One of the channels that drives patients to your website and PMC is Organic Search.

On average, 62% of your patients land directly onto the PMC portion of your website from Search Engines via Organic Search. The patient is searching for the right provider on search engines and will directly link to this provider (a match) on PMC.

If your percentage of organic search is below 62% there are some ways to improve this.

First, many SEO optimization tools come “out of the box” with PMC, such as rich metadata and dynamic page titles. PMC also supports features proven to drive search engine clicks, such as the ability to include patient ratings and reviews in the search engine result meta descriptions, and rich patient demand analytics to track website activity.

Our Kyruus PMC product team is always looking for ways to improve SEO. For instance, we pro-actively anticipated the changes that Google  implemented related to Core Web Vitals back in May 2021.

To learn more about what SEO is, how it is leveraged, and how it fits into your healthcare organization's digital marketing strategy, take Kyruus' SEO Deep-Dive with ProviderMatch for Consumers course. 

What actions can you take to optimize your SEO:

• Optimize your content strategy to ensure search bots can properly search and index your content and the associated PMC content. Focus on creating high-quality, informational and up-to-
  date content.  
• Ensure your providers have robust profiles. The more you display relevant content and keywords, the easier it will be for search engines bots to search and index this information. Learn more about clinical keywords in our Clinical Best Practices Toolkit.
• Ensure that your provider profiles in PMC are linked with your appropriate Service Line Pages. This not only will improve SEO, but it will also facilitate the patient journey. We have an API available that can facilitate connecting your Service Line Pages to the relevant providers on PMC.

• Ensure that your provider profiles are optimized for Local Listings in Google. GMB or Google My Business has become a more prominent feature in Search Engine Results pages (SERP’s) and will help drive SEO and conversion to a booked appointment. Google notes that factors such as relevance, distance, and prominence of the practice itself all determine whether the Google My Business profile appears in a search.
• We highly encourage you to create / claim these GMB “knowledge panels” not only for your healthcare organization but also for each of your schedulable providers. GMB now has many new COVID-19 related features you can leverage, such as links to virtual care and links to your COVID-19 landing page.

One option is to set up and maintain them yourself, which will require resources on your side. Alternatively, you can work through a vendor, who can do this work for you. This is highly recommended if you have limited resources and/or if you have a large number of providers.