DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT

Diving into SEO with These Simple Steps
Optimizing search results for health systems starts with simple tricks like keeping listings up-to-date and answering common questions.

Setting up a website to be favorable to search engines, mainly Google, is not what it used to be. “I remember working on pages where the words on the page hardly even made sense. We were cramming keywords in wherever we could,” said Julie Goldstein-Dunn, director of experience, insights and analytics at Henry Ford Health System, in Detroit, Michigan. 

Of course, keywords are still important, but over time, search engine optimization (SEO) has matured, to the point where reader experience is synonymous with it. “It's great because it helps our patients, and there's more context to our pages than maybe there had been in the past,” said Goldstein-Dunn. Although getting to that point can seem like a struggle, combining a considerable amount of good content with structured data — also known as schema markup, the language of search engines — can increase search engine traffic to a health system’s website.

Curating that content can certainly mean maintaining blog posts or articles, but also providing patients with details to help them find providers, specialties and procedures. One of the easiest ways to do this is by keeping Google’s directory — Google My Business — up-to-date. Updating a provider’s address, phone number and specialty, and even uploading a picture, can help promote the listing and increase reliability when a patient searches for a specific provider near them. “As we've gone along this journey, we've optimized our listings, and we've seen an increase in user interactions with those listings,” said Goldstein-Dunn.

For instance, the Henry Ford Health System has found that transitioning from listing just buildings to instead listing the service lines in those buildings made a difference in patient use. “We were finding that we were actually missing some folks because they weren’t searching for a building, they were searching for a service,” such as radiology, Goldstein-Dunn said. 

She knows this from the data. “I can go into my Google Analytics and see how many people clicked on something in the Google My Business listing, whether it's who came to our website, asked for directions or even how many calls came in through our listing.”

Managing listings is important, but so is having content where the patient lands on the website, Goldstein-Dunn said, and harnessing schema markup within the website itself can have similar results that increase viewers. When using schema markup, Google compiles that information into a rich search result on its page, where photos, videos, star ratings and other information will be prominently displayed.

Searching for What the Reader Wants 

As computers and technology have advanced, so too have the mechanisms behind search engines. With their complex algorithms, Google and its competitors are now putting the reader (the patient) at the forefront with machine learning. “If you think about it, if Google needs to be able to apply their machine learning and artificial intelligence, then it absolutely makes sense that we need to structure our websites to make them more consumable,” said Martha van Berkel, CEO and co-founder of Schema App, which is a software platform for doing schema markup at scale. “Because if Google understands the content, and can match it to the search query, then [patients are] going to find the answers they need.” 

Because user intent and the nature of medicine are always evolving — especially during this pandemic — content needs to be updated. “It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of tactic. It’s ongoing,” said Goldstein-Dunn. “Google changes the rules all the time without a lot of notice. It might be a best practice today, but next week, Google might change their algorithms and then it doesn’t work anymore.”

For Henry Ford Health System, creating an up-to-date Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section was just as important as updated provider directories. Many times a patient is searching for an answer to a medical question and not necessarily a care provider. Providing that answer will not only help the patient, but help the health system create brand awareness, too. “They're looking for an answer, they're looking to engage, and they're curious,” said van Berkel.

Top answers supplied by experts can also satisfy qualifications that are referred to by the acronym E.A.T — expertise, authority and trust.  As explained by van Berkel, E.A.T helps drive traffic in Google’s algorithms. Great content, combined with structured data works to provide the best answer to a searcher’s question FAQs with citations fit that to a tee.

Content like FAQs is a great place to showcase expertise for health systems of all sizes, but is also a great jumping-off point for systems that haven’t dived head-first into SEO just yet, said van Berkel. To create popular FAQs, focus on exactly that: the most frequently asked questions. Ask a provider for questions they field about a procedure, or an administrator about the hospital, she advised, and then get them on the web with the proper coding. “It's worth delighting your consumers bringing them that information at the beginning of their journey,” she said.

That hard work has paid off for Henry Ford. As medical advice has progressed throughout the pandemic, the health system took the time to create updated FAQs with the latest information and coding from Schema App. Creating a COVID-19 vaccination FAQ page months prior to the vaccine rollout proved fruitful. Goldstein-Dunn got one call from a partner, several states away, to say that the page was in his top results, even without a Detroit location tag.

“Almost immediately, it was in the top results all over the country for questions about COVID vaccines,” she said. They remained a top result into February of this year. “But that was just such a great way to illustrate if you set your pages up right and you tagged the content correctly, search engines pick up on them very, very quickly.”

Learning More

• To listen to an in-depth conversation on this topic via SHSMD Rapid Insights Podcast on “Using Google to Build Trust in Your Brand” with Julie Goldstein-Dunn and Martha van Berkel, click here

This article features interviews with: 

Julie Goldstein-Dunn
Director, Experience, Insights and Analytics
Henry Ford Health System
Detroit, Michigan 

Martha van Berkel
CEO
Schema App
Ontario, Canada