Count On Coffey

No matter how good the content is on your website when it goes live, your work there is never done. Your hospital or health system website needs to evolve as your services and organization evolve and competition changes, and it needs to stay current with the best practices for search engine optimization (SEO).

Keeping up with all of this is possible, but even the best healthcare marketing teams benefit from an outside perspective on their website content now and then.

How a content audit can help your website

A content audit’s scope and deliverables should be customized to your organization’s needs. But here are four questions any audit can answer:

1. What’s on your website right now?

Content can build up over time, especially if you have a large organization and multiple people contributing in your content management system (CMS). An audit creates a current inventory, flags duplications and outdated pages, and gives you a single source of truth for ongoing governance.

2. How does your content perform?

An audit shows how people find your site, what pages they view and how engaged they are. For hospitals, dig into high-value journeys: service-line pages, “find a doctor” tools, appointment and class sign-ups, and health education. Map organic entry points to conversions, then identify content gaps where competitors currently outrank you.

3. What can you do to improve?

Expect a prioritized road map from an audit team that separates quick wins from strategic projects. Quick wins often include fixing metadata and broken links, adding internal links, and cleaning up duplicates. Strategic projects might be reworking content for clarity, readability and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), plus implementing structured data for physicians, locations and events.

4. Are you staying compliant and competitive?

In healthcare, content is also about trust. An audit surfaces accessibility issues, verifies authorship and medical review cadence, checks tone for patient readability, and aligns with E-E-A-T. It also ensures that analytics and privacy practices support decision-making without compromising compliance.

What a hospital-focused audit typically includes

• Content inventory and quality scoring across key service lines.
• SEO technical checks: indexation, Google’s core web vitals basics, internal linking, redirects.
• Structured data for providers, locations and events.
• Accessibility and readability review against WCAG and plain-language best practices.
• Governance recommendations: roles, workflows and frequency of updates.
• Analytics readiness: GA4 events, conversion definitions and dashboards tied to goals.

Set yourself up for success

Consider outsourcing. An experienced partner brings an outside lens and preserves your team’s capacity.

Set goals in advance. Define success metrics like appointment requests, find-a-doctor searches, click-through rates, calls from location pages or class registrations.

Be realistic about resources. If the budget is tight, start with priority service lines where demand and revenue impact are highest.

Plan the rollout. Use an impact vs. effort matrix, socialize the road map with clinical and IT partners, then schedule quarterly refreshes.

Categories: Digital