SEO In Healthcare – How To Capture Millennials

Each year, a new generation of Americans begins their search for a primary care physician. These millions of newly-fledged adults are among the most technology savvy people in the world, having grown up in a culture with a new way of advertising. Instead of print ads and traditional media, social media (including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Pinterest) and search dominate the landscape.

How can you as a medical professional take advantage of this new era to advertise and more importantly, grow your business? SEO targeted marketing for healthcare.

Millennials’ have erratic search behaviors that aren’t easily translatable into SEO strategies. So how does one target them? You could shift focus to what we do know about them.

1. Most Millennials Choose Doctors Based On Personal Recommendations

A whooping 70% of Millennials, turn to friends and family when searching for healthcare services. To capture this market, you could create a referral system. Build a feedback system for your patients and monitor their comments periodically. You could also request happy customers to refer you to their network on social media.

However, collecting referrals is tough, and only a small number of the people you reach out to are likely to participate. Since the targets in question are Millenials, you could use a social interactive tool like Klout to prompt those referrals.

2. Most Millennials Refer To Online Healthcare Information Resources

In fact, more Millennials consume healthcare content than any other generation. A good part of them feel rushed during visitation, and are likely to surf the web to complete their incomplete understanding of healthcare issues. As healthcare professionals, you either have to provide that information yourself, or source it for your patients.

Refrain from syndicating or otherwise republishing content from top blogs or standard medical texts, like many healthcare organizations do. 

If you do reuse content, follow these guidelines:

1. Prevent the folder with the republished content from being indexed by excluding it in your robots.txt file, or
   
2. Use the canonical link element to point to the real source of the information, and/or
   
3. Add additional value to the republished content; add your opinion, explanation, video, images etc.

But the best guideline remains: don’t reuse other’s content on your site.

3. Most Millennials Source Their News From Facebook

Over 88% of the Millennial population search for news on Facebook. Some of them also use Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. If you have a PR team in place to build your brand, have them focus on social media.

Informational healthcare write-ups are great, but they can’t compete with real stories. Accounts of actual patients and their experiences are relatable, and are more effective as social media stories. Make it a practice to interview your patients once every few months and collect their experience to tell as stories. You could increase shares and reach for your social media stories by building a network of advocates on an advocacy tool.

Curate content for your social pages with curation services like DrumUp or Storify.

4. Most Millenials Are Likely To Voice Criticism Online

In the healthcare industry, credibility is of prime importance. While Millennials don’t fret about the credibility of their information sources, we do know that they trust friends and family. That is why it becomes important to monitor your brand on social media, and on the internet in general.

Positive mentions of your service could be shared for better impact, and negative mentions could be resolved before they balloon. You could also keep track of what your competition is doing and adapt the tactics that seem to be working for them. A reliable mention monitoring tool like Mention could help.

5. Most Millennials Want Interactive And Instant Solutions

In 2015, the average attention span of people fell to about 8 seconds. People either find what they are looking for or they quickly lose interest. How do you connect with people who move that quickly? What could add value to quick and urgent searches?

Remember, when people search for healthcare solutions, their search terms rarely include specializations and probably include healthcare issues. Instead of sharing complicated doctor bios, share content that your audience is likely to search for.

It is also a good idea to make taking action easy. Enable click to call, make an appointment and patient log in on your website.

Two simple keys to implement effective healthcare SEO – consider what they are searching for and what they expect. With Millennials, it is quick information on social media and a wholesome healthcare experience.

^{* Adapted lead image:  Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com}