Are you putting your health system’s website content to full use?

Maybe! But if you’re like most healthcare marketers, you’re always looking for more ways to tell the full story of your extensive services, expert doctors, satisfied patients and impressive facilities. What if you could do this without creating new content from scratch? Here’s how:

1 – Repurpose content across channels

Did you publish an inspiring patient story in the latest issue of your print magazine? Do you have a press release announcing your renovated birth suites?

To maximize the odds potential patients will find the information, add it to your relevant service-line web pages. Revise the content of brochures, magazines and news releases to match a web-writing style that’s concise, jargon-free and user-focused.

What if you post a video of an orthopedic surgeon talking about a new surgical technique he helped develop?

Write copy that highlights the most marketable information your surgeon shared on camera. Adding the text or even the full transcript to the page can give you an SEO boost—and communicate the doctor’s main message to visitors who might not be able to watch or listen to the video.

2 – Showcase your health library (if you have one)

After you’ve invested in a health library, don’t let it sit in a lonely corner of your website. Invite users to visit it by adding links to relevant library pages throughout your service-line content. When site visitors can find thorough, accurate, up-to-date health information with just one click, they’ll stay on your site rather than heading off to WebMD for details about their injury, illness or medical procedure.

If you integrate health library content through our VitalSite content management system, make sure you take advantage of SmartPanels that automatically link to related medical content from pages about your services, physicians and events. Using StayWell’s health library? Choose pages to display right in your website’s service-line sections, where they’re easy and intuitive for users to find.

3 – Cross-promote your services

Do visitors searching for treatments for a serious illness know your behavioral health department offers counseling to help families cope with a loved one’s diagnosis? Have the users researching your rehabilitation services heard about the warm-water therapy pool and gentle aquatic exercise classes at your health system’s fitness center?

Link to the pages about additional services that benefit your users. Show visitors they can stay within your health system to find most or all of the services they need.

4 – Ask an external content strategist to review your content

If a professional communicator—outside of your organization—understands what you’re saying, can locate information and finds your content engaging, it’s likely potential patients will, too. But if she sees room for improvement, you’ll get specific suggestions for making your site even more useful to visitors—and ultimately, to your health system. So ask a content strategist for help!

Already doing these things? Congratulations!

Need help getting started? Contact us.

It was with this in mind that I attended David Marlowe’s Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategies Summit session on pricing transparency.

Marlowe reiterated that like so many trends in healthcare, our customers are driving us forward and healthcare organizations are fighting to catch up. Consider these stats:

• Research indicates that 12-20% of consumers report “price shopping” in the past year, up from 6-10% in 2004/2005.
• Younger consumers are more likely to shop, up to 25% of those under age 44.
• Amongst shoppers, 40-50% indicate that price is a key decision factor.

Given the number of patients that are truly in play to be influenced as to where they receive services, this has become a significant part of the audience. Certainly too big to be ignored.

How Provider Organizations Should Proceed

Obviously, actually sharing pricing is a good place to start. Diagnostic imaging in particular seems to be an area where consumers research and select a provider because they know exactly what the test will cost.

You can also look to insurers for inspiration, as they have long led in this space. They have the data and understand the plans best. A new collaborative effort by Aetna, Assurant Health, Humana and UnitedHealthcare offers a consolidated view.

Some providers are deploying pricing engines of their own. Past efforts in this area typically shared charge master data, which is often so disconnected from what consumers actually pay it’s often counter-productive. Newer iterations go beyond this, like the personal expense calculator NorthShore LIJ developed.

It’s important to tote that not all services are equally influenced by price comparisons. Diagnostic Imaging is the top service consumers shop for, along with physician office care, lab services and dental care.

In contrast, few consumers are price shopping from the back of an ambulance – trauma care isn’t a price sensitive service.

The future of Pricing in Healthcare

Pricing transparency is the beginning of a strategy, not the end-game. If we walk through the evolution we’re likely to see, it looks like this:

1. Pricing certainty – only player in the market able to answer the pricing question
2. Pricing comparison – multiple providers offering or health plan allows comparison
3. Pricing adaptation – pricing transparency leads to changing pricing strategies

As we move towards adaptation, pricing will either become a commodity pricing battle (he who becomes cheapest wins) or it becomes a strategic competitive tool.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember when marketing healthcare was very uncomfortable for many organizations. Over the years, it’s become a normal part of the business of healthcare.

Pricing, too, will need to go through this transition. We will need to understand that strategic pricing strategies like discriminatory pricing, discounts for pre-payment, set price service bundling, two-for one pricing, loss leader pricing strategies, introductory pricing to drive initial volumes, convenience pricing, and other strategies are acceptable in healthcare just like they are in other service industries.

Since our first post on mobilegeddon, we’ve had a many questions from healthcare marketers like you. And, we’ve even learned a few more things about the algorithm itself. Before we share this, let’s first recap our previous guidance for understanding the scope of your mobile traffic, and surfacing any problems you might have on your websites.

The Five Things You Need to Do To Prepare for April 21

1. Check your mobile traffic in Google Analytics
2. Using your smartphone, look for the “mobile-friendly” tag in search results
3. Check your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
4. Review the Mobile Usability Report in Google Webmaster Tools
5. Check the Mobile User Experience score on Google PageSpeed Insights

None of this has changed, and it’s as important today that you do this as it was when I originally wrote my blog post. So if you haven’t gotten to it yet, it’s time to get crackin’!

Now, let’s tackle some of the questions we’ve received…

When will the new algorithm actually affect my site?

Based on what we’ve heard from Google, here’s what you can expect: the new Mobile Algorithm update will “go live” on April 21, but it will take several weeks for it to have an effect across the entire index. This means that even if you have a decidedly mobile-UNfriendly site, you may not notice immediate penalties. Or, you could see change on the 21st. There’s simply no way for us to predict when a specific site will be affected. So, be patient and remember that if you have problems on your site, it may take a little time for you to feel the effects of the algorithm update.

I heard that Google already deployed the mobile algorithm update. Is this true?

If you visit the right forums and websites, or crawl through some of the darker corners of the Net where webmasters talk shop, you might see some individuals claiming they’ve already been penalized by the new mobile algorithm update.

Take such claims with a grain of salt.

While it’s certainly possible — especially given that Google has been much more circumspect and reluctant to officially announce their algorithm updates — the fact remains that they’ve been specific about the date of this one. April 21. Additionally, they have been going out of the way to help webmasters prepare for it (and they’ve been doing so for quite some time). Given this, I think it unlikely that the algorithm has actually been deployed.

But what to make of the claims that it has?

For every claim that a site has already been “hit” by the new algorithm, I consider the possibilities…and then use Occam’s Razor to cut away the unlikely ones.

When you hear someone claim their site is already affected by the April 21 update, here are three possibilities that could explain it:

1. False attribution: The website has seen an actual decrease in traffic from Google organic search, but this decrease has nothing to do with the mobile algorithm update. The sites in question are, in fact, suffering from algorithmic or manual penalties for other reasons.
2. Testing artifacts: It’s not unreasonable to expect that Google has been and will be testing the algorithm change. Perhaps this means that some sites are affected early…and this is what webmasters are actually seeing.
3. Google lied about the date: Google is mounting an elaborate campaign of deception by communicating one date, and then deploying the update much earlier than promised.

If you can’t tell, I tend to chalk up claims of an early release to the first possibility listed above. But not all webmasters share my conservative views.

Will my whole site be penalized because I have some pages that are not mobile optimized?

No. …or at least, not directly.

At SMX West, Gary Illyes (a Google employee) revealed that the algorithm operates on a per-page basis. This means that pages are evaluated and (possibly) penalized independently of each other.

While this might seem reassuring if you’re responsible for a site that has an obvious problem with mobile usability on many pages, don’t interpret this to mean your site as a whole won’t suffer. Remember, Google uses hundreds of ranking factors…and some even appear to influence others.

In my experience, sites with a superabundance of problems at the page level (broken links, bad experience, etc…) often experience site-wide ranking consequences. So I interpret Gary Illyes’ comments to mean that an entire website won’t be penalized because it has “some” problematic pages.

How long will a penalty last?

Well, if you do nothing to ever fix mobile usability problems on your site, any penalties you suffer from will likely be permanent. But that’s an extreme form of neglect that we don’t often see among professionally-maintained websites.

It’s more than likely that sites that are penalized will eventually fix the underlying mobile usability problems. And when they do, they should expect that any penalties they’ve suffered as a result of the new algorithm will be lifted.

How exactly will this work? Google hasn’t given explicit guidance on it, but my expectation is that penalized pages that are subsequently fixed will see positive changes the next time they are crawled and reindexed.

I have a separate mobile site. Am I safe?

You would have to work hard to misconstrue Google’s stance on this: “Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern.” It’s where all sites should be moving (if they aren’t there already).

With that said, if you have a separate mobile site that is passing the mobile-friendly test, it should do just fine.

And if your main website is configured to correctly detect mobile traffic and redirect to the appropriate page on the mobile site, things should be OK. But this is a notoriously troublesome way to accommodate mobile traffic, and such sites are often rife with configuration issues that may cause problems in a post #mobilegeddon world. So be careful.

The advice I give in this circumstance is check, test, and retest your configuration to make sure it follows Google’s guidance for separate mobile sites…then cross your fingers while you make plans for your responsive redesign.

Our site fails the mobile-friendly test. We know it has poor mobile usability…but there’s no way we can do a responsive redesign by April 21. What should we do?

Sadly, this is not an uncommon situation. It goes without saying that you should be talking with someone who can help. And this obviously means help you plan for your site redesign. But it also means, help you assess where you currently stand…and what you can do to mitigate your exposure.

Do some digging in Google Analytics. It may be that you can identify a small number of high-value pages that you can change to be mobile-friendly. Or, you can even implement a mobile site composed of your highest-value pages to get you through the update and buy you time while you work on your responsive redesign.

Rather than amplifying the message that the end is nigh, I’d like to cut through the noise, describe the pending change and share some of the concrete steps I’m taking to figure out what sites are well poised for the change, and which ones need to be worked on.

Google’s April 21 Algorithm Change

Over the last few years Google has been constantly advising webmasters to provide optimal experiences for users across mobile devices. At first these were mere recommendations, but over time Google has increasingly changed its motivational tactics from wielding carrots to wielding sticks. And now, it seems, Google is ready to use a stick that’s going to pack an epic wallop for sites that aren’t optimized for mobile.

This is the pending April 21 algorithm update. On social media, you might know it as #mobilegeddon, or the coming mobile searchpocalypse.

If we peel back the layers of clever hype and wordplay, here’s what’s actually changing:

Starting April 21, we [Google] will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. (source)

“Impacts mobile searches in all languages, worldwide.” “Significant impact in search results.” So, just how big will this algorithm update be?

Well, one of Google’s very own revealed at SMX Munich that it will impact more sites than Panda or Penguin (source). In other words, it’s BIG…and if you’re responsible for a website, you can’t ignore it.

But it’s far from the end of the world.

Rather than prepare for Armageddon, here’s how you can invest some time to understand your exposure to the upcoming algorithm change.

Check Your Mobile Traffic in Google Analytics

The first thing you want to do is dive in to GA check your mobile search traffic. Not only do you want to understand this month’s number, but you want to understand the slope of the traffic growth over time. Even if you don’t have many mobile visitors today, the slope of the growth curve can give you an indicator of what to expect tomorrow.

It’s fair to say that for the sites I look at, mobile search and mobile visits are already a significant and growing portion of site traffic. So much so, in fact, that I’d be clearly negligent if I were to ignore the mobile experience. Regardless of Google’s upcoming algorithm change. So take a few minutes and pull the numbers for your sites. You’ll gain an understanding of the scope of your visitors that could be affected after April 21.

Look for the “Mobile-friendly” Tag in Search Results

Now that you understand the relative size of your mobile traffic (and have a rough understanding of how it’s expected to grow), take a look at how your website is currently performing in Google search.

Doing this is easy. Just pick up your smartphone and perform a few Google searches that include your organization in the results. Look for the presence or absence of the Mobile-friendly tag in the results pages. If you’re missing it, you know you likely have a problem.

And remember, while the presence of the Mobile-friendly tag is a good sign, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of the woods.

As you test, make sure you query for results beyond your website’s home page. Check the deeper pages that drive significant search volume on your site. If you’re in a competitive market, look for the Mobile-friendly tag on the competition’s pages. If they are all Mobile-friendly and you are not, you’re going to be giving them the advantage in the days and weeks that follow April 21. If they aren’t yet Mobile-friendly, but you are… congratulations! You’re setting yourself up for success in the post #mobilegeddon world! But you aren’t done with your preparation work yet. There’s still more to do…

Check Your Pages With Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a natural analogue to the raw search testing recommended above. If you saw the Mobile-friendly tag in search results for your website, you should expect to see the pages you test here pass. If you didn’t see the Mobile-friendly tag in search results, this tool can help you understand some of the issues that Google thinks are causing problems.

If you’re in a competitive market, this is also a useful tool for doing research on the other organizations vying for your traffic. Go ahead and plug in your competition’s URLs to see what, if anything, is holding them up.

As you do your testing, there are some important points you’ll need to remember:

• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test only checks the specific page URL you enter. It will not reveal issues on other pages of your site. For that reason, even if you appear to pass the Mobile-Friendly Test for the URLs you enter, you need to continue reading and check Webmaster Tools for issues. More on this in the next section.
• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can report results inconsistently. Two tests against the same page URL can return both passing and failing results. Make sure that if you see a failure, you read the page carefully. Sometimes Google indicates that “a temporary error occurred” and your results are likely incorrect…but this text is not prominently displayed and can lead unfamiliar webmasters to panic and despair when everything is actually fine.
• A failure in Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test doesn’t always mean there’s a real problem for mobile users. In addition to the “temporary” issues described above, there are a range of technical reasons why a page might fail this test, but actually provide a passing mobile user experience. Sometimes this is due to robots.txt settings and other technical issues that prevent Google’s Mobile Testing service from reaching or seeing your pages correctly.

At this point you should see that as the preparation for #mobilegeddon becomes more sophisticated, so too does the skill required to interpret the results and figure out the next steps for your websites. It’s important that you persevere now to make sure you aren’t dealing with big problems after April 21.

Review the Webmaster Tools Mobile Usability Report

Almost a year and a half ago I urged healthcare webmasters to stop ignoring Google Webmaster Tools, and if you heeded that advice, this step is likely old hat. But if you’ve been remiss and haven’t checked regularly, it’s time to reacquaint yourself with this essential tool.

As you prepare for Google’s upcoming algorithm change, your first stop in Webmaster Tools is the Mobile Usability Report. This helpful report has a much wider scope than the Mobile-Friendly Test discussed above. But because it reveals issues across all pages of your site (with some caveats), the results can seem overwhelming if your site has problems.

Hopefully your experience is like that pictured above: “No mobile usability errors detected.” Anything else warrants investigation.

As long as you are in Google Webmaster Tools, take a moment to glance at the Crawl Errors for Smartphones, Site Messages log, Manual Actions notifications and Security Issues list. While these are not all directly related to mobile usability and the coming Google algorithm update, they are all important and it’s a good habit to check these areas for problems whenever you’re in Google Webmaster Tools.

Check PageSpeed Insights

And the last stop on our journey is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. While not just a mobile-usability testing tool, it offers a valuable report on the mobile experience for healthcare webmasters, and can quickly highlight mobile issues that need to be addressed.

In addition to the User Experience score, Page SpeedInsights can also reveal issues that might be slowing down the rendering of your website pages. These are important to keep in mind, but are generally not directly related to the issues you’ll need to focus on for April 21.

Next Steps

By now you should have a greater sense of what you need to do as you prepare for the April 21 Google algorithm update. However, not all the information you’ve gathered may be easy to interpret. In fact, some of it may seem downright contradictory…or beyond the scope of what you’re experienced in. If you feel anything less than confident that your website is well positioned for the pending Google algorithm change, it’s time to reach out to the experts.

We’ve already started having conversations about it with existing clients. If you don’t yet have expertise on call to help you understand and improve your exposure, why not get in touch today?

As a product owner (PO), I work hard to ensure that VitalSite is the best content management system on the market. Prioritizing which features and enhancements make it into the product each release requires thoughtful decision making – you have to give attention to shifts in the healthcare market, technology advancements and of course, the feedback of clients.

It’s fun to talk about the big, sexy stuff the team accomplishes: new modules, major new features and strategic integrations.

The reality is that we have a wide range of requests coming from many different stakeholders and sometimes it’s the little things that make clients (and coworkers!) really happy.

That’s why I’m excited about our most recent product release. VitalSite 16 consists of some great little advancements that are the result of feedback from our clients. Two enhancements in particular have been well received: multi-file upload and an updated WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

Improved Productivity with Multi-File Upload

Multi-file upload is already saving our clients and our Geonetric team a lot of time, particularly during initial website implementations. Uploading multiple files seems straightforward enough, but this process was more than just dropping files into a directory since VitalSite has a pretty sophisticated taxonomy and workflow.

Enhanced WYSIWYG Editor

Like most CMS solutions, VitalSite uses a third party content editor component as the base of our editor – albeit with significant modifications. For a while, this was OK, but our clients weren’t able to enjoy the benefit of new capabilities and bug fixes. So we rebuilt all of our smartlinking capabilities, integrated the editor with VitalSite templates and worked with some of our heaviest end users to rebuild the user interface in a way that works particularly well for our clients.

A Better User Experience

As you know, we survey our customers several times every year. In our most recent customer satisfaction survey we had the highest ratings increase for our VitalSite product in this history of VitalSite survey taking.

The difference? We’re experimenting with new ways of actively working with our clients in the development of new capabilities and listening to them as a primary driver of our engineering priorities.

The result? A CMS that continues to improve and a client community that knows we’re committed to building enhancements – big and small – that make managing their hospitals’ websites easier and more intuitive.

And that’s a pretty great story to tell as PO.

Want to learn more about VitalSite? Schedule a demo today!

Attend this webinar and learn how to successfully translate your organization’s strategic goals into digital goals, making your website a revenue-generating and volume-driving machine. You’ll discover how to define value for your online tactics, and how to communicate that value to key stakeholders. We’ll also cover what effective digital plans look like, and provide actionable guidance to help make your digital marketing strategy deliver real results.

As the old adage says, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Google Analytics (GA) gives you lots of data and ways to evaluate usage patterns and user trends on your website. So much data, in fact, that it can be overwhelming. But if you have a sophisticated content management system and you’re just using GA “out of the box,” you’re missing important parts of the online experience.

That’s why Geonetric’s CMS, VitalSite, can be set up to track a number of extra components automatically! For example:

• Outbound: Ordinarily, you simply lose track of visitors when they click on a link that leaves the site. You can’t follow visitors off the site, but you can capture when a visitor clicks an outbound link.
• MailTo: If you have links to trigger email, wouldn’t it be nice to know how often?
• Download: File downloads are notoriously difficult to track. The file doesn’t run any JavaScript and doesn’t trigger any tracking in Google Analytics. VitalSite can track when someone clicks a link on a page in your site, even a link to download a document.
• Error: Errors, particularly bad inbound links, are inevitable. VitalSite can effectively track where these bad links originate and where they’re going.
• Google Translate: Google Translate is an interesting but controversial feature to add to your website. Does anyone actually use it? Analytics is the only way to truly know.

Customized Reporting with Script Manager

VitalSite’s Script Manager was created initially to support the transition to Google’s new Universal Analytics – allowing us to coordinate changes to code and analytics without adding stacks of outside calls to third-party tag management tools.

But the benefits go beyond just supporting Universal Analytics. This capability allows a wide range of customized code to be added to different pages on client sites, including these custom Google Analytics tracking behaviors. It’s just another way we give our clients even more insight and help arm them with the information they need to make decisions.

You’ll discover how to leverage current content resources and identify gaps in your content strategy to deliver the right content at the right time to your potential patients. We also cover search engine optimization topics such as schema.org markup, local search, third party content platforms, placed content, back linking, syndicated content and video. But most importantly you’ll gain the understanding that the true value of SEO doesn’t lie in mastering the little details, but realizing how everything interconnects.

Picture it: you’re on a website. You’re looking for a specific piece of information and you’re in a hurry. After looking at the navigation, you find it isn’t clear where the information is. What are you supposed to do? You look around and there, you see it, the solution to all your problems: the search box, of course! You type in your request and press the submit button.

Behind the scenes an entire world of logic, computer processing power, and data spins to life to read your mind and deliver exactly the piece of information you’re looking for. If you misspell a word, it guesses the correct word. If the target of your search is a difficult or unusually spelled word, it uses a phoneme dictionary to identify similar sounding words or names. Search is one of the most complex and data intensive parts of any website. The denser the data, the harder the challenge to identify what the user means — not just what they say — and provide results that satisfy that need.

Using context to enhance VitalSite’s search

Providing the right search results requires more than just a lot of processing power. The logic underlying the search process must strive to understand the context of the user experience. The goal is not to just provide a bunch of things the user could be looking for, but the right thing.

Within a hospital website, there is a lot of context we can glean from the visitor’s actions. If the visitor is looking at birthing plans and from that page searches for a provider, we can expect they are looking for an OB/GYN. Knowing about the visitor’s intent allows us to sort the results to provide the most relevant providers first.

This context drives us to continue to evaluate and update our search logic. In the release of VitalSite 15, we updated the way that provider search works to prioritize results based on the match to the taxonomy term on the page. In other words, results now take the context of the search into account first, as seen in the chart below.

Highest term weight compares the taxonomy of the visitor’s page with the taxonomy of the provider so that providers more like that service line are seen in the result list first.

It’s all about user experience

These small tweaks to the way we think about providing data to a website visitor not only means we are constantly reviewing how the website is used, but also ensuring that our client’s website becomes more relevant to visitors. We want to reduce the sense that visitors often have on websites: feeling like they are lost. Small changes like this make a big difference in the visitor’s experience.

How can you use these changes to make the most out of your search? See another recent post to learn from a specific example: Physician-Seeking Behavior.

For instance, when shopping for a physician, consumers use your physician directory’s search capabilities to practice the same winnowing behavior to help them identify and choose the best physician for their needs. Consumers may filter for potential physicians who:

• Treat their specific conditions.
• Specialize in certain areas of care.
• Speak their native language.
• Practice in a location near their homes.

Because this filtering behavior is so prevalent among consumers, it’s important that your online provider directory supports it. It’s also why we’ve designed VitalSite Provider Directory to support this type of behavior. When visitors look for physicians on a VitalSite-powered website, they have the ability to search, sort, and filter providers in a way that quickly surfaces physicians relevant to them from all the providers in an organization.

Let’s walk through an example of how this works using Abington Health’s website. The visitor behavior we describe in this example is informed by data from across many healthcare websites.

In this first image, we see that the website visitor has made it to the Find a Physician page (1). The visitor conducted an empty search without filters (2) in order to list all physicians at the organization. We can see that there 1092 potential physicians to choose from (3):

That’s too many to make sense of without some sort of refinement. And so the visitor engages in the first of a series of search refinements that continually narrow the pool of potential physicians.

In this first search refinement, the site visitor has specified the Obstetrics & Gynecology specialty filter (4) that focuses the number of potential physicians to 73 (5):

The next refinement is to filter physicians by gender (6). And this establishes a tighter focus still, with 43 potential physicians (7):

And the last step is to filter physicians by city (8). Note how with a few clicks, the visitor is easily able to focus in on three potential physicians (9) from an initial pool of over a thousand:

At this point, there’s a manageable number of likely candidates to work with, and visitors typically begin reviewing their profiles to determine which provider to select.

Though some of the discreet steps represented above may be consolidated, and the actual filters used can vary from one organization to the next, the pattern of behavior is one we see over and over again as visitors look for physicians. That’s why VitalSite’s Provider Directory is intentionally designed to help users quickly hone in on the best physicians for their needs.

If you’re not yet using VitalSite to power your hospital website, or you’re curious to know if you could be doing more to visitors as they search for physicians, contact us.