Shari Thurow, who has written the book Search Engine Visibility, has a post at SearchEngineLand yesterday that brings up a topic I’ve been discussing recently. Shari is quite right in writing, “I find that searchers who are truly interested in purchasing a product and/or service actually dig for information.” This is the same in all industries. The challenge we face however in healthcare SEM is the ensuring that web content is optimized for how people are searching, even though it may conflict with branded messaging. For example, and this is for illustrative purposes only, say a new diabetes drug is specifically indicated for Type II Diabetes and the original web copy spells out “Type Two Diabetes” because of marketing requirements by the brand team. A quick look at the chart below shows that when users (i.e. potential paying customers) search for this type of diabetes information they use “Type 2 Diabetes” thousands of times more than with the numeral 2 spelled out as “two”.
The point is, not optimizing for high volume related keyphrases results in lost targeted traffic. Educating clients on the balance between their marketing messaging and how people are actually searching is essential to a successful search marketing campaign.
