SEO & Healthcare PR

All hail the mighty search engine

Want to zoom to the top of search engine rankings? Tap the power of public relations.

Currently, most SEO experts agree that the search engines Google and Yahoo! account for more than 75 percent of all Internet searches. Today most American adults use these two search engines routinely to:

Shop for a new car

Help select a child's school.

Find a mate

Choose a doctor

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In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, the nation's most prominent authority on media usage, more than 8 million Americans go online every day in search of healthcare information. This massive volume of traffic means that carefully executed PR campaigns can have immediate effect on search engine rankings.

Medical public relations & search engine rankings

Although the mathematical algorithm that search engines use are kept secret, we do know the important factors in rankings:

How many other Web sites link to your Web site.
The prominence on your Web site of the same words that prospective patients use in their Internet searches.
The amount of relevant information on your site and how often it's updated.

The last factor is especially important as it relates to news. Search engines like news because ... well ... people like news. It's what Internet users crave and search for. Supporting statistics:

71 percent of Web users get their news online. (Nielsen/Net Ratings)
21 percent of newspaper readers are using the online version exclusively. (Pew Internet & American Life)
The number of newspaper site visitors grew by more than 30 percent from 2005-2006. (Newspaper Association of America)

When a news story goes out over the Web, it literally goes around the world in seconds. And if there's a link back to a healthcare Web site, that site can catapult to the top of the search-engine rankings in hours.

This is why the MedMarketLink program includes a significant PR component. Make news on the Web and you bring new patients to your Web site immediately, often by the thousands.

Online Journalism Booming While newsrooms are shrinking alarmingly quickly, many major daily newspapers are seeing mushrooming growth in online readers, according to Editor and Publisher magazine and the Nielsen research company. As of 2008, some newspapers have seen a doubling in numbers of online readers in just a year. Moms Mad for the Web Parents are among the highest users of the Internet, significantly outpacing couples and singles without children, according to a variety of sources. The Vanishing Newspaper Is the daily newspaper dying? Or just catching its breath for a new competitive sprint in a different format? The Pew Charitable Trust's annual report on American media says people appreciate journalism perhaps as much as ever. But mass communications is reaching a pivot point in accelerating changes.