Marketing budgets in the healthcare industry are not known to be robust. Healthcare marketers must constantly prioritize efforts. While inbound marketing can be labor intensive and can take awhile to build momentum, it can also be cost-effective and highly fruitful. We recommend inbound marketing as a strategy for many of our health tech clients. Inbound marketing is all about attracting leads via creating useful content rather than with traditional promotional methods.
Within an inbound strategy, we have identified one, overarching key priority for B2B health tech marketers: SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; it’s the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
With an inbound strategy in mind, here are some key, free activities we recommend for increasing SEO:
Use keywords (but not too many)
All new content posted to a company’s website--such as blogs or case studies--should use precise keywords. For us, that might be ensuring our content includes phrases like “healthcare marketing agency” or “health tech public relations firm.” Come up with a keyword list and make sure it’s easily accessible to the marketing team. Here’s a free tool we like. One note of caution: don’t try to include an entire list of keywords on one page. Focus on just a few, so the website is not dinged for “keyword stuffing.”
Update meta descriptions
Most marketers know to write a meta description for any new pages they publish to the website. However, legacy pages may have old or missing meta descriptions. It’s worth a look back to see, and to update meta descriptions.
Name images
In addition to including alt text for images, be sure to name the image itself, including a keyword. It’s an often-overlooked, but valuable best practice that affects SEO ranking.
Be active on social media
Social media is well-known to be a powerful tool to increase SEO. Posting consistent, high-quality content with keywords is a necessary part of any SEO strategy. A recent experiment showed a 12% boost in search visibility achieved when posting organic content to Twitter. Social media is just as important for healthcare B2B companies as other industries.
Refresh content
One of the most labor intensive parts of using an inbound strategy is consistently creating new content, especially in the complex world of health IT. To offset that burden, consider refreshing older content with keywords and re-publishing.
Include contextual backlinks
Especially since the last algorithm update, Google is placing a lot of emphasis on contextual backlinks. Look for opportunities to share your content with other sites that are relevant to yours and swap high-quality backlinks--building domain authority.