SEO in 2025 – How to Maximize Search Visibility, Organic Traffic & Returns on Investment

Posted on August 29, 2024 - 3:41 AM by admin

SEO is changing rapidly with evolution in generative AI, evolving algorithms & new search features that are propelling search engines, such as Google & Bing, to improve their search results in order to be more meaningful and personalized for their users. In such times, what should your SEO agency be doing to get you high page visibility?

While affordable SEO services are an important consideration for most businesses looking to boost their search visibility, you should look for an SEO agency that is ready to adapt to search changes in search engine optimization.

How will Generative AI Impact SEO in 2025?

AI Overviews –

AI Overviews, earlier known as search generative experiences or SGE, is one such big change due to search results being triggered by generative search.

We have now seen how Google Search produces an AI overview to provide an AI-generated summary at the top of the search page for many searches. For instance, if I type in ‘transactional or commercial search keywords and zero click searches’ and I see an AI overview right on top, which gives me a pretty good overview of the impact of AI Overview on transactional or commercial keywords:

Notice how there are ‘links cards’ to the right which allow users to dig deeper into the topic. These are the websites that provide specific guidance on this topic, which is one piece of search real estate that websites can aim to occupy. More on this later.

An important note here; AI overview in its current form is new, but Google’s attempt to provide relevant and summarized information has existed for a long time, in the form of People Also Ask (PAA), featured snippets, and Knowledge Graphs.

These are all attempts to show the most relevant and useful information in search results and AI Overview is another feature that is propelled by Generative AI. One big difference between these other features and AI Overview is that AI Overview is getting SEO teams flustered over the potential zero click searches, which we will discuss next.

Zero click Searches –

A much-feared implication of AI overview in the SEO community is that people will reduce the number of clicks to websites in response to the AI-generated overview as the overview will provide a concise and useful answer to the user’s query, thereby reducing the need for open web clicks.

In reality, how has this panned out?

Well, a well-sourced study by Rand Fishkin of SparkToro has found that about 69.1% of Google searches resulted in zero clicks to the open web (meaning, web platforms beyond Google.com). For more information, caveats and data limitations, visit Spark Toro’s blog on zero click searches:

While this appears apocalyptic, in reality there are nuances that we as SEO experts need to be aware of.

Zero click searches will likely affect top-funnel or informational / educational searches.
For transactional or commercial searches, most will click to an open web click. This is because users have a purchase intent and would need to click to a website in order to initiate the purchase or gather more information.
While AI Overview provides a summary that is intended to meet the search intent of the user, it also provides link cards which allow users to dig deeper into the topic by clicking through to the open web.
Not all users will be satisfied with the AI overview and some will go into deeper searches. IN SparkToro’s study, we see 21.4% of users went on to another search.
Finally, as SEO professionals, our aim should be to develop content that can get featured in search features other than organic (website) listing. Getting content impressions on AI overview, link cards, featured snippets, knowledge graphs or PAA boxes are all ways to improve brand recognition and increasing market share.

Should I Be Thinking of CHERP?

CHERP or chat experience results page/position is the new kid on the block. CHERP refers to getting mentions on chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-Pilot or many of the gen AI chatbots on the market.

With regards to Google search, CHERP is synonymous with AI Overview. The question we are asking is how can we get mentioned in AI Overview (or other CHERPs) if our audience is searching for us?

Or, if we are not visible in the chat experience results page, where are we appearing in search results? We know that for local searches, 42% of searches click on a local pack result, which is the 3-pack Google Maps result. If you are a local business that is relying purely on organic SERP optimization, you have to consider that 50% of Google users click on their results within 9 seconds of searching.

Which means that if AI Overview, Local Service Ads, Paid Ads and Local 3-pack are dominating the top 50% of search real estate, how likely are users to click on your website link if it’s placed down below in the premium real estate of SERPs? Remember, only 9% of Google searchers make it to the bottom of the first page of the search results.

This means, for SEO in 2025, it is not enough to appear on page 1 of search results, At the very least, if you are a local business, you have to aim for the local 3-pack, which means optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) and aiming for the coveted top 3 positions in organic search results.

How to Navigate the New SEO Space in 2025?

As Generative AI changes the nature of search results and as Google updates its algorithms to be more meaningful and useful for searchers’ intent, what can an SEO agency do to play in the new landscape?

A good foundational content strategy – A good current SEO base will be your defensive strategy in 2025. This means authoritative content that projects experience, expertise, authority, & trustworthiness (E.E.A.T.) should still be your foundational strategy! Good content allows helps you in multiple ways, including:
1. Good content allows your article or multimedia to be indexed by search engines and drive high value traffic to your website or channel. At Webtage, we have seen at least one-third of our organic traffic generated through high-quality informational blogs that we create that bring together our E.E.A.T. as trustworthy & dependable digital marketing partners for our clients.
2. Great content also helps build great backlinks from authoritative sources in your industry. In 2025, go beyond creating non contextualized backlinks from generic content sites. Instead, use great content that reflects principles of E.E.A.T. to reach out to high authority niche content sites. These backlinks appear to be naturally placed in a piece of content that is authoritative, trustworthy and denotes expertise, which makes these links much more valuable for your organic SERPs.
3. The more often you create and publish good content on your website, the more frequently search bots will crawl your website and this will increase the chances of your content being shown on search results.
4. Good content that is useful for your audience also increases the chances of higher engagement rates and lower bounce rates. The longer your visitors spend time on your website, the more likely your website will rank as an authoritative source of information and higher up in search results

Content that is easy to digest, aligned to user intent, and displays first-person experiences – aka ranch-style SEO content– AI Overview, in particular and CHERPs in general, favors readability. Look at your readability score and summarize your page info into simple sentence structures followed by a clear call to action. This means presenting your information on a page in a clear and easy-to-understand language.

Second, instead of creating a skyscraper SEO strategy that relies on deep, in-depth pillar content, generative AI favors ranch style SEO that breaks down comprehensive pillar content into digestible bits of information that is mapped to varying search intent of a user’s journey.

Third, a critical component of ranch style SEO strategy is creating content that conveys first-hand experience, deep expertise, pointers, evaluation & refinement to make the output useful. This is exactly the kind of content that chatbots cannot spit out. And this is the type of content that you should aim to produce in 2025 that will likely get included in AI Overview, link cards, and other SERP features.

The days of spitting out large volumes of shallow content or AI-generated content is long gone. Even Google’s recent Useful Content update prioritizes websites with content that serve people’s needs and penalizes content that is produced primarily for ranking high on search engines.

Aim for SERP Features – A related offense strategy, that is relevant not only for AI Overview but also other SERP features, such as featured snippets and PAA boxes is the creation of content mapped to user intent, careful selection of keywords, and developing high authority backlinks to appear as search feature.

To aim for featured snippets or PAA boxes, for instance, use a tool such as SEMrush’s keyword magic tool to filter most relevant keywords for your business that have associated featured snippets of PAA appearing in search results.

Once you have the keywords narrowed down, focus on creating content that precisely and concisely answers questions being asked in SERP features. AIOSEO suggests “includes simple elements like using question-based heading tags immediately followed by an answer containing the keyword in the question.” Other suggestions include answering those questions as short and concise paragraphs, creating a list of steps in the form of how-to tutorials, compressing large amounts of data as tables, and adding table of content to your posts and pages that allow for easy to generate list-style featured snippet or PAA answers.

Finally, think about adding schema markups, also known as structured data, to your webpages, especially those pages with frequently-asked questions, user-generatetd content, such as reviews, how-to content pieces and product and service details. These allow search engines to better understand your content and context to allow for better generation of SERP features.

SEO in 2025 will mean more competition and more work for Visibility, Traffic & ROI

While affordability remains an important factor in a company’s decision while selecting SEO vendors, remember in 2025, you want an SEO agency that is ready to unlearn many facets of SEO over the years. No longer a numbers game, the SEO of the future will in many ways support the foundations of good SEO along with the quality and relevance of your content that needs to be concise and easily digestible for your users.

Also important is creative ways of content creation that would increase the chances of getting featured on SERP features through list-style, clear, concise and super organized text.

This means your SEO agency has to stay ahead of the curve and explore creative ways to get you featured prominently on the highly-competitive real estate of search results.

If you are looking for a digital marketing partner with a relentless focus on excellence and a proven track record of success, Webtage is the trusted partner of choice for businesses seeking to dominate their digital landscape and achieve unparalleled growth through SEO. Contact us at 630-277-9521 today!

Seven Best Practices for B2B Lead Generation Campaigns in 2024

Posted on August 15, 2024 - 4:56 PM by admin

A key B2B marketing goal is to generate a pipeline of qualified leads that can then be handed over to sales to be followed upon. Other marketing goals are brand awareness & reputation building, customer upsell & cross sell, and building brand advocates – this completes the lifecycle revenue marketing model. More on this later.

As a B2B Advertising Agency in Chicago, our B2B lead generation is usually done through a two-pronged strategy: an inbound, content-led strategy or an B2B outbound search or social media advertising, including account-based campaigns. This article will focus on one such outbound strategy: Google Search Ads.

The Power of B2B Lead Generation with Proven Google Ads Strategies

Google Ads is an excellent outbound strategy that works well to drive sales qualified traffic, assuming you have a well-positioned & credible brand and a clear set of solutions that you can either demo or provide a quote for (the two scenarios will dictate the clear call to action in your Google Ads).

Let’s start with the well established best practices of B2B lead generation through Google Ads

Create Your B2B Lead Generation Google Ads Strategy

B2B sales cycles are long, ranging from an average of 2 months to 6 months & more. B2B buyers go through stages of awareness, consideration and decision making. Google Ads can work well to target buyers when they are still in their awareness stage. Marketing can target buyers through advertising content-led informative pieces such as white papers and industry trend write-ups. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) who consume top-of-the-funnel content pieces can then be nurtured deeper into the funnel through marketing automation and drip marketing.

However, for sales qualified lead generation, it is best to target mid-funnel and bottom-funnel buyers who are actively looking for solutions and are in the process of shortlisting candidates for their final decision making. This is the sweet spot that you can target via Google Ads.

You can create clear calls to action to drive demo, consultations or requests for quotes.

Identify Your Ideal B2B Customer with Precise Targeting

Before you look into targeting on Google Ads platform, you should create buyer profiles. In order to do so, list your customers characteristics , including geographies you are targeting, their things they like (interests), things they value (value system), job profiles (targeted job titles, industries, company revenue range etc.), and demographics (age, sex, marital status, presence of children, etc.).

Based on your buyer profile, you can now set targeting options on Google Ads. Google Ads allow for rich targeting options, including locations, audience targeting via inbuilt Google Segments (such as affinity or in-market audiences) or search-term intent segments. You can also upload customer lists or create retargeting lists based on criteria you set and develop similar audience segments to make your targeting laser sharp (more on this later).

Assuming you have identified the best keywords for your campaigns, define your campaigns and ad groups strategically aligned with your business goals. Remember, similar solutions or products typically should be placed under one campaign unless you want to allocate different budgets or goals (for instance, Solution A advertised in two different locations), in which case you may want to create separate campaigns for each location. Once you create campaigns, you can use ad groups within each campaign with common themes or targets to control bid strategies, placements, audience targeting etc.

Do Your Keyword Research & Add Negative Keywords Diligently

Just like identifying ‘high-traction’ keywords that signal commercial or transactional intent for SEO, B2B Google ad campaigns’ success also rests on identifying mid-funnel commercial or transactional keywords. If you are targeting top funnel audiences, you may also decide to include informational- or educational-intent keywords.

Google ads allow for broad match keywords, phrase match keywords or exact-match keywords. When starting with a brand new ad campaign, it may be worthwhile to start with broad match campaigns if you want to cast a wider net. As you collect more data on search keywords, you may want to switch to or add phrase match keywords. Remember, you may want phrase match or exact match keywords to increase the probability of a good match but the volume for those keywords may be low or the cost per click may be higher.

B2B lead generation via Google Ads requires very tight monitoring of keywords in the initial phases to ensure you are neither paying for irrelevant clicks nor do you want to pay exorbitant prices for keywords that spiral your ad budget out of control.

We find adding negative keywords is an especially important step, especially if you’re starting out with broad match keywords. Mixing in broad match keywords with phrase match or even exact match keywords over time is a great strategy that brings in the greatest ROI as that casts the widest net but also builds high-intent keywords through phrase and exact match. However, regular monitoring is a must anytime you work with broad match keywords.

Crafting Irresistible B2B Ad Copy, Offers & Landing Pages

As a B2B marketer, you know the importance of standing out in a crowded landscape. Your ad copy and offers need to be compelling enough to capture the attention of your target audience and inspire them to take action. But how do you achieve that?

The key lies in understanding your buyers’ pain points and crafting a value proposition that speaks directly to their needs. Your ad copy should clearly communicate the unique benefits of your product or service, while your offers should provide tangible value that your prospects can’t resist.

Whether it’s an informative lead magnet, a limited-time discount, or a free consultation, your B2B offers must be tailored to your audience and designed to drive conversions. By focusing on the specific challenges your buyers face and how your solutions can solve them, you can create ad copy and offers that are truly irresistible.

Add Ad Assets

Are you looking for an easy way to improve your Adwords performance? We highly encourage you to consider ad extensions to improve your ad performance. Ad assets (previously known as extensions) are hyperlinks you see below the main text ad. Having visible and relevant hyperlinks along with the main ad is likely to increase your click-through-rate (CTR).

Amongst the ad assets we recommend for B2B lead generation ads are:

Sitelink – Sitelink ad extensions are hyperlinks that are deep linked to relevant pages on your website. You could consider adding sitelink extensions to your product/service specific landing pages, for example.
Callout – Callout extensions allow you to display additional text along with your ad that highlights what makes your business unique. Note that callouts are set up at the account level and are not clickable.
Call – This is a must for your on-the-go mobile audience! By enabling the call extension, you are allowing users to simply click on your phone number displayed in the ad, reducing the number of clicks required for conversion.
Price – If you offer competitive pricing, you may want to use price extensions to display those under your ads for differentiation and improved conversions.
Promo – If you are running promotions or discounts, you may want to use these extensions to highlight them in your ads. You can select dates to show these extensions and use either flat rate or percentage discounts.
Lead Form – Lead forms are especially useful for B2B lead generation as they eliminate the need for a click to your landing pages. Users can provide required information directly through Google Ads.

There are other ad assets provided by Google Ads, such as location, seller ratings, app, image, affiliate locations and structured snippet assets that can also use, if they make sense for your business.

Optimizing Your B2B Google Ads Bidding for Maximum Conversions

Now that you’ve created your ad strategy, defined your buyer profiles, researched and refined your high traction keywords and created outstanding ad, offers and landing pages,the next step is to define your bidding strategy.

Most B2B lead generation campaigns benefit from maximize conversion, maximize conversion value, or Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) bidding strategies.

A word of caution here – do not set a maximize cost per click (CPC), a maximize cost per acquisition (CPA) or a target ROAS percentage without collecting 6-12 weeks of data. We have seen that low CPCs, in an attempt to control ad budgets, can generate low-quality leads. Similarly setting very low cost per acquisition can also skew the results towards low-quality B2B leads.

Leverage Retargeting Ads to Nurture B2B Leads

It’s a well-known marketing rule that a prospect needs at least seven touch points before they will consider your call to action and act upon it. For B2B sales, you may require even more touch points than that. In addition, there may be multiple decision makers that you need to convince in order to drive a consideration or a sale.

This is where retargeting platforms come in handy. Consider setting up retargeting lists of website visitors who have exhibited an interest in your services or product on Google Ads, LinkedIn or even Facebook / Instagram.

You can target not only the visitors to your website through more personalized ads on other platforms, but you can also build a lookalike audience segment and target similar profiles through targeted ads.

The multiple touchpoints will only strengthen your chances of being considered as a vendor for the solutions your prospects are looking for.

Conclusion: Dominate Your B2B Market with the Power of Google Ads

If you’re serious about growing your B2B business, you can’t afford to ignore the power of Google Ads. By leveraging the unparalleled reach and targeting capabilities of this platform, you’ll be able to connect with your ideal customers at the exact moment they’re searching for your products or services.

Crafting a high-performing B2B Google Ads strategy requires a deep understanding of your target audience, their pain points, and the buyer’s journey. But when executed correctly, it can deliver a consistent flow of qualified leads and skyrocket your revenue.

You can use other social media ad platforms complimentary to Google Ads to run retargeting campaigns. However, Google Ads is one of the most powerful outbound campaign platform that we have seen in driving sales qualified B2B leads, if executed well.

Dominate your industry and reach new heights of success with the help of this proven digital marketing powerhouse.

Contact Webtage, a premiere B2B brand and performance marketing agency in Chicagoland to discuss your B2B sales pipeline generation needs.

How to Choose an SEO Agency that will Provide Solid & Sustainable Results

Posted on August 6, 2024 - 1:24 AM by admin

Ever since the rise of the internet and search engines, companies have looked to expand into the online market by increasing their visibility on the internet. One of the most effective ways of increasing visibility online is having a Search Engine Optimization(SEO) strategy that puts your company and its work at the top of search engines. Therefore, it is important to hire an SEO agency that can provide solid and sustainable results.

The web & digital marketing industry is an unregulated industry and clients are unable to differentiate effectively between vendors. As an SEO agency with 12 years of experience, we have unfortunately seen many ‘black-hat SEO techniques’ being adopted that bring clients sub-optimal and unsustainable results. These include poor quality, automated, paid backlinking strategy, chat GPT-generated website content and poor user experience. Usually, these services are offered at dirt-cheap prices and many clients fall for these scammy practices since it’s hard to differentiate a good SEO partner from a scammy one.

So how should you go about choosing an SEO partner?

There are three pillars of a successful SEO strategy and a reputable SEO agency should particularly focus on technical SEO, superior content generation, and solid backlinking. Let’s go through these one-by-one.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the functional aspects of a website in order to increase visibility online. This is about creating a good user experience for your website. Why does user experience matter? The main reason for this is that visitors will engage better and spend more time on your website. This tells Google that the website is useful for the visitor and hence your website ranks higher on Google’s algorithm.

A good SEO agency will look for three things in particular to focus on: Largest Contentful Paint(LCP), this measures the loading speed of your website, Interaction to the Next Paint(INP), which measures how interactive your website is to user interactions such as downloads or add to carts, and Cumulative Layout Shift(CLS), which measures how visually stable your website is.

A good SEO agency must also have certain strategies for creating great user experience. Some of the strategies they would look at would be:

Good Load Speed:

An example of a good user experience would be to have the website load quickly instead of it taking time to load. Having a website that takes a while to load on a mobile device or computer could potentially lead to website abandonment and lead to lower engagement. All of this would hurt your search engine rankings.

A word of caution here – be careful of low-performance SEO companies which use page speed as a hook to grab clients. Page speed alone is not enough to vet an SEO partner. Let’s proceed.

Mobile Friendly Site:

Having a website that is also able to fit and operate on a small screen is increasingly important for good SEO. With a large percentage of mobile traffic originating from mobile devices, this step is key to rank high on the search algorithm for Google.

Use Breadcrumb Navigation:

Having breadcrumb navigation allows users to keep track of where they are within a specific website. It increases the chance of your content being discovered, reduces bounce rate, and improves engagement with the website’s content.

Use a Solid On-page keyword strategy:

Each page should have 1-2 primary focus keyphrases that it is optimized for along with 5-10 Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, that are conceptually related to the primary keywords. Mapping your target keywords to pages on your website through this strategy is immensely useful in ranking n search engines. Ensure all target keywords are efficiently mapped to pages and there are no keyword cannibalization, that is, two or more pages are not competing for the same keywords.

Superior Content Generation

This is perhaps the most obvious quality to look for in an SEO agency – do they create great content that will be favorable to people online? However, this warrants a further look.

What are some of the ways in which a good SEO agency goes about creating high quality content?

Creating Relevant Content:

Creating content that is relevant will be more appealing to users. This starts with having some expertise on the topic or being able to do deep research. Then, it helps to research what topics are already written about online and find any topics people haven’t talked about. If the topic being written about is relevant, then you can dive deep into the content and have contextual material to make an article or a video.

Satisfy User Intent:

Google is capable of categorizing content based on what the content is about. It can be classified as people, organizations, concepts, etc. Using these classifications, Google then separates them into one of four categories: informational, navigational, transactional, and commercial. This is important for content creation because the specific key words used in articles and the content purpose should be aligned so that when the user searches the key word, the content of the article matches what the user wanted to read about.

Create Original Content:

An agency’s commitment to using original content for articles is key to high SEO. In the age of ChatGPT, high quality content that is taken from an individual’s perspective and expertise is highly valuable these days.

While ChatGPT can be used, we believe it should mainly be used to create outlines, generate ideas & summarize existing literature on the topic.

Solid Backlinking

Backlinking is incredibly important in order to get high search engine rankings. Having these backlinks exist on other websites are a signal to Google and other search engines about the authority and relevance of your website and how highly your website should rank on their search engines.

Finding High Authority Websites for Backlinking:

Finding high authority websites to put in backlinks can be of great help to a website. Tools such as SEMrush help in this endeavor. SEMrush has a backlink audit tool which helps you identify high quality websites. When you identify what websites you want to have backlinks on, there is a wide variety of ways you can have backlinks on the website such as through guest blogs, forum interactions, etc. This strategy is difficult as it involves contacting the owners of the website and requesting to create any content that can have backlinks on them.

This is one of the primary differentiators between a reputable SEO company which spends the time and effort to generate valuable backlinks and backs those backlinks with superior content vs a low-quality SEO company that builds hundreds of backlinks each month but automates the process and relies on creating backlinks from a limited set of domains.

Local Citations:

Finding niche and local directories and posting backlinks on there is an effective strategy for local businesses. Having backlinks on various local and niche directories help improve local SEO. They also help build implicit endorsements if these backlinks are on directories such as Google Business Profile or Bing Places, search engines consider sites like these quite valuable.

If you are looking for a digital marketing company in Naperville that can provide great results for your website, talk to Webtage, a premiere digital marketing agency in Naperville that provides the best SEO service in Naperville for expanding your search visibility.

SEO Agency in Naperville

A Quick Guide To Get You Started With A New Brand Identity

Posted on June 3, 2024 - 10:39 AM by admin

First impressions and lasting impressions are crucial in the online world where consumers are flooded with more information that they can take in. Your brand is your organization’s first impression. However, how do you plan for an effective and authentic brand? Brand identity development, if not well thought through, can be fraught with misunderstandings, conflicts, and cost & time overruns.

The problem occurs because brand development is personal to people in your organization and that can mean different things to different people. Advance preparation can help both clients and vendors develop a common understanding of brand design objectives & constraints. It will also lower your risk for running into a time and cost overrun.

This questionnaire will help all parties involved understand your vision for the brand and plan the overall effort required for a confusion- and conflict-free delivery.

Whether you are planning an extensive overhaul of your brand or small updates , take the time to answer the questions in the checklist and start off your brand design/redesign project on the right foot.

About the Author

A believer in hype-free and performance driven digital strategies, Snigdha’s endeavor is to get your brand established and your business grow. She is passionate about research, design and analytics and works non-stop and meticulously to make sure that your brand stands out from the rest.

Snigdha’s background is in research design, industry research, content creation, and qualitative and quantitative research (including web-based and phone survey methods and focus group discussions). She is a highly qualified professional in the areas of digital marketing strategy design, SEO, content creation, and social media marketing. Most recently she has grown a client’s online presence from zero to 25% online leads within 3-6 months; moved client website to the #1 & #2 spots on Google, Bing, and Yahoo for all major keywords; and generated online leads accounting for 25% – 30% of all leads for that client.

Contact her at snigdha@webtage.com

Brand Agency in Naperville

Server Side Tag Management & HIPAA Compliance

Posted on February 27, 2024 - 4:35 PM by admin

A recent statement issued by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health & Human Services, significantly expanded what’s considered Protected health Information (PHI).

Most importantly, this directive puts direct onus on a covered entity under HIPAA to take measures to protect PHI from getting shared with third-party analytics and marketing platforms by way of on-line tracking codes commonly added to healthcare websites.

What are these expanded PHIs and how does server side tag management help support compliance while simultaneously making useful data available to marketing platforms that are essential for healthcare organizations’ growth?

Simply put, according to the new directive:

OCR now extends HIPAA protections to any online visitor who visits a healthcare website, not just a patient or a person known to your healthcare organization.
If this visitor conducts any website pages that contain healthcare conditions, treatments or provider research, that signal could be included in the website’s URL.
The URL with health specific data along with the visitors’ IP address could now point to a past, current or future health concern of a potentially identifiable individual.

So any data that may link an individual with a past, present or future health or healthcare or health payment is now PHI. Importantly, this PHI is most likely being shared unencrypted with your third party analytics or marketing providers, such as Google, Meta, LinkedIn, DoubleClick and more, unless measures are taken to prevent it.

Server-Side Tag Management as a Solution to HIPAA Requirements

Server side tag management has emerged as a robust solution that can create a HIPAA compliant solution when implemented correctly.

To reiterate this important point, server side tag management is not HIPAA compliant out-of-the box. It needs customizations to make it compliant while also passing on useful data events to third party analytics and marketing platforms.

What is server side tag management?

To explain in simple terms, most data collected by your healthcare website is sent directly to analytics and marketing platforms via online tracking code installed on your website. For instance, ePHI is probably being sent directly to Google Analytics servers or Meta servers or any other analytics or marketing platforms you are currently using.

By setting up an a server side container on your cloud provider of choice, you now become an intermediary between your website (often referred to as a client) and your third party analytics and marketing platforms.

Since you own this container and the server, you can now to three things to keep your ePHI data out of unwanted places:

You control all data streams that originate from your website.
You can cleanse and de-identify any ePHI that originates from your website
You can send clean data to third party analytics and marketing platforms while keeping it useful enough to allow for campaigns and attributions to continue being useful.

Customizations in Server Side Tag Management to Allow for HIPAA Compliance

First-Party Data Collection & Data Control – Data collected by your server side setup allows for “first-party” data collection, making it more secure and efficient.

Since your website visitors’ sessions-specific data is now sent to your own server, as opposed to third-party vendors’ servers, it provides more protection against data leaks, compared to client side tracking.

With the phasing out of third-party cookies by most major browsers, data collection will need to be rearchitected to depend on first party data collection. Server-side tagging provisions for more secure first-party data collection by enabling server-managed cookies and client identification that are less prone to hacks.

Finally, because all data streams are not collected by your server endpoint, you can have total control over data tracking, transformations and enrichment before it is sent to your analytics and marketing vendors.

Data Transformations & Enrichments – Let’s consider the HIPAA identifiers that are the greatest causes of concern for HIPAA compliance purposes.

There are two types of identifiers, when mapped together, have the potential to connect an individual website visitor with a past, current or future health condition:

A personal identifier, such as an IP address which technically can map to a specific network (it is not a device identifier but for HIPAA compliance purposes, IP is considered an identifier). Other personal identifiers could be a user id (if your website allows for patients to login, for instance, and you have enabled the collection of logged in users via ‘user_id’), device ID, especially when paired with an IP address, and sometimes geographical location, including city, state, latitude and longitude.
Health information – The second type of identifiers are URLs that may contain static components of healthcare condition, treatment or payment for healthcare. As an example, if the url has the following structure: https://www.domainname.com/type2-diabetes-treatment-plans, technically, the URL has health information attached and when linked with a personally identifiable information, such as an IP address, violates HIPAA as it links a health condition (past, present or future) with a potentially identifiable individual.

In addition to static components of URLs, there may be dynamic components that may be passed from your web browser to your server container (in a server side setup) that may contain very transparent individual identifiable information, such as email addresses, names, etc.

A server side setup allows for encryption for both components of PHI identifiers. However, complete encryption of this data may make your analytics and marketing campaigns unattributable and useless.

For instance, if you hash (a type of data encryption) the IP address of your website visitor, you lose all tracking of city or regional level data. Thus, you will be unable to analyze where your website visits, events and conversions are coming from – and that’s a big hit when it comes to geo-specific marketing campaigns.

Similarly, if you are running a retargeting campaign based on an audience profile that shows interest in a specific healthcare service, by hashing the page location, page path and page title of the page visited, you have rendered the retargeting campaign useless.

Server-side tagging however, allows for data transformations and enrichments that extend beyond simple hashing.

Custom Activations – We create advanced custom audience insights based on PHI data streams received from web browsers. The custom data insights are then stripped of PHI and activated to be sent to third party vendors that allow us to continue marketing campaigns as envisioned but still keep ePHI out of outbound data streams.

For instance, to enable Facebook conversions tracking in a compliant fashion, we create custom conversion events on our client server container with non health specific conversion names. These conversion data events are sent to our secure server container, where we strip the event data of any ePHI by hashing all health information identifiers, such as page location, page title and page path. We then forward this stream to Facebook with a Facebook id, ip address and the conversion event but without any associated health information.

Similar solutions can be designed for other commonly-used marketing platforms, including Google Ads, and analytics platforms such as Google Analytics 4.

Based on need, server side containers also allow for parsing information into database warehousing tools, such as Big Query, where data can be cleansed of PHI and sent as outward streams to third party platforms for marketing purposes.

A data warehouse can also be utilized for internal retention of data for custom data insights and enrichments.

Conclusion

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) along with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health & Human Services has issued warnings to several health care systems over the use of online tracking technologies in 2023. The healthcare analytics & compliance community expects the first set of enforcement actions related to online tracking to begin in 2024. This will intensify a series of class action lawsuits and settlements around sharing of protected health information with advertising platforms, such as Meta & Google, by at least 21 hospital, health systems and technology companies.

In light of rising concerns about privacy, in general, and protection of health information, in particular, server-side tagging offers a robust solution.

Contact our analytics team at Webtage to start a conversation about making your MarTech HIPAA compliant.

How to Make GA4 Web Analytics HIPAA Compliant

Posted on February 22, 2024 - 3:17 PM by admin

How to Make GA4 Web Analytics HIPAA Compliant

In today’s digital landscape, privacy and data protection are of utmost importance. Covered entities under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) need to ensure that they are taking the necessary steps to protect electronic protected health information (ePHI) while still gaining valuable insights from analytics.

What are these identifiable ePHIs that may be collected from your website that may be introduced by third-party tracking code and may implicate you of HIPAA violations, according to the new HIPAA guidelines?

“When consumers visit a hospital’s website or seek telehealth services, they should not have to worry that their most private and sensitive health information may be disclosed to advertisers and other unnamed, hidden third parties,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

This article will deal specifically with ePHIs that may now make you non-compliant based on new risks introduced by online tracking technologies, as the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Human & Health Services (HHS). In this article we will discuss ways to make Google Analytics 4 (GA4) compliant, considering that GA4 commands close to 89% of web analytics platform market share.

After covering how to make analytics platforms HIPAA compliant, we will then move to HIPAA compliance for third-party marketing platforms, such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads in our next blog post.

Google Analytics 4 Settings

GA4 collects a vast range of user data to provide insights into user behavior on your website or app. Web URLs and IP addresses, for instance, contain valuable information about an individual’s online activities, including their browsing history and potentially sensitive healthcare searches that may link individuals with past, current or future health conditions, now considered protected health information.

While GA4, a positive upgrade for privacy concerns, compared to the earlier Google’s Universal Analytics (UA), makes it closer to being HIPAA compliant, there are additional steps that you need to take to ensure full compliance.

We are mostly concerned with two identifiers recently added to the new list of 18 HIPAA identifiers: unique identifiers (such as IP address and client ids) and page URLs (such as page location, page path, page title, and query parameters that may contain health specific queris and/or unique identifiers). When the latter is combined with a unique identifier, it has the potential to link individuals to a health condition, treatment or payment.

There are a few steps you need to take to ensure compliance:

Redact email & query parameters – GA4 allows you to prevent sending email and any personally identifiable information (PII) to Google. This is a good practice in general because you do not want to send any personally identifiable information that can easily be mapped to their health-specific page visits and clearly violate HIPAA. Once you redact any PII that you might be collecting via query parameters, make sure you preview redacted data to ensure, GA4 does not contain any PII in the URLs tracked and stored by GA4.

Turn off user-id and user-provided data collection – If your website visitors can login to your website, you may be generating user IDs that may then be a personal identifier that can again be linked to health-specific services, conditions, treatment or payment pages to violate HIPAA.

If you do have the ability for visitors to login to your website, ensure user-ID and user provided data collection is turned off for your website.

Note: Interested to learn more about user IDs? Here’s a great article that walks through ways to enable user-IDs so you learn how to disable it for your healthcare website.

Turn off Google Signals – If user data is not available, Google will map signed-in Google customers who have opted in for ad personalization with third-party data for rich user, cross-device and cross-browser tracking. This allows reporting identities to be linked to individuals and will therefore result in a HIPAA violation.

IP anonymization – We know that Google Analytics collects IP information (though temporarily now under the revamped Google Analytics 4 (GA4)) when a visitor visits your website. The good news? GA4 automatically truncates the last 4 octets of your IP address so if your ip can not really be traced back to your network location. The bad news? Well even though your IP address is never really logged or stored, it is transmitted to allow for location data before it is discarded. To redact IP addresses completely, you will have to rely on server side Google Tag Manager setup.

However, if you do not want to go through a server side setup, but want to be extra cautious, you may want to mask city-level data by turning off granular location and device data collection for regions you want to be compliant in. For HIPAA, it would make sense to turn off granular location off for all US states in order to make users’ locations even less identifiable.

Note – As an aside, remember that IP addresses cannot track an individual device, only a network connection. However, other device specific data (referred to as a ‘user-agent’ variable, collected by GA4 may allow you to connect IP and ‘user-agent’ data to a specific device though.

Minimum Period for Data Retention – Ensure your data retention for events and users is set to its minimum possible of 2 months. This allows for your GA4 data collection to adhere to the HIPAA minimum necessary rule, which states that under “the HIPAA minimum necessary rule, HIPAA-covered entities are required to make reasonable efforts to ensure that uses and disclosures of PHI is limited to the minimum necessary information to accomplish the intended purpose of a particular uses or disclosure.”

Reporting Identity – Finally, for reporting identity under data display settings in your GA4 admin panel, ensure that you select device ID as the reporting identity, instead of the default Blended or Observed.

Note that device ID combined with IP can still be a personal identifier, which when linked to health conditions, treatments or payment page location can lead to a HIPAA violation. However, with granular location turned off and IP addresses automatically truncated, this is less of a concern unless your legal department advises a stricter adherence to HIPAA, in which case, you should consider a server-side tag management setup (see below).

Server Side Tag Management

While the above settings will allow for some safeguarding against HIPAA violations, these measures are not absolute and fool proof in protecting your against non-compliance. More importantly, redacting data means that you might lose important elements from your attribution analysis or reporting.

Instead, we strongly recommend a server-side tag management setup to provide you with greater control over your data streams, while also allowing you to safely navigate the third-party cookie free era that we are now entering. Most importantly, server side tag management can help you balance data anonymization (which inevitably leads to data being made less usable for marketing purposes) with usefulness of data.

Learn more about server-side tag management security and control for HIPAA-compliance in our next blog post.

Alternatives to Server-Side Tag Management

A final word on alternatives for server side tag management. There are HIPAA-compliant analytics platforms, such as those provided by Adobe or Matomo that can be configured for HIPAA compliance. However, migrations to these platforms will require a cost assessment and additionally will require some ongoing management to keep your web & app data analytics HIPAA compliant.

There are also customer data protection (CDP) platforms, such as Freshpaint, Rudderstock, and PikWikPro, that allow for secure data storage, custom audience insights, customer data exports and custom activations and other advanced integrations that are required to keep customer data useful for marketing while keeping ePHI safe from third-party (and presumably HIPAA non compliant) platforms. While most offer a freemium service, HIPAA compliance usually comes with a price tag.

Conclusion

GA4 Settings adjustments, server side tag management, HIPAA-compliant analytics platforms and CDPs are all viable options for healthcare organizations and price points will differ based on number of applications or websites being managed, integrations with third-party marketing platforms, need for data warehousing, analysis & visualization capabilities, hosting provider, privacy & security needs, consent management needs and management.

At the end of the day, the difference between the solutions will depend on your risk tolerance and resulting comfort level with the tradeoff between anonymizing ePHI and usefulness of customer data for marketing purposes.

At Webtage, we take HIPAA requirements, along with technology stack, into account to determine the best HIPAA-compliant MarkTech solutions for your organization. Talk to us to discuss your healthcare MarTech compliance needs.

Is Your Healthcare Marketing HIPAA Compliant – What to Know in 2024?

Posted on February 21, 2024 - 2:34 PM by admin

As medical practice owners, you understand the significance of protecting patient data and maintaining legal compliance while providing top-notch care. In this digital era, where information flows seamlessly across platforms, ensuring HIPAA compliance is paramount.

HIPAA is not just limited to your IT and office operations. It also applies to your healthcare marketing operations. As HIPAA requirements evolve, so must your marketing efforts.

Most recently, the Office of Civil rights (OCR) at the US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) issued a statement that warned of HIPAA violations with regards to online tracking technologies that are commonly used by healthcare websites & apps. According to the new HIPAA guidelines, identifiable electronic protected health information (ePHIs) may be collected from your website that are introduced by third-party tracking code and may implicate you of HIPAA violations.

Online tracking may not be the only technology that may be exposing you to HIPAA violations. Here is a list of things your marketing team should be doing to keep your digital tech stack compliant in 2024.

HIPAA Checklist for Marketing in 2024

Website & HTTPS Protocol – The use of HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) protocol strengthens your website’s security by encrypting data transmitted between the client and the web server by using Secure Sockets Layer or Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) convention. This ensures that patient information submitted on your website browser remains confidential during online transmissions.

However, it’s important to understand that while an https protocol protects data transmission from the client (your web browser or email client, for instance) to your web server, it does not provide end-to-end security for email transmission (more on this later). For that reason, you will need to enable a separate email security protocol to make data transmission from client to web server and back is secure and HIPAA-compliant.

Compliant ePHI Data Encryption & Transmission – Many medical websites have contact forms that allow patients & potential patients to contact them, set up appointments, complete patient registration, release or request medical records, and others.

This contact form is typically emailed to your staff upon submission. It may also be stored in a database on your web server. You may also send a reply e-mail or SMS to the individual who filled out the form. So there are several data communication streams that are enabled when a contact form is filled and submitted on your healthcare website.

Even with an HTTPS site with SSL/TLS certificates in place, when this data is either stored in a database (at rest) or emailed to a recipient email address in your organization (in transit), protected health information (PHI or ePHI) may not be secure and expose you to a HIPAA violation.

To make it easier to understand, think of SSL/TLS as encrypting the communication channel. However, it does not encrypt the message. So when the email reaches the receiver’s email server, it can be hacked into and PHI can be retrieved.

In order to be truly HIPAA compliant, you should either enable end-to-end email encryption by integrating S/MIME or a PGP Network, which should be built into your website or applications, along with SSL/TLS. Alternatively, you could set up a custom HIPAA-compliant application that encrypts data at-rest and in-transit while allowing for secure links that can then be shared via email or SMS with the desired audience.

Analytics Tracking – A red hot topic in healthcare marketing in 2024 is whether website analytics that you may have set up for your website and your marketing campaigns is HIPAA compliant. On July 21, 2023, the office of Civil Rights (OCR) at Department of Health & Human Services issued a warning to all hospitals and healthcare providers to guard against “impermissible disclosures of health information to third parties.”

What are these identifiable ePHIs that may be collected from your website that may be introduced by third-party tracking code and may implicate you of HIPAA violations?

Let’s consider Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as a reference point here to understand how Google Analytics tracking code could link a patient with a past, present, or future medical condition, considered protected health information. We know that Google Analytics collects IP information (though temporarily now under the revamped Google Analytics 4 (GA4)) when a visitor visits your website. They may visit treatment or disease specific pages on your website that may connect the individual with the regulated entity, i.e., your healthcare organization. As per the OCR, this “relates to the individual’s past, present, or future health or health care or payment for care” thus making impermissible PHI available to third party technology vendors, such as GA4.

As a healthcare technology & marketing company, we are erring on the side of caution while we set up GA4 for our healthcare clients. While GA4, a positive upgrade for privacy concerns, compared to the earlier Google’s Universal Analytics (UA), makes it closer to being HIPAA compliant, there are additional steps that you need to take to ensure full compliance.

Server-side tag managers, customer data protection (CDP) platforms, and recommended analytics platform settings are some options available to make analytics tracking HIPAA-compliant.

We are strong proponents of server side tag management setup that allows you control of your data and what is shared with third-party marketing platforms, thus meeting compliance requirements. And that’s not all, a server side setup also creates a first-party cookie context, improves your data collection, and allows you to circumvent ad blockers (although in the world of privacy-first world, we do NOT recommend circumvention).

Talk to us to see how we can customize your tag management setup to make your analytics and marketing pixels HIPAA compliant.

Retargeting & Other Marketing Pixels – Another aspect of third-party tracking includes pixel codes, such as Meta Pixels or Google Ad codes that allow for retargeting of your top funnel audience to lead them closer to making an appointment or completing a purchase, is no longer HIPAA compliant.

Just like web analytics code can relay and store impermissible & identifiable PHI, so can other marketing and retargeting pixels, such as Meta. Furthermore, like Go ogle, Facebook is not willing to sign a Business Associate Addendum (BAA), which is required to keep the covered entity and all its all business associates HIPAA compliant.

This unfortunately means that retargeting ads are currently out of bounds for healthcare organizations, unless PHI identifiers are transformed into anonymized data points before it reaches a third-party tracking or marketing platform. These PHI could be anything from IP addresses, page URLs that contain health information, including health conditions

This solution creates an obvious dilemma – the more anonymized the data that you send over to marketing platforms, the less useful that data becomes. For instance, a simple solution of redacting or encrypting HIPAA identifiers, such as IP addresses and page location/path/referrers that can connect an individual to a past, present, or future health condition, treatment or payment plan also removes important data points that are needed to optimize or initiate targeted campaigns.

At Webtage, we are implementing server side tag management solutions that allow for creation of PHI-free custom audiences that are then sent to third-party marketing platforms, keeping marketing campaigns free of any HIPAA identifiers.

Social Media Compliance – Social media channels can be a landmine of non compliance covered entities under HIPAA, unless the channels are navigated carefully and cautiously. There are plenty of cautionary tales about healthcare social media marketing gone awry.

Bottom line – you never want to post testimonials, pictures, before & afters, or any other information that may link a patient or even a prospective patient with their past, current, or even future health condition.

If you plan to use user generated content (UGC) or your own content that contains identifiable PHI, do request a media waiver form to be signed by them prior to any social media posting.

Beware that even private messaging to your colleagues on social media will violate HIPAA unless you know for certain that those messages are encrypted end-to-end. Even acknowledging a social post from a patient by stating that your organization treated them or is going to treat them for a condition is a violation of HIPAA.

Some common precautions we take at Webtage is we require our healthcare clients to always have a Media Waiver form signed by patients before their faces, names or other forms of identity is released on social media or on the website. We also never add names of patients to testimonial posts or imagery. Rather, we simply add their initials, thereby removing any identifiers.

Remember that deliberate or thoughtless disclosures of PHI are both HIPAA violations and can result in distress, citations, fines & punitive actions. Work with a marketing team that understands the tightrope of protecting PHI while building trust and marketing your organization.

Review Management – When it comes to review management and HIPAA compliance, businesses in the healthcare industry face unique challenges. With the rise of online platforms and social media, publicly-posted reviews can have a significant impact on a healthcare provider’s reputation. However, it is crucial for these organizations to navigate this landscape while ensuring compliance with HIPAA regulations. This includes any information that could potentially identify an individual’s health condition or treatment.

Negative reviews can be particularly problematic in terms of HIPAA compliance. While businesses need to address customer concerns and feedback, they must do so without violating patient privacy rights. This requires careful monitoring and response strategies that prioritize both reputation management and adherence to HIPAA regulations.

Here’s the golden rule for maintaining HIPAA compliance on publicly-posted reviews. Even if the patient acknowledges that they are your patient, your response should not indicate a patient-provider relationship. In case of a negative review, Aledade.com, a healthcare accountable care organization (ACO) suggests the following:

Use neutral, professional language
Thank the reviewer for providing feedback
Stress that a great experience and patient satisfaction is of importance
Detail any changes implemented within the practice, if appropriate
Request that the reviewer contact the office if they have questions; however, do not acknowledge if the reviewer was or was not a patient
Never post information about a patient or their condition without their authorization

Business Associate Agreement (BAA) – A final word of recommendation. When working with a marketing technology (MarTech) or marketing agency, signing a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with them is crucial for ensuring HIPAA compliance when handling protected health information (PHI). By entering into a BAA, your marketing providers agree to safeguard ePHI and adhere to HIPAA regulations. This agreement outlines the responsibilities and obligations of the provider, such as maintaining data security measures, reporting breaches, and ensuring compliance with HIPAA rules.

For instance, while choosing an email marketing automation platform, look for those that offer BAAs to healthcare organizations to help them securely manage PHI within their email campaigns. By partnering with BAA-compliant marketing providers, healthcare businesses can confidently navigate the complexities of HIPAA regulations and protect sensitive patient data.

Conclusion

At Webtage, we are committed to helping medical businesses create compliant marketing and web technologies solutions that provide peace of mind while enhancing patient care.

Talk to us about our HIPAA-compliant web technologies, marketing analytics and digital marketing protocols that provide an end-to-end solutions for your healthcare business.

Solutions we offer:

Custom server-side tag management solutions for HIPAA-compliant analytics & marketing tracking
HIPAA-compliant applications that encrypt data at-rest and in-transit
HIPAA-compliant communication protocols for social media and review management platforms

HIPAA Compliant Marketing Solutions

Generative AI-Led Search in 2024: How Healthcare Organizations Should Refine Their Strategies for Improved Search Visibility

Posted on December 14, 2023 - 10:30 AM by admin

We are a lead generation company with specialized expertise in organic search and paid search for healthcare and B2B verticals.

We are seeing some significant changes in search results, especially for healthcare, led by generative AI, propelling search engines, such as Google & Bing, to improve their search results in order to be more meaningful and personalized for their users.

In this article, we focus on competitive search strategies for healthcare organizations in the age of generative AI.

What are some of these search trends and how will they affect your ability to attract patients?

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) – Google (and Bing) are working to bring generative AI capabilities into their search engines. Generative AI is poised to change the way search engines work and is the biggest search technology breakthrough in 25 years!

Google says: “With new breakthroughs in generative AI, we’re again reimagining what a search engine can do. With this powerful new technology, we can unlock entirely new types of questions you never thought Search could answer, and transform the way information is organized, to help you sort through and make sense of what’s out there.”

Google is not the only search engine experimenting with gen AI in search models. The new Bing, powered by ChatGPT, is already in business.

What does Gen AI-led Search mean for you as a healthcare business?

Earlier, if you typed in ‘how do I find a doctor who truly cares in Santa Clara, CA’ Google would provide you with the ten best sites and would expect you to sift through the websites to find the best doctor for you.

With SGE, Google will save you the trouble of sifting through results. Instead, it will rely on real-time information and Large Language Model-led AI analysis to provide search results so “you’ll be able to understand a topic faster, uncover new viewpoints and insights, and get things done more easily.”

Let’s see what an SGE will produce for the same search: ‘how do I find a doctor who truly cares in Santa Clara, CA.’

As you can see, Google’s SGE has done an analysis of content and produced a compilation of results to provide you with guidance on:

Ways to find a doctor who truly cares in your location. There are websites that Google considers important and lists them. You want to appear here!
A carousel of the top 3 websites that provide specific guidance on this topic, with the ability to click right on the carousel to see more websites. Another real estate on SGE that you would want to target.
Google SGE also offers ‘Perspectives’ which allows user-generated content (UGC) from forums and discussions, including social media, to appear on SGE results. This, interestingly, is also a growing feature Google search currently. We expect perspectives to gain more importance in the coming months.
Finally, with SGE, you can have a follow-up conversation with generative AI by typing in a follow-up question.

How do you go about appearing in Google’s SGE?

If you truly consider the impact of Google’s SGE, it is a paradigm shift in search. With generative AI capabilities, powered by Med-Palm 2, Google’s large language model trained to provide high-quality answers to medical questions, Google search for healthcare will be positioned to provide many healthcare-related informational questions on Google search itself, without the need to directly visit your website.

However, this does not mean that you cannot attract high-quality transactional search-led traffic to your website. Here are steps you can take to position your website high on generative AI-led search engines in the near future:

A good foundational SEO strategy – First of all, you need to ensure that you appear high on organic search results currently. In that sense, a good current SEO base is your defensive strategy. This means authoritative content and the E.A.T. strategy should still be your foundational strategy!

Let’s talk about your offensive strategy next.

2. Clear content that is easy to read – SGE favors readability. Look at your readability score and summarize your page info into simple sentence structures followed by a clear call to action. This means presenting your information in a clear and easy-to-understand language.

3. Well-researched, current, and well-sourced content – Additionally, since healthcare websites fall in the ‘ Your Life, Your Money’ (YLYM) category, it becomes acutely important to put forward well-researched and well-sourced content on your website. This is because search engines are particularly demanding of the trustworthiness of your content if you provide advice regarding money or health. The more current, well-sourced, and trustworthy the content (as in quoted by a reliable healthcare site), the more likely it is to appear on SGE results.

4. Featured Snippets – A related offensive strategy, that is relevant not only for SGE but also current organic search results, is the creation of deep content and developing high authority backlinks to appear as a featured snippet on search.

This begs the question – What are featured snippets?

Featured snippets are valuable answers to search queries that are displayed at the top of search results. Featured snippets aim to provide quick and direct answers to questions being asked. SGE, in that sense, is an extended featured snippet with a summary of the most important information taken from a variety of sources, as opposed to a single source, as in the current featured snippet.

So, how do you go about being featured in the current Featured Snippet or the extended SGE of tomorrow?

First of all, according to Google, it will source featured snippets only from authoritative sites, like government & healthcare sites. So that’s good news for healthcare businesses

Create deep content. What do I mean by deep content? In short, I mean content that meets professional compliance requirements and is medically vetted, so readers get valuable, up-to-date, and factually correct information. It also means creating dynamic and real-time content as far as possible. This is because Google favors “fresh and recent information sources.”

Further steps include getting valuable links from reliable sources in the healthcare industry. To this end, a few things we do for our clients is to have a digital PR strategy for them by getting their content published in high authority industry sites, joining sites like HARO and Qwoted to get them published in reputed journalistic pieces, and building backlinks from local organizations, such as the Chambers of Commerce, professional associations, and local media.

Focus on adding structured data that enables Google to easily parse markup data on your site & brand authority. For healthcare sites, make sure you include frequently asked questions (FAQs) related to healthcare services, article bylines & author schema markups.

5. Digital Reputation – As early versions of SGE become available for personal use, our experience shows that your digital reputation will be paramount in getting links within SGE.

While most healthcare practices think this means getting high ratings and laudatory reviews on Google Business Profile, Healthgrades, Yelp etc. digital reputation is a bigger goal than just getting good reviews.

Digital reputation can be built by combining good reviews with authorship. Ensure your practitioners are authoring articles, appearing on podcasts, and being quoted by reputable local and industry sites.

What Hasn’t Changed

As generative AI-led search becomes prevalent, foundational search strategies remain the same.

E.A.T. Still reigns Supreme – Use content to build brand authority and authorship. Gen AI is even more likely to look at expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to decide which content links to include in its SGE search results.

Local SEO Remains Important – Most healthcare organizations have a local focus. They tend to serve individuals in a certain locality. Building a strong local SEO strategy that includes building high authority local citations, will continue to be important for your business.

Good technical SEO Still Matters – Using a crisp site structure that follows a clean and intuitive navigation structure. Use structured data to mark up the content of your website. For healthcare organizations, we strongly recommend healthcare service FAQs, medical organizations, and authorship markups. Maintain easy readability scores and summarize the information on your pages at the top in clear and concise language, followed by a call to action.

In conclusion, make sure you work with a forward-thinking marketing team that stays ahead of their domain curve, so you don’t have to.

Here are two examples of strong digital reputation management for our clients that have led them to appear prominently in Google’s SGE:

In that sense, some things never change. Search engine optimization (SEO) has never been about tricking Google through paid links or keeping up with algorithm changes. It is about improving user experience (UX) and providing value to your users – if users and influencers find your website relevant and useful they will keep coming back and Google will notice! And that’s the reason we don’t lose page rankings to algorithm changes.

Learn more about our healthcare patient generation services and our other digital solutions for healthcare organizations.

Healthcare Digital Agency

Why You Should Consider a Virtual Outsourced Agency for Your Marketing Needs?

Posted on October 6, 2023 - 2:09 PM by admin

Forrester Data indicates that B2B organizations “have really expanded their in-house agency, their centers of excellence, but that trend has really peaked in 2020.”

Reason? In times of downturn, companies are finding it hard to justify the costs of maintaining large, in-house marketing teams.

Downturn or not, experienced and vetted outsourced agencies are an excellent option for companies looking to step up their revenue and build a better-known brand. In the aftermath of COVID, where work-from-home has become more acceptable, there has been a rise of outsourced ‘virtual’ agency, which offers additional benefits when compared to a traditional outsourced marketing agencies.

What is an Outsourced ‘Virtual’ Agency and Why It Works so Well for B2B & Other Clients?

An outsourced, virtual agency is boutique agency comprised of partnered professionals and full-time staff. This means full engagement from experienced team members which continues beyond initial few months of the project. Unlike traditional, brick-and-mortar marketing agencies, our partners and employees work from their own spaces. And unlike many big name agencies, we do not hand-off work to juniors and are fully accountable to our clients’ needs at all times.

Looking for an analogy? At Webtage, we consider ourselves a digital version of George Cloney’s ‘Ocean Eleven.’ Instead of specialist conmen, we are a group of specialist digital experts who are on top of their game.

What does this mean to you, the client?

Stable network – Unlike agencies with high turnovers and high costs, a virtual agency works lean and works well because we have a shared work history, deep trust, and common work ethic that enables us to regularly & successfully work together. Many of us work full time on your marketing campaigns, while “our partners” join us for specific project needs.

For instance, you may need a specialized motion graphic production team for an sales-enablement video. We’ve got you covered with our partners. Need a ad strategist who specializes in Demand Side Platforms (DSPs)? We’ve got you covered as well!

Whether your outsources team consists of our employees or partners, you can always be assured of professional work process, non-disclosures, timely deliverables, and world-class services.

Highly vetted & Highly Experienced – Our network consists of experienced and highly specialized experts and you never have to worry about your project being handed over to a junior staff at a traditional agency.

We have a very rigorous process of vetting our partners and employees. Just like you have full control over your recruitment process and do your due diligence, so do we.

Our global team is comprised of creative, fun, passionate, and analytical minds and we love the work that we do. Our work is world-class, out of the box, and has always succeeded in moving the business needle. Along the way, we’ve won the admiration of our industry peers and deep appreciation from our clients.

Amongst the adjectives our clients and partners have used for us: professional, prompt, effective, polished, delightful, patient, gracious, skills nonpareil, amazing, dedicated, sharp, attentive, responsive, knowledgeable, the best and we could go on but here is the more important part. We have more years of combined work experience than we would like to acknowledge, lest we feel ancient!

A globally distributed team with deep agency experience and a keen ability to assess business situations and create out-of-the-box hooks to capture the imagination of the audience, you can be assured that only the very experienced and brilliant minds will work on your projects. We work lean and work passionately.

Flexible and scalable – Our extended network of fraternity members allows us the ability to scale up and down.

During downturns, we can scale back our operations to support your operational continuity. We also switch from a retainer model to a project or hour-based invoicing, if a situation so demands.

Cost Savings – here’s our value proposition: for the cost of one full-time employee (FTE), you have the skills and services of an entire marketing team working for you!

How do we do this?

Well, to begin with, we work lean. We work out of our own spaces, eliminating the real-estate and utilities costs associated with having a physical location.
We also rely on cost-differentials between different teams spread across the globe. That being said, we always are fair to the expectations of our employees and partners. We are a highly ethical and empathetic organization and we believe in a win-win situation.
Finally, we distribute our time between multiple clients, while compromising on none. This means, we work hard and we deliver, every single time.

Long-term Revenue Growth – We analyze marketing strategies, marketing operations, and marketing returns through the lens of revenue generation.

Due to our lean process, lean pricing structure, smart strategies, impeccable execution and tight project management, we are consistenly able to bring multi-fold returns on marketing investment. We love to show the results via our clean and interactive marketing dashboards as well as deeper insights by providing lead intelligence and lead reports.

So How Do We Keep Up With Our Clients’ Internal Teams & Develop a Nuanced Marketing Strategy?

We understand that clients may have a sense of unease about bringing in an outside team to manage their marketing efforts. However, we have perfected a process that allows us to become an integral part of your organization. This process involves:

1. DISCOVERY SESSION
  
  This is where we define your marketing objectives (i.e., establish thought leadership, increase prospect database, raise awareness about a particular solution, promote an event etc), identify buyer personas (what are their needs and motivations) and buyer journeys. This helps us craft a strategy that is closely aligned with your business needs, your competitive market and buyer persona.
2. SUBJECT MATTER KNOWLEDGE EXTRACTION
  
  We follow a knowledge extraction process where we interview Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on a regular basis, identify influencers, study hashtags and develop fluency in topics of interest, conversation nuances, industry jargon, as well as gaps in conversation.
  
  And we do this through weekly, bi-monthly or monthly meetings. We also work closely with our clients’ sales team to ensure there is common ground and mutual understanding between marketing & sales.
3. INVENTORY & AUDIT
  
  We perform a quantitative and qualitative assessment of your existing marketing campaigns, content pieces & collateral that you already own. We evaluate the current state of affairs, returns on investment and compare it to your business goals. How are the campaigns performing? Are they generating engagement and conversions? We conduct trend analysis of assets that are performing well & poorly.
  
  This process allows to work in a contextualized space.
4. GAP ANALYSIS & CONTENT STRATEGY
  
  Based on the discovery, knowledge extraction, and audits, we create a core strategy that will be the grounding point that all stakeholders will agree upon. Then we will create hooks and themes, followed by a marketing plan mapped to objectives and buyer’s journey.
5. CRAFT & MARKET
  
  Here is where we craft your content, marketing collateral and your campaigns, lending to them the levers required to strike a chord with your audience, build your thought leadership, and compel them to engage with your brand.
6. REGULAR CHECK-INS –

We practice a well-thought out, modular process that helps you get the maximum returns on your investment. There is always scope to omit certain areas if you already developed those in-house. Conversely, we may want to dive deeper in certain other areas, if that’s seen necessary by all stakeholders.

Regular check-ins via regularly scheduled virtual meetings, email and phone conversations always keep us looped in and available for our clients’ needs.

Still on the Fence?

See many of Webtage’s outsourced web technologies & marketing success stories here. Read our testimonials, see the awards we have won, and see the industries we service.

Our digital build & market experience spans multiple industries, but our strongest strengths are B2B/technology, education, healthcare, B2C, and professional services. Our clients achieve sustained visibility because we conduct online campaigns the solid way. We are here to build a relationship with your business and work with you as your creative, marketing & technology partner.

Digital Marketing Agency in Naperville

Local SEO Vs National SEO

Posted on May 16, 2023 - 7:55 AM by admin

In a competitive digital world, businesses now need to focus on their online presence more than ever before. A digital presence builds trust and relationships with your customers and allows you to be found easily online.

There are many strategies and tactics that you need to consider when building and promoting your business online.

To reach more people online, the Search Engine Optimization process plays a major role. SEO boosts your content online, making your website rank higher in search engines, and increasing qualified traffic to the website. Within SEO, there are two categories: National SEO and Local SEO. The two seem similar, there are different reasons for undertaking them and different strategies to help promote your organization on search engines.

Local SEO Vs National SEO

When it comes to marketing a business online, several different strategies and tactics can be used. However, one of the most important is search engine optimization (SEO)—and, within that, national SEO and local SEO. Local SEO is a strategy that helps to get more visibility for local search-specific keywords. National SEO is aimed at companies with a nationwide reach. It’s the strategy that focuses on promoting your business to rank for broad, highly searched keywords.

What is the Difference Between Local SEO and National SEO?

There are some distinct differences between the Loacl SEO and Nationa SEO strategies.

Key Differentiation 1: Target Audience

Businesses that engage in National SEO generally target a broader audience. National SEO is best suited for businesses with a national or global target audience. If your target audience is national or international, then ensure that you optimize all the pages on your site with the right titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content that’s suited to the needs of your audience.

Local SEO businesses’ websites are designed to attract customers in a specific area. Optimizing your website for local searches is an important step to increasing location. Make sure that all your locations are listed correctly on your website so that customers can find your business easily.

Key Differentiation 2: Keywords & Targeted Search Real Estate

National SEO campaigns target various keywords and phrases that relate to the product and services without any geography. Important Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) features include organic listings, People Also Ask (PAA) boxes, and featured snippets.

In order to get featured on search engines, optimize the website content with broad keywords and long tail keywords. If ‘running tights’ is a broad keyword, ‘best breathable running tights’ would be a long-tail keyword.

Broad keywords are highly competitive and may be harder to gain visibility for. Try to target long-tail keywords that use a different strategy. These phrases are longer and more specific than broad keywords and therefore may allow you to gain visibility for highly relevant keywords faster.

Second, use semantic keywords (words or phrases that are related to each other conceptually) properly to get visibility for organic listings, PAA boxes, and featured snippets. For example, if we were to speak about “digital marketing,” a semantically related keyword might be “SERP” or “SEO.”

A PAA box includes similar questions that people have asked on the topic that the user is seeking more information on and appears like this on search engines:

You might find more PAA questions about your brand or related to your industry. Make sure to answer all of those questions on your FAQs page on your website. In order to rank in a PAA box, your content must include the most relevant answer for your target query.

A featured snippet, on the other hand, is a reversal of typical search results where the descriptive snippet appears first, followed by the website link:

The content that appears inside of a Featured Snippet is automatically pulled from web pages in Google’s index. Optimize the content on your webpage so Google chooses to use your content in the Featured Snippet. The key to scaling this up is to add lots of definitions, ordered lists, tables, and other formats that Google loves to put into Featured Snippets on your page.

Local SEO Campaigns, on the other hand, are best suited to target location-specific similar keywords and terms that individuals are likely to be searching in their local areas.

Important SERP features that businesses can get visibility on include the local map pack, Google My Business cards (that show photos and other information about your business), and organic listings. To start, you need to conduct some research on local search engines and understand what types of queries people are using in your geographic area. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to get an idea of what keywords people are searching for in your area. Once you have a list of all relevant target keywords, you can start optimizing your website for them.

A local map pack is a great real estate to appear in on search engines for local businesses as that’s what appears right under paid search results.

If you’re looking to appear on positions 1-3 of Local Pack listings, work on optimizing your Google My Business listing as that provides more than 25% of ranking success in Google Local Pack. Pay attention to your Google My Business listing by verifying it first and optimizing it.

Key Differentiation 3: Content

In National SEO, top-of-the-funnel content should be emphasized.

Your content should be of unique and high quality and should be able to solve user problems. For instance, awareness stage keywords, such as ‘WordPress vs Drupal,’ where the user is trying to figure out a problem, is a great keyword strategy to adopt when creating a content strategy for a National SEO.
Consider submitting your content on niche or industry-specific lists for higher quality and relevant links.
National SEO strategies rely mostly on high-quality content creation, including blog posts, white papers, and product, industry, and location pages. An important consideration here is whether to leave your white paper ungated to allow search engines to index the content or gate it for valuable lead information.
Ensure your website has a proper structure so you can easily access your important pages with as few clicks as possible. This allows people to navigate to your page easily and also signals to search engine bots that the page is valuable when it is not deep inside a complex navigational hierarchy.
Remember to create attractive and useful content that can engage maximum users as Google refers to user engagement and signals as determinants of web page relevancy.
The main content marketing goal should be Traffic × Conversions = Sales.

Location-based content is emphasized in Local SEO. You should create content that is targeted toward local customers.

These could be blog posts about events or attractions in the area or reviews of local businesses and services.
Additionally, make sure that all of your content is optimized for local SEO by including location-specific keywords throughout.
Ensure that the Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) usage is consistent across owned, paid, and earned channels. This is referred to as NAP Consistency.
Ensure that you optimize location-specific pages.
Build backlinks from niche or location-specific citations.

In general, you should let content fuel your SEO strategy.

Key Differentiation 4: Backlinks

Both Local and National SEO campaigns can benefit from having effective high-quality backlinks, which could be built using content marketing, niche blog postings, link building, and guest blogging.

While building backlinks for National SEO, invest time in building trustworthy links from genuine websites in your niche. Moz Pro SEO, SEMRush, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and WordPress CMS are a few important platforms that help in improving National SEO. These platforms help analyze traffic, backlinks analysis, competitor analysis, and visibility of websites in the search results.
An important aspect of local SEO is claiming and managing profiles on directories like Google My Business, Yext, and Yelp. These profiles help customers discover your business online and provide an opportunity for you to manage the information about your business that appears in search results. Make sure all the information listed is accurate and up-to-date, as this will help improve your ranking in search results.

Citations

Creating local citations won’t help national SEO campaigns at all. Instead, focus on creating and optimizing informative and valuable content, which helps in boosting the domain authority of the website.
Maintaining NAP consistency throughout the citations is very important in Local SEO Campaigns. Any inconsistency can lead to dropping the keyword positions in the local search results. Include a map with directions or contact information on each page of your website so potential customers can find their way to your location easily.

Competition

National SEO has a lot of competition, and it is expensive to build top search visibility. If your website has informative and valuable content, it can attract high-quality inbound links that will boost the domain authority of the website and drive search engine ranking positions. To gain traction in search engines create high authority content (focuses on building your brand’s credentials in an industry), ebooks, how-to content (videos, blogs, infographics), and standout opinion pieces(platforms like Medium and Huffington Post have made it easy for thought leaders to share their ideas), original research pieces (whitepapers, case studies, interviews), and more.
Generally speaking, local SEO has less competition compared to businesses looking for national search visibility, but the approach to building local search visibility relies on building local citations, getting content published in local, industry-specific directories, maintaining NAP consistency, and creating content that is useful, relevant, and local. You can improve your website’s visibility and reach new potential customers organically by creating a city-specific landing page, FAQ pages, hosting local events, and more.

Key Differentiation 5: Reasons to Choose National vs Local

Reasons to Choose National SEO

Target Market: National SEO is an excellent technique for enhancing your brand recognition across locations and positioning yourself in the crowded marketplace.
Established Expertise: If you have a national SEO campaign in place, establish your brand expertise by developing thought leadership articles.
National Level Brands: If you have become big enough on a national level, national SEO can help you penetrate even the international market.

Reasons to Choose Local SEO

Local Area Focus: If your company is relatively new in the business and targets local clientele, it’s better to target local customers.
Local Competition: If you are only competing against local businesses that offer the same products and services as you do, then go for local SEO.
Nature of Business: Local SEO can definitely improve your chances of attracting people who might need your business in your area.

Conclusion

Having a solid SEO foundation should be a priority for your business. Every business is unique and requires a unique approach to marketing its campaign online.

The key ranking factors for local SEO are quality local backlinks, google my business optimization with high-quality images, frequency of listings, business updates listings, and review quality and quantity.

While a high-quality result for National SEO primarily depends on the authority, expertise, and reliability of the content.

With the right SEO strategies, you can increase your website’s visibility and rankings, as well as boost your keyword’s searchability and annual revenue. The best SEO company in Chicago can help in developing and implementing SEO campaigns for your business.

SEO Agency in Naperville

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Still on the Fence?