Medical Clinic SEO and PPC
When it comes to growing your medical business in the online world, you have two options: Organic or Inorganic. While, both of them cost, in terms of resource, money, time and labor, there are major differences between them. The differences range from speed of growth to finance required to the labor necessary.
As a medical clinic, you want to establish your brand in the online world. Doing so will help you create brand awareness, attract customers, and generate revenue. However, picking between an organic or inorganic method may have you splitting hair. This article will cover which path is right for you.
What is Organic and Inorganic?
Organic
In its simplest term, organic growth refers to growth that occurs naturally – without any spending on advertisements. Your most basic presence in the online world refers to organic growth. This includes having a website and social media profiles. For organic growth, you are required to blog regularly, put up posts frequently, and have active social media profiles.
Inorganic
Inorganic is paid advertisement in the online world. You are able to reach out to online users who have not heard of your medical clinic, but are also searching or potentially interested in medical services. Today, online platforms gather in-depth data on online users. This data ranges from their search history to likes, dislikes to their interaction with other brands. Through the massive collection of data, online platforms are able to effectively estimate which users are looking for the medical services you offer.
Online paid advertisements include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Sponsored posts, etc.
The Sales Funnel of Organic and Inorganic
Rather than compare the pros and cons of these two methods, you can get a thorough understanding of the difference between organic and inorganic growth by looking at the sales funnel. A sales funnel identifies the steps or process your target audience goes through before finally taking action and reaching out to your clinic.
Organic Sales Funnel
- Brand Awareness
- Through search engines and social media platforms, your audience becomes aware of your brand.
- Top of Mind Presence
- By being active through blogging and social media posts, your clinic brand builds a top of mind presence.
- Active Follower
- By creating a top of mind presence, your audience becomes interested in your brand and finally follows your social media profiles or subscribes to your blog.
- Interest in Service
- At this stage, your audience has an interest or need for your service. This could be due to medical illness.
- Action
- Since your audience follows your brand, they easily recall your brand when they require your service and take action.
An organic sales funnel is slow and can take as much as a year before you actually start converting your audience. For an organic sales funnel to be successful, you require:
- Time: It is a time consuming process that you must stick to for at least year.
- Labor: Skilled human resources are required to frequently blog and update the social media pages.
Inorganic Sales Funnel
- Interest
- The audience is interested in medical assistance.
- Brand Awareness
- Through advertising, your brand and service appear on their search result or social media feed.
- Action
- Because the advertisement appears to them at the opportune moment, they take action.
An inorganic sales funnel works quickly and brings your audience directly to your brand and services. For an inorganic sales funnel to be successful, you require:
- Finance: You need a sufficient budget to ensure you can advertise online. While it is not expensive like traditional advertising, it requires substantial investment.
The inorganic sales funnel appears to your audience at the right moment. This right moment is when they are interested in getting medical assistance. However, they have not heard of your medical clinic at all. Yet, thanks to paid advertising, your ad appears to them at the opportune moment and converts them.
Which one do you Choose?
The right choice, when it comes to organic or inorganic online growth, largely depends on your objective.
| Objective | Action |
| Brand Awareness | Organic Growth |
| Build Relationships | Organic Growth |
| Increase followers within a short time period | Inorganic Growth |
| Direct traffic to your website | Inorganic Growth |
| Conversion and Sales | Inorganic Growth |
And, this does not even include your available budget. If you do not have the sufficient budget, your best choice would be organic growth. Organic is slow, however, it is quite cheap to perform. More importantly, it is able to achieve all objectives of brand awareness, relationship building, increase followers, drive traffic and sales – however, the only catch is that it requires time and frequent organic activity from your brand.
Actually, the Best Options is – Both
So, ultimately, you either choose an organic or inorganic online growth for your medical clinic. However, the real best choice is if you choose both, and here’s why.
- Your Brand Needs to be Active
- Even if you choose inorganic online growth, it is necessary for your brand to be active organically. Paid advertising is a poor substitute for brand building. Your website and social media pages should have content for your audience to discover more about your brand.
- Inorganic Growth is Temporary
- Chances are that you aren’t going to have paid advertisements continuously. You may have it for one or three months. What happens when you stop those advertisements? All the momentum, traffic and followers you have built will fall flat – if you don’t have organic content to show for it. For example, if you have gained 1000 new followers on you social media profile through a paid campaign, it is necessary for your clinical brand to continue to appear on their feed – this can be achieved through organic activity.
The challenge for running an organic and inorganic campaign together is of budget and human resources. However, through smart allocation and division, it can be done. And more importantly, you will be able to achieve your business goals.
Inorganic and organic growth are not two opposite ends of the spectrum. If done right, they can harmonize and give your clinical brand a big boost in number of followers, traffic and sales.
Other blogs on medical clinic marketing:
Landing pages for Dental Clinics
Dental Clinic SEO and blogging done right
How to optimize a low traffic dental clinic website
Today, it has become important to have a strong digital presence. If people are searching for information, they are more likely to use their smartphones and conduct a Google search. Thus, every organization should have a website if they want to get hold of these customers. However, just having a medical website for your clinic isn’t sufficient. You need to drive more traffic to your clinic’s website to get more people to know about your services and use it for their benefits locally. But how can you drive more traffic to your clinic’s website? To answer your question, here’s what you need to do:
Write Blogs and Create Content
You should start by writing successful blogs on a regular basis. When you write blogs, it gives a boost to your clinic’s website to get ranked higher on the search results. But before you go ahead with writing blogs, you need to answer the following questions:
How many blogs should I write in a month?
There is no specific number of blogs that you should write. Moreover, it does not guarantee that if you write maximum blogs, you will get ranked higher. Ideally, 5-10 blogs per month should be a good practice to begin with.
Should I write blogs or hire a professional?
The answer depends on your writing skills and the amount of time you have to write them. If you are often occupied with treating your patients, then you may not have sufficient time to write blogs. In case you take the help of a professional firm, you need to consider the quality of blogs that they write.
What should I write about?
You can start by writing about different services that you cater to. For example, if you are a heart specialist, you can write about various complications related to the heart or about latest treatments for any heart ailments. Also, new cures or diseases about which people are not aware of can be written. This way you not only provide unique content but educate people and so they perceive your medical services to be of excellent quality. Lastly, a better understanding of your target audience such as young or old population can help you develop content that will drive traffic to your medical website.
Optimize Your Website
Once you are ready with the content for your website, you need to carry out a few tests to ensure your website is search engine optimized. In this case, you need to take into consideration various elements in your website. This includes the use of right keywords, internal and external linking of your website, the quality of content, load time of your website, mobile responsiveness, images, meta-descriptions, content format, ads on a page,301 redirects, HTTPS, and others. You can conduct an SEO audit to identify which elements of your medical website need to be optimized. When you optimize your website, it gives you a high chance of getting your website ranked higher on SERPs. However, SEO is not a one-time process as search engines constantly change their algorithms. Hence, it is suggested that you take a note of all the changes to stay on top of SERPs.
Go Mobile
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org
The increase in the number of smartphone users has made it important for small businesses to develop websites that are mobile responsive. In fact, the popularity of mobile apps has been instrumental in driving a majority of the traffic from mobile devices. Therefore, you must ensure that your website works on all types of mobile screens. If your website is not compatible with small devices, then you need to ask your web designer to do so. Your clients should find it easy to navigate your medical website on all kinds of devices. This is important because you never know which device can increase traffic to your website and with a large volume of smartphone users; it’s risky to take any chance of not creating a mobile friendly website.
Enhance Your Website Design
Your website should provide clear information to your users. For this purpose, you need to ensure that your landing page is optimized by giving information that is valuable to your website’s visitors. In fact, due to the urgent nature of the medical industry, it becomes even more critical to provide information quickly without wasting your user’s time. The web pages should not only load quickly but a user should find it easy to scroll web pages. Information relating to the services offered, time, geographical location and contact details should be mentioned. You can also list your medical clinic on Google Maps so that you can be located effortlessly when your clients search for you.
Link Building
There are two types of link building, namely internal linking and external linking. Internal linking is an effective way to drive traffic to your websites. When you link your posts to other pages, it keeps visitors on your website longer. The longer a visitor stays on your website, the more he discovers about your services. Hence, care should be taken that you hyperlink pages wherever it is appropriate. Do not make the mistake of linking pages unnecessarily as the visitors may get annoyed and leave your website. Moreover, Google ranks website higher if it finds that visitors to a website stay longer. This directly gives your medical website a high chance of getting noticed by others and thus, you generate more traffic.
External linking is equally important as internal linking. In external linking, you can link content from other reliable and trustworthy websites. For example, if you want to provide statistics about diabetes, then you can add links to your content from American Diabetes Association or WHO. When you link to other websites, you point out to search engines that the linked website is a reliable source. Similarly, you can ask other websites to return the favor by linking their content to your pages. However, it depends on others whether they want to link your website or not. Therefore, you need to ensure that you create valuable content so that other websites add links to your medical website.
Use Social Media
Use social media to get more traffic by sharing content on your social media pages. When someone likes, tweets or shares your content, their friends and followers can see it too. Thus, it helps you to maximize your reach by reaching to people who do not follow you yet. Apart from the general public, you can engage with physicians and medical experts too. These top professionals may, in turn, endorse your medical clinic or your website on their social media posts. Thus, it adds credibility to your medical website and helps you get more website traffic.
Add social media icons and social share throughout your content so that people can easily share content on their social media profiles. This way the visitors to your website do the work of sharing content on your behalf.
Following these points will help you drive more traffic to your medical website and increase footfall to your medical clinic. Through proper keyword planning, developing valuable content and focusing your efforts on social media, you are sure to increase website traffic. If you are unsure where to start from, then it is recommended that you contact a professional marketing firm. The professional firm will guide you and develop plans to ensure that you get more clients visiting your website, thereby helping you to grow your medical clinic.
Ali Salman is an online marketing strategist who have worked with Coca-Cola, Extreme Pita, Mucho Burrito, KIA, Honda and other Fortune 500 companies. Ali Salman now heads Rapid Boost Marketing - Canada's fastest growing search marketing agency. RBM clients include Fortune 500's and medium size businesses across North America. Ali as RBM CMO leads his team in building and managing quality, high-performing and cost-effective interactive campaigns and programs for our company's customers and partners. In his career, he has significantly improved campaign performance for large brands such as Government of Alberta, Liberal Party, Workopolis, Cathay Pacific, as well as medium to large retailers and high-tech B2B-enterprise niches. Ali and his team develop online promotional concepts that spark viral growth through search and social media for RBM clients, devising strategies that use search engines and more to reach key demographic segments in the ways they're most likely to be receptive. Ali Salman also oversees corporate marketing initiatives for Rapid Boost Marketing, including strategic communications counsel, public and analyst relations and client education programming.
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