SEO in Healthcare & Pharma: From Mystery to Mastery

🎙️ Welcome to another episode of the OUTCOMES podcast, where we break down the most effective digital marketing strategies for healthcare and biopharma sectors. Today, we are thrilled to have Meghan Lalonde, Senior SEO Strategist at emagine & emagineHealth, join host and Founding Partner, Bill Gadless.

📌 In This Episode:

👉 The Enigma of SEO: Bill and Meghan discuss why SEO has been a mystery for many marketers and what makes it a critical component of modern marketing strategy.

👉 Content is King, Quality is Emperor: Discover how to boost your SEO ranking by focusing on quality content that serves your audience's specific needs. Meghan shares her expert insights on the debate between quality vs. quantity in content production.

👉 The User Experience Factor: Learn how enhancing your site's performance can significantly influence SEO metrics.

👉 Leveraging AI in SEO: A look into how AI can be harnessed for keyword research, heading structures, and even writing structured data for your site.

👉 Traffic Volume vs Quality Traffic: Uncover the often overlooked elements of your SEO strategy that can turn your traffic into quality leads.

🎧 Audio Podcast Links:
Spotify: 
https://tinyurl.com/4cz39rpw

Apple Podcasts: 
https://tinyurl.com/ycy3vfdf

Website: 
https://www.emaginehealth.com/

LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/company/emagineusa/

Thank you for listening to OUTCOMES. Please find more healthcare and biopharma marketing thought leadership in the Insights section of our website and follow us on LinkedIn!

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to Outcomes, the healthcare and biopharma marketing podcast. Where marketing leaders discuss the most effective strategies for the health sectors, coming from a digital first AI powered perspective. I have here with me today, Megan Lalonde. She is a senior SEO strategist here at Imagine and Imagine Health. Hi Megan. Hi, thanks for having me. Of course. Thank you. Um, I have asked Megan to join me to chat a little bit about SEO today. That's her expertise. I still have been. At this for, for more years than I even want to say, but from, from when I got into the whole digital and web world, and I still believe through today, SEO to me has always been and still is probably the most misunderstood kind of. Mysterious topic to marketers of all the things we do. Maybe AI is going to be similar to that too, where people are so intrigued with it. But until AI came along, SEO has always been this mystique and, you know, like, like this thing behind the curtain that nobody really understands. And, um, and so there's a lot to talk about. There's a lot of, a lot to understand. And so what I've asked Megan, and I'll turn it over to you is, is. Come up with a few things, um, different ways that you recommend marketers think about and approach SEO. So with that, Megan. Yeah, so I would say, first of all, Bill, you know, thinking about SEO in general, uh, from a marketing standpoint is often different than what most people do, because it is very much like the wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtains. People aren't sure of how it works. Um, so they're often very intimidated by it, but there are a couple of really easy things that people can do just to kind of. Think of it better incorporated into their everyday website builds, content production, et cetera. Um, so the first thing that I would say as far as how to think about it differently is to always be adding or improving the content on your site. Very simple. There is always a ways for that content to be improved. Starting with who is this content targeted for? Who is this intended to speak to? Is it utilizing a keyword that we know our audience is leveraging and searching for? Is it structured properly? Are the, are the headings appropriate? Um, that's one thing that's often overlooked and misunderstood, you know, by way of content management systems like WordPress, making it really easy for us to change the way that things look on the site that often undermines. The actual SEO value of things, um, titles, headings are, are not just meant to look pretty. They're meant to have a structure. Um, so yeah, considering, you know, that your homepage is not always the front door to your site, at least for SEO inorganic searchers, I would venture to guess that anywhere between 50 and 75% of your users are not going to enter. The site through your homepage, those, those users are going to fall on an interior page that speak more directly to the services, the offerings that users would be searching for who don't already know about you. That's a big difference. That's a, that's a huge difference. And again, just thinking about this in general is it's kind of step one to SEO problem. The second thing I would say is consolidating content that isn't serving you. So not all content is good quality. Not all volume is good quality. Um, so just identifying and leaning on the analytics and the data to tell you that some of your content is not serving you offers you an opportunity to consolidate that. Um, often it can be, you know, consolidated with canonicals. So in other words, telling search engines to deprioritize one page over another that might offer similar content. We're combining it into a longer form article, which as, as we know, just from being in the industry, as long as we have. Longer form content is often better ranking. It often offers that kind of user experience or the vast amount of information that people who are sort of in that information gathering stage of the funnel want to have. I'm sure we've all seen it just by, you know, researching one thing or another. Rarely is it ever those short, you know, marketing phrase punchy driven pages that are being offered as search results. They're the lengthy, long, doom scrolling pages because we like to consume information. Um, so yeah. So, sorry to interrupt, but um, Nope. So, more is not always better in that. As you're saying length is good and a lot of text and all that is good, but, but it's, it's, you can't just make that generalization because you could have a lot of content. But what you're saying is you need to be strategic in terms of knowing how to put it together, consolidate, put things, you know, integrated into single pages sometimes. And so. So that's kind of what you're saying is, is more is better in a way, but it's not that simple. Yeah. And, and quite frankly, there's a lot of free resources that you can use to kind of identify what that content should look like. It can be as simple as going and searching out and looking at the top search results for a specific phrase that you know your audience is searching for. You can learn a lot. By what your competitors are already putting out there. And again, to the point of free tools, things like Google trends are incredibly useful as far as identifying, you know, new surges, as far as what terminology and vocabulary is being used by that audience. So more is certainly sometimes better, but, um, the phrase that I've relied on is that content is usually King, but quality content is. Like the emperor of the world, because it's rarely about just the actual number of words on a page, but how well those number of, of words is, is serving your audience. Yeah. And I think, and we could actually reserve this for a future conversation, but I think the quality versus quantity. Debate is probably one of the, one of the biggest things that a typical layman marketer struggles with in understanding SEO strategy, including myself, because we know we need both. We also know that all content isn't going to be gold. And, you know, and, and I, so, I mean, maybe that's a future conversation with us. Yeah, I, and again, I think for me, just being familiar with the number of clients and in the range of industries that, that I deal with, it does come down to that. Identifying which pages are intended to speak to your audience at different parts of the funnel because, you know, kind of your main site structure is most often going to speak to somebody who's already familiar with your brand, already familiar with your service offerings, the parts of your website that are specifically useful for search engine optimization, Are going to be those blogs that speak to users at a very informational gathering state who don't know about you that you're answering questions and providing answers to questions that they may need and then lean on you for in the future. That's a very, a very big difference. A critical 1. I think to point out. Makes sense. Yeah, and I guess to follow it up, I would say my, my 3rd point is to, to really think critically and technically about your site, the site structure and embrace change. You, you mentioned, uh, leveraging AI and how that can be useful to people who aren't experts in this area. So, leveraging AI to help you and assist you with things like keyword research, heading structure. If you aren't an expert, you don't have to be today. Um, it's also really useful and we've used it ourselves just as far as writing structured data for your site. Um, when I say structured data, I'm speaking specifically about Jason LD schema language that is essentially a header script that we add to the page that calls out. Very specific pieces of information on a web page for search engines makes it really clear, uh, allows you to get things like featured snippets and those kind of enhanced search results listings that we all know drive up user engagement as far as, you know, users being able to click through your site, wanting to click through to your site. Um, And then, yeah, kind of considering your site's overall performance from a user experience and functionality perspective. So making sure that your site is loading quickly, making sure that you have very clear steps for your user to take once they've read your content, once they've gotten to that page, what do you want them to do next? Is it download an ebook? Is it schedule a consultation? Is it call and request a demo? Um, those things are often, you know, very Overlooked to a degree and they do absolutely just kind of benefit that overall broader SEO conversation as far as making that volume of traffic quality traffic. Got it got it. Well, this was awesome. Yeah, I think you just gave a complete. SEO tutorial in under 10 minutes, um, which is phenomenal. Um, all right, well, thanks Megan. This was awesome. And I'm sure we'll be talking, uh, many more times on here in the future. Sounds great. Thanks for having me, Bill.