Content is king when it comes to SEO, and this is certainly true for healthcare content marketing. The only way to succeed with content marketing is to offer your visitors fresh, original content on a regular basis.
But research shows that actually producing that content is tough for busy healthcare marketing professionals, let alone physicians and the other people working at your healthcare facility.
One common solution is to use content from somewhere else: duplicate content. Except this isn’t really a solution.
When it comes to patient education, it might seem that lifting an article from a reputable source is just as good as writing your own. From the point of view of SEO, though, duplicate content is harmful to your healthcare content marketing plans.
Where does your content come from?
Here are some things we’ve seen people do when they need content for their healthcare content marketing efforts:
- Use a library of articles provided for hundreds or thousands of subscribers
- Re-publish articles from online sources, with or without giving credit
- Post press releases
- Publish the first paragraph of an article and link to the source
This type of content is duplicate content. That’s text found not just on your webpage, but on multiple web pages. Google is very clear on this kind of content:
In some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.
Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information… [When] Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
Google gives lots of examples of innocent duplicate content in their article on the subject. But the paragraphs above quoted from that article make it pretty clear that they don’t think, “We needed great content to increase our traffic!” is an innocent use of duplicate content.
Where should your content come from?
You need fresh, original, high quality content. If you have a writer on staff, great. Most health and wellness organizations don’t. In that case, turning to a web content company like Haden Interactive is your best solution. You can count on high quality content, optimized for SEO, on a regular basis at a lower cost than hiring an in-house writer.
Recent research shows that most Americans look for health information online, and that more than half of the information showing up when they search is inaccurate. Other studies have found that most patient education information is written at too high a reading level. Your patients want and need clear, reliable answers to their questions. We take that need very seriously.
Haden Interactive employs only full time, college educated native speakers to write for our clients. Fill out the simple form below to start the conversation.
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