"Help! My hospital website content isn't working."
Find out about common content concerns we see in healthcare websites, and learn what you can do to fix them.
When something goes wrong with the technical side of your hospital website, you'll probably know it. Links might be broken, forms might not work or the site itself might not load. These are the sorts of issues that are easy to spot—and hard to ignore.
But some hospital website issues are a little harder to pin down—and they're no less damaging. Consider the content, for example. If your hospital website content isn't working, you might not get the results you're looking for. Over time, that could lead to big marketing problems.
4 common healthcare website content concerns
When it comes to content, everyone might define the word "working" a little bit differently. After all, whether or not a piece of website content is successful depends, in part, on your goals.
But there are a few common red flags that signal a potential content problem for any healthcare website:
1. People aren't visiting your website. Google Analytics reports like these can help you determine how many people come to your website. If your overall numbers are low, or you're seeing a dip in traffic from one month to the next, your content could be cause for concern.
2. Your website doesn't show up in key searches. You might hear about this one from someone at your organization who says "I searched for X and didn't see our site." But the best way to understand how your site is performing in search is to look at the data. Google Analytics is a good place to start. Take a look at how often key pages are serving as the landing page for organic search visits—and monitor that data over time so you know what's normal and what signals a worrisome drop. Google Search Console can also provide you with valuable information about the types of search queries that your site is showing up for and where you tend to rank for those searches.
3. Your readers aren't becoming patients. In marketing terms, this has to do with "content conversion." If you're cranking out content to promote a doctor or a key service line and you're not seeing a corresponding leap in the outcome you're measuring (such as appointments set or calls coming in), you could have a content issue.
4. People within your organization are complaining. Internal stakeholders like service line directors are often the first to realize when content is outdated, missing or just not hitting the mark.
How to fix your hospital website content
Making a list of your website's issues, perhaps with the help of a content audit, is a great place to start. From there you can identify the resources you'll need to start turning your content around.
Make sure to bring your key stakeholders to the table early in the content-creation process. You may find that these people have key insights to share about their specialties, their patients and their market. And you may be able to tap into this expertise as you work, which could make your writing a whole lot easier. Bringing in stakeholders early will also help if you decide to outsource SEO or content creation.
We can help
When your hospital website content isn't working, it's scary. And finding the time to both assess and fix that content isn't always easy. We can help. At Coffey, we have an entire team of SEO and user experience experts who can help to audit and amend your content. And we have extensive experience in writing content that consumers just love. Let us give you a demonstration. Contact marketing@coffeycomm.com.
