Trends in Online Medical Marketing

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently reported in “The Engaged E-patient Population” that between 75% and 80% of internet users have looked online for health information. Harris Interactive’s study yielded similar results: 81% of internet users, 66% of all adults, have sought health information online.

Pew attributes this rise in health-related searches to two factors: the adoption of broadband internet connections, and “personal motivation.”

The report offers detailed insight into the manner and depth of patient’s usage:

“in health care, people who feel they have a lot at stake are more likely to engage intensely with online resources. Internet users living with a disability or chronic disease are more likely than other internet users to be wide-ranging online health researchers and to report significant impacts from those searches. For example, 75% of e-patients with a chronic condition say their last health search affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition,” and

“Newly diagnosed e-patients and those who have experienced a health crisis in the past year are also particularly tuned in: 59% say the information they found online led them to ask a doctor new questions or get a second opinion, compared with 48% of those who had not had a recent diagnosis or health crisis.”

If you are a doctor, how does your next patient find you? It is clear to us that a substantial patient base is consistently seeking medical care through internet searches. The keywords and search patterns that we study consistently show dozens of searches per day for medical specialties in major markets, and even in smaller markets the search patterns are acceptably robust. The single phrase “Houston Plastic Surgery” is searched 93 times daily—and that is without variants such as “surgeons” or “implants”.

Even a smaller market like Yuma, AZ, garners 14 searches a day for “cardiologist Yuma az”. Your keyword study, like the one pictured jus above, is included in your SEO/Web Design contract. In fact, your keyword study is the foundation of what we do: it is the search queries, their number and relevance, that guide us in our development of your website.