“I don’t really pay attention to our top search terms,” says one of my customers, a marketing analyst at a prestigious academic medical center. “They are mostly just a variation of our hospital’s name.” For a lot of analysts at hospitals and health systems, especially those cursed with having an easily misspelled name, I can understand why they feel this way. Top keywords are frequently filled with various versions (both correct and misspelled) of the organization’s names and hometowns. Our research shows that across all hospitals, the average is about one in four visitors who arrive at a hospital or health system’s Web site from a search engine use some version of the organization’s name as a keyword.
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Greystone is pleased to announce the results of our recent survey on hospital/ health system Web budgets. We sent the survey invitation to more than 100 healthcare marketers, and received responses from 65. (please note: Greystone’s research panel is made up of hospitals or health care systems with at least one FTE dedicated to the Web, and members tend to be more “Web 2.0 savvy” than other hospitals and health systems)
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Convincing a client to pursue local search is a no-brainer. Just show them one sample that lists their competitors at the top of the page with a nice map, and they are sold. Getting it done is another matter entirely.
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I heard a comment the other day that if your site is well organized and nicely designed that the internal search function doesn’t matter. Really? As you can tell, I’m skeptical.
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Those of us who obsess over search engine traffic (and that should be just about everybody, right?) are having a hard time keeping up these days. First, there’s the new Bing, which we talked about a while ago. Then the combination of Yahoo! and Bing, followed by an announcement by Yahoo! that they are still working on their own search.
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We thought we’d wait a few days for the dust to settle and the wailing to die down after the announcement of the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal. After all, there has been plenty of both (dust and wailing). One blogger went so far as to suggest “Yahoo committed seppuku today” (the equivalent of hara-kiri). Others took a more measured view, pointing out pros and cons, along with the risks for both parties.
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With the dominance of Google, and the availability of MSN, Yahoo and others, online search may be one of those services that you don’t know you want better until you get it.
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With 185 hospitals using one form of social media or another, I’d say healthcare has clearly gotten the message. But I worry a bit about some of what I’m seeing out there. Let’s just say there’s evidence aplenty that while many have dipped their toes in the waters of social media, few have a real plan in place.
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I recently helped my 3-yr old daughter prepare her wish list for Santa. What I thought would be a simple task proved to be a significant challenge, as she wanted virtually every single toy in the catalogue! I tried my best to explain to her that even though she has been very good this year, it is Santa’s job to pick out a few toys that she would like best.
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You can’t take much time off in this business. Just as I was about to settle in for a nice long weekend, I noticed that Google took their Google Suggest feature out of the closet. While it had been available to search engine gurus and the like, it’s now there for all to see.
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