At Wormann Consulting, we do a lot of marketing for medical practices, medical device companies, and other healthcare organizations. Our team has been working with medical practices since 2012, with much of that time spent exclusively in medical marketing. Thanks to this wealth of experience, we are confident in our ability to generate exceptional results in the healthcare space.
Beginning a New Project with a Healthcare Practice
This year, our team began working with a large specialty medical practice (over 60 offices and over 150 physicians). We are responsible for everything from PPC and SEO to Social Media and paid social advertising. In the first few months, we started with some simple steps that we knew could create a big impact:
- Major audit of the website – This needs to be the first thing that is done on any major web marketing project. If your agency doesn’t do an audit before starting work, you’re going to have a long few months ahead of you…
- Fix any moderate to major issues on the website – These could be indexing issues, broken links, bad meta data, improper redirects, or just a lack of internal linking. There’s a lot that can go here, and these issues typically show up in the audit.
- Revise key pieces of content – If there’s some content that is ranking fairly well already, there’s a good chance it can be improved to make it great (more info on that in a bit, but trust us, revising “good” content to make it “great” is a HUGE opportunity).
- Fix issues related to local search, such as Google My Business listings, local listings for consistent Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP), and local on-site search signals – Here this was a major undertaking due to the number of doctors/locations (quick tip – in healthcare and legal, you can have a Google My Business listing for the business AND another one for the physician/attorney. You can use this to gain a LOT of real estate in search engine result pages).
- Fix minor issues that could help in the creation and reclamation of links to the site – Sometimes this is just as simple as creating proper redirects for web pages that don’t exist anymore, or a little more complicated like fixing redirect chains.
What Did We See as a Result?
There’s a few months of work in here, but the results could be seen almost instantly. That’s not typical, but there have been a lot of changes here over time that have produced quality results:
- Increase in year over year traffic of over 275%
- Estimated $28,000+ value every month in free website traffic (update: As of Feb 2021, the site is now getting $35,000+ in free traffic per month)
- Conservative estimate of over $3.2 million per quarter in generated revenue
Keyword Rankings & Traffic
First, we saw a dramatic increase in keywords on the first page of search results. Organic search traffic year over year for the quarter increased 278.18%. Revised key content doubled on average against the previous month before revising.
To see the real impact of the organic traffic, it helps to look at the estimated traffic value. This is calculated by an algorithm factoring in all known keywords the site ranks for, their position, estimated clicks based on position, and average cost per click of that keyword in PPC.The estimated value of the search traffic coming in is $28,703 month (update: as of February 2021, the site is getting an estimated $35,000 in traffic/month). And that number keeps growing, bringing in additional value every month.
New Patients
Traffic is great, but revenue is better. By measuring contact forms and phone number clicks, we are able to get an estimate of how many new patients the practice is getting every month. In the same quarter mentioned above, there were 5,458 contacts that came, at least in part, due to organic search. While this does include branded searches, the key is the continual trend upwards with more and more leads coming in.
There were an additional 1,123 conversions utilizing paid search. That’s a total of 6,581 conversions. If the lifetime value of a patient is $500 (which is a conservative estimate in this case) that’s a total of $3.2 million in revenue in search traffic alone. With more complicated medical procedures and treatments added in to the mix, that number has the potential to be significantly higher. And, the traffic is still growing.
How Do We Do It?
There’s no secret trick or magic formula here. Anyone that tries to tell you they have a proprietary system, some secret sauce, or another vague answer – just run. It’s either a scam, or something that won’t work in the long haul. The honest answer is that it takes work and, especially in healthcare, industry knowledge.
Here’s our “secrets”:
First, we know medical marketing. Although we have clients in a variety of fields, we know healthcare very well and have been doing it for a long time. Our two primary project leads at Wormann Consulting have led teams working exclusively in healthcare marketing for a number of years and have been working on a variety of healthcare and medical device clients for years here at Wormann Consulting. We’ve worked with multiple practices who are the among largest in NJ for their specialties (including orthopedic, urology, GI, and plastic surgery practices, to name a few). Because of our experience, we know how to write healthcare content that cater to what Google is looking for and that patients need. We understand the top things that patients are looking for on your website (and you’d probably be surprised), and how to create navigation that’s streamlined and helps the user find that content. We are on top of the latest search algorithm changes that affect healthcare, and lately there have been a lot. If your agency doesn’t at least in part specialize in healthcare they’re the wrong agency for you, no matter how good they are.
Second, we know digital marketing. We aren’t a jack-of-all trades agency that tries to do everything and winds up doing it all at an “okay” level. We know digital marketing inside and out, so that’s what we do. We’re not good at design – so we don’t bother. We have great partner agencies we can recommend you to that can help you with design. Same with branding. Or traditional media. We keep ourselves small so there’s no red tape, and are laser focused on what we do well.
We listen to our clients. This is probably the biggest complaint we hear from new clients about their old agencies, and one of the things they appreciate most about us. We don’t have cookie cutter approaches (in fact, we typically do in-depth audits at the beginning of every project so that we can really focus on what’s most important), and we tailor everything to what the specific practice needs. This gets us results that keep everyone happy.
We’re proactive. While we do listen and act accordingly, we are proactive in helping clients. We come up with new and creative ideas for marketing. We monitor what’s happening in the client’s space online so that we can make quick adjustments and capitalize on new opportunities. Sometimes, that also means proactively helping with damage control or emergencies outside of anyone’s control. The bottom line is that we take the steps to make sure our clients are putting their best foot forward.
Need Help?
Looking for someone to help you take your practice to the next level? Let us know. We’d be happy to talk with you and help you find the best solution to help your practice move forward. Contact us to get started.
