Paid, Social, or SEO: What works and what sucks?

Quick: what's the best - and worst - thing you can do to market medical practices?

That's the million dollar (sometimes literally) question, and I get asked that by doctors as well as my own team.

If we look at how marketing is done for medical practices it breaks down into two distinct groups: browse and intent.

Browse is when you drop your name and content in front of people who didn't ask for it. It just shows up, on billboards or radio or television or Little League shirts. You paid for it because you thought somehow it would get you more patients. Other than being an expense you can write off, browse is one of the least effective at actively driving patients to your office. It doesn't hurt, and maybe people will remember you, but if you aren't doing all the strategic marketing first, you're better off avoiding anything browse-centric.

Browse in the digital world is Social Media and Paid Display ads. Social media is hyped as something critical to your business but it's not nearly as important as it's made out to be. People who SELL social media will violently disagree with me on this, but it's very easy to identify what social media is and isn't good for. Just name the last time you went to social media to SEARCH for a doctor, or shoe store, or tire store, etc. You haven't. You go on social media to lose hours to reels and to see what your old high school friends are up to. You MIGHT post asking if anyone has a recommendation for a doctor or shoe store or tire repair place, but it's not that frequent because social media is for entertainment. Simple as that. We use social media in our line of work for only one thing: posting links back to our website to drive SEO. More on that later.

Paid Display Ads are those ads you find littered across websites on the side and bottom. They just pop up and typically have nothing to do with the site itself. These ads may be remarketing to you because you looked at a treadmill on a website and now you're seeing treadmills everywhere in ads. That's called Paid Display Ads also known as Programmatic Advertising. It's simply blasting ads across many different venues to get in front of as many people as possible to get clicks based on a whim rather than a search. It's the digital equivalent of a billboard. It's technically cheap to show an ad, but this is done in volume, so you still up paying for a lot of ad clicks and the conversion - someone actually filling out a form or calling you - is abysmal compared to actual marketing. You'll notice it is called Programmatic ADVERTISING, not MARKETING, because it is just that - making a lot of noise and hoping for clicks.

Short answer: Browse Marketing, which is anything using social or display as a PRIMARY means of medical practice marketing, is one of the worst things you can do as it is not addressing an actual intent. If you have the money AFTER you do proper marketing, have at it. There are ways to make it effective as an adjunct to a primary campaign.

Intent is when you go to Google (92% of the time) and search for "spine doctor phoenix" or "knee doctor near me". You are looking for something and Google gives you the results based on your input. There is no social aspect to it; the result is based on your intent and the matches - search engine results - given based on your query. There are two ways to show up on search engine results with intent marketing: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search Ads.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search Ads work on the idea of keywords, and everyone thinks they know what keywords are. "Spine Surgeon", for example, is a keyword phrase and you want to be in the number one spot for that phrase! Well, good luck with that, because there are many, many factors to rank high: a recent Google "breach" showed there are over 2,500 pages of criteria used for search ranking. Add to that, there are many variations of phrases that you may not think are important, but really are.

For example, using Google Trends (https://trends.google.com) we can see that the results for the terms Spine Surgeon, Spine Specialist, and Spine Doctor vary over the past 90 days in terms of searches.

And if you drill down to the individual states, it's all over the place. So the idea of ranking in only one term isn't the best idea as it turns out.

Keywords themselves are now subject to interpretation based on content. The Google algorithm has gotten so smart, it looks for keywords used in context, and appropriately. The days of keyword "stuffing" - repeating a phrase over and over on your webpage - are long gone. When you use the word "spine surgeon" you should also use words and phrases that a spine surgeon might use: spine health, spine care, spine treatments, spine surgery, spine patients, etc.

But let's assume you're in a hurry and you want your fresh new website to be found. Paid ads are often promoted as a solution and, if you aren't ranking at all, they are. But consider that a paid ad only gets clicked around 6% of the time, according to Wordstream ranking for the Healthcare industry. 6% is equivalent to the fifth to ninth position of organic results (those search engine results below the ads) depending on which authority you believe. If you aren't on the board, that's still better than nothing. However... one factor that people selling ads often leave out of the discussion is Search Impression Share (SIS). This is how often your ad actually appears. The industry average allegedly is close to 50%. I can tell you from millions of dollars spent on medical marketing and billions of lines of results, that a 28% SIS is closer to reality. This means your ad, that only gets clicked 6% of the time, will only show up 1/3 of the time people are looking. Again, it's better than nothing if you aren't ranking. Which brings us to the point of this article...

How do you rank? Organic ranking apparently has about 2500 pages of algorithm variables and requires lots of different versions of words and sounds really, really difficult. So how come we see doctors who barely practice ranking higher than our websites? Google has many variables, but some are more critical than others.

Here's the formula for a high ranking website: Create a website that is localized and optimized, with lots of SEO content on the pages that are relevant to what people are looking for (hint: your mission statement is not what they're looking for). Add content frequently that is relevant to those topics you want to be found for. Submit your sitemap to Google on a regular basis. Add links from all your social site back to that content. Repeat weekly if possible.

I guarantee if you do this, you will rank high in local searches, as well as national and international ranking. This is literally what we do for every customer because it is exactly what Google wants: Search Engine Optimization is creating quality content that addresses a user's intent and letting Google know about it.

Creating a content plan seems like a daunting task, because it is. You have to commit to creating content calendars that reflect your practice, creating articles to publish, and creating additional content related to the core topics over and over again. Then you have to put pictures and descriptions on social media and link back and then tell Google about it. Again and again and again. It's not something that Missy at the front desk can do for you. It's something that you will want to outsource unless you have a lot of time or it is something you enjoy. I know a number of doctors that are very prolific writers, and I've worked with them to become even more prolific using techniques we've developed, but they're the exception, not the rule.

You need to outsource and build up your SEO collateral on your website because it is an INVESTMENT, not an EXPENSE. Consider an ad campaign: you will spend thousands on your ads to get found for terms you believe your patients are looking for. These ads point to a webpage and, ideally, your marketing person created content relative to that term but unfortunately a lot of these so-called experts simply point at your homepage, which is the dumbest thing to do. If you run an ad for Knee Replacement, your page title better say Knee Replacement in large letters with content about Knee Replacement only, or you just burned an ad click. So let's say you DO create a nice page about Knee Replacement. If you did a good job with using words about knee replacement in context, and you localized it, etc. it will be a page that reflects well as a "landing page" for a Knee Replacement ad and will hopefully get you some clicks on a form or a call. But it also will be doing something else IF you are letting Google know about it: getting indexed and seen organically. That same page will eventually start showing up organically in the results if you keep adding content about knee replacement, or literally anything about orthopedics. The ad campaign will end, but organic results CAN keep growing.

Case in point, we just created a content calendar plan and are executing for a doctor. We analyzed his ad spend and found he could fund his entire SEO strategy by eliminating some of his ads that he was already ranking for. It was a pointless ad spend that someone talked him into. Now he is using us to create content that will continue to pay off for him for years and years.

But where do you keep getting ideas about Knee Replacement? Or Ankle Fusion, or Spine Decompression or whatever. It's easy if you know what People Also Ask. That's a term Google uses for additional questions associated with a topic. Try it out: search for "Knee Replacement". Now scroll down the page and you'll see four or so questions under the title "People Also Ask" on the Google results page. I currently am seeing: How long can it take to recover from a knee replacement? What is the hardest day after knee replacement? What is the best age to have a knee replacement? and How long does it take to walk normally after total knee replacement?

If you're an orthopedist, you can answer these in a minute or less because you give these answers every day. Write those answers down, and you now have four blog articles. If you're in Google and you clicked on "How long can it take to recover from a knee replacement?" you'll now see additional questions you can answer. This is literally how we create content calendars.

To sum up, investing in creating articles, both short and long, linking to them from social media, and submitting to Google for it to see you're adding to your website, is a much better long term strategy than any paid ad or social strategy. Ads and Social has its place but it is to support a robust website. Like to learn more? Contact us at [email protected] and we'll bend your ear.