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.

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.