Gastroenterology Practice Attracts 409% More Leads

TL;DR: Using less medical jargon gets more patients and lowers PPC costs.

A cash-pay Gastroenterology Center has a tough job: drawing in uninsured potential patients for a colonoscopy. That job gets even harder when Google thinks your site’s content is so low in quality that it charges you 600% more for a search ad than the next website. That certainly will block up any search engine optimization efforts.

That was the situation when a Texas-based Colonoscopy Center approached us to clear the way to improve their SEO rankings.

A cash-pay Gastroenterology Center has a tough job: drawing in uninsured potential patients for a colonoscopy. That job gets even harder when Google thinks your site’s content is so low in quality that it charges you 600% more for a search ad than the next website. That certainly will block up any search engine optimization efforts.

That was the situation when a Texas-based Colonoscopy Center approached us to clear the way to improve their SEO rankings.

It didn’t take long browsing this healthcare company’s site to find what was blocking up their patient acquisition efforts — and the issue is a common one if you’re seeking medical SEO services.

Their content was too thin. With not enough written, they weren’t ranking for the long-tail keywords that uninsured patients used when looking for these kinds of healthcare services. On average, their text was written at a college reading level but with only a word count of 97 words. In fact, the hardest-to-read sentence that our content checker found was their definition of a colonoscopy.

Not only is this a bad user experience, it’s a rough patient experience.

On top of that, Google penalized the site by charging a premium for search ads to the tune of 600% to bid on keywords that Google didn’t think their website was talking about. That back-end problem limited the ASC from reaching prospective patients in a way that’s far worse than a one-star online review on a Google My Business profile!

The website’s original page score, word count, and readability. Do you see why they needed more than a digital marketing agency?

This is one of the important lessons for every medical practitioner when they’re first considering medical search engine optimization: How you describe your healthcare practices have to be both substantive (as in long word counts) and filled with everyday search terms that potential customers might be using. That’s the heart of medical search engine optimization.

Search engine algorithms aren’t deciding arbitrarily which healthcare websites to show a potential patient. Search rankings are determined by how well your website matches search queries. Think about a time when a medical professional eventually has to explain a procedure to a patient, and good patient engagement means trying to find terms that your patients are using. That’s one of the first things that healthcare SEO companies should notice when they pull up your website on the exam table and take a close look at what’s there.

In this case, our content specialists examined and rewrote their website, page by page, in order to address the health-related questions that were at the top of online search rankings, in online reviews, and what organic search traffic wanted to know about getting a colonoscopy without insurance. We paid special attention to ensure the content used the same everyday language that searchers themselves used. That’s how you connect to the widest possible audience possible and build online authority.

We treated their website with relevant content, using primary keywords and making the medical industry make sense to the average, uninsured patient.

How did the site perform in organic search traffic?

Not only were the ad cost premiums removed, the page itself began appearing nationally in search queries with keywords relevant to “colonoscopy without insurance.”

Optimized content and its new page score

Developing valuable content with the right primary keywords in natural, straightforward language cleared things up for the ASC. Search users who arrived on the new page stuck around for more than two minutes longer than before, reading the description of the health services the ASC provided. With 1,129 words and an average reading time of 4.5 minutes, the content was much more accessible at a high school level.

Ultimately, this did turn into more patients booking more procedures.

Traffic increased 409% and session time increase 285% following the content updates

Healthcare SEO services can require managing a lot of data and powerful tools — but in the end, making sure that you’re explaining things clearly to a potential customer will do wonders for your patient pipeline.

Add Pero SEO as a preferred source to your Google searches to find more healthcare marketing strategies.