Search engine optimization for physicians [PODCAST]

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“What is SEO? In short, it is the process of optimizing content found online in order to help it be seen by those searching for the information found in that content. It used to be that people would just stuff their poorly written, short, and low-quality blog posts with their keyword, and they would rank for that keyword. Long gone are those days, and it’s a good thing because when it comes to health care and medical content, that kind of content has no place being seen.

If we all start putting out quality medical content, soon there will be no room on page one for all of the noise that not only provides low-quality information but can actually put people’s lives and health in danger.”

Andrea Paul is a physician-entrepreneur and can be found on Instagram and Facebook.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “How the Google algorithm update helps doctor-written content rank higher.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have Andrea Paul. She’s a physician-entrepreneur, and she wrote the KevinMD article “How the Google algorithm update helps doctor-written content rank higher.” Andrea, welcome to the show.

Andrea Paul: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and your journey to where you are today?

Andrea Paul: Yeah, sure. I have sort of a unique story. I actually left clinical medicine, temporarily at first, during residency to pursue a business idea, and I ended up spending almost the last decade building businesses and helping others build businesses. BoardVitals was the first bigger business that was quite successful, and then I started Health Media Experts, another business dedicated to helping other health care businesses grow. Another hat I wear sometimes is as a partner in a health care VC fund, so that’s been pretty interesting too.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic. I always ask this question of physician-entrepreneurs: Has your background in medicine helped or hurt you as you pursued your business ventures?

Andrea Paul: In the beginning, it hurt only in that I felt I wasn’t part of the business circle, and I didn’t understand, and I felt like it was, I guess not impostor syndrome, but almost like I was at a disadvantage because I hadn’t had formal business training. Then I soon realized that with medical school and residency, we learned to have so much stamina. We can work harder than anyone else. So in the end, I realized it was actually quite an advantage, and it’s just getting past that. You can learn whatever is taught in business school in a few months of self-teaching, but what we learned just through medical school, and the energy and stamina that it takes, can’t really be learned. So I think in the end it is an advantage.

Kevin Pho: I talk to a lot of clinicians who are looking to leave clinical medicine and pursue business ventures like yourself. What’s your number one tip that you can share with these clinicians who may be thinking about ventures outside of clinical medicine?

Andrea Paul: So I actually think it’s great if you have something to pursue that you’re passionate about, that you’re interested in, outside of medicine. It might be something you monetize, or it might not be. It might be something you do for giving back, or something you do for your family, or just for yourself. But I think it’s important to have something outside of medicine, and then see: OK, well, now that I have something else to focus on that I’m passionate about, maybe you still also love your job. If that’s not the case, it may be time to consider other career options, other types of jobs, or maybe even starting something of your own.

Kevin Pho: So let’s pivot to your KevinMD article, “How the Google algorithm update helps doctor-written content rank higher.” Now, for those who haven’t read your article, can you walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Andrea Paul: Basically, all the businesses that I’ve built or helped to grow have really relied heavily on content in all different formats. A lot of it is text content, but also video and social media content. So over the last decade or so, putting a lot of content out there, I got frustrated that a lot of the health care-related content, if you were to do a search on treatment of anything, or anything health care-related, most of the first page was dominated by non-experts, just random bigger businesses. So it wasn’t always the best content, or the stuff that was written by trusted experts, that was coming up first.

I was really happy this May, especially in the last couple of Google algorithm updates, to see that they’re actually recognizing the need for expertise, for good-quality content written by experts. They have made significant changes such that that content is actually going to be preferred now and ranked higher.

Kevin Pho: If you’re a busy doctor, you see patients all the time. Why is it important for a physician to have some type of online presence, or some type of platform where they can publish content?

Andrea Paul: So really, no matter what you do, I think, in medicine, whatever type of specialty you are, it’s really that same thing: There are other people putting content out there who are not physicians, who are not trained, and you don’t know what kind of sources they’re using, nor do they know where to find the best sources of information. So it’s kind of our responsibility, I feel like, to put the right information out there. Then there’s a lot of things you can do with that. So if you have your own blog, or you want to submit to KevinMD or other outlets where you can put the accurate, actual expert information out there, it gives you a creative outlet, it helps others get accurate information, and in the end it’s something that you can actually build something around.

Kevin Pho: So when it comes to content that you publish on your website, Google has a mysterious algorithm that’s constantly changing. What are some of the things that Google looks at to help your content rank higher?

Andrea Paul: Yeah, they say there are 200-plus factors that Google looks at. Some are obviously more important than others. In health care content specifically, they look for expertise. So, first of all, who is it written by? Who’s the author? Second is what references you use. So use higher-level quality references, like .edu references, .gov, things that are from primary journals, so they recognize, “OK, this is someone who actually knows where to get the best information from.” So that’s important as well, who you’re linking to. And then lastly is getting links to your content. They recognize that if respected outlets, or other websites that have the same niche or same focus, are linking to your content, that’s a sign to them that it’s quality content and it should be ranked higher too.

Kevin Pho: So when it comes to sharing and validating your expertise on a piece of content, how can we do that? Because anyone can write and say they’re a doctor. What are some specific ways that trusted physicians can verify their expertise on a given piece of content?

Andrea Paul: So I mean, in terms of what Google looks for, they’re looking for the right collection of words in that piece of content. So, A, it should be long enough to show that you have enough to say about whatever it is. Are you including other related keywords that clearly demonstrate that you understand the topic? And then, what else do you have on that same domain? So if you’re, say, doctorblog.com or whatever, they look at other things that you’re linking to within that same site. If there’s a lot of related links and information, that raises their flag that this is an expert on this topic or this domain.

Kevin Pho: One of the things that you mentioned is getting other people to link to you. Now, that’s obviously easier said than done. What are some techniques that physicians can use to get other people to link to their content?

Andrea Paul: So there’s some outbound stuff you can do. You can reach out to related blogs and say, “I posted this topic that’s related to what you do,” and ask if they would link to it in a certain place. Maybe find related articles that have dead links in them. So if you’re reading an article and you click on one of their references and it goes to an error page, well, there’s a perfect opportunity for you to say, “You could replace this dead link that’s harming your site with my amazing article that I’ve written on the same topic.”

A lot of the backlinks come just from having a highly ranked article. If your article does well and you end up on that first page, people will just start referencing your article. So there’s sort of a tipping point. Once you get to that first page, usually in the first half of that first page, the backlinks will just come on their own, because you are already considered a top reference for people writing on the same topic.

Kevin Pho: Now, you and I, we are veterans in terms of producing content, and I think we both know it does take a lot of time. One of the pieces of pushback I get from physicians is that they’re too busy. They’re seeing patients. “I don’t have time to create a platform and produce all this content.” What are some easy ways that they can create a platform and produce this content that’s so important?

Andrea Paul: Yeah, I think there are a lot of ways to simplify it, like creating a content calendar. So you plan for yourself: OK, this month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and so I’m going to focus on breast cancer topics. Create a schedule, whether it’s going to be one post a week or whatever it might be, and try to just commit to sitting down and creating some content on four different topics within that month. The further out you can go, obviously, the more time it gives you to add images and videos and all the other things that Google likes to see in articles. But just having a plan helps a lot, because then you can see in front of you what you want to do and what you want to create, and then you can check things off the list as you go.

Kevin Pho: Are there any specific platforms that you recommend for a newer physician?

Andrea Paul: I’m a WordPress-for-life person, but there is a learning curve to it. Once you get the hang of it, there are so many tools, and it has so many options. But actually, more recently I’ve found that even Wix, Squarespace, all of them have really caught up in terms of SEO tools, content creation tools, and other plugins and apps you can add to make it easier to use. So I think it matters less what platform you’re using, and more that you’re actually doing the research ahead of time. It’s great to just write down your thoughts and put it out there, but that probably won’t rank. So you need to really start by thinking about what search term you’re going after, and then create the content around that.

Kevin Pho: Now, what’s the role of social media when it comes to your content creation strategy? A lot of physicians, I see, sometimes write articles on LinkedIn, and they write Facebook articles, or they even do tweets. Now, that type of content is different from what you’re talking about, where you have your own website. So can you share where social media specifically fits into a content creation strategy?

Andrea Paul: Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you’re taking the time to create a piece of content, and probably a really quality piece of content, then it seems a waste to just put it on your blog and forget about it. You can reuse that in so many ways. You can take pieces out and use them as captions on all the different social media platforms. You can record a podcast of basically summarizing or reading that blog post out. You can create a video of it. You can use slides and images to do a lecture, talk, or webinar. So one piece of content can be 10-plus different things.

The only thing you don’t want to do, obviously, is post that exact word-for-word article in multiple places. It looks like copying or plagiarizing yourself, and you don’t want to harm your own rankings that way. But with all the other options, as far as pulling up the content, using different pieces of it, and summarizing it in different ways, there’s just countless ways you can reuse it.

Specifically on social media, you can do a short video clip of it. You can do different kinds of image-based posts that pull out key facts. So if there’s a key percentage or something you highlight in your article, you can pull that out, create an image of it, say for Instagram, and then take a piece of the blog that highlights that and use it as a caption.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Andrea Paul. She’s a physician-entrepreneur, and she wrote the KevinMD article “How the Google algorithm update helps doctor-written content rank higher.” Andrea, I talk to a lot of doctors, and all this sounds pretty intimidating to them. Can this be outsourced? A lot of doctors ask me whether they should hire third parties to do this content creation for them. Is that feasible?

Andrea Paul: Yeah, no, it definitely is, and that’s part of what I do in my medical writing team. As long as the content gets reviewed and the finishing touches are put on by that expert, there’s nothing wrong with having that first draft written by a really quality medical writer, who’s going to use the sources you tell them to use and basically pull the information out the way you would. So it’s absolutely something you can outsource, particularly if you don’t have a lot of SEO expertise. It helps to have someone at least outline, “OK, here are the keywords that are not too competitive, that are within your niche, that you can create content around,” and at least have that created so that you know exactly what your titles and topics are going to be.

Kevin Pho: And if physicians want to learn more about creating content, about SEO, about content creation strategy, what kind of resources can you point them to?

Andrea Paul: There are so many resources online, especially about keyword research. So if you search “keyword research,” all these different tools can come up that will help you. There are free ones, and there are paid ones. Within health care, it’s narrow enough that I don’t think you necessarily need to pay to do your keyword research. But type keywords around your niche into these tools, and they’ll come up with lists of how many people search for this per month. It’s probably not worth writing a blog on something so narrow that 10 people a month search for it, so you want to go for things that have higher volume. So those kinds of tools are really helpful to pick what keywords you want to start with.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Andrea Paul: Think about what interests you and what your passions are, whether it’s medical or not, and do something to pursue those, whether or not you monetize it or create a business from it. It’s something of value you can put out there, and other people will appreciate it. Especially coming from physicians, anything that we put out there just comes with a level of attention and respect that others don’t get when they put a piece of content out. So take advantage of it, put some stuff out there, and see what happens.

Kevin Pho: Andrea, thank you so much for sharing your expertise, and thanks again for being on the show.

Andrea Paul: Thank you so much.

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