For people with a range of abilities different from your own, you must take usability a step further and address accessibility.

In May, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) released the final rule for Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare. Section 1557 builds on a host of existing legislation to ensure access to health services by prohibiting discrimination on a wide range of factors including race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability.

So what does this mean for your organization’s website?

There are a two sections that are particularly important when it comes to healthcare web operations:

1. Meaningful Access for Individuals with Limited English Proficiency Section 1557 requires healthcare organizations to provide language assistance to those with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Organizations must offer some form of real-time translation services for patient encounters today but, at a minimum, Section 1557 also requires a tagline (their term, not mine) alerting LEPs to the availability of language assistance services and a notice of individuals’ rights to communication assistance in the top 15 languages spoken in that state. The Department of Health & Human Services has been nice enough to provide samples in a wide range of languages. Action: While the legislation doesn’t specifically refer to posting these notices and taglines on your organization’s website, it’s a good starting point. Also, consider how to make more of your website available to LEPs through translated content or automated translation services such as Google translate.
2. Effective Communication with and Accessibility for Individuals with Disabilities Section 1557 requires healthcare organizations to take steps to ensure that communications with individuals with disabilities are as effective as those with anyone else. It incorporates existing federal guidance on these topics including the American’s With Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (home of the Web Accessibility requirements commonly referred to by their placement in Section 504 of that act). Action: While many organizations are interested in accessibility, few actively invest in expertise to verify their websites’ accessibility, train content contributors or monitor accessibility over time. It’s time to either invest in accessibility yourself or partner with an organization that does.

Accessibility Audits

An accessibility audit by an agency like Geonetric that understands accessibility in healthcare is a great place to start. Our certified specialists can help you uncover opportunities to improve the user experience for people of all abilities.

Contact Us today to learn how a Geonetric Accessibility Audit can help you avoid a costly lawsuit while ensuring your website is accessible to all visitors.

An understanding of the market context is also essential when deciding where — and where not to — invest our marketing dollars. These decisions are at the heart of strategy, and can result in growth for your healthcare brand (and patient census) or stagnation while your competition eats away at your market share.

And this is why I look forward to the comprehensive Digital Marketing Survey we conduct every few years. Not only does it collect strategic insights from across the healthcare marketing industry, but we invest in making sure all healthcare marketers have access to the resulting analysis.

I’d like to share a couple examples with you. If these hold when the full results are in, they will be important to you as you plan and adjust your marketing strategy going forward.

Let’s start with budget.

Your Competition Is About To Invest More In Digital Marketing

Take a look at the graph above. In some cases, overall marketing budgets are increasing. But even when they are not, the share devoted to digital marketing is expected to rise. To be clear: a full 60% of healthcare organizations are expecting to invest more in digital marketing initiatives in the coming year. And it’s a much needed change. As consumers look to interact digitally with healthcare brands, brands are increasingly shifting some of their focus from billboards to bits.

We’re seeing some tantalizing hints that healthcare organizations will be spending some of this new budget on direct hires for their digital marketing teams. The survey suggests they are looking to buy expertise in some key areas and in new digital experiences designed to improve patient acquisition and retention. The precise details of each of these will have to wait until the survey concludes, but suffice it to say that many organizations appear to be growing their digital repertoire in ways predicted by other industries with a consumer focus.

This means that you can expect your competition to invest more in digital marketing than they have in the past, and they will be building new digital experiences to help recruit patients. The question before you is: will you be a leader or a laggard in this space?

What Limits Your Success?

Take a moment to review the above chart. Anything stand out?

There are a few things to note, but the thing I find staggering is this: agencies clearly think the single biggest impediment to marketing success for healthcare brands is the lack of [effective] strategy.

Meanwhile, healthcare marketers say, “No. Our strategy is fine. We just don’t have the budget we need [to execute].”

Since we know from the previous questions that healthcare marketing teams are going to be increasing budget and some specific areas in which they want to spend, it appears we may be about to see which side is right.

If it’s merely a matter of budget, we’ll see improvement concurrent with the increases in investment the survey predicts. But if it’s really a strategy problem, then healthcare brands won’t get the return on investment (ROI) bigger budgets should bring.

The survey is now closed and we’re busy analyzing data. Request early access to our 2016 Digital Marketing Trends in Healthcare eBook and get the data you need to compete.

At Geonetric, we’re reflecting, too. And we’re proud of the recent feats of functionality we’ve “coached” into hospital intranet launches, making them stronger, faster and more efficient while they support your organization. Thinking of overhauling your organization’s intranet? Here are the medalists you want on your team:

Gold Medal: Personalization

The best intranets provide quick access to what you need, when you need it. Personalization ensures users can easily navigate to the content that relates to their roles and responsibilities. Going a step further, combining personalization with security roles creates an intranet that is both easy to use and secure.

For example, a medical group employee can only access benefits for the medical group. With help from a security setting, users are identified as a member of a specific group, which alerts the system of the credentials as well as the appropriate navigation to deliver.

Geonetric’s VitalSite CMS integrates Active Directory, content personalization, and security roles. This means no annoying pop-ups or password bumbling as users log in only once with familiar credentials and freely navigate the intranet using links that are targeted to their needs.

Silver Medal: Form Workflows

Who doesn’t love an easy way to manage workflows?

Web-based forms can be used to solve all sorts of challenges. In an intranet environment, extra workflow steps can turn forms into full-fledged custom modules. Processes like employee nominations, benefit forms or other secure documents might need to pass through several hands before they’re finalized.

Geonetric’s Form Builder supports flexible workflows, making it easy for anyone verifying or approving employee-related forms to access them and move them down the assembly line. This functionality is a huge win if you work with several teams or offer several points of contact on your employee intranet.

Bronze Medal: Blog Integration

While we typically see blogs as a way to attract and engage patients and visitors on your public website, they can be an important part of an intranet as well. Employee blogs celebrate your organization’s culture, encourage conversation between staff, and shine a light on standout employees.

Whether created in VitalSite, WordPress or another blog tool you can easily integrate posts into your VitalSite intranet. The result? A seamless experience allowing employees and staff easy access to read what’s new at the organization.

Honorable Mention: Responsive Design

Designers who build responsive designs always deserve a gold medal, but we’ve relegated responsive design to that heart-breaking fourth place. Why? By now your intranet should already be adapting to the devices your employees use every day: tablets, smartphones and desktop screens of all sizes.

A lot of organizations understand why responsive is so important for health consumers, but don’t forget about your employees. They’re looking for the same ease of use on their devices as they have at home when they browse online.

Give Your Intranet a Gold Medal

If you’re ready to take your intranet to new heights, contact us today. Whether you need to sort out what you have (and make it easy to find again), or want to create a customized experience for your employees and staff, we can help.

As you probably garnered from the name, the conference covered all things SEO, but also provided a broader view of today’s digital marketing landscape. This year featured speakers from several leading names in the industry, and our Geo trio was especially excited to hear from two of their favorites: Google and Home Depot.

There was a myriad of great advice and information presented during the nine sessions, but for your convenience, we pared it down into three main points that could have the biggest potential impact on your current and future SEO strategy:

Speed Up Your Site

One of the most interesting statistics shared was that 40 percent of users abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load. If you’re curious about how your site matches up to benchmarks, check out yslow.org. This is a great resource for departments or individuals lacking dedicated help from their design or IT teams.

Also worth noting in the realm of speed is that last summer (2015) marked the first time mobile searches surpassed desktop. Simply put: if your site isn’t fast, easy to use and engaging on mobile platforms, it’s a detriment to your brand.

And while you’re paying attention to site speed and mobile users, now is a great time to get acquainted with the AMP Project, if you’re not already.

Tell Your Story

For a long time, SEO followed a linear approach to conversions – a search engine result page (SERP) led to a website, which (hopefully) led to a specific action being taken.

Today, it’s not that simple. Organic search space is disappearing and search assistants like Siri, Cortana and Alexa are reshaping the way we find information. You have to assume people are interacting with your brand multiple times on a variety of channels before they get to your main website (if they get there at all). It’s no longer enough to cross-market between off and online; every open channel you manage should be treated as a potential entry, exit and conversion point.

Instead of being overwhelmed, focus on what you can control: your story. Build a consistent identity across your digital channels by appealing to emotion over logic. Think of the famous quote from Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The sentiment still rings true in the digital world.

Focus on Searcher Intent

To no one’s great surprise, user experience and page quality continue to be hot topics when it comes to improving SEO. After all: search engines want to send users to quality websites that have a track record of providing value.

Here are some things to keep in mind that help add value to your website:

• Write strong, useful content that is valuable to the end-user.
• Remove or repurpose content from pages with fewer visitors.
• Create shareable content that provides value on its own.
• Avoid copy or design choices that mislead the user.
• Ensure pages have useful titles, descriptions and headings.

Remember: if you’re writing for the search engine, you’re doing it wrong.

Partner with Our Experts

If you’d like help with search engine optimization, Geonetric offers several SEO packages to help you improve your rankings and drive more people to your site content.

As a healthcare marketer, it’s important to ensure you’re providing the best user experience possible to all your site visitors. Here’s just some of the reasons you should pay attention to your site’s accessibility practices.

Accessibility is Equality

Millions of Americans are faced with permanent, temporary, or circumstantial disabilities that affect how they surf the web and your chances of acquiring one of these disabilities goes up with age. People are resilient and adaptable, and thanks to technology that can assist these individuals, using computers is still possible in their everyday lives.

Accessibility is the Law

However, what you do as web designers, developers, and content admins can interfere with how well these technologies work. Most websites do not lawfully comply with all the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, for people who depend on assistive technology to access websites for business, education, entertainment, and to stay in touch with the rest of the world.

Accessibility is Everyone’s Responsibility

Every role in your organization plays an important part in assuring your website remains compliant. It is a practice, not a feature, that needs to be considered at every stage of every project from planning to ongoing maintenance.

View Our On-demand Webinar

Watch our on-demand webinar Make Your Website More Accessible to All Visitors on June 28, 2016 for a demo of how assistive technology helps people overcome obstacles on the web. Develop empathy with your site visitors by participating in interactive simulations of what it feels like to have a variety of disabilities. Learn what you can do to empower everyone to use your website effortlessly and avoid a costly lawsuit.

Items needed for the simulation activities:

1. Accessibility Worksheet: A11y Academics
2. A crayon or small pencil
3. A hand-held mirror
4. A few extra sheets of blank 8.5 x 11” paper

Enter the Intelligent Personal Assistant (IPA). You might know them by their formal names: Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant or Cortana.

There’s very little data right now on personal assistant usage, but one report suggests over half of adults (56%) are using tools like Siri on their mobile devices. The same report also suggests users in the 18-29 age group tend to use these tools more frequently.

And it’s not just mobile devices where we’re seeing these trends. Cortana is already part of Windows 10 and Siri is rumored to be coming to OS X in the coming months, so laptop and desktop users are also in the mix.

So what does the voice search trend mean for your organization and search strategy in the coming months or years?

The Classic Search Experience

Consider the “classic” mobile search experience: Users perform a Google search, review the results, proceed to a landing page and then (hopefully) convert or take whatever the next action might be.

As users begin to explore and engage with the personal assistants on their phone, this workflow changes dramatically. Webmasters and site owners controlled the experience that users had once they landed on the website.

Changing the Search Experience

Imagine planning your next vacation. You might search for flights, hotels or other vacation details using Siri or Google Now.

But instead of being given website results or directed to a specific website, you might be directed to the Expedia app (or travel app of your choosing) installed on your phone to see results and complete your purchase. No website(s) necessary!

Users that ask these assistants questions may receive a direct answer from the assistant or, with available SDKs, reference another app on your mobile device for the answer or the next steps.

This is a fundamental shift in the way users receive and interact with results of their search query. It puts answers in the hands of users almost immediately and makes them reliant on the personal assistant technology in a way we haven’t seen before. It potentially takes the website out of the equation.

With industry giants like Apple announcing new hardware and SDK tools daily, it’s going to be hard to ignore this new search interface.

Next Steps for Healthcare Organizations

So how do healthcare organizations play in this space? Are the days of optimizing your page titles, page descriptions and page content over?

First, don’t abandon your website. That’s still number one. The work you’ve done – or will do – is still relevant and important. Continue with your current SEO strategy, but look to the horizon and what these new search entry points mean for where you want to be visible.

The right app might make sense if you can provide value and make it work well with the various personal assistants, but be mindful of investing there if there’s not a clear reason to. With the new APIs and integration opportunities being announced, there will be many creative ways to remain in front of potential searchers.

Consider the type of audience currently using personal assistant technology, too. If what the data suggests is real, it’s a fairly young demographic. This should factor in to your overall strategy, but I would also expect growth in older demographics as well, especially as the technology gets better and more useful.

Wrapping Up and Moving Forward

Traditional search is not going away anytime soon. But the landscape is slowly changing and new technology will change optimization strategies going forward.

The end goal is to always be in front of potential patients or customers however they search. As an industry, we’ve been focused on what users type in the search field. Now we must pay attention to what they say to their search engine.

Pay close attention to future announcements and trends in usage. Start planning your strategy now and, just like Siri, your organization will be ready to answer the question, “What can I help you with today?”

It’s time for you to take control of your local listings and get on the path to optimizing your organization for local search. We’re here to help show you how.

The changing search landscape

Before showing you how to improve local search optimization, it might be helpful to understand what exactly is changing in the SEO landscape. There’s really two main shifts we’re seeing that are requiring everyone to rethink search.

• Organic space is disappearing
  You may have noticed that the big trend within search engine results pages (SERP) lately is diminishing space for organic results. What used to have ample room is now given just two or three results. The page is instead filled with address and map information as well as what is known as the “local pack” – search results you see in a query that has local intent.
  The key to having a valuable presence in this new SERP? When you think about optimizing for search, you must start thinking beyond just the URLs on your website.

• Search is more than web browsers
  Another important shift in the landscape revolves around the fact that search is moving beyond web browsers. Think Siri, Cortana and other voice-activated search engines. These types of search platforms retrieve data in different ways than traditional search, and rely much more heavily on structured data – which we’ll get to in a moment.

Validating, claiming and structuring

Now that you understand what’s impacting some of the changes in the search world, let’s talk about how to optimize your hospital and clinics more effectively and position your organization for local search success.

There are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to determining what will show up in a SERP. But there is a rhythm to the madness. Here’s the map we use to shed light on the local search world.

As you can see, there are many factors that impact local search results. Some are more traditional – like page titles and descriptions – but others aren’t as familiar, including data aggregators and directory/review sites like Vitals.

Let’s look at how you can impact this ecosystem and hopefully improve the accuracy and position of your local search listings.

• Validate name, address, phone (NAP) data
  Search engines like Google and Bing rely on data aggregators to provide reliable information. As described by MOZ, there are four primary sources of data that filter into the major search engines. And of course other companies like yellowpages.com also play a role in sending search engines information, so the landscape quickly gets crowded. Unfortunately many healthcare marketers are realizing their business information is incorrect in Google – and thus most likely incorrect in the aggregators. It’s critical to make sure the NAP information published about your hospitals, clinics and other facilities is accurate. Unfortunately, figuring out how to change your business information is more complicated than it should be – but it’s important you set aside some time to figure it out if you want to improve your local search rankings. (Of course, we’re happy to help if you get frustrated.)

• Claim your listings
  The data from the aggregators filter into both the directory and review sites (like Healthgrades, Vitals and Doximity, to name a few) as well as directly into the search engines. Today this area sees a lot of overlap, especially as Google and Bing both have moved more into the directory side of things with Google My Business and Bing Places. Although there are a number of directory and review sites, it’s important to go through the list and manually claim your profiles. This allows you to build out those profiles with more information than what the aggregators provide – you can add information like facility photos, descriptions and clinic hours.

• Publish structured data
  The third piece of the puzzle has to do with publishing structured data on your website. Using schema.org markup, you can help tell the web crawlers from the search engines important details about your pages. If you’ve been putting off investing in schema.org markup, the time is now. For the last few years Google has been investing more and more in semantic search, and as search moves into new areas like local and voice-activation, using schema.org markup will become more and more important. Search engines have demonstrated schema.org helps them improve the accuracy of results, especially as they move to understanding searchers’ intent and contextual meaning, not just the string of keywords typed in a browser. Schema.org discussions get pretty advanced pretty quickly, but if you’re looking to get started check out our blog post Four Essential Tools for Getting Started with Schema.org Markup.

It’s time to invest in local search optimization

The bottom line – if you’re ready to invest in optimizing for local search it’s going to take some time and resources to do it right. But you have to. Right now, 50% of your health consumers are looking for local results on mobile and that percentage is only going to grow.

Feeling overwhelmed or confused? No worries. We help hospitals and health systems around the country implement effective local optimization strategies and we’d be happy to help you too. Contact us today and let’s get started.

If you’re like most healthcare organizations, provider profiles top the list of most visited content on your website. In fact, provider search and profiles frequently make up 15-25% of pageviews for hospital and health system sites. This high visibility among both potential patients and internal stakeholders makes your online provider directory one of the most challenging and critical parts of your web strategy.

However, the challenge extends far beyond your own website. Health consumers are increasingly finding information about your providers on third-party sites – business directories, social media, provider review sites – and right within their search results pages on Google, Bing or Yahoo!

Are these potential patients finding the accurate and complete information they need to make decisions? Attend this webinar and learn how to make your provider directory a go to resource for consumers. We’ll also cover why ignoring physician ratings and providers’ online reputations isn’t an option in today’s connected world.

With so many tools and platforms available to measure results, though, the big question is: Where can you get the best insights?

Google Search Console

Your first stop should be Google’s own Search Console. Often overlooked, the Search Console gives you deep insight into how the search engine is viewing the health of your website. For example, you’ll find messages for manual penalties such as spam, malware and more. These are items you’ll definitely want to be aware of and get corrected if you should find them in your account.

Beyond those messages, you’ll find important information about keywords that are driving traffic to your website, crawl errors that Google has experienced while working through your site and insight into any other errors that might be hurting your search engine performance. Additionally, you can test your robots.txt and sitemap.xml files, making it easy to correct any errors.

The best part about Search Console (besides being free!) is the data is retroactive. You can set it up today and see historical data for your site even if this hasn’t been on your list in the past.

Search Console should be on your daily (or at least weekly) list of stops for website analytics.

Google Analytics

Speaking of Google Analytics, the tried-and-true analytics platform is a great way to measure how your SEO efforts are paying off.

Some quick ideas for using Google Analytics to measure your SEO performance include:

Watching organic traffic trends. You can find this data under Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels. Don’t be afraid to dig a bit deeper to find meaningful trends.

Using specific goals to track conversions from your organic search audience.

Drilling down to see how specific audiences who originated from organic search are performing. For example, how are mobile users finding and interacting with your content? Could that inform the focus of your SEO efforts?

Building a dashboard that includes data telling your organic search story. This might include organic keywords, top landing pages for organic traffic and the source of your organic traffic, for example.

SEO Platforms and Rank Checkers

There are many great platforms available for tracking your overall SEO health. Some are all-in-one solutions while others specialize in one task. Here are some of my favorites:

AuthorityLabs – A simple, effective rank tracker that measures trends in your site’s rankings. Additionally, they can help track your results on a local basisThey have great export functionality for reporting, too.

SEMrush – More of a keyword analysis tool, but also helps with competitive information and overall performance of your own organic/paid efforts. This may be a tool that helps kick off your projects, too.

Moz – One of the all-in-one platforms that offers functionality such as keyword research, SEO project tracking and dashboards for much of your website data.

Putting It All Together

It might seem overwhelming to see all of the options available. However, setting up the right tools for your situation is key. You may be able to get all you need out of Google Analytics, or you might really enjoy Moz as an all-in-one solution.

You can also work with your web partner to help set all of this tracking up or turn over responsibility to them completely. A thorough partner will insist on showing you these reports and using the data to make decisions about next steps for your site’s SEO strategy.

What did Facebook (allegedly) do?

It turns out when you put Facebook’s “Like” button on a page on your website, it acts like an analytics tracking code – communicating information about the page you’re visiting to Facebook. This information is not just available to Facebook when you click that “Like” button, but as soon as it’s loaded on the page! Facebook is able to connect this information with your profile through a variety of mechanisms and uses it to profile you into some of its 154 health-related segments.

There are a few things the Plaintiffs see wrong with this arrangement.

For starters, Facebook doesn’t reveal that by placing a “Like” button on your webpage you’re sharing certain information with the company, nor does it reveal what information is shared or how that information is used. Further, by combining this health-related information with an identified individual, they argue this information becomes Protected Health Information (PHI) under HIPAA.

What did the hospitals and websites (allegedly) do?

The class action lawsuit specifies “Cancer.org, Cancer.net, Melanoma.org, ShawneeMission.org, BarnesJewish.org, ClevelandClinic.org, MDAnderson.org, and other health care and hospital websites”, claiming they’ve violated patients’ privacy by sharing this data with Facebook.

Although the complaint does debate if the owners of these websites were aware this information was being shared. Facebook is less than forthcoming with information about what information is shared by simply placing its “Like” button on a page. This fact may help the named organizations, but it’s by no means any guarantee of protection.

Of course we want to do right by our visitors as well as to protect our organizations and ourselves. How can that happen?

We need a better definition of PHI

The definition for PHI seems straightforward: Information held by a covered entity and stored electronically is personally identifiable and tells us something about that individual’s health. This case reveals the flaws in that definition. Does a user’s browser history tell us something about their health? Maybe, but we search for health information not only for ourselves, but also the medical situations experienced by friends, family members or even celebrities. What degree of certainty is needed to qualify as PHI?

And that’s only one area of confusion. The browsing history and individual identification aren’t being assembled by the covered entity (and some of these organizations aren’t covered entities, so HIPAA certainly doesn’t apply). Is it PHI if it’s being assembled by Facebook, which isn’t typically covered by HIPAA?

For this reason, I hope the lawsuit proceeds, and we get a ruling which might clarify some of these issues.

Is privacy being violated?

I’ve spoken with a number of health law experts in the past around these questions to understand issues like remarketing. The consistent message I received was: this is the way the internet works. If consumers don’t want to participate in the normal behavior of the internet, they need to take action to prevent it through heightened security options in their browser, ad blockers, anonymous/incognito browsing modes or simply not using the internet.

Numerous articles have been written about the death of privacy. The complaint references the many ways websites can track visitors from one session to another, but ignores obvious ways internet users are compromising their privacy. For example, links to the sites in question within the complaint aren’t encrypted (using HTTP rather than HTTPS) so the very information they’re so concerned about is bouncing around the internet in a way any random stranger might see! Similar information is also captured by Google through Google Analytics tracking code, Google Chrome and numerous browser add-ins (although it’s not clear when it’s being used for marketing targeting).

But there is a problem.

Your privacy policy is aspirational but not defensible

The complaint makes one statement over and over again: “Broken promises at YOUR SITE HERE”.

Your privacy policy gets almost no traffic, but it still represents a promise you’re making to visitors about what data you’re collecting and sharing as well as how that information is being used.

Most privacy policies attempt to present a minimalist view of how browsing information is being stored and used. We want this to be true, but it’s difficult to guarantee.

What should my organization do?

Certainly, this is a call to review the privacy policy on your website, but it seems prudent to include a pragmatic disclaimer like the following:

“Other information about your visit may be captured by your browser, browser add-ons, other software running on your computer or other device, by your employer, the various Internet Service Providers (ISP) and other network services used to access this site and by third party components in use on this site with or without our direct knowledge and permission.”

And keep in mind – I’m not a lawyer, so this is a great time to get their thoughts on these issues. The complex nature of tracking, websites and marketing today requires our organizations to be thoughtful and careful with visitor privacy.

If nothing else, this is a reminder to always consider patient privacy when creating a new feature or marketing campaign for healthcare consumers.