Healthcare organizations must be investing in optimization efforts, but with so many areas to focus on including technical, on-page, and external search engine optimization (SEO), it’s hard to know which tactics are the most valuable.

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how Dan Small, Director of Digital Strategy, from Hartford HealthCare (Hartford, CT) invested in research and their site’s technical foundation to own organic search for priority service lines and how Megan Yezak, Marketing Manager at MidMichigan Health (Midland, MI) transformed their site traffic to a more clinically focused audience by taking a strategic approach to business listings.

You’ll learn how to:

• Review your current efforts and uncover where you need to focus your optimization efforts – on-page, externally, or in technical enhancements
• Take actionable steps to “own” organic search for your service lines, locations, and providers
• Make search optimization a priority in your organization – from fixing technical issues to maintaining business listings to establishing governance systems and processes to make those investments pay off in the long term.

Today’s healthcare marketers demand more in a CMS. It needs to not only house hundreds of pages of content about services, doctors, and providers, but it also needs to offer governance tools to keep content up-to-date and provide an appropriate engine for hosting content marketing and marketing assets.

And managing these throngs of marketing opportunities becomes a bit more complex as you start to weigh all the CMS options in the marketplace. If your current platform is giving you headaches and draining your team’s human and financial resources, it might be time to see what’s on the market.

But as the guardian of your brand’s marketing, what should you look for when it comes to content strategy inside a CMS?

Here are some areas where you can start to bring content strategy considerations into the mix once you start comparing CMS options.

1. Site navigation

Site navigation is essential to any user experience (UX), including healthcare, and managing public-facing navigation is a big task.

An ideal CMS should make it easy to create, update, reorder, or restructure any navigation element to properly maintain the hierarchical browsing experience of your site, from global navigation to the footer.

Healthcare websites often comes with complex structure, many of which require deep parent/child relationship pages to exist. But without the ability to properly build these pages or move or restructure navigation as needed, you’re doing your UX a disservice.

In the same breath, the CMS should let you easily update domain information and set proper redirects as necessary. At the end of the day, the question of “where stuff lives” should be easy to control by you and your team without jumping through hoops to get there.

2. Taxonomy and dynamic content

What is taxonomy? Taxonomy is a branch of science concerned with classifying things, often in groups. In healthcare, that’s often things like services, doctors, locations, and more.

Taxonomy that’s built into the CMS can do a lot of the legwork for you by eliminating planning and implementing your own classifications. But you should also want a CMS that gives you the freedom and flexibility to create additional taxonomy configurations if you need them, such as those used for content marketing hubs.

When taxonomy is executed well, it delivers one-stop experiences for potential patients, displaying related information throughout your site without too much manual work by your team.

3. File storage and management

Whether you’re building an intranet or a public-facing website, having up-to-date files — such as images and PDFs — available for patients and web visitors to download with ease is a must. Extra points go to the CMS that allows you to easily overwrite and version control your files so that you’re using the most current version available.

If you need to protect your files, check for public and secure file options so you can control their release.

Most importantly, a single asset management “home” in the CMS means you can easily link to files when and where it’s appropriate rather than having to upload them uniquely to each page where it’s referenced, saving you time if you need to update the file in the future. Publish once, link everywhere!

4. Content strategy & author experience

Content is a big word. It can include everything from writing and placing copy on a page to building the design layout of the page with callouts and images to structured content and taxonomy that allows admins to “write once, publish everywhere” across the site.

While you may be solely responsible for content strategy and authoring, some organizations have multiple team members with admin access to edit and publish pages or content. Choosing a CMS that streamlines the access but controls the quality is a worthwhile consideration.

When reviewing the authorship experience, check if the CMS allows:

• Ability to easily edit content and see live or preview changes
• Ease of uploading and linking to or embedding files, including images or videos
• Access to version control, including republishing previous versions, or noting version changes to share with other administrators
• Control to adjust pages and templates at will, including placing related and dynamic content on the page, adding callouts or feature content, and more
• Ability to adjust taxonomy to dynamically display related content across the site

When it comes to structured content, see what the platforms you’re reviewing have to offer. In healthcare, some prebuilt structured content, like location directories and provider profiles, can lift a heavy load off your shoulders and give you a leg up with a fully integrated system and manageable governance going forward.

It’s possible you and your team would prefer a blank slate — even a CMS that isn’t built specifically for healthcare. This puts you and your team in the development driver’s seat, giving you full control over the taxonomy and structured experience you build. It might take more strategic planning and implementation considerations, too, so you’ll need to think about the kind of time you have to devote to it.

If you’re allowed a lot of freedom in the content experience, see if your CMS allows you to build example templates in the back-end so your team can reference them as they continue to build and edit pages across the site. Voice, tone, and style guidelines can also help keep your team rowing in the same direction when it comes to your content experience.

5. Search and findability

How a page is searched, both via search engines and on-site search, is vital to UX.

Keyword research that identifies common terms and phrases used by your audience or communities should drive how you write copy and control search components. Seek a CMS that allows you the ability to:

• Craft unique, page-specific page titles
• Develop unique, appropriate meta descriptions to influence search engine users
• Apply keywords to pages of content or taxonomy to engage the on-site search experience
• Insert proper redirects when pages are moved throughout your site’s structure

If your current CMS is automatically configuring this information for you, it could be doing more damage than you realize. Having the power to control your search engine optimization experience is an important factor in any website manager’s role.

6. Governance tools

Your team members have various skills, roles, and responsibilities. Those roles may have a wide reach or a narrow, specific purpose. But keeping your team working together means knowing who’s capable of what and when — also known as governance.

Choose a CMS that has pre-structured governance workflows and permissions to keep your site healthy. As you’re CMS shopping, check for:

• Permission settings, such as the ability for a page to be “saved” but not “published” until a specific person or role approves
• Workflow status, which can send pages to various people in the organization for final approval and publishing rights
• Version control and the ability to republish or revisit a previous version
• Notes and open communication spaces built-in so team members can communicate with one another within the CMS

Document your team’s roles, responsibilities, and capabilities, too, as these lay an important foundation and shared understanding among your team’s operation.

BONUS: The right CMS partner

You need a partner who understands your needs and can bring experience and expertise alongside your new system.

Maybe you have a team of dozens supporting your site but need strategic guidance to stay ahead, or you’re a team of one and need assistance with the day-to-day operation of your website. No matter the case, it’s important to understand both the abilities and availability of your internal resources and find the right partner to either complement those skills or fill any gaps.

Whether you’re choosing open-source solutions like Drupal or WordPress, or proprietary, healthcare-specific software solution like VitalSite®, it’s essential that you have a team who can support you.

But what’s the difference?

Proprietary software teams likely live within a company, but as owners of the software they take the task of ensuring compliance with PCI and HIPAA off your plate. They’re also responsible for software upgrades and bug fixes or patches.

Open source gives your team an array of freedom and control on the final product, but often leaves it in your hands to ensure compliance. You’ll also be responsible for finding reliable plug-ins that are trustworthy, secure, and updated regularly to deliver expected functionality.

No matter what CMS you choose, you’ll want to have access to experts who can provide troubleshooting and upgrades while keeping your CMS running efficiently and delivering the best possible web experience across a host of devices.

And don’t be afraid to ask potential partners about skills beyond CMS expertise, too. Digital marketing skills — including content development, paid advertising services, design assistance, and more — can be helpful additions to even a robust marketing team.

Let us help

Contact the Geonetric team today if you need helping selecting the right platform or want to learn about the CMS platforms we support.

All important to the overall digital well-being of your organization – and all require different skills. It’s no surprise that large health systems now boast teams of 20 full-time equivalents (FTEs), according to our recent 2019 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends survey.

But for every large organization there are multiple smaller health systems, medical groups, and community hospitals doing the same functions with a lean team. And when it comes to digital, your website approach and tools can be the difference between competing with the big dogs or getting buried under piles of requests. Attend this webinar and learn what you should be looking for in your next CMS to give your team the foundation you need to compete.

In this webinar you will learn how to:

• Understand the skills and roles needed for digital to be successful in a small organization
• Identify signs your current CMS isn’t supporting your team or your digital goals
• Evaluate the different approaches to web content management and what they require of your team
• Understand healthcare-specific needs of a CMS to keep your organization in compliance with HIPAA and PCI

Online listing management can seem like a daunting task. Many healthcare organizations have hundreds or thousands of location and provider listings that require ongoing maintenance. Inconsistent or inaccurate data can misdirect patients and consumers, which can hurt your reputation and your revenue.

But, intimidating though it may seem, online listing management is critical today.

In 2019, Google reported that 63% of mobile searches were no-click searches. This means that Google answered the search query themselves without users clicking through to a website. Through various featured callouts, structured snippets, knowledge panels, and most often, Google My Business (GMB) listings, Google can deliver the information that searchers are looking for without ever sending them to a website. Assuming that 63% of people will not be clicking through to your website, do your business listings give users what they need?

Consumers have come to expect accuracy with everything we find online. Patients looking for care are no different. Ensuring that all of your locations and providers are claimed, verified, and accurate in GMB is a significant first step to addressing this. However, it should not be the last step. It is essential to understand that managing your online listings is not a one-and-done task. Ongoing optimization and management are just as crucial to ensuring your information is accurate for patients, both existing and potential, who are searching for care.

So if you’re looking to invest more in business listing management, here are seven tips to optimize and help your listing rank in Google:

1. Work with internal stakeholders

If you are in charge of creating and maintaining your business listings, reach out to the key people at the different locations or within your organization. Let them know the importance of having accurate data in your listings. Request that they let you know when a provider leaves or if information changes for their location. Let them know who to contact if they receive comments or questions based on inaccurate information. They are the ones who hear the patient feedback most: “Google says you open at 8:00 a.m.” or “I couldn’t find the building,” etc. Encourage them to pass that feedback onto you so you can resolve the misinformation online. Or, consider creating an internal ticket system to request changes to establish an efficient flow of information.

2. Choose the right primary category

Google is going to show listings that are most relevant to the user’s search query. Although you can add multiple categories to your listing, the primary category should best represent your location or provider as it is the only one that users can see on your listing. Look at your listing insights to see what terms users are searching for when they come across your listing. For example, if you use the primary category of “Medical Center” when “Urgent Care” would be a better fit for that location, you may be missing out on potential traffic or rankings. If your category isn’t an option in the GMB dashboard, you can reach out to GMB Support and request it be added.

3. Make sure your website is the source of truth

One of the top foundational ranking factors for Google listings is that there is synergy between the name, address, and phone number (NAP) and the corresponding GMB listing. If necessary, create a web governance checklist so that when people make changes to a name, address, phone number, or hours on the website, they also make them on the Google listing or notify someone of the changes.

4. Drive the user to the right page

Imagine this scenario: a user conducts a Google search for “urgent care near me.” Your listing shows up first in the local 3-pack, the prominent map listing in search results that presents users the three businesses that Google considers most relevant to their query and location. Great! The user sees that the location is nearby and clicks the website link to learn more about provided services. If this links to a service line page that doesn’t include location information, the user can become frustrated. It is good to remember that every search is really a question and every click should be an answer to that question. The information on your website must match the listing so that it can most accurately answer the searchers’ question. If you have a listing for urgent care, there should be information for urgent care locations. If you have a listing for a cardiology department and you link to a cardiology service line page, you should ensure that page has location information in sync with the corresponding business listing.

5. Add photos and videos

According to Google’s own data, “Businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions to their location from users on Google and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t have photos.” It is essential to upload your own, professional photos to each listing so that your images have a better chance of displaying over images that Google users can upload. If you have videos of your providers or virtual tours of a location, consider adding them to the appropriate listings. Photos and videos encourage engagement with your listing, and that is a key ranking factor on Google.

6. Check for updates regularly
Take the time, preferably on a weekly basis, to check your listings for updates in the GMB dashboard. These updates could be based on user-suggested changes or Google’s crawl of your site. Often times, these updates can be a change to the business hours or website URL. If this task is left to Google’s automation, you may find incorrect, inconsistent, or outdated information on your listings. This leads to frustration and poor user experience but can be avoided with a regular maintenance task.

7. Use UTM Parameters

Also known as Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes, UTM parameters are snippets of code that are appended to URLs to track different sources of traffic to your website from various advertising and marketing channels and tactics. While having UTM parameters won’t affect your local listing ranking, they will allow you to get a better understanding of what listings are driving the most traffic to your site and how users are engaging with your site from there. You should use UTM parameters for both your website and appointment URLs, if applicable. There are several tools to help you create your UTM tracking code, such as the Google Campaign URL Builder. You can also use an Excel spreadsheet to build and keep track of all your UTMs. Make sure you’re using a consistent naming convention for all of your online listings, so your data aggregates as accurately as possible in Google Analytics.

Take control of your data

Maintaining an active and ongoing role in your online listings management is important. While the first initial time investments can be significant, ongoing maintenance may just take a little bit of time every week or every month. That continuous pruning and care can make all the difference in preventing issues from coming up and snowballing into more significant problems. Plus, it helps ensure you are meeting the needs of the 63% of people who inevitably don’t visit your site.

If you need help getting the ball rolling or locating the most substantial pain points, we can help you. We work with healthcare organizations around the country to manage their listings and can use our insight to help you optimize your listings. We can perform a business listings audit and help create a plan of action for addressing any problem areas that we find as well as create an ongoing maintenance strategy.

Remember, Google and other listings providers rely on automatic algorithms and user input to provide information. Do not leave your information up to that process. Take control of your data and maintain it for ongoing digital health.

When to Create a Location Profile

Creating individual location pages is good for SEO because it localizes your services to a particular area. Make a location profile if the facility has unique information in one or more of the following categories:

• Address, including suite number if applicable
• Hours of operation
• Phone number

Locations Within a Larger Location

Sometimes, you will have a location within another location that provides specialized services to a distinct audience. For example, an emergency room, outpatient therapy office, pharmacy, or gift shop may be located inside your hospital, or a medical home supply store may be located inside a clinic or doctor’s office. Make an individual profile for a specialized location if it has a unique suite number and different contact information or hours of operation than the location it resides within.

How SEO Fits Into the Equation

Learn strategies that can guide users to what they’re seeking and help search engines like Google understand a location profile’s content and rank the page accordingly.

What are Your Location Strategy Goals?

Before you start writing, understand your location strategy and ask yourself the following:

• What do you want to accomplish with your location’s web presence? How will you measure success?
• What do you want users to learn when they come to your location’s webpage?
• What should they do after visiting your location’s webpages – make an appointment, pick up the phone, download a brochure, or visit?
• What services does this facility offer and what do you want to highlight?
• What certifications or accreditations does your location have? What awards has your location received?
• What does your current online presence do well, and what could be improved?

What to Include in Your Location Content

Your location content should describe the particular facility, distinguish it from competitors, and answer user questions. Consider including the following, when applicable, if they’re unique to the location:

• Accreditation, awards, and/or certifications
• Admission criteria and what to bring and expect during admission and discharge
• Amenities (gift shop, dining options, etc.)
• Appointment and preregistration information
• Contact information
• Hours of operation, including holiday hours and special circumstances
• Insurance and billing information
• Interactive map that indicates the location’s address—and, preferably, links to directions. You may also consider adding written directions (“Take the I-380 exit”) and onsite wayfinding details (“Turn right at the front desk”).
• Parking information
• Patient forms and information about how to prepare for your visit
• Photos, videos, and virtual tours
• Provider team members and their approach to care
• Proximity to additional services patients may need
• Wait times
• Visiting hours

This information improves your SEO and gives users with a better online experience with your location and brand. Google values informative, user-focused content, because it provides web visitors with the information they need and engages them on your site longer. This translates to higher search rankings and more traffic to your site. Valuable content can increase conversions because it makes users feel more confident choosing your facility for care.

User-Focused Keyword Targeting

Through effective keyword research and content development, you can write unique content for your location pages, even when they offer similar services. Research what terms users search for in your area. Then, strategically choose keywords related to your location, and include them in your copy. Use these keywords to build out content about those subjects, answering users’ questions.

Highlight Your Services

List the services you offer at the location. Briefly explain each one to help users who may not be familiar with a procedure or treatment. Strategic, SEO-focused phrasing is important to promote what you offer in a way that attracts users searching for care. For example, if a location offers immunizations and people in your geographic service area are looking for “flu vaccine,” include exactly this phrase. (Just take care to exclude any search terms that don’t accurately reflect your services.)

In-depth information about services and treatments should live outside of the location profile, in the website’s main service-line content. Avoid duplicate content – cross-link to that information from the location profile. This helps users learn about all the relevant services available throughout the health system or organization as a whole and navigate your website more easily.

What “About Us”?

If the location has unique “about-us” information, such as their own mission, vision or history, consider featuring it on the profile. But it shouldn’t take prominence over user-focused content. As always, keep the user in mind, and only present information that’s informative and may help your audience take action or further understand your brand.

Location Profile Conversion Points

Make it easy for users to take the next step and accomplish their goals with actionable links. Featured links may differ depending on a location’s needs, but could include:

• Appointment scheduling
• Billing
• Medical records
• Patient forms
• Wait times

Provider Profile Content

Most information about your providers should live on their profile pages. But you can help users get provider information they’re looking for without multiple clicks. Include certain provider content—such as names, photos, and specialties—on relevant location profiles, and then link the photos to the provider profiles for more in-depth information. Geonetric’s software, VitalSite, makes it easy thanks to dynamic content population of related providers or relevant pages of your site.

Get Started Today

Whether you’re creating one robust hospital location profile, three urgent care clinic profiles, or hundreds of medical group office location profiles, find expert help building your strategy and writing keyword-rich, user-first content from Geonetric.

The good news is that Geonetric is here to help. Let’s start with the basics.

What is alternative text and why do I need it?

People who have low vision or who are blind typically use assistive technology called screen readers. A screen reader does exactly what it sounds like: It reads what is on the screen. Proper HTML markup is important so that screen readers announce things properly.

When a screen reader encounters an image, it says a phrase like “graphic,” followed by whatever text is added as the alternative text, also known as alt text. If this alt text does not exist, some screen readers will try to guess what the image is by reading the file name.

By applying alternative text to your images, you’ll help people with low vision or blindness understand the context (and content) of the page. Often in healthcare marketing, we add images to pages to elicit an emotional response, or tie the content together in a visual way. For people who can’t see the content or pictures, an alternative text description can help fill that gap.
Alternative text is necessary for screen readers, but it also:

• Displays if a person disables images from loading
• Displays if a path to an image is broken
• Helps web crawlers understand what your image is about so it can be properly indexed

How do I add alternative text?

There are multiple ways to add alternative text to images, but the most common method is to use the alt attribute. In HTML, you’ll find the alt attribute looks like this:

<img src="image.gif" alt="This is alternative text" />

When using a content management system (CMS) like Vitalsite, WordPress, or Drupal there is typically a field to enter alt text when adding an image to a page. Then, the CMS generates the HTML markup.

How do I write good alt text?

Writing good alt text is a bit of an art form. Your goal is to write a description that gives a blind user an equivalent experience to a sighted user—not more, not less. It’s also important to take into consideration the context of why the image is on the page in the first place.

For example, a page about a birth center may have an image of a sleeping baby. In this instance, “sleeping infant” may be all that’s necessary to describe the image.

Now let’s take that same image and put it on a page titled “Safe Sleeping for Infants.” This time, instead of “sleeping infant,” you may need to say “Infant, laying on her back in a crib,” so the image has more appropriate detail on context with the topic.

Alternative text best practices

When it’s time to add images to your page or website, or you’re ready to go back and fill in all your missing alt attributes, keep these best practices handy:

1. Don’t include “This is an image of…” in your alternative text. Screen readers will announce “image” or “graphic” before reading the alternative text. Adding “Photo of…” is redundant and clunky to the user’s experience.

However; an exception to this rule applies if you’re describing a work of art and its context is vital to the experience. You’ll see alternative text for art such as, “Sculpture of David by Michelangelo” or “Lithograph by M. C. Escher titled Drawing Hands.”

2. Describe only what you see. Avoid attempting to interpret feelings or emotions, or provide more information than a visual user would receive.

Take for instance the above image. This image’s alt text could say, “Nurse talking to an elderly couple at Benefit Health Cancer Center.” However, this is providing more information than a visual user would get. Why? Because the image doesn’t explicitly state where this scene is taking place. This couple could be at home, or in an assisted living facility. We also don’t know if this is a “cancer” discussion or just an at-home visit. Remember: If it’s not obvious to a sighted user, don’t include it in the alt text. We’re aiming to deliver an equal experience to all by allowing the user to interpret images based on their journey and emotions.

3. Don’t keyword stuff your alternative text. Alternative text, like the other text on your site, should be realistic and human, and simply describe the image. Keyword stuffing is a black hat practice and won’t get you any points with the search. In the end, it just delivers a poor experience to people using a screen reader.

4. Avoid abbreviations or technical terms. Again, like other content on your site, you should be considering the health literacy and experience of the real people using your site, particularly patients and healthcare consumers. Medical jargon and abbreviations might mean something to your doctors, but they’re not so clear to a patient or someone with lower health literacy. Aim for clear, people-friendly terminology that’s easy to understand.

5. Keep the alternative text concise, approximately 250 characters or less. Use a character counter in your word processor or through tools online to check the length and stay within best practices. You won’t be penalized if you go over this amount, but it will likely annoy people using a screen reader.

6. Complex images may need more consideration. Detailed and complex images, like charts and graphs, may require more than the “best practice” 250 characters to adequately describe the image. In these cases, it’s best to give a brief description in the alt text, followed by a long description. There are several different ways to accomplish this, but the easiest is by adding a few paragraphs of text describing the chart directly on the page.

Your alt text may be something like “Bar chart of procedures for the year. A detailed description follows.” Then, after the chart, you would add as much text as necessary to accurately describe it, listing each month and the number associated with it.

Example:
<img src="/images/chart.png" alt="Bar chart of procedures performed in 2019 by service line. Detailed description to follow." />

In 2018, Benefit Health performed 1,660 procedures and surgeries. This data represents a breakdown of seven critical departments responsible for these procedures. This data is captured through daily statistics throughout the healthcare system. The surgeries performed are as follows:

• Bariatric surgery, also known as weight loss surgery: 91
• Births in the birth center: 336
• Cardiovascular (heart) surgery: 212
• Colorectal surgery: 173
• Emergency and trauma procedures: 632
• Ear, nose, and throat surgeries: 129
• Joint replacement (knee, shoulder, etc.): 87

Not only does this help people who are blind, but it also helps those patients or healthcare consumers who may have a hard time understanding charts.

7. Avoid using images of text. However, in rare instances (such as logos or word art), the alternative text should match the text in the image.

8. For images that are buttons, the alt text should describe the action. For example: If you have a form that uses an image of an arrow as the button to submit the form, the alternative text for the image should say “Submit,” rather than “arrow pointing right.”

9. For images that are links, the alt text should describe the destination. Do not include alt text that says “link to…” because screen readers will announce “link graphic” before the alternative text.

One common example is using Facebook’s “f” logo as a link to your organization’s Facebook page. In this instance, the alternative text should not be “Facebook logo” but instead “[Organization name] Facebook page”.

Does every image need alternative text?

No, not every image needs alternative text. If the image is purely decorative or redundant to the content on the page, then the alternative text is unnecessary. In these cases, keep the alt attribute empty.

How do I know if an image is decorative?

If you’re using our VitalSite CMS, most instances of decorative or redundant images are handled at the template level. This means your developers at Geonetric already did the hard part for you.

The majority of images you’ll add to your pages will need alternative text. If you’re ever questioning whether or not an image needs alternative text, the W3C has a handy decision tree that can help.

In the end, we’re here to deliver a good user experience.

Yes, alternative text can help you rank images in search. But more than anything, it’s important to deliver a website experience that’s equal for all. Failing to add alternative text only puts walls around content for real people and makes them question what they’re missing.

While alternative text falls parallel with other topics on “accessibility,” these guidelines and tips for best practices really are more about inclusive design—design for all. If you’d like help writing alternative text for your site or talking about other accessibility best practices, contact us.

Six of the Most Common Accessibility Issues Websites Face Online

WebAIM did an accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages
on the most popular websites across industries, and what they uncovered is interesting. All of these sites, regardless of industry, tend to have the same six common accessibility issues plaguing their sites:

1. Low Contrast: For people who have low vision or colorblindness, low contrast is a real issue. If the text and icons are not easily distinguishable from the background, some users will not be able to see the information on your website. This isn’t just a nice to have feature for people with low vision, it simply requires less strain and cognitive effort from all users.
2. Missing Alternative Text: People who are blind or have very low vision typically use assistive technology called screen readers. Screen readers do exactly what it sounds like—they read what is on the screen. The proper HTML markup is important so that screen readers announce things properly. When a screen reader encounters an image, it will say a phrase like “graphic” followed by whatever text is added as an alternative text. If this alternative text does not exist, some screen readers will try to guess what the image is by reading the file name. Alternative text typically should describe the image and be 250 characters or less. Check out these tips for writing alt text.
3. Empty Links: Quite often, we will find links on a page that do not have any text inside of them. In the HTML markup they look something like this:

   <a href="https://www.geonetric.com"></a>

   As opposed to the correct markup for a link which would look like this:<a href="https://www.geonetric.com">Geonetric</a>

   Empty links are usually the result of a deleted link when using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. The editor will delete the text from the page but doesn’t always remove
   the link from the markup.

4. Missing Labels: Every form field on a website needs to have a label. It’s highly recommended that these labels are visible for all users, but at the very least these labels need to be in the HTML markup and programmatically tied to the correct field. Placeholder text is not a valid label.
5. Missing Language: Every page on a website should have a language attribute that tells screen readers how to pronounce words and which dialect to use. It also helps translation tools know what language the page is originally written in. The language should be set on the opening html tag, typically done inside the template files.However, if you change languages anywhere on your site, you need to declare what language you are using. For instance, if the default language on your site is English, but you have a paragraph of text written in Spanish, you need to add lang=”es” to that paragraph tag to tell screen readers which language to use.

   <p lang="es">Esta frase es en espanol.</p>


6. Empty Buttons: Like empty links, empty buttons typically happen by accident. WYSIWYG editors will delete the text inside the button, but leave the markup on the page causing empty buttons. These are easy to remove if you know what you are looking for. They will typically look something like this:

   <button class="SomeName"></button>

   As opposed to the correct markup for a button which would look like this:
   <button class="SomeName">My Button</button>

Create a Plan of Attack

Healthcare websites are not immune to these same issues. And, it’s important to note that web crawlers can only identify certain types of barriers. There are likely additional issues on your site.

Learn more about how to check your healthcare website for accessibility issues and be sure to watch our webinar on Accessibility and Healthcare. Then contact us to get started.

Start with Strategy

Before you start writing—or even outlining—your service line section, take these steps:

• Consider your voice, tone, and style – Will your content be academic and authoritative or caring and conversational?
• Determine your project goals – What do you want to accomplish with this new content? For example, are you hoping to increase seminar registrations, drive appointments, or improve your search engine rankings?
• Reflect on your capacity – What resources can you dedicate to content creation and upkeep?
• Understand your audience – Who will the content be for, and what do those people want to learn or do on your website? How are they searching for healthcare services?
• Review related marketing material and news releases – What has your organization already developed about this service line?
• Interview internal stakeholders and subject matter experts – What information do they think is important to include on the website? What common questions do they hear from patients that you can answer online?
• Identify gaps or inaccuracies in current web content about this service – What information needs to be added, expanded, or updated to best reflect your services?
• Check out your competition – What do competing health systems offer for this service line, and how do they market it? How can you make your organization stand out online?

Your answers to these questions will help you figure out what stand-out service line content looks like for your organization.

4 Examples of High-Quality Heart & Vascular Content

Get inspired by checking out how other healthcare systems have approached heart and vascular service line sections. Whatever approach you choose, get the best results by following our guidelines for writing healthcare web content.

Focus on the Patient Journey: Adventist HealthCare

To make their website as patient-centric as possible, Adventist HealthCare, based in Gaithersburg, MD, takes a patient journey approach to their service line content.

Its Heart & Vascular Care service line section follows a typical patient pathway to receiving heart care—from preventive care (“Keep Your Heart Healthy”) to screening and diagnostic testing, through treatments, and, finally, to rehabilitation and follow-up care.

This approach helps consumers orient themselves and easily find the information they want at the time they visit the website.

Plain language, short sentences, and bulleted lists make it easy for users of all literacy levels to read and understand health care concepts. A focus on explaining the benefits of certain technologies, services, or treatments helps users make educated decisions about their care. Understandable, empathetic content supports conversions because users are more likely to take action when they feel reassured by the brand.

Spotlight Subspecialty Care: Overlake Medical Center & Clinics

Every health system, hospital, or physician practice has something that sets it apart from its competitors. Something that’s worth shining a spotlight on. For Overlake Medical Center & Clinics’ cardiology department, it’s their electrophysiology care.

Their distinctive Seattle-area arrhythmia center—and its focus on patient education—merits a deep dive into this subspecialty online.

Overlake’s extensive Arrhythmia Center content is robust and readable, with detailed pages that highlight causes, symptoms, and advanced treatments for atrial fibrillation and other types of heart rhythm disorders.

Content uses plain language to answer common queries, like “Should I See a Doctor for Heart Palpitations,” and thoughtfully explains what the center’s awards, technology, and facilities mean for health care consumers and the care they’ll receive.

Give a High-Level Overview: Olmsted Medical Center

Like many health systems, Olmsted Medical Center in southeastern Minnesota has a small marketing team. They don’t have the capacity to update core website pages frequently, so they’ve chosen to take a high-level approach to service line content.

Their Cardiology & Vascular Care page provides a comprehensive overview of cardiovascular services—from diagnosis through treatment. Subheadings and bulleted lists make the content easy to scan.

The page is concise but optimized for search and for users. It lists common conditions and treatments—and, just as importantly, explains them in patient-friendly terms.

Build SEO for Cardiology: Hartford HealthCare

Search engine optimization should be woven into every content development project you take on. Sometimes it’s the driving force.

Rewriting the entire Heart & Vascular Institute section wasn’t in the cards for Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut. But when research revealed that that “cardiology” was one of the most popular heart care-related search terms in their area, they prioritized a new, SEO-friendly cardiology page.

To boost SEO, the new specialty page:

• Answers key user questions
• Integrates “cardiology” and related keywords in subheadings, body copy, and other high-SEO value areas
• Cross-links to related pages
• Features a prominent call to action

The new content brought the web traffic Hartford was looking for. So they took that targeted approach to additional high priority service line pages across the site.

What’s Your Approach?

Need help determining the best approach to service line content for your organization? Contact us. Geonetric’s experienced content strategists and writers work exclusively with healthcare clients, which means we understand the complexity of healthcare marketing and writing.

Writers’ skills and abilities come in all shapes and sizes. While your writers may be experts on your brand, there may still be gaps when it comes to the expertise needed for excellent web writing for healthcare. Maybe your staff is made up of digital gurus with little healthcare experience, or maybe they are healthcare insiders with a huge print portfolio but very few digital projects under their belt.

At Geonetric, we’ve been delivering online and in-person training for healthcare organizations for years, putting marketing teams on the path to success. Here are just a few of the benefits your organization could enjoy when you get expert training for your team on web writing for healthcare.

       1. Understanding Content’s Impact on SEO

It’s been said that content is king and it seems that Google agrees. In your training, make sure everyone understands the impact that content can have on your SEO. You can also learn tools and formulas to make things like page titles, meta-descriptions, and keyword usage a breeze.

Your team will benefit from training that’s customized not only for your team’s interests and skills, but tailored to your organization and target audiences. For example, we can create a keyword portfolio for your hospital or health system before the training and then teach your team how to naturally integrate those keywords into your content. This helps your staff make the most use out of your portfolio so you get the most out of your SEO efforts.

       2. Come Together on Voice, Tone, and Governance

Your voice and tone are your brand’s personality and governance helps you make sure your content is meaningful and beneficial for your users. Writing training helps to unify your team on these topics and provide an agreed-upon single approach, making it easier to wade through the tricky conversations that arise out of voice, tone, and content governance questions.

It also means that, while your content may be written by a team of writers, your users will have a more cohesive web experience. That’s because even if five writers work on a page if they all have the same understanding of your editorial voice, it will seem like it’s all been written by one person.

       3. Greater Empathy for Your Audience

Great web writing training should give you the tools to help you better understand your audience and what they’re doing online. Understanding data — like how users search for information on your site, how they navigate your site, and your audience’s health literacy reading levels — will help your team make sure you’re providing your users the information they need when and how they need it.

Learning about reading patterns will help you understand how your users see your content, and understanding readability and accessibility are crucial to finding and addressing barriers you may be unintentionally creating in your website experience.

For example, if your content is written at a 12th-grade reading level but users in your area read at a 6th-grade reading level, you’re not going to be delivering a very good experience. Your readers may not understand your content and because of that, they won’t feel confident making a choice. That may result in your users might not take your desired action or they may even go to your competitor’s website instead. Creating an online experience that’s empathetic and helpful enables your users to take the next step in their patient journey!

       4. Stay Up-To-Date on Best Practices

In the world of the web, best practices are constantly evolving. Team training means you can all learn the current best practices and implement them together. Ensure your team knows how to add local elements into content to help with location searches, write effective calls to action, and create content that addresses your users’ needs. Another important facet of this is creating accessible web content, which should be at the forefront of best practices not just because it’s the right thing to do, it’s also the law!

       5. Get Your Team on the Same Page

The best part of any training is that it’s time to revisit your team’s foundation. By learning together, you can move forward from a shared starting place and keep everything in check with what you’ve learned. This has the double benefit of creating a stronger team — and learning in a group setting means that everyone can help each other grow in their skills.

Once you’ve got all these new skills in your back pocket, you’ll be ready to tackle any and all writing projects. Whether your project calls for a light refresh or a full-blown rewrite, you’ll be ready!

Need Help Training Your Team?

Whether you’re looking for a one-hour virtual training or an intensive multi-day workshop with ongoing editing support, Geonetric’s expert team of writers would love to help. We work exclusively with healthcare organizations and we’ve supported numerous approaches for handling content development and upkeep, from writing full sites to training and providing guidance as your team manages the work — and taught a wide range of writing skills. Regardless of your team structure, equipping your on-staff writers with the tools and knowledge they need to write the best possible web content gives your organization a competitive edge. We’ll provide tools and training your team needs to become more competent and confident web writers. Our web writing trainings are personalized for your health system and designed to meet your needs.

Check out our guidelines for writing healthcare web content to get started. Reach out if you’d like to talk with us about your writing training needs!

Over the last few years of administering the Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey, digging into what challenges healthcare marketers face has proven to be an important piece in understanding the state of digital marketing.

Traditionally, “lack of time” and “lack of budget” have always been at or near the top of the barriers list.

In last year’s survey, we encountered a surprise: “unable to measure effectiveness or ROI” emerged at the top of the list and remained near the top again this year, slipping to the number two spot. This had always been high on the list in the years when we posed this question to agency/vendor respondents, but it usually placed low for the health system’s concerns. The increased priority for calculating return on investment (ROI) was a recognition that while resources, in the form of time (staff) and budget, are barriers the failure to make the case for those resources is an important underlying cause of those previously mentioned challenges.

Online transaction and offline operations

The surprise factor this year was that “unable to support online transactions with offline operations” found its way to #4 on the list of top barriers, just behind resources and the aforementioned ability to measure ROI.

Last year we saw this begin to emerge as a concern, but only from respondents who self-identified as outperforming their competitors across numerous digital strategy areas.

Leading digital healthcare organizations are reaching the points where new online capabilities are a catalyst to create changes not only in marketing but also in the way in which healthcare services are accessed, delivered, and funded. The changes that are made possible through digital transformation require internal process changes or, at the very least, cooperation from other parts of the enterprise.

Now we’re seeing operational challenges emerge across many more organizations in our survey, even those who do not see themselves as digital leaders.

This is likely because average and laggard organizations have invested in the last few years in their martech stacks, which inevitably leads to operational questions.

Types of operational challenges

Digital transformation forces clarity around processes, which often leads to lots of internal conversations about how to handle incoming requests.

Some of the most common ways we see healthcare organizations run into process challenges is from web transactions. For example:

• Appointment setting: This is often one of the first digital-to-operational challenges organizations face, and it’s often because internal processes haven’t been standardized. Scheduling is often decentralized with individual clinics or practices following different processes from one another let alone standardizing with hospitals! Many organizations still push online visitors to use the phone to schedule an appointment, which goes against the way many site visitors want to interact with the organization and could impact the user experience. As online appointment options expand, particularly with real-time appointment scheduling, this is an area that will continue to be a headache for many until they standardize their processes.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): For the last few years, we’ve seen organizations indicate on the survey that they are investing in CRM technology and CRM team skillsets. CRM implementations make it possible to get a complete overall view of a consumer and how they engage your organization through in-patient, outpatient, and non-clinical touchpoints. Integrating CRM with your website creates the opportunity to build a better understanding of a customer’s interests in your organization and can open the door to deliver more personalization experiences both online and offline. Creating this consolidated view of your customers and using that data to create meaningful experiences opens up numerous operational challenges from I.T. to call center to the bedside.  Though not easy to accomplish, this type of transformation can pay big dividends in improved patient acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.

• Delivering on marketing ROI: Being able to track the financial impact of attracting new patients is the holy grail of digital marketing. Many aspire to do it but have trouble delivering. Despite growing CRM adoption by healthcare systems, most organizations still struggle with tying financial results to marketing efforts. Equally problematic are marketing strategies that make new patient attribution difficult, a shortage of online patient conversion opportunities, an inability to track health consumers across marketing engagement channels to becoming a patient, and identify where the conversion funnel could be improved.

As organizations think strategically about moving the offline processes to the web, healthcare marketers will need to be proactive in building relationships with operations, finance, and I.T. to avoid pitfalls as your digital systems push those boundaries.

Download the survey and learn more insights

The 2019 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey is full of additional insights around how healthcare marketers are using digital tactics to engage and convert today’s health consumers. Download the free survey report today and learn where your organization and gain understanding into how your peers and competitors are planning, budgeting, and staffing for the coming year.