Choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your success is as important as choosing the right partner, but it seems that with each passing day, the decision gets more and more complex.

Depending on your specific situation you may have internal politics to navigate, and balancing the disparate agendas and opinions within your organization can be no small task. Whether it’s an IT group eager to showcase their capabilities to the rest of the organization, the opinions of influential stakeholders in the C-suite, or even your very own board of directors, internal stakeholders can easily turn a decision quagmire into an outright minefield.

But even if stakeholder politics aren’t in play and the decision is truly yours to make, the right choice may still not be clear. There’s the rapidly evolving marketing technology landscape to contend with…one that seemingly changes daily. If you haven’t looked at it yet, take a moment to review Scott Brinker’s 2016 Martech Landscape Graphic.

Panic-inducing though it may be, it’s still one of the better maps to our world. And year over year, it’s clear that our world becomes more and more complex.

This comes as no surprise, really. Legislation, consumerism, consolidation, retailization…these are just a few of the tectonic shifts that are reshaping our world. SHSMD’s 2016 Bridging Worlds report describes some of these changes and issues a provocative challenge for us all:

“Given the evolving changes in the healthcare environment and our desire to enhance the value we bring to the enterprise, how might we, as strategy professionals, re-imagine our work?”

But what, if any, do all these changes mean for you and your CMS selection process?

Given all the stakeholder preferences and the remarkable changes in the world of marketing, it’s no surprise that choosing the next CMS remains as important of a decision as it is worrisome.

But it doesn’t have to be. The steps to selecting the right CMS start with assessing your current marketing technologies, your required features and your existing technical capabilities. Let’s explore!

Technology Assessment

One of the things we’ve learned in recent years is that marketing technologies can’t live in silos. Your systems need to talk with one another, and be able to pull, share, update and use the data contained in each. And this includes your CMS. Your customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation (MA), credentialing systems, active directory infrastructure, secure communication systems, forms management and more are all either pulling data from your CMS, or are having data pulled from it.

These dependencies introduced by your other marketing technologies can quickly rule out some CMSs and identify others worth considering. If your CMS can’t talk to your credentialing system to keep your provider directory up to date, do you really want to use it? So put the time in to make sure your CMS will be a good fit for your existing environment.

But it’s not just about making sure your next CMS is a good fit for where you are today. Choosing the right CMS is also about choosing one that is a good fit for where you’re planning to be tomorrow. If you’re making significant changes to your marketing technology stack (and these days, who isn’t?), make sure you understand the scope and direction of these changes before making a decision on the ideal CMS for you. The ideal solution for tomorrow may be radically different than the right fit today, and if change is in the air, you need to factor it into your decision.

Features Assessment

Most organizations are able to specify with great detail the precise functionality they want their CMS to provide in a multitude of very specific areas. You make this investment in your RFPs precisely because the cost of choosing the wrong CMS is enormous.

So it’s not surprising that you need to evaluate the CMS features. But you’ll also need to think beyond the product and define the features you want from your vendor and partner. As CMS features become increasingly commoditized, this is increasingly the differentiator between marketing success and mediocrity.

The right vendor is someone who can clearly articulate not just how their recommended CMS will meet the requirements described in your RFP, but one who goes beyond to help you identify needs that you might not even be currently aware of. And more importantly, it’s one who will work with you on achieving your goals, even after the initial implementation is done.

While you may not always want to avail yourself to all of a vendor’s services, there’s a difference between one who wants to walk away as soon as their implementation work is done, and one who is invested in your continued success.

This type of partnership can be of enormous benefit to you. Remember, you may evaluate CMSs a few times a decade, but a top-notch vendor has worked with hundreds of organizations and will bring that experience and expertise to bear when helping you select, implement and succeed with the right CMS.

Skills Assessment

The right CMS for your organization will be a good fit for the technical expertise and skills fielded by the people who will maintain and use it. It may seem obvious to read this, but it’s something that’s often overlooked and easy to minimize when chasing the next generation functionality you want. Remember, all the cutting-edge features are meaningless if your team can’t use them or doesn’t want to. What’s worse, they’ll drain your capacity and throughput if they require such an investment that the work of the team shifts from marketing your organization to managing the CMS.

Some organizations need a CMS-as-a-service experience where their partner takes care of all the hosting, design changes, templating and integration required for the organization to execute on its vision. The marketing team can then focus on the work of marketing.

Other organizations really just want a development framework or platform on which they will build their website, and the work becomes a mix of software development and marketing.

And there are a range of options in between these extremes. Be honest with yourself over which experience will let you focus on the work that helps you move your organization forward, and go into the CMS selection process with a clear understanding of what you need, based on the skills and expertise of the teams who will be working with the system.

Finding the Right Fit

As I noted earlier, there are few things more important for your organization than choosing the right CMS for your needs. But today’s rapidly evolving marketing landscape makes this more challenging than ever. Success begins with an honest assessment of the features and functionality you need, the marketing technologies it will need to work with (today and tomorrow), and an honest assessment of the skills and expertise of the teams who will work in it. The right fit means finding an ideal match for these requirements, and identifying a partner that is as invested as you are in selecting the right system for your organization. Look for one who pushes you to identify new opportunities, helps you understand what’s working and where to improve, and one who understands the importance of being with you after the sale as well as during implementation.

If you’re interested in making sure your next CMS is the right fit for your organization, reach out and start a conversation.

If you’re considering a new content management system for your hospital website, watch this video and learn how to:

• Separate the promise from the hype in next-generation marketing stacks
• Understand what’s changing and what’s not in the digital marketing ecosystem
• Identify critical pieces you may be missing in your digital marketing toolbox
• Know when you should partner for expertise, and when you should cultivate in house
• Choose a future-proof CMS in a rapidly evolving ecosystem of digital marketing tools

Sounds like a flashback to junior high, but you’re probably asking these same questions when you think about what your audience may be saying about your organization online.

Social media comments and posts have an impact on your organization. What one person posts in a review or on social media has the potential to influence dozens or hundreds of others. And, even more critically, the way you choose to respond is equally influential.

This isn’t a new problem, but it’s a continually growing challenge. It’s easy for a disgruntled patient to post a critical comment on Facebook or a negative review on Healthgrades. It’s also easy for that patient to copy and paste the comment on a handful of sites. For your team, it’s a time-consuming effort to find and respond to all of these posts.

But it’s worth the effort. Here’s why you should monitor and respond to online reviews and social media posts:

• You can prevent more negative comments: While it may seem easier to ignore the comments on social media, or at least limit your efforts to a single social platform, not paying attention has its risks. Ignoring comments can allow the negativity to grow. Responding to both the negative and positive comments can help restore the balance.
• You can be part of the conversation: Online comments give you an enormous opportunity to be part of the conversation and tell your story through your actions. This is your chance to demonstrate the human, caring side of your organization by being present and responding with a compassionate and professional tone.
• You can be transparent about your patient experience: Online comments are highly visible, but they’re really the tail end of the problem. To fully address your reputation as an organization, you need to look holistically at your patient experience and transparency. Make sure you know what patient experience challenges your organization is facing. What are the problem areas and hot spots that are about to become the negative comments and one-star reviews? But don’t stop there. Know how your organization is addressing these patient experience concerns — and talk about it. If long wait times at a particular clinic are showing up as a problem on patient satisfaction surveys, consider writing a blog post about how you’re working to fix the situation. (And add a follow-up post when the problem is fixed.)
• You can lead the conversation: Publishing your own physician ratings and reviews are another way to have your voice in the conversation. You already know what your data looks like for your providers, it’s likely to be more positive and greater in volume than the reviews on third-party sites. Publishing this information can be a great move for organizations wanting to demonstrate increased transparency, be a first-mover in their market, set the tone of the conversation, or just boost their search performance and conversion numbers.
• You can watch your competitors: It’s not just your reputation that’s visible online, your competitors are there as well. The public nature of these review offers a huge opportunity for competitive intelligence and benchmarking. What are consumers saying about the clinic down the street? What does this tell you about what they value? How might you build on that to differentiate your services?

Monitoring your online reputation enables you to respond to patients’ comments and concerns, improve the experience delivered at your organization, and gain competitive information. A holistic approach to online reputation is an essential component of a healthcare organization’s marketing strategy.

Are you monitoring your reputation online? What are you finding most challenging? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

For more information on how you can utilize online rating and reviews to promote your physicians, download our eBook: Online Physician Promotion for the Healthcare Marketer.

So what is this new project? It’s the new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.

What is the AMP Project?

AMP is a collaboration between technology partners and content publishers that provides a new way to serve content to mobile users at blisteringly fast speeds. It does this by a number of means, including:

• Extending HTML with a new ‘AMP HTML’ that restricts the use of many of the web design techniques that slow down page load times and contribute to page bloat.
• Restricting the types of JavaScript used on a page. Asynchronous JavaScript only, and no third-party scripts allowed (with some exceptions).
• Caching pages and content using Google’s new AMP Cache.

The result of all this is that on average, pages that correctly implement AMP and are served from Google’s content cache load five times faster and use ten times less data than their non-AMP equivalents.

What’s more, search results for mobile users will link to the corresponding AMP pages that Google has cached on its own servers. This means your servers and hosting infrastructure will not be used to serve AMP content to mobile users when they follow links from Google search results.

Why would I want to use AMP pages?

The truth is, you might not. There are certainly some vocal opponents to AMP out there, and nobody will force you to create AMP versions of your content. But like it or not, making Google happy is often good for business. To encourage publishers to adopt this new project and embrace AMP, Google is promising lucre in the form of rich snippets in search results, improved ranking signals and more. But be weary: some of these benefits will only appear if you’re using the appropriate schema.org markup and have a sound AMP implementation that isn’t rife with errors. There’s even some speculation that you should meet the general, quality and technical guidelines for Google News in order to qualify. As is frequently the case: there are no guarantees. You can have a sound technical implementation but never see a rich snippet or SEO boost.

How do I AMP-lify my content?

Unless you are hand-coding your web pages, chances are that you’ll need to look towards your CMS vendors and partners for recommendations and solutions. Most content management systems today do not render AMP HTML out of the box without some tweaking. With that said, we’re currently evaluating AMP support in VitalSite, and need to hear from you if this is a feature you’re interested in. If so, please discuss with your CA or let us know by using the contact us form on our site. We may even have followup questions for you as we continue.

Should I AMP-lify all my site pages?

At this time, no. AMP is currently identified as being for news and syndicated content types. So if you have a press release section on your website, it’s possibly worth investigating. If you have a blog, it’s likely time to consider whether it will make sense to use AMP there.

At this time, AMP is not for all your content pages. But don’t be surprised if that changes. There are already tantalizing (or frightening) indications of this on the AMP Project blog:

The goal is for all published content, from news stories to videos and from blogs to photographs and GIFs, to work using Accelerated Mobile Pages. (emphasis added)

As a result, I’ve already seen people add AMP versions of all their site pages. Personally, I don’t think that’s warranted yet…but I won’t be surprised if we see the scope of AMP grow to become more inclusive than it currently is positioned.

Staying current with AMP

AMP is an important topic for webmasters and web publishers alike. Even if it’s not something you’re interested in pursuing today, it’s something you can’t afford to ignore completely. Changes in this space could reveal real opportunities that force you to reconsider your approach to AMP. For that reason, it’s a topic we’ll continue to cover in the future. So if you’d like the latest on AMP for healthcare marketers delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter.

This webinar provides an insightful discussion about the current state of SEO as we know it. From the relationship between structured data markup and rich snippets, to the ever-increasing importance of video, to tips on how to survive a redesign or domain change, you’ll learn where it’s most beneficial for you to focus your efforts and how to make the most of your SEO tactics.

But there are scary elements to both of those processes—side effects that might make you squeamish about going through one of them—such as drops in your organic search rankings, broken links, a loss of domain authority or confused users.

Fear not. There are steps you can take to reduce the blowback from these big changes and help mitigate any SEO damage they may cause.

How the Internet Views Your Domain Change

If I suddenly decided to pack up my house tomorrow and move across town without telling anyone, it would probably take quite a while for my friends and family to figure out what happened and where I went. Sure, they may be able to track me down eventually, but it’s possible I’d lose some acquaintances along the way once they stopped being able to contact me.

That’s kind of how the Internet views you moving your site to a new domain. It’s similar to moving houses. You may know you’ve moved, but others need to be told where you’ve gone so they can still get to you.

But what if you’re not changing your domain and instead you simply want to make your current website a better version of itself?

How the Internet Views Your Site Redesign

If changing your domain is like moving to a new house, a site redesign and restructure is like going through an intense home renovation.

After you remodel your house, you still know how to find your way around. But the next time you have a dinner party, your guests might now know anymore how to find their way to the bathroom. If you’ve shifted where your hallways are located and where your doors lead, you’ll have to show your guests around and direct them to where they need to go.

The same goes for the Internet. If you drastically restructure your site, the World Wide Web still knows how to get to your domain. But crawlers may no longer understand how to navigate the pages and pathways that make up the bones of your site. They may no longer understand where your service line content is located if it’s now been moved somewhere new.

Sounds a little scary, right? Luckily, there are solutions.

How to Reduce the SEO Impact of Site Changes

Whether you’re redesigning your site or moving everything to a new domain, you can put measures in place before, during and after your site changes to try to reduce the SEO impact of these alterations on your site.

Check out our infographic on how to stem the flow of lost organic search traffic when redesigning and restructuring your site. The three phases—Plan for Site Launch, Implement Site Launch and Monitor Post-Launch—will walk you through how to create some baseline reports and benchmark numbers pre-launch so that once you get through the launch process itself you’ll be set up to monitor everything after it’s over.

You can apply these same steps to reduce your traffic loss when changing to a new domain. You’ll just need to add a few additional steps during the Implement Site Launch phase. In that phase, when you’re launching a new domain, follow these steps:

1. Program and implement 301 redirects at a page level from the old URLs to the new URLs.
2. Register and configure your new domain in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools); do the same for Bing in Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. Use Search Console to inform Google that your old domain has moved to your new domain; do the same for Bing in Bing Webmaster Tools.
4. Submit a new sitemap.xml to Google via Search Console and utilize “Fetch as Google” to ask Google to re-index your site; do the same for Bing in Bing Webmaster Tools.
5. Check that your robots.txt settings are correct.
6. When possible, modify the external links leading to your site so they send users to your new URL.
7. If available, use your CMS’s recent-changes RSS feed to inform Google when page changes are made on your site moving forward.

And as always, if you have any questions, the digital marketing team here at Geonetric is always willing to jump in and help you make your site launch as successful as possible.

Want to learn more about SEO best practices? Watch our webinar: The State of SEO in 2016.

The other day, I noticed this retweet from one of SEO’s top voices, Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete):

The point? Google has gotten noisier and, as a result, changed the strategy for many brands focused on better search visibility.

Today’s Search Results

When it comes to strategy today, many organizations are still focused on being number one in the results. While that is a noble goal, it doesn’t necessarily mean you gain more eyeballs. The first organic result may be buried below ads, shopping recommendations or local results.

More importantly, casual search users are relying on Google to sort the data for them and taking what they get. This means your great content may get little-to-no visibility while other results such as knowledge graph, local and shopping hints get all the clicks.

Take a look at a search for “kitchenaid mixers”. Not healthcare-related, but still intriguing. KitchenAid itself doesn’t show up until after ads, some product details (by Amazon) and some sidebar content.

Extreme examples like this are harder to find in the healthcare space, but the point remains: options presented to searchers today are vast and wide.

So what can your organization do to gain more visibility?

The 2016 SEO Strategy

Luckily, the new search landscape is full of opportunity. While awesome content, well-researched keyword strategies and optimized websites (for speed and mobile experience) are still a necessity, there are new ways you should utilize to put your organization in front of searchers.

Local Results

With the explosion of mobile usage, local search results are more important than ever. Your organization can be a part of these results by claiming, managing and updating your local listings via Google My Business.

Since this can be a major undertaking, you may elect to have an agency handle these local listings for you, but either way, this is another case where rich, updated content wins.

Local results for “urgent care cedar rapids”.

Schema.org Markup and Knowledge Graph

We’ve covered Schema.org and the knowledge graph extensively here on GeoVoices, but it goes without saying that more and more answers are being provided to searchers right in the results.

Provider ratings and reviews are a prime example of Google utilizing data from your website when marked up correctly. Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare has seen more rich search results because of their Schema.org efforts.

Ratings included as part of the provider search result.

Google Answer Boxes

Another item you may see in search results is the “Answer Box”. This is relatively new to search results, but offers searchers an answer to their query right on the search results page instead of having to click through to a website.

A Google Answer Box for “knee replacement surgery”.

While it’s a bit unclear what earns a spot in Answer Boxes, well-structured content, succinct answers to a query and a great user experience are great starting points. It also seems that humans reviewers are responsible for choosing which sites appear in the Answer Box for certain queries.

Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP)

Still a bit of a fringe project, this initiative aims to making web pages on mobile browsers load instantly. Accelerate Mobile Pages introduces AMP HTML and a variety of tools for developers to make mobile browsing experiences even cleaner.

While this is brand new and not widely used just yet, it’s a project that Google is part of, so it’s hard to imagine this not impacting mobile search results in some fashion. In fact, there is already some priority being given to AMP pages.

Be Focused, Yet Flexible

There are many ways you could spend your time when it comes to optimizing your website and content for search. It should be obvious that ranking number one simply isn’t good enough in many cases.

As marketers, webmasters and website owners, we must use a wider strategy when it comes to optimizing for Google and other search engines, especially in 2016.

Best of all? These are all approachable, free-to-use strategies that your team can begin prioritizing today.

I have recently become obsessed with the way that website visitors search for and find content on large, complex sites. This obsession has left its footprints in our recent VitalSite release. Before we focus on the improvements we’ve made to VitalSite, let’s start by considering how the big players utilize search.

Let’s face it. You can’t talk about search without talking about Google. But it’s important to understand this: the problem Google is trying to solve is different than the problem Wikipedia is trying to solve. And this is different still than the problem an effective hospital website solves. Google’s goal is to find a bunch of things that match the whim of the searcher close enough to give a path forward. Google has both the advantage and the challenge that the domain of their search is the entire internet. They crawl the internet looking for what a visitor wants. And because of this, we all welcome Google’s crawlers onto our sites. In fact, we go out of our way to help them understand what we want indexed, what we don’t want indexed, and even how we’d like search results to appear.

Wikipedia’s goal, on the other hand, is to find topics within the confines of their own database. They don’t worry about what the entire internet is saying. They only care about the content on their own domain. (It’s worth noting that the content is large in its own right. Wikipedia is routinely ranked in the top ten biggest and most visited websites in the world.) The advantage that Wikipedia has is that users who come searching within Wikipedia are expecting content on Wikipedia. As a result, dead ends are acceptable. Disambiguation pages and redirect pages that say, “I think you actually meant this other topic” are reasonable and expected.

What both Google and Wikipedia have figured out is the user experience. They have hundreds of user experience and software volunteers and employees concentrating on helping visitors find exactly what they are looking for. A hospital website doesn’t have those kind of resources. But, fortunately, a hospital website doesn’t have that kind of daunting task either.

Based on the data we have been collecting on search patterns on hospital websites, there are two types of searches that visitors conduct. The first is actually the easiest: the site-wide search.

In this case, the visitor is looking for information about something specific. Let’s say the visitor is pregnant and wants to tour the birth center. She comes to the hospital website and immediately locates the search box. She types in something like “pregnancy tour.” And the search results gives her enough of a direction to find what she’s looking for. This is similar to the Wikipedia or Google search problem.

The second case is module-specific search. For example, consider a visitor looking for a new primary care physician or trying to find the nearest instant care clinic. This kind of search is where understanding the user experience comes in.

In our most recent VitalSite release, we enabled:

Provider, location and other search pages to be customized using taxonomy to filter results.
Name search on providers to now auto suggest results.

With these two customizations to module search pages like providers, locations and services, VitalSite administrators can customize the experience to visitors’ expectations and needs. For example, when we looked through the data on how visitors search, we discovered that an overwhelming number of searches are name searches. So we added an auto suggest function on the name search field. This populates a list of results while the visitor types his or her query.

We also found on some sites it was extremely important that visitors have the ability to find relevant results based on queries for provider specialties or insurance policies accepted across their locations. To help support this, we added the ability to use taxonomy terms to filter results in ways that are meaningful for site visitors.

So what does this mean for you? It means more ability to customize the module search experience to your visitor’s specific needs. It means we can now do more to provide the website visitor with exactly the provider, location or service he or she is looking for. And it also means that if you’re curious about tweaking the way your own website search functions, we just might be able to help. But it requires a conversation. Are you interested?

There are many reasons for considering a website redesign. Chief among them: your health system probably has changed significantly since your last launch, and your web presence needs to keep up. Although every organization might have a different motivation for initiating a redesign, every hospital knows the importance of having a design and navigation that works for today’s mobile users and web copy that is benefit–driven and focused on conversion.

Learn how Owensboro Health worked with Geonetric to take its site design in a new, bold direction. Features include unique navigation, card-inspired design elements, and a large-format homepage video that steals the show. During the redesign, Owensboro Health also took a critical look at the site’s content and search engine optimization efforts.

Set the right goals with the right people

Any major project like a website redesign should start with the right people in the room talking about what goals are needed now and in the future. Your goals could come from Google Analytics, user experience studies or just the need to have better brand awareness in your community.

It’s always a good idea to have a discussion with key stakeholders to define the scope of the project and set the stage for what the priorities are, and what kind of things will be addressed in future phases.

Match your goals with your vendor

Whether you’re about to launch a new microsite, or sink your teeth into a full website overhaul, understanding the partnership with current vendors or building relationships with new vendors is a big piece of the puzzle.

And finding a vendor isn’t just about fulfilling the project. When shopping for a vendor, think instead about a partnership – one that is met with strategic planning and goal setting to keep you on track. Consider the following questions:

• Is this vendor healthcare specific?
• Does this vendor offer an array of digital services?
• How has this vendor worked with other clients like us? – Don’t be afraid to call references for confirmation!

Of course, you’ll want to work with vendors that align with your own organization’s values and approach to digital marketing. When you’re bringing in outside vendors, consider how you’ll craft the perfect RFP to attract the right candidates.

Identify your internal resources

No matter how pie-in-the-sky your project might feel, with the correct number of internal resources and an all-hands-on-deck approach, anything is possible. But identifying those internal resources is critical.

After you’ve gotten buy-in and approval from key stakeholders and your vendor(s) are selected, consider who internally will be involved with executing the project. If you have a team of five, for example, how much time can each of those people devote? What are their skillsets? Where will you need to fill in gaps?

In our experience creating new content for a site is one of the biggest constraints healthcare marketing teams encounter. Current teams often don’t have the skillset to refresh content and/or write content from scratch, and if they do they often don’t have the bandwidth to do it for hundreds of pages. That’s where having a partner that offers complimentary services like content development comes in handy if you want to meet your go-live date.

Your vendor(s) will likely work out a timeline with you, and at Geonetric, our redesign team is ready to find a flexible timeline that will work with your team. We also work with clients to identify what their internal team can tackle, and what they might need help with to keep the project on track.

Understand and prioritize your audience needs

No matter how many people in your organization might think otherwise, your website has a primary audience and that’s usually your patients. Many groups in your organization will likely identify other key audiences, but it’s helpful to start from a single point of view.

Finding out what your audience wants is a great investment for any redesign. From website surveys to in-person focus groups or usability studies, getting your audience to point out what does and does not work for their experience is a great way to establish goals and make a list of needs (not wants) for the first phase of your redesign.

Prepare for SEO

This might be the most technical consideration as you start discussing a redesign. Keep in mind, however, that even with proper SEO measures in place before launch, search engine rankings may drop initially as search engines work to understand the blueprint of your new site.

In planning for site launch, keep in mind:

• Rankings – Verify a sample of rankings to establish benchmarks
• Traffic – Especially organic traffic for your current domain
• Links – Review sources of inbound links so they’re aware of any changes after launch

At the site launch, you’ll want to be prepared for 301 redirects from the former website to the new one, and you’ll want to register and configure the domain – especially if it’s changed – in Google Webmaster Tools.

It’s always a good idea, too, to send Google a new sitemap after launch so it can find all the great, improved pages of your redesign effort.

Watch our redesign webinar

Want to know more about planning for your hospital or health system’s redesign? Watch Redesign Smarter: Make Your Next Hospital Website Your Best and hear a first-hand account from Owensboro Health, who recently launched their redesigned site. We’ll be talking process, decision-making, SEO and more. Don’t miss it!