As a healthcare marketer, helping health consumers make that connection with a doctor is important – but far from easy! And doing it on a website can be even more difficult. How do you showcase a doctor’s personality online in an authentic way? The key is to humanize the doctor.

Humanize the doctor

Just thinking about physicians makes a person envision white coats and sterile environments. Your mind is flooded with images of cold metal tables, getting poked and prodded, and you might even experience the feelings of being scared or anxious.

These are the exact thoughts and feelings you don’t want your health consumers to feel when looking for a new family doctor or specialist! The notion of humanizing medicine has been around for a while and works to combat that sterile, clinical feeling. The concept focuses on compassionate care and creating a real partnership between the doctor and patient. Instead of a business relationship, it’s a personal relationship and one that plays an important role through any health journey.

With so much of the condition and doctor research taking place online today, it’s important to take steps to humanize your doctors on your website.

Create powerful online provider profiles

Offering compelling and engaging online provider profiles is one of the best ways to showcase your doctors in a unique and genuine way.

PIH Health in Whittier, CA, does an excellent job using its online doctor profiles to create a compelling snapshot of its providers, helping site visitors get a real feel for what it would be like to partner with that doctor.

The key to success for PIH Health’s profiles is the way it shares useful information while still providing a personal touch.

As you can see in this example, site visitors are greeted with a smiling, professional image and immediately get a sense of the doctor. An engaging biography shares relevant educational and specialty information, while also providing personal details that help a site visitor identify and connect with the doctor.

A health consumer may or may not choose a doctor based on where they did their residency. But knowing that doctor also has two kids and likes the Lakers – well now those are things a potential patient can relate to! PIH Health’s profile also includes important office and location information, helping the site visitors determine if this doctor’s office is in the right part of the city for them.

As you scroll down, the profile shares more relevant information – like specialties, languages spoken, education, and certifications – and also includes a video, the pièce de résistance.

Bring the profile to life with video

Nothing brings a doctor to life online better than a well done video. PIH Health has recorded videos of its doctors sharing their practice philosophies. The videos are short in length – only two or three minutes, but go a long way to showcasing the doctor and his or her bedside manner.

So far 64 of the organization’s doctors have recorded videos and those videos average 1,150 views a month.

Now not every doctor wants to be in front of the camera, but every doctor does want to fill their schedules, so you can make the case why this is a great investment. Plus, the content marketing opportunities with a great doctor video are endless.

Have the right provider directory as your foundation

Compelling profiles are key to connecting doctors and site visitors, but having a sophisticated provider directory running behind those profiles is key to managing and presenting all that doctor data online.

Check out how PIH Health uses our VitalSite Provider Directory to deliver detailed profiles, offer impressive search capabilities, and effectively cross-promote doctors across the site.

In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

• Put yourself in the minds of your site visitors and patients
• Get past marketing-speak and provide helpful details
• Revise current website copy to emphasize benefits users receive from your services
• Streamline content and quickly get to the point
• Create strong calls to action that focus on users and benefits

Promoting multiple brands and facilities on one website can be difficult.

If you’re ready to trade in silos of web content for a strategy that balances a regional brand while still highlighting individual facilities, this webinar is for you. Using healthcare examples, we explain how to build a website that makes it easy for consumers to access services across a system. You’ll learn how to manage multiple online brands in a way that meets organizational goals while providing a seamless user experience every step of the way.

In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

• Develop a content strategy that promotes multiple web presences in a way that meets organizational goals while still making sense to consumers
• Communicate the value of a centralized system-wide site and still showcase facilities’ core competencies
• Create a seamless online experience for site visitors
• Go beyond social media as a content marketing strategy

Explore ways to effectively use your current content assets as well as have a better understanding of how to develop new content that’s relevant to your audiences.

In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

• Implement a quantitative content inventory
• Employ popular and effective methods for evaluating your content quality
• Use your current content assets more effectively
• Achieve a laser-like focus in developing new content that’s useful and relevant to your audiences
• Create a basic content governance structure to help manage online content assets for the long-term

You know content is king. But without useful tips for improving content, that knowledge doesn’t really help. Stop talking about how important content is and actually develop better content!

In this webinar learn how to:

• Establish a content marketing program
• Use content marketing to build service line volume
• Create content that is valuable and gets shared
• Go beyond social media as a content marketing strategy

hat’s the great thing about CRM systems today – they can easily be customized to your organization’s business model. However, along with the positives of easy point-and-click customizations, such as new data fields, also comes the increased risk of creating useless and unreliable data. In a recent article I read The Five Data Management Practices B2B Marketers Are Overlooking, author Derek Slayton cites research from the Aberdeen Group that says companies that actively manage their marketing data for hygiene and improved segmentation require just 64 marketing responses to generate a customer. Those that do not require 329 (industry average) or 622 (laggards) touches!

The purpose of data fields in your CRM is to store data on CRM objects (leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, etc.) that are important to successful lead generation and tracking of your organization’s success. As Derek Slayton stated, “Consider data the fuel of your marketing engine.” They are used to track sales opportunities and potential revenue for the upcoming year, won and lost sales from the prior year, estimated timelines for converting a prospect into a client through the sales pipeline, influencers in a buying decision and numerous other things.

When creating a new data field in CRM, here are a few things to consider:

• Team Consensus: Make sure your team agrees with the data field being created and the purpose behind it. Ask your team, “How will this data benefit in our lead generation activities?” and “How will this help in generating revenue for the company?” Continually adding new data fields without planning or consensus can result in unused or redundant fields and a system so complex no one knows how to use it.
• Usage Guidelines: Have your team set rules and guidelines behind the data field. Make sure you agree on things such as data type, business rules, naming convention, usage, quality, etc. When guidelines are not tied to a new data field from the beginning, every individual using the field will create their own personal guidelines and processes. This creates inconsistent data. A great tip from the article is to establish standards and work with your marketing and sales teams to ensure that all constituents have the same expectations for data quality. Clarity for what is expected and agreement on goals as an organization are critical to your go-forward strategy.
• Permissions: Custom data fields that may contain sensitive information should have permissions set. Using a type of role-based security, you typically have the option and ability to choose whether to make the field visible to certain user roles and restrict edibility of the field. Each CRM varies with their security features, but this is always a vital step.

Data fields are important to the evaluation of aggregate data as well as the ease-of-use of your CRM system. It’s important to not get carried away and create data fields for every bit of information you would like to gather. Put emphasis on evaluating the necessity of each data field and the quality of data being entered. Derek Slayton’s article tells us to remember to establish a process to assess, cleanse, and enrich your data regularly throughout the year. Their research shows that marketing data decays at approximately 3% per month—and your inbound channels introduce hundreds (or thousands) of new records over the same time frame. This is similar to having a governance process for content on your website, you want to make sure it’s always displaying up-to-date and valuable information to your users.

Few things connect verticals like well-kept CRM systems. Whether you’re a local brick-and-mortar shop, a B2B business, or even a healthcare organization, at the end of the day effective customer relationship management is likely an important part of your marketing and sales strategy.

In Understanding Broken Links and 404s, we explored the differences between internal links, outbound links, and inbound links. Now that you have a working understanding of what these are and how they are different, we’ll cover some easy techniques you can use to be proactive about identifying them. For broken links that require 301 redirects to fix, we’ll even show you how you can use VitalSite’s redirect manager to add redirects.

Identifying Broken Internal and Outbound Links

Broken internal and outbound links are usually the easiest ones for you to find and identify. In addition to free and paid tools that crawl your site looking for broken links, you may be able to identify some of these in Google Analytics. Google Search Console records broken internal and outbound links in its Crawl Errors report. While useful, understand that this report provides only a snapshot view of broken links it has crawled recently.

If you’re a Geonetric client, you may have an additional resource at your disposal: your quarterly Stat report. As part of these conversations about your website performance, we’ll share with you a list of broken internal and outbound links on your website. This is a great way for you to stay on top of things without having to invest time in learning a new tool or deciphering the results.

Identifying Broken Inbound Links

Identifying broken inbound links is a bit trickier than identifying internal and outbound links. If you wanted to use an on-demand site crawling tool to find these, you’d essentially have to crawl the entire internet looking for broken links pointing to your website. That’s something that’s probably not going to happen any time soon.

Fortunately, Google does this for us and provides a convenient report for us to use. The Google Search Console Crawl Errors report identifies all links it has crawled recently that appear to be broken. This includes inbound links.

Be aware that Google’s Crawl Errors report can help identify broken links, but may also report a fair number of noise/false positives (as is the case with the second link reported above).

The reason for this is that Google is continually testing its algorithm and attempting to crawl links contained in JavaScript. It’s far from perfect, though. Sometimes it incorrectly interprets as a link some standard JavaScript code or another artifact in a page’s HTML. If you see a large number of odd broken links in the Crawl Errors report, and they don’t correspond to actual links on pages, you can ignore these.

As with internal and outbound links, many Geonetric clients have an additional advantage with Stat. As part of this quarterly review, we share with you any broken inbound links we have identified. If you’re not yet ready to dive in and start investigating yourself, this can be an invaluable resource to help you keep on top of inbound links that are broken and need attention.

Options for Fixing Broken Inbound Links

If you identify a broken external link pointing to your site (otherwise known as an “inbound” link), you have two ways to try to fix it. The first is to contact the webmaster of the external site and request that they fix or change the link to your site.

This is usually a slow and painful task.

The other (and usually more efficient) way is to create a 301 redirect so that your site redirects traffic from the broken link to a page you specify. It’s worth understanding that 301 redirects pass on SEO benefits to the destination page. This means that quality backlinks you earn over time can continue to pass PageRank on to the destination page. In other words, it helps with your SEO… provided that you redirect broken inbound links instead of letting them linger as 404 errors when your site’s URL structure changes.

Redirecting in the Page Editor

Administrators with the appropriate permission can access the VitalSite redirect manager in the Navigation tab when editing pages. To use this redirect manager, simply add the “broken” URL to the destination page you want to redirect visitors to.

Once added and the page is saved, visitors following the broken link will be redirected to the current page.

In addition to adding redirects, administrators may also use VitalSite’s on-page redirect editor to remove existing redirects.

Advanced Redirect Rules and Other Redirects

From time to time, some clients may have more complex redirect needs than can be accommodated through the redirect manager. Some common examples of this include the need to redirect page types that aren’t supported in the redirect manager, and the need to redirect many pages based on regular expression rules. If you’re a VitalSite client and you’re unsure of how to go about redirecting something that seems a bit more advanced than what you should be using the built-in redirect manager for, contact your client advisor. They will work closely with you to make sure your redirects are implemented appropriately.

Pulling It All Together

Broken links have been beguiling webmasters since the early days of the internet. They result in 404 errors on your site, and provide a poor user experience to your visitors. Fixing them (either by correcting the link, or using VitalSite’s redirect manager to redirect them) is part of the standard website hygiene regimen for any webmaster. Fortunately, today there are more ways than ever to help us proactively identify and fix them. A myriad of tools exist that crawl and flag broken internal and outbound links on your website, and Google Search Console and advanced Google Analytics views can reveal broken inbound links. If you don’t have time for the data mining and working with these tools, our quarterly Stat calls provide you with a great starting point.

Internal Links

Internal links are links that you (or your staff) placed on your pages and that link to other pages on your website. When they are broken, users see 404 errors on your site instead of the content they expect to see when they follow a (broken) link.

Don’t think this matters? Reflect on this question: how many broken links does a visitor need to encounter on your website before they begin to associate your brand with difficulty, error and failure?

Not many. And whatever the number, it’s probably not the emotion you want visitors to associate with your brand.

The good news is that you can avoid this. Since internal links are, by definition, links that you’ve made… they are also links that you can easily fix when broken. Once you discover such a link, edit the page (or panel) that contains it and fix the link so that it points to the correct destination.

If the destination no longer exists and there is no equivalent destination to direct visitors to, then you’ll probably want to remove the hyperlink altogether. If you do this, make sure to review the surrounding content in its entirety. Often the context of the content will suggest a hyperlink. If you remove a hyperlink without revising the content around it, your readers will likely be confused.

Outbound Links

Outbound links are hyperlinks you (or someone in your organization) placed on your website that link to destinations off your website. For example, your cardiac care pages may link to some authoritative resources on the American Heart Association’s (AHA) website. If those resources are removed by the AHA (or their URLs change), your links will be broken, and users clicking them will experience a 404.

Like broken internal links, broken outbound links reflect poorly on your brand. A profusion of them suggest that the basic principles of website hygiene are being ignored, and visitors may lose trust in your site. And even though the resulting 404 error appears on the destination website and not on your own, it’s your hyperlink that is broken and site visitors will blame your site when the link you provide serves them an error message instead of the content they were looking for.

The unfortunate thing with outbound links is that even if you’re a very conscientious webmaster, you have little control over the external resources you link to. Links will break without warning, and you may not even know it. Fortunately there are ways you can stay ahead of such problems. We’ll cover strategies for identifying these in our next post, Finding Broken Links and Fixing Them With VitalSite Redirects.

Inbound Links

Our last category of links are those that you have little control over. If you’re doing your job right and your hospital website is a trusted and authoritative resource on the web (and in your community), you’re going to have external people linking to your website. Chances are, you may even have a great many of these inbound links.

These inbound links represent external people recommending your brand, and these are obviously important to most marketers. In addition, inbound links also influence how your web pages perform in search (for most search engines). Pages on your website that are frequently linked to with similar anchor text will tend to perform better in search results for queries containing terms used in that anchor text.

Unfortunately, as you curate your website content… or even go through Web redesigns and updated site launches, you run the risk of breaking all these “earned” inbound links. As a marketer, you should be loath to throw away any quality backlink that you’ve earned.

Because of this, it is important to fix broken inbound links whenever possible. Not only does this maintain the SEO benefit, but it’s important that visitors arriving on your website from external sources are met with the type of content they expected to find.

With internal and outbound links, the fix is relatively easy: find the content on your website containing the problematic link, and fix it.

With inbound links, the work can be more difficult. To fix a broken inbound link, you either have to contact the webmaster of the external site and ask them to update their hyperlink, or you have to redirect visitors who follow that broken link to a relevant resource on your website.

Most webmasters find it a more economical use of their time to use redirects to address broken inbound links than to reach out to webmasters every time they identify a problem with an external website linking to their site.

In tomorrow’s post, Finding Broken Links and Fixing Them with VitalSite Redirects, you’ll learn several easy ways to identify broken links on your hospital website. We’ll also cover the best ways to fix them you retain the best SEO benefit while providing your site visitors with the best user experience possible.

At one point in time the advice about 404 errors was clear: you fix broken links (which result in 404 errors) because it’s a bad user experience to have them on your website.

In the last few years, however, Google has muddied the waters.

It has begun saying things like, “404s are a natural part of the web. We won’t penalize you for them.” And while 404s are indeed a natural part of the Web (the 404 error message is part of the HTTP protocol, after all), it’s dangerous to assume that you can ignore them.

Dismissing 404s as a natural part of the Web does nothing to address the poor user experience and site quality issues (which we know DO affect search rankings) engendered by a proliferation of errors, nor does it provide your marketing team with the opportunity to capture valuable inbound traffic from existing links to your site. Lastly, broken links leak PageRank, since URLs returning a 404 are eventually deindexed (source).

If this all sounds like geek speak, let’s distill down to the essence: marketers and webmasters of hospital websites need to stay on top of their 404s. It’s that simple.

404s: A Closer Look

A 404 error is a special server response code that a web server sends when a visitor tries to open a page (or other resource) that doesn’t exist. Typically via a link that was incorrectly typed, or one that points to a page that has been moved, deleted or whose URL has changed. Collectively, we refer to these as “broken links.”

If you follow a broken link to a page on our website that doesn’t exist, you’ll see something like the following:

The text of the page indicates to the visitor that the resource they were looking for could not be found.

Behind the scenes and invisible to you, the server returned a special 404 error message in the HTTP header.

If we use special software to view these HTTP headers, we see that the 404 response looks something like this:

As Google maintains, this is indeed the “correct” response to provide when a visitor tries to navigate to a page that doesn’t exist. And therein lies the rub.

The fact that it is technically “correct” can lead you to logically conclude that it’s OK to have a slew of 404s on your website.

Such conclusions are dangerous.

Out of control 404s can result in big problems for websites. Most Web marketers intent on driving and maintaining business value from their websites invest in understanding their 404 profile and keep it as clean as possible. Think of it as a standard component of your website hygiene program, one that is no different than hand washing is to your hospital’s hygiene program.

Unfortunately, not all broken links are the same. Some you’ll want to monitor and live with, others you’ll want to identify and fix on a regular basis.

Not sure how to tell the difference between a broken link worth fixing, and one you should just leave alone? We’ll cover this in our next post, Understanding Broken Links and 404s.

Treat questions like currency.

A great channel for figuring out what kind of content your audience wants to consume is right in front of you: your patients. They have questions. Lots of questions. I’m a mom of two boys and I can easily think back to a few questions I’ve had lately….

• “How do I tell if it’s a cold of the flu?”
• “Fevers: when do I take my child to the ER?”
• “Why antibiotics aren’t always the answer.”
• “Five myths about flu shots.”

Figure out a way to capture the questions your patients ask. You could collect them from social media accounts, ask nurses at your clinics to share frequently asked questions, or internvew atual patients. Then, develop content that answers those questions.

This positions your hospital as an expert and a resource, and developing content that many people would like to consum will add to its shareability factor.

More Content Marketing Tips

The thing about content marketing is – it sounds new and time consuming. But chances are, you’re already doing a lot of content marketing at your hospital. Creating useful content is something you’ve likely been doing for years. This new emphasis on content marketing should help you think about your efforts in new ways and hopefully keep it top of mind.

For more tips on content marketing, be sure to check out this webinar.