Question Mark: Why has my hospital’s website traffic hit a wall?

Mark Shipley answers your healthcare marketing queries

Q: After years of growth, my hospital’s website traffic has hit a wall. What’s up with that?

A: Voice Command Search.

If I had to venture a wild guess, I’d say it had something to do with Siri and Alexa. According to a recent Google report, 20 percent of mobile search traffic is now voice search and voice search is three times more likely to be localized than text. And voice search on a mobile device is likely to have more detail. For instance, “I need an emergency room, that’s open, in Landsdowne, on a bus line, that can fix my broken arm.”

If you want to capitalize on this trend, ask your agency to create content on your websites that capture the attributes of voice search. It needs to be localized content and it needs to take advantage of long tail keywords so you can capture this type of search. We started seeing this trend a while ago and we’ve been working with our clients to create very localized content that is specific to long-tailed keywords. This type of content will drive voice search queries to your website.