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Your website's content was written, it was placed online and you can see it when you look at your hospital or health plan's site. Your work is done, right?

Not quite.

It turns out that a "set it and forget it" approach just doesn't work online.

Content becomes out-of-date as your staff and services evolve, and best practices for things like search engine optimization (SEO) change regularly.

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

That's where a healthcare content audit comes in.

Getting an audit done by an organization that specializes in healthcare websites can provide you with valuable perspective on how your site is doing right now and give you ideas for how you might improve it in the future.

A good audit will take your needs and goals into account while also including recommendations that are based on broader trends and best practices.

5 questions a healthcare content audit can answer

These are some of the basic things you should learn in a content audit:

1. Is your content accurate and complete?

Your website should offer the latest information about your services, equipment and staff.

An audit can help you understand where you might want to add content to fill gaps and show you any areas where your content is outdated.

2. Is your content optimized for search?

SEO is complex, and it seems like best practices are constantly changing. But at a bare minimum, if your content is going to rank well in search it needs to include the right healthcare keywords in the right places.

An audit should give you a snapshot of how your site is currently performing in search, evaluate how well your content is optimized and list any areas of opportunity.

3. How do readers interact with your content?

People are impatient when looking for information online. So it's important for your website to provide valuable information that consumers can find easily. It's also important for your content to be written in a way that consumers can understand. That means no jargon.

An audit should give you information about what pages people are looking at on your website, how they're finding those pages and what they're doing after they read the content. It should also identify any areas where the content's tone needs to be adjusted to be more reader-friendly.

4. Does your content deliver the results you need?

One of the great things about digital marketing is how easy it is to objectively measure the success of your efforts. There are many different reports and tools that can play a part in this analysis depending on the goals you've established for your site. Here are four Google Analytics reports that we often find useful.

The analysis included in your audit should help you understand areas where change is needed. It should also serve as a benchmark you can use to help measure the results of any changes you make.

5. What should you do to improve?

With a clear picture of how well your content is performing, your audit team should be able to make some solid recommendations for next steps. What content should you remove? What needs to be optimized or reorganized? Where does new content need to be created?

This to-do list in your audit should be prioritized by level of urgency and potential impact and should be accompanied by specific recommendations for how you'll measure the success of your efforts.

Your audit should cover the basics like this, but you should make sure that it also covers any specific areas of importance to your organization. For example, are you considering what to name a service line that you haven't launched yet? Do you have a competitor who's taking away key business? Make sure to let the organization who's doing your audit know about these things and ask for them to be reviewed.

Is your website content in need of help?

At Coffey, we specialize in healthcare content audits, and we tailor each one to the needs and goals of the clients we work with.

For more information about our content audit and healthcare SEO services, give us a call at 888.805.9101 or email us.