Master the Art of Healthcare Online Marketing: Landing Pages, PPC and SEO

April 06, 2018

When you’re promoting your next service line, where do you want your users to land?

Combining informative content with user-friendly design, an amazing landing page can turn the average onlooker into a potential patient. Essential to digital marketing, landing pages are a piece of the URL puzzle, working alongside PPC campaigns and healthcare SEO strategy to amplify your prospects’ online experience.

If URL, PPC and SEO are sounding like a jumble of letters right now, let us explain each of these terms and how they fit into your healthcare response marketing strategy. A landing page is just that – a page someone “lands” on after clicking a hyperlink. While it might not sound like anything special at first, hospital landing pages wield a lot of power if designed correctly. Incorporating signup sheets, service line descriptions and call to actions (CTAs), healthcare landing pages can provide that extra push users need to move from prospect to patient. Landing pages are also useful tools for lead generation and measurement, creating quantifiable data with every click-through and sign-up. When designing healthcare SEO landing pages, there are a few best practices that will maximize their value, here’s a quick list of our top tips:

  1. Keep it simple. Clutter is the enemy of every landing page! To guide users through your landing page with ease, incorporate easy-to-read copy, condensed sign up forms, direct and legible CTAs and a healthy balance of whitespace, copy and imagery for a clean look and more efficient user experience.
  2. Use clear headlines and specific CTAs. The headline immediately should immediately people’s attention and let’s users know the landing page’s intention. If this healthcare landing page is promoting a specific service line, you will want that clearly stated at the top of the page. Specific CTAs, like “Sign Up Here,” “Send me the Report,” and “Speak to a Physician,” are excellent ways to incite user engagement. To highlight your CTA, consider creating a brightly colored button that the user won’t miss.
  3. Have user-generated reviews? Use them! Known as “social proof” in the world of user experience design, HIPAA-compliant patient testimonials collected from interviews, review-based websites and social media will add an extra layer of authenticity and credibility to your medical landing page.
  4. Don’t shy away from A/B testing! If you can’t decide between two landing page designs, you can always try both! Choosing color schemes, messaging and other elements is only made easier when you can test their performance, and A/B testing is one way to uncover the best landing page design for your service line.

Next is PPC, or pay-per-click, a method of online marketing in which an advertiser pays every time a user clicks on an ad. According to MarketingCharts.com, 34 percent of marketers consider healthcare PPC marketing to be one of the most effective forms of marketing, but 28 percent of marketers also believe it’s one of the more difficult marketing methods to master. So, what is it about healthcare PPC campaigns that perplexes the best of response marketers? Well, the first puzzling question is: What kind of hospital PPC marketing campaign will be most effective for my healthcare brand? Medical PPC marketing campaigns can be found in a variety of digital spaces, most notably on social media and on search engines like Google. Google’s online advertising program is called Google AdWords, and these advertisements can be found on multiple platforms, such as search result pages, websites, YouTube videos and apps. Google AdWords has an algorithm to determine which ads get the best real estate, and this formula accounts for money spent per keyword and your ad’s “quality score,” or how relevant the ad is to the average user. If your ad earns a great quality score by using keywords that are relevant to your core demographic, chances are that you won’t have to spend as much per click than those brands with a lower quality score. Finding that balance between quality score and ad spend the trick to getting the biggest bang for your buck at the AdWords auction, so be sure to do the research and be picky about the healthcare keywords you choose.

For social PPC campaigns, marketers spend money to ensure their advertisement is delivered to target audience lists that have been customized based on factors like age, gender, location and occupation. The ability to tailor core audiences is key here because it ensures the healthcare social media marketing campaign reaches the people who are most likely to become conversions. With more conversions, your company will have more sales and, ultimately, more revenue, so, if done effectively, that pay-per-click fee should pale in comparison to the dollars its raking in. Like healthcare landing pages, hospital PPC campaigns are also a huge asset to marketers because they provide measurable analytics, like number of clicks, comments and shares, which all paint a detailed picture of user engagement.

In addition to paid forms of online marketing, healthcare brands should also take steps to boost organic traffic, that is, traffic that occurs without paid advertising. This “earned” or “natural” traffic is directly linked to search engine optimization (SEO), a marketing practice that relies on creative content and strategic planning to increase brand visibility on search engines. When a potential patient or the family member of a patient is looking for a service line or hospital in their area, strong hospital SEO will ensure your hospital is the first option they see on the results page. The trick to great healthcare SEO marketing is remembering that the highest-ranking websites provide the answers that patients are looking for while facilitating a streamlined and efficient online experience, so maintaining fast load times, optimizing your website for multiple platforms, using hyperlinks and backlinks, and constantly creating high-quality, keyword-rich content are easy ways to help your page rank high on popular search engines.

The world of online healthcare marketing is vast, and we’ve really just scratched the surface. Perfecting the art of healthcare SEO is an ongoing process – it requires knowledge of multiple elements, including healthcare landing page development and healthcare PPC marketing – and following these best practices will bring you one step closer mastery. To learn more about Orange Label’s online marketing capabilities, click here.

Written By: Janell Rowland

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