A New Perspective of Ophthalmology Marketing

TL;DR: Skip the focus groups. Go straight to Google.

Whether you’re writing a new ophthalmology page to attract new patients or trying to improve an existing page, taking a deep dive into the data can help you really answer what your future patients are asking. Here’s how we helped a Colorado hospital optimize its eye-care pages for a 582% increase in pageviews.

When a Colorado Hospital decided to redo the entire eye care section of their site, they pulled out all the stops: they brought on a digital strategist, conducted market research, interviewed physicians, and held patient focus groups to determine which information was most relevant. From these, they created a messaging strategy.

The newly developed content was launched without a hitch. But a month later, the trend was clear: website visits for eyecare treatment and surgeries plummeted from 1,750 to 1,035, a 41% drop. And, for the rest of the year, it stayed that way.
When we began working with this Hospital, we realized there was a fundamental flaw in their initial content-creation approach.

The beauty of focus groups and stakeholder interviews is that you have real-life individual’s input about a topic. The problem, however, is just that: it’s individual.

What one person searches for is not the same as what everyone searches for.
In other words, if you want to truly optimize a page to address your patients’ questions and needs, you can’t just ask a handful of patients. You need a deep dive into big data to identify all the signs and signals prospective patients exhibit along the way. You need to be part of their entire health journey.

Whenever you’re optimizing content, it’s important to understand the health seekers’ intent. There are many tools out there that can help you with that, but a good place to start is simply looking at Google search results.

When we started working on this eyecare section, that’s the first thing we did. We googled eyecare. And like that, we ran into our first problem:

To the Hospital, ‘eyecare’ referred to glaucoma, cataracts, and related conditions.

But that didn’t actually match users’ search intent. When people googled ‘eyecare,’ they were thinking glasses and eye exams, not eye diseases and treatments.

Once we realized that, our team went about finding the right search terms, ones that had high search volume and were specific to this Hospital’s services.

A few quick glances at competitor pages (like Mayo Clinic) were enough to find what we were looking for: ‘ophthalmology’ rather than ‘eyecare’ better matches the search intent. If you are an ophthalmologist listening to this, you are likely thinking to yourself that everyone knows that! Remember, you are dealing with marketing people here, not doctors, and that’s exactly the question we asked: “Why did you use eye-care for this section’s heading?” The answer was simply because it had a bigger search volume. Bigger search volume, yes, but they weren’t selling glasses!

Once you have the right keywords to focus on, you can conduct topic research. It’s just what it sounds like – researching all the topics and keywords that relate to that main query.

Start by researching topics related to services; you’ll want to pick what you can write strongly about; it’s better to have a few very solid pages than a hundred mediocre ones. These related topics will serve as support pages.

Once you have your support pages, you’ll want to do some topic research for each page separately.

And then simply rinse and repeat until you have a comprehensive list of every topic you need to cover, along with the keywords for each.

In this case, the pillar keyword is ‘ophthalmology.’ Based on that, we pulled all the data we could find on related topics. ‘Glaucoma’ was one of the first things that came up, and we pulled all the data related to glaucoma conditions and treatments. This left us with a data table looking like this:

Once you know which topics to cover, you need to figure out what your patients want to know about each one. You could conduct surveys and focus groups with patients and stakeholders to figure out what to write… but we know how that turned out. Remember, the vast majority of people start their healthcare journey on Google or Bing. They might look up a condition and ask a specific question about symptoms they’re experiencing, or treatment outlooks. This search engine data becomes the best focus group you could ever ask for; it’s millions of people’s real experiences, not just a handful. All you need to do is pull the data!

After you have the data: group questions by topics. Many patient questions will be variations on the same theme.

For instance, with glaucoma, you may get “will glaucoma cause blindness,” “will glaucoma make you blind,” and “glaucoma blindness reversal.”

These are all different questions, but they connect two related topics: glaucoma and blindness. So, make ‘glaucoma and blindness’ a subsection of your page. That way, you can answer all of these questions and all of their variants in a single paragraph or two.

When we grouped questions about glaucoma, we reduced 537 questions down to 37 and organized them into 6 categories. It looked like this:

Once you’ve gone through this process, you’re pretty much ready to go. Whether you’re optimizing existing content or creating something new, you can use your question and topic charts as a guide for format. The topics act as your headings, and by answering the search queries for each topic, you’ve answered your potential patients’ most pressing questions.

Try to compare the topic headings to your competitors to see what they’re answering, and more importantly, what they’re missing. If you see that most of your competitors aren’t talking about something important, like prevention or how a condition or procedure might change a patient’s lifestyle, focus hard on that. By using your competitors’ content gaps as footholds, you can quickly climb to the top of search results. Better yet, by infusing your content with your hospital system’s specific stats, patient success stories, or unique case studies, you’ll ensure your content isn’t just rehashing the same info.

For this Hospital, we were updating existing content: ensuring we had parity with the competition and then addressing the content gaps identified through the research. We created a targeted, easily implementable recommendation documents.

These kinds of tweaks may seem small, but they provided health seekers with the answers they were looking for. And that means they’ll stay on your page and, if you do the process right, will find their way to book an appointment with you.

When we were hired to help this hospital rebuild its ophthalmology program to attract new patients, their ‘eye care’ page visits were down over 40%. After optimizing their Ophthalmology section, pageviews increased by 582%.

The updates we made have endured ongoing Google algorithm updates, the onslaught of AI Overviews, and the growing use of ChatGPT.

The page updates we made continue to attract new visitors to this Hospital. Creating quality, meaningful, and engaging content that meets the users’ search intent has staying power.

Give us a call to see for yourself.

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