A number of trends are becoming evident in medical practice digital web marketing. The internet is no longer just a place to have your website, instead it’s becoming the location of your new patient generating efforts. Essentially, your website and other web presences must now generate business for you.
Search Engine Optimizations
Increasingly medical professionals are establishing web and social media presences that are search engine optimized (SEO) in order that search engines such as Google and Bing can not only find those websites, but direct search traffic to them. Medical procedure searches are in the millions every month, and growing more and more every day, with searches coming from mobile devices leading the way. Practically, this means that if your website and other digital presences, such as in social media channels, are not optimized for what prospective patients are looking for, your competition will be the beneficiary of all these prospective patients looking to give their business to someone.
Local Medical Search Presence
In addition, to website SEO, there is developing a separate online category of search results referred to as Local Search. As the term suggests, these are search results that are specific to a geographical area, and which have developed as a unique category because the large search engines, Google and Bing, have in many metropolitan areas, carved out a search result display area on the main page of search results dedicated to Local Search. SEO of Local Search presence has its own rules and therefore must be dealt with in a distinct fashion, in order to obtain high placement in Local Search results.
Socially Networked Medical Marketing
Utilization of social networks for medical marketing is an increasing trend evidenced by the growing number of Fan Pages or Twitter accounts in these leading social networks. Social networks offer unique opportunities in providing access to communities defined by interests, on a regional as well as general community basis, into which you have the ability to outreach and engage members thereof. In this way you can establish a direct connection with prospective patients.
Mobileweb Searches
As noted above, the potential of the mobileweb has yet to be felt, but it’s coming. The vast majority of the population has not only access to a mobile phone, but rarely leaves home without it. Advances in network communication speeds and mobile technologies will essentially make the mobile browsing experience, if not identical, then competitive with the desktop pc. The implications are that prospective patients will increasingly search for medical services using their mobile phone, whenever its most convenient to them. As a result, digital medical marketing will have to have a mobile component, whether by way of a mobile optimized websites, or a mobile app, in order to capture this increase and/or redirection in search traffic.
For more information please contact Tee Marek at http://www.MediTrafix.com – where these trends present opportunities for medical marketing, and for medical practices that understand the digital directions that are developing around us.
