Carrie Liken - Head of Industry, Healthcare | Yext
Every health system I have spoken to in the last year and a half is doing something with their website. One of the most common focal points on digital teams is to relaunch a website.
The website is an important part of the patient’s digital journey, but it is increasingly becoming less important given how many other digital touchpoints exist for patients to find information during their healthcare research. We know that 83% of patients never visit a health system website before making a healthcare decision. And what will happen when people start to use voice devices that don’t even have screens? The website will become less important, but the information your website houses needs to remain consistent, sacred, and syndicated to places where the patient is actually finding this information.
We’ve seen so many of these launches and relaunches in the last year and a half and have learned what works and what doesn’t work. We wanted to share a few tips with you on what we’ve seen and how you can prepare for post-launch and ensure that your patients always find the right information at the right time, whether they are consulting your site or another portal to find health information.
Every health system we have talked to has said the same thing: SEO post-launch tends to decline and doesn’t pick up for 6-8 months. Sometimes it never returns to pre-launch status.
In the last year and a half, there has been a 32% decline in patients visiting health system websites before making an appointment. With this trend, it is hard to track website visitor KPIs as a metric of success for a new website launch. We consistently hear that health systems can’t understand why fewer people visit their website after the new launch — only to realize 6-12 months later that they are getting far more referral traffic to provider-specific pages (directly from Google and other sites).
I see this all of the time. New sites launch and then suddenly a patient will see third-party sites come up on the SERP well before your owned site experience. This can happen for months. After you launch your new site, search for one of your doctors on Google. You will most likely not see a Knowledge Card for the doctor, nor see that provider’s page on your site. Instead, you will see third-parties dominating the SERP. And 68% of people are now searching for healthcare on mobile devices, so that means patients may only see third-party links — meaning you don’t control the patient experience and you definitely don’t send people to your website, either.
For more tips on how your health system can best provide patients with information, watch our webinars: The Evolving Patient Experience: Set Your Health System Up For Success and Hey Google: What Do I Need To Know About Voice Search In Healthcare?
The original version of this page was published at: https://www.yext.com/blog/2018/04/health-systems-website-is-not-your-digital-front-door/
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