How do your potential patients search on the internet?
Understanding how potential patients search and behave on the internet helps doctors address them through their online channels. As a result their practice often realizes growth. Learn how your patients are searching online!
Patients search for many things when they want to feel better quickly. As such, if one is looking for a healthcare service, the first platform he or she uses is Google Search. There are 4 major type of searches when it comes to the healthcare industry:
- Searching for a specific doctor
- Searching for a specific procedure
- Searching for a specific illness
- Searching for a symptoms
Usually there are not so many patients who search for a doctor’s name. But since they already know about that particular doctor, these searches lead to conversion. Therefore it is very important for a doctor that patients searching for his name can find him.
The second group consists of people, who already know what kind of treatment they need, and they want to find the best doctor for themselves. The conversion rate is definitely lower here than in the case of the group 1, but the volume of this type of searches is definitely higher. Usually we advise doctors to select the most important services and to advertise those ones.
The broadest group is the group of the searches for symptoms. These people have some problems, and they want to find the cause or the possible treatments. This is the biggest group in terms of the search volumes, but the conversion rate is low here. Usually it is not worth, running active ads for this group, however a content marketing can provide with good results. You can benefit from organic search conversions or google ads on these searches.