Attracting new patients
It is difficult for doctors to believe that online articles can mobilise new patients to them. Doctors are aware of many online platforms and service providers who bring in patients, and their services to bring your clinic or hospital name on top of the list. But articles? doctors do not know the logic of attracting new patients. This is a one time effort to attract new patients.
Power of good medical articles
Power of good medical articles
Many of the doctors may not be realising the power of online articles in getting new patients. In a highly competitive hospital industry in India, being more privately run services, it is very important to attract patients online. This gives a chance to doctor to educate the patient and hence to create a sense of trust, especially for new patients. My other article ‘Google Patients‘, briefs you the patients’ behaviour on Google to look for good articles. So I feel it is good to understand how patients behave in the growing access to information.
Only 0.1% (1 in 1000) or maximum 0.5% of the doctors knows this secret, and such doctors may not be hardcore clinicians. They will be helping their friends/colleague to mobilize new patients.
I think a good example will help a doctor understand better. Let us take a case, a patient suffering from Appendicitis. Let us take 2 scenarios
Before visiting a doctor
He will definitely not know the term ‘Appendicitis’ and he will be using keywords like ‘Pain abdomen, vomiting, fever etc. The keywords are mostly the ‘Symptoms’ that he could comprehend in his words. It will be simple English that is easily understandable.
After visiting the doctor
By this time, he would have known the probable diagnosis or differential diagnosis. Hence he will start using this as keywords in Google.
I am taking an example keyword ‘right side pain abdomen‘ and this is one of the poor keywords as this is not used in Google by a good number of people. You will see ‘0’ search for this keyword.
Now you can check out the top 3 keywords
| Keywords (Top 3) | 12 Months Searches | Monthly Average |
| Stomach Pain | 60,500 searches | 1k to 10k |
| Abdominal Pain | 27,100 searches | 1k to 10k |
| Lower abdominal pain | 18,100 searches | 1k to 10k |
You visit www.ads.google.com with your Gmail account and register for AdWords. Once done, you search for keyword planner under tools. You will be able to do explore all the keywords related to your area of specialization
The image shows the patients behaviour while they look for symptoms in Google. This is a huge number and every month in the city Bengaluru alone, you are witnessing 1k to 10k searches with those keywords.