Healthcare SEO Marketing With Codrin Arsene

Codrin:

Any type of healthcare company that really wants to get in front of the largest amount of people who may be interested in their services should consider investing in SEO.

Sliman:

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to the Care Frontiers podcast. The show where we bring healthcare professionals to share with us their own experience running a successful medical business. Joining me today the CEO of Digital Authority Partners and the healthcare weekly digital magazine Codrin Arsene, Codrin, welcome to our show.

Codrin:

Sliman thank you so much for inviting me to the show.

Sliman:

My pleasure Codrin. And before we get deep into the actual content, tell us a little bit about you and what inspires you to venture into this career path and build digital authority?

Codrin:

Absolutely. So Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is a consulting agency out of Chicago, Illinois, we work with a variety of companies, but about 60% of our business is in healthcare, focusing both on what we call digital transformation, which is helping health systems or insurance companies, pharma companies build digital experiences. So think mobile applications, websites, chatbots, artificial intelligence solutions, and the second part of the company, like 35%, of the company focuses on helping healthcare companies market their products. So that’s good to Market. But most importantly, just growing their brands through a variety of tactics such as SEO, PPC, social, etc.

Codrin:

And, yeah, I started the company originally was kind of on the side, I still work for a multinational company back in 2015. And within a year, Digital Authority Partners company was generating enough revenue that myself and two other co founders decided to take it full time. And we have now grown to having 54 employees working all over the US and some of them even internationally, we work with some of the biggest companies in the healthcare space here in the United States.

Sliman:

Absolutely, Codrin you worked with the healthcare professionals and you worked also with other industries. And a big part of digital authority is doing marketing services for for your clients. So and I really want to know that what makes the difference between healthcare marketing and the marketing in other, let’s say, consumer brands or other industries?

Codrin:

Yes, marketing in healthcare is tricky at first, because you have very different distinctions. So if you’re an insurance company, the way you market to consumers is different than if you’re a pharma company, let’s say you have developed a new drug which successfully treats a medical condition, some parts of healthcare significantly more regulated than others. So there are statements that let’s say, if you worked in financial technologies, if you worked in e commerce, if you worked for a government organization you could make but in healthcare, the same statements cannot be made with regards to the product that you’re building. So really, the the biggest struggle is, of course, just regulation, what can be said how, in what conditions. The other part, of course, is the fact that much of the healthcare industry, unless you’re talking about just doctors that interact directly with patients happens in the back office, the biggest costs of healthcare is just companies that provide a series of services that most of us and consumers we never think about, will never know about them, etc. So, yeah, it’s very tricky when you do marketing because if I do marketing, say for a b2b company that has created a software that will make hospitals more efficient, the way you go about marketing types of assets that you have to build are very different than say, I’m a medical practice in Chicago or in London, and I want to acquire more customers. So focus branding, messaging. The tools available to grow your business within the healthcare space, differs wildly based on ultimately the your target audience.

Sliman:

While we’re on the topic of marketing, and I know that you, you wrote a lot of articles on marketing in the digital authority partners' blog, and one of the things that you almost always emphasize on in that is SEO. So can you tell us why health care providers should make a SEO priority to establish a strong online presence?

Codrin:

Sure. So SEO is short for search engine optimization. And really, what it boils down to is, people go online to find an answer to a question that they have. And they type into a question in Google, or in Bing, or in other browsers. So a question that I had recently was, what is the recovery time for your root canal? I had a root canal, I had a lot of meetings during that week, I wanted to make sure that I can be off and running right away. Like that question. How long does it take to do root canal. People have a tremendous amount of questions about their health? And that’s why there’s a term for it. It’s called Dr. Google. So many people go online to search for information on medical conditions, be those chronic conditions, or just event based medical care that they need, like I have a problem right now I take care of it in the medical space. And where do people go? They go to Google.

Codrin:

SEO is the discipline of making sure that your search result, your article, your landing page shows up at the top of search results, when people Google a specific question or keyword that they’re interested in, for which your company provides a service, that would actually be perfect. And you know, what do we call it the moments of care like to buy or to engage with the brand. So the reason why SEO is incredibly important, not just for healthcare providers, but in general, is that 94% of what people click on in Google his organic search results. When we talk about SEO, we talk about organic search results, how do I show up at the top of Google for organic search results. The remaining 6% is PPC which is any brand, any company in the world can just go open a an ads account with Google. And they can pay to be at the top of search results. And then they will be paid based on how many people click to get to the landing page. The reason why this is important, A) less than 95% of people will only click on organic search results. So if you just run ads, you are missing out on 94% of people. But also B) because the cost of SEO is significantly lower in the long term than the cost for paid ads, or even social and other marketing techniques.

Codrin:

because of all of these, ultimately, financial considerations, any type of healthcare company that really wants to get in front of the largest amount of people who may be interested in their services should consider investing in SEO. Now, of course, the trick and the challenge with SEO is that it’s not overnight, if you’re a new brand, or if you have not invested in content marketing, it will usually take nine to 12 months before you can actually see results versus with paid ads where you just turn it on you put your credit card on file, and you may see traffic right away. So there’s pros and cons to SEO, but ultimately it is the primary way through which consumers find and ultimately interact with healthcare organizations and brands.

Sliman:

So you touched on the the patient or the would-be patients when they are having questions like yourself, and how do patients transition from, let’s say, a regular reader of a blog or an article to a patient and coming to the actual facility.

Codrin:

So there are multiple ways to look for things online. And that has to do with the search intent. So search intent can be a variety of things one can be I want to buy something. So if I look for black shoes for sale, for example, I have a an inherent purchase decision that I’ve already made before I went to Google, like, I want to buy black shoes. If I want to look for a dentist or dental office near me, I want to go to a dental office right away.

Codrin:

If I’m looking, for example, for OCD services, or let’s say high blood pressure management techniques, that’s a different type of content. If I’m looking for high blood pressure techniques, what I’m really looking for educational content, which is the other big bucket of a purchase intent, right, I’m not necessarily looking to buy a service, I’m not looking to go to a dental office, I’m just trying to get educated about my condition, and how I can manage it. When you have a direct purchase intent, the first thing that’s very important is that user gets to a landing page. So when you do SEO and content marketing, you think about a both, you think like how do I create a blog content, which I get the people who just want to get educated about a specific topic versus the landing pages that very succinctly talk about my value proposition service that provided how people can interact with me.

Codrin:

Now, of course, it doesn’t mean that the blog content is not something that I want to convert some of those people into paying customers. But one should expect that the conversion that comes from the blog would be significantly lower than the conversion that comes from people who end up on your landing page. Now, when it comes down to conversion. That’s not an SEO question. an SEO question is simply Can I get the qualified traffic to my website? How I turn it into a paying customer? That’s a conversion optimization question, which is ultimately a web design question.

Codrin:

What you need to understand is that like a blog, if you just put a blog in there, and yes, sir, you have a global navigation with your services, people who may or may not see them, or may just be focused directly on the blog. At which point, you need to create a variety of strategies to which you convert people from being just active leaders have your content into being interested in your services, how you do that? there’s a variety of strategies. So for example, you can put banners inside of the articles that say, you know, I’m a doctor in Chicago, click here for more details. Or you can have a pop up, which basically says, Hey, I see you’re interested in best tips on how to deal with a root canal, do you want to learn more about the root canal service that we provide? Third, you can have banners on the side of your blog, which very directly calls out the services that you provide. Fourth, you can have, let’s say, either ebooks or white papers or checklists, checklists are very popular, it’s just gathering email addresses with off people that you want to interact with.

Codrin:

So in the example above, the example would be like, Hey, I see are you reading about a root canal, if you want to get a checklist of what you should do after root canal, put your email address here, and you can download it. So see, these are all conversion optimization tactics, which have nothing to do with SEO. So you know, I can get you 100,000 new organic visitors per month. And you may still have zero conversion, if your overall website is not structured, but also optimized in a way to push people, these organic visitors through your purchase cycle, down the funnel, to where they interact with you or even purchased from you directly from the website.

Sliman:

So SEO is all about attracting the traffic and what happens after is all about multiple layers of conversion and other strategies that go under the background.

Codrin:

Yes, SEO, just search engine optimization, getting organic visitors from Google to your website. That is where SEO ends as a discipline. And everything else that happens on the website is a function of conversion rate optimisation and just website optimization.

Sliman:

So you mentioned earlier about PPC and pay per click advertising. And I really want to touch on the main, let’s say differences between SEO and PPC and when should healthcare providers prioritize one over the other and what are the pros and cons of each.

Codrin:

Yeah. So usually, if you’re a new business, you want to do PPC. It means you want to do ads. When you’re a new business, we haven’t invest in your website, or you just need to fill up your books. As a doctor, you should invest in PPC. The drawback of PPC, of course, is that the second a person clicks on an ad, you get charged, but you can literally if you’re not, if you’re not paying attention, or if you do not put a maximum daily budget, you can spend $100,000 a day. Now the problem is back to conversion, which is if your website is not designed in a way that the user wants to interact with your brand, you may spend $10k or 100k, whatever, and that money’s gone, right? If your site is not good enough to convert, the money is gone. Now, if you’re a new business, you do want to spend money on PPC, because even seeing that people do not convert is valuable information and a data point that you should use and how to structure and redesign your website.

Codrin:

The reason why PPC is not necessarily the preferred route, as a long term strategy for marketing success is multifold. A) you may have competitors who, seasonally we spend a lot more money than you in which case you cannot even get that traffic. Most of the PPC, most of Google ads, and even social ads, they operate as a marketplace, which means if your competitor comes in and says I’m willing to pay double the price, then your cost per click goes up twofold. So you see this at different moments in time.

Codrin:

let’s say around Christmas, for example, when people are not careful about how they eat what they drink. And then a lot of them may end up in a hospital or needing other types of health care services where the cost of acquisition, which is what this boils down to go significantly through the roof. You don’t get that with SEO. Right. SEO is a long term strategy to get to the top of search results, yes, competitors can absolutely invest and try to outrank you. But you don’t have that wild variation in pricing, which just happens ultimately overnight.

Codrin:

And B), studies after studies have proven that ultimately what it goes down to, if you are an established business, and you invest both in PPC and SEO, the cost of running paid campaigns is almost always significantly higher than the cost of acquiring new customers through just pure SEO. So usually, the cost of acquiring a new customer is six times higher for PPC than it is for SEO if you do that consistently. That’s a drawback. So to summarize it, if you’re small business, medical business, and you just started doing your marketing, you should start with PPC observe, optimize your website. And you can of course, invest in SEO, but do not expect SEO results to come in for at least six to nine months depending on how competitive your specific industry and business type is at a local level.

Sliman:

So, Codrin, what would you say is the toughest part of the whole SEO strategy, particularly in healthcare?

Codrin:

Yeah, so it’s, it’s a, there’s a few challenges that medical practices should be familiar with or should know about the first one I just mentioned, which is you have to have patience. If you want to see a return on investment on SEO, say in a month or two, just forget it, it doesn’t happen that way.

Codrin:

Right now, with new businesses, the average time to see significant SEO results is around one year. If you’re an established practice, and then you just had an SEO company that was not very good. Then another company coming in could show you results in like three to four to six months. But if you’re new, just you have to think about it as a long term investment and not get pissed off If you don’t see the results right away and not necessarily think like it is the fault of the company, or your employees that you’re hired for purposes of doing SEO, that you don’t see the results. So patience is one of them.

Codrin:

The second thing and this is very important is that you cannot right off the bat rank from an SEO point of view for the most competitive keyword. So let’s take your agency for example, right, like you provide healthcare branding services. And if you want it to be number one for healthcare branding, right off the bat, it may take a very long time to get there, or you may not get there at all, because you need to understand that Google wants to first understand your website, see the value of your website, see the authority of the website, and then eventually, you’re going to rank for your top keyword. So I was giving this example. You know, when I was younger, like I would play World of Warcraft. And if I was going against other players that had more powers and more power ups, like I would just be dead, like they would kill me, and then I just was alive. But the one way you could get more powers is if you go to the woods and you kill boars, and you kill a lot of boars, you waste a lot of freaking time, but you get the power ups needed to then kill your opponents in the game. And SEO is a game of killing boars. And the enemy is the top result, which in this case, in your case will be healthcare branding. So what does that mean in practice? It means that if you understand that healthcare branding is the most competitive keyword, you have to first define and do some research and understand what are easier keywords that nobody’s competing over, that I can create long form assets that answer those questions, which then Google sees and understands, okay, I’m an authority in those particular topics. And after that, once you become the authority, then you try to rank for healthcare branding. I know this sounds confusing. It’s what’s called an seo keyword universe. But let me give you have some very specific examples.

Sliman:

I’m writing my notes Haha.

Codrin:

Haha Excellent. So how can branding is medium difficulty, which is not bad, but it’s not great if you’re just starting. But there are other keywords, which are actually very easy. For example, medical device branding, you know, doesn’t get a lot of traffic, it’s about 100 organic visits per month in the United States, but difficulty is zero. Which means that if you create an ultimate guide on medical device branding, you’re likely to get into the top search results, it’s very high. Similarly, hospital branding, also getting around 100 150 organic visitors per month. Difficulty is incredibly low medical branding. Here’s another example of something that’s very easy to rank for. eye doctor ads, you know, it’s not something that’s going to make your money, but it’s super easy to rank for. So why do we do it like this and why do we create these assets? The boars in the forest is because it’s significantly easier to rank for them. And in ranking for those assets. You make Google trust you as an authority on this topic. And once you rank for all these assets, that’s when you create your healthcare branding, and money making asset. You link from all these articles that help your branding, landing page, and or article and then you start finally ranking for the more competitive but also your money making keyword. So you have to create this foundational structure in place that Google trusts you for it before you can get to that healthcare brand new moneymaker.

Codrin:

So going back to your question, the mistake is everybody wants the money making keyword, but doesn’t understand that it’s not how Google analyzes, interprets and looks at websites, you first establish trust, and then Google is going to reward you with the keyword that’s going to make your money. So if people and companies go to agencies, and they just ask like, Hey, can I just go for this keyword? And some agencies will say yes, they’ll do the work, but you’ll never get the result. So you have to first invest in easy things to do. And then go for your money making keyword.

Sliman:

Hmm, definitely, um, today I’m getting free consultation from you Codrin haha.

Codrin:

Haha for sure.

Sliman:

So speaking of these kind of advices to contrast that, what would you say is the most common, let’s say mistakes that healthcare brands do when they start establishing an online presence?

Codrin:

Yeah, I mean, the mistake is A) not investing enough money B) not investing for an enough period of time that you actually see the results and just blame it on factors that have nothing to do with whether you’re gonna rank or not, which is like you can blame someone like as I said, you know, let’s say 60 days like, Hey, I don’t get any traffic because you don’t understand that will take up to a year before. Google trust you as a platform and see, is not listening to the advice that either agencies or employees provide you with either people who say, Hey, your website may get traffic, but your URL is never going to convert. Or in addition to creating content, you have severe issues with your website that impact Google crawlability, which is another discipline called tactical SEO, and not acting on both the recommendations and investing the time and effort that it takes to see the results from SEO.

Sliman:

Codrin to close this off, do you have any takeaways to share with listeners about content marketing and SEO in general?

Codrin:

Um, there’s a tube, there’s two things that you should bear in mind A) SEO is absolutely the best way to acquire customers in the long term. You know, like I’ve worked in SEO and marketing for about a decade now. And I mentioned at the beginning, is that I started the company, as an aside as a way to just make some additional money. And now the company makes more than $5 million in revenue. And we’re growing and growing year after year. The reason why this happens is that from day one, I did SEO whilst had the knowledge, right. So you know, I didn’t have to pay anyone for it. And I invested heavily into this practice, particularly because at the time I didn’t actually have the money for PPC ads. And I didn’t want to invest a lot when it was just like a side business.

Codrin:

So to me, there’s no better way in the long term to acquire new customers if you do it. And if you do it well. And then the second part, as I mentioned before, just be patient. It’s not going to happen overnight, but once it does, your company is going to absolutely grow exponentially, and it may even grow beyond what you could possibly imagine.

Sliman:

Thank you so much. Codrin You were awesome.

Codrin:

Real pleasure Sliman., Wish you all the best in your podcast and business.

Sliman:

It’s an honor. If you want more from Codrin connect with him on LinkedIn @codrinarsene, and if you’d like to reach him out personally, all of his contact information are in the show notes. Make sure to also visit Digitalauthority.me For more helpful marketing resources. Codrin do you have anything you want to add?

Codrin:

That’s it. I mean, I everybody should know I read every single email I receive. you can just send me notice c@digitalauthority.me or just go to the website or add me on LinkedIn. I may not answer to every email I get but I will always read every single email in my inbox.

Sliman:

All right, ladies and gentlemen, that was Codrin Arsene.