 2021.

Selecting a Healthcare Intranet Platform: A Guide for Marketing & I.T.

For information technology (I.T.) teams, data storage, security, and hosting may be of higher importance than the authoring experience, content management, and document control that teams like marketing and internal communications prioritize. Download this white paper and learn:

The needs of the two major players who should be involved in the buying decision for a new intranet platform.
The different needs those stakeholders may have and how to ensure their buy-in.
The questions to ask to find the best healthcare intranet solution to move your organization’s digital workspace forward.
And more.

Download our White Paper

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

Winning at the Web: Roundtable Discussion with Modern Healthcare’s ‘Website of the Year’ Winners

You’ll hear from Lindsey Meyers, Vice President of Public Relations at Avera (Sioux Falls, SD), Patrick Kane, VP Marketing and Business Development, Cape Cod Healthcare (Hyannis, MA), and Matthew McKinney, Assistant Director, Digital Engagement, Cone Health (Greensboro, NC). Each represents organizations that took home honors in the competition in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Don’t miss this insightful roundtable where you’ll see real-life case studies on winning healthcare digital experiences and hear first-hand from candid leaders on what helped them succeed and what they wish they’d of known five years ago.

Watch this session and learn:

What each leader did to make digital a priority in their organization
What features, functionality, and investments made them winners in Modern Healthcare’s competition
How that winning framework laid the foundation to use the web strategically during the COVID-19 pandemic
What’s next for these forward-looking leaders and their teams

This insightful roundtable is part of Modern Healthcare’s 2020 Strategic Marketing Conference and is being replayed as a Geonetric webinar.

Person holding a tablet with graphs displayed on it.

The State of ROI in Healthcare Digital Marketing

As marketers work to solidify their seat at the decision-making table and secure the budgets required for modern MarTech stacks, the need to justify those investments and show that they’re performing becomes more and more important. That’s why as we look at top healthcare digital marketing goals for our annual survey of the industry, we take a bit of a deep dive around tracking that ever-elusive ROI. Here’s what we found this year – and how it compares to last year’s results.

How important is ROI really?

As we look at the relative importance of different digital marketing goals overall, ROI (and most other financially-minded goals) falls in the middle of the pack, trailing more patient and consumer-focused goals but still ahead of goals relating to other audiences such as physician engagement, HR recruiting, and fundraising.

This isn’t equally true in all organizations. When looking at how digital leaders approach those goals compared to the average or laggards (respondents self-select into a segment based on how they view their digital marketing initiatives as compared to tactics), we see that financial measures, including ROI, are top goals for average organizations, falling just after patient acquisition.

It seems that digital leaders have more credibility and are less pressured to demonstrate a return on every digital marketing investment. Lagging organizations often lack the tools and infrastructure to measure, so it’s not an expectation. Organizations in the middle of the pack, digitally speaking, find themselves under the most pressure to deliver measurable ROI on their marketing investments.

How important are each of the following for the future success of your digital marketing efforts? Importance chart

Scale: -2 to +2

Ability to Demonstrate Impact of ROI

It’s one thing to have a goal and quite another to be able to deliver on it. As we looked at how respondents are able to demonstrate that digital marketing is improving performance on those goals, a different story emerges. Leaders are also far more capable when it comes to demonstrating the impact of digital marketing on most of the listed goals, but not on ROI where those average organizations who are under pressure to deliver ROI are more able to do so.

That said, no goal showed as much year over year improvement as the ability to demonstrate ROI — which more than doubled — from .35 last year to .72 this year.

Scale: -2 to +2

Top Goals vs. Ability to Demonstrate Impact

Next, let’s look at the gap between organizations’ goal importance and their ability to demonstrate how digital marketing has impacted those goals.

In 2019, the financial metrics led this gap by a wide margin. This year is more mixed — profitability still remains elusive despite its importance, but patient satisfaction makes its way into the second position ahead of revenue.

However, ROI has closed the gap significantly and falls to the middle of the pack.

ROI Reporting

Although the ability to demonstrate ROI has improved in the last year, the lack of tools continues to lead the list of reasons why healthcare organizations fail to report this metric. The most interesting result this year, as it was in 2019, was reason #2 – organizations aren’t reporting ROI, in part, because no one is asking.

In fact, this year the percentage of respondents indicating a lack of interest in ROI has grown from 33% to 48%. On top of that, organizations that can measure ROI but it’s just positive has grown to 16% this year from 1.68% last year!

What’s this mean for you?

So it seems a lot of healthcare marketers are getting better at tracking ROI, but many of their executives still aren’t asking for it. It’s like the tree in the forest – if you track and no one’s there to see it, did it really happen?

The risk, of course, is that many marketers may be asked for the first time to justify their investments in a different way in this year of pandemic-induced financial woes and unprecedented budget cuts. We strongly encourage healthcare marketers to work towards measuring ROI regardless if they’re being asked to do so and share this with stakeholders along with the other marketing metrics – and as marketing will be at the forefront of helping to recoup revenue after a year of shutdowns, you will be at a critical role to do just that.

Learn more in the full report

Be sure to download the full survey results report today and learn more about what success measurements today’s healthcare marketers are working towards and what barriers get in the way. If you need help setting and achieving digital marketing goals for your team, we can help.

Should My Website and Intranet Look Alike?

How Intranet & Website UX Align

Intranets, like websites, are a digital experience. Users of both have expectations in their use, and many of those expectations align across audiences, from your colleagues and employees to your prospective patients and hospital visitors.

The best designs guide people to what they need

No matter where content lives on the site, well-thought design should help people complete tasks and find what they need, not hinder or distract them. Whether it’s a website or an intranet, a compelling design that’s intuitive to browse and easy to navigate is essential to a good user experience (UX).

People expect great online experiences

Nielsen Norman Group, an expert of user experience research, has found that web and intranet users tend to expect online experiences to mirror their favorite online brands. While this doesn’t mean your intranet or website should look and operate like Amazon or Facebook, it does mean your intranet and website should have intuitive navigation, accurate search results, and pleasing designs that are easy to use across devices.

Responsive design is still essential

Your patients are coming to your site from laptops, tablets, and phones. Your employees may be accessing the intranet or employee communications portal the same way. Limiting your intranet’s design to an antiquated, outdated format hinders your users’ abilities to find what they need when they need it.

People are task-oriented

Social media is for connecting with friends. Amazon and online shopping are for ordering goods and services. When it comes to healthcare, users on both the web and intranet are largely task based. They seek answers to questions, connection points to appointments and forms, or just checking off a box on their daily to-do list, like paying a bill or registering for an event.

Aside from user experience, some organizations have found it beneficial to build their intranet and website on the same platform, such as VitalSite. This is especially helpful for teams that manage the content for both experiences.

How Should My Intranet Be Different?

Your intranet should keep navigation clear and intuitive, and the design should be accessible across devices and meet the needs of your busy, frontline teams.

A well-designed intranet, even if built from a public website template, is better than no intranet or a poorly built one, but there are a few specific reasons why your intranet should have a different design experience than your public-facing website.

Audiences are different

It’s an obvious statement, but your audiences for the intranet are drastically different from that of your public website. Employees are far more task-oriented than prospective or current patients who are browsing your content to answer questions.

Where your public website is a place to spotlight your brand, your intranet should put tasks and resources front-and-center for quick access to help people get their job done. In fact, modern intranets have seen a pivot from document repositories and digital “filing cabinets” to more app-like experiences, with iconography and visual navigation that’s flexible and accessible across devices.

Not sure what your employees, colleagues, and teams need? Start with an employee survey to learn where your intranet is succeeding, and gaps where it could be improved.

User experiences are different

While it’s true your intranet UX should connect your employees to your overall healthcare brand, it should also serve as a connection to their colleagues and teammates throughout the organization.

Investing time and energy in important elements like employee directories can greatly impact not only employee morale and connection, but collaboration throughout your health system.

Likewise, as your health system grows and adds new clinics or hospitals, a location or facility directory can be an extremely helpful tool to help compartmentalize information for audiences in those walls.

Your intranet is a place for your organization to come together under one umbrella to do the best job they can. Design and user experience should be as unique as your organization and the people in it.

Content types are different

A content type, by Microsoft’s definition, is a reusable collection of data, workflow, behavior, and other settings to be used across a system. While your website has content types for provider and location profiles, events, and your service line pages, your intranet’s will be quite different, for example:

Employee profiles – Likely require different fields from your provider profile, and more space for information that is pertinent to outside teams and colleagues
Events – Employee events might not be classes like your public site has, but instead continuing education opportunities or on-call schedules for front-line teams to access daily
Department pages – Not unlike service pages, department pages should explain what the department and team offers, but the information here will likely be different than a service line page for a prospective patient

Content types need consideration with design, which is why working with a designer and developer to create the most effective content types like these will result in a better and more usable intranet experience.

Aside from digital content types, you likely have far more files and documents to connect to your intranet than your public site, and those need consideration, too.

No matter the file types or content types you have, having an intranet content strategy for implementation, functionality, and ongoing governance is crucial to your lasting success.

Conversions (and metrics) are different

Your public site might be trying to invite and capture prospective patients, urging them to schedule an appointment or visit one of your clinics. But your intranet likely doesn’t have the same level of conversions.

Likewise, the return on investment (ROI) of your website might be scheduled appointments, increased patient volume, or donations to your hospital foundation. But your intranet metrics might not be as clear.

One thing’s for certain with intranets: The biggest conversion is employee engagement, which can be measured in a number of ways, such as:

Page visits and access
Session duration
User path, or what pages or documents they click during visits
Document downloads
Event or class registration
Newsletter, blog, or news release visits

Another great thing about redesigning your intranet is the less-analytical ROI, such as improved employee access, fewer calls to IT for intranet help, higher success of new hire training, and better employee self-service and independence for completing tasks or accessing tools.

Can My Intranet Mimic My Website?

If your employees are heavily engaged with your organization’s website, building an intranet design that mirrors your website may be a great way to connect the dots and get people to navigate the intranet more efficiently.

But there are other ways your intranet can mimic your website, too.

Brand recognition

Your brand – not just your colors and fonts – but your mission, purpose, and rally cry for your teams, should be as immersive on your intranet as your website, if not more so. That said, giving your intranet its own brand is a good way to build morale and familiarity with your intranet as one of the essential tools for every employee toolbox.

If you’re approaching an intranet redesign – especially coming from antiquated environments or document repositories like SharePoint – talk to stakeholders about how you can reimagine the intranet experience by giving it its own brand that links your public-facing organization to the missions you live out internally.

Henry Mayo in Valencia, Calif. did exactly that when they redesigned their intranet, HenryNet. Coming off the heels of a recent website redesign, the Geonetric team wove similar elements, such as a horizontal navigation and promotional spaces, into the intranet design experience.

Engage with content hubs

Your public-facing site might have a content hub or blog where you and your experts share information for healthy living, total wellness, or specialty care on a regular basis. You probably share this across your social media profiles, or even through email newsletters.

In the 2020s, healthcare will see an increased presence and need for content hubs on intranets, too. According to Gallup, nearly 74% of across industries employees don’t feel connected to company news, which negatively impacts employee engagement.

Instead of creating printed newsletters for breakrooms, organizations are moving them online into a digital content hub, making it easy for employees to read stories and explore topics relevant to them and their work. And with digital articles, it’s easy to build an email outreach funnel and monitor the engagement through click-throughs and page visits.

Tested, intuitive navigation & design

At Geonetric, we work hard to understand the needs of your core audiences for your public website, particularly prospective and current patients. With that research in hand, we recommend navigation structures, taxonomy, and page design that helps meet the needs of the modern healthcare consumer.

And when it comes to your intranet, you should put in the same level of research and detail.

In the many employee surveys we’ve conducted and analyzed over the years, some comments align time and time again:

The intranet is hard to navigate and find what’s needed
Search is confusing and doesn’t deliver accurate results
Lack of information or outdated information, like employee profiles and departments, make it hard to connect with people when you need them

By implementing an employee survey – both pre- and post-launch of your redesigned intranet – you’ll keep a better eye on what your employees need to do their job confidently and efficiently.

The design you implement is just as important as the navigation, and in fact, supports the employee experience and engagement. A cluttered, mismanaged “junk drawer” of a homepage is going to be far less engaging and easy to digest than one that’s thoughtful and governed.

Get Your Intranet Up to Speed

Whether discussions for intranet redesigns have started in your organization or not, having points like these in hand is a great place to approach any project. If you’re looking for a partner who can guide you through a healthcare-specific intranet redesign, Geonetric is here to help. Contact us today set up a demo of VitalSite, or learn more about our intranet capabilities.