Unlock welcomes guest author, Tom Hespos, Interim GM, Media.
Healthcare marketers breathed a sigh of relief last month when research showed that despite aggressive uptake of AI tools, use of traditional search hasn’t fallen off in any meaningful way. While that may be good news for your current investments in SEM, that shouldn’t delay your organization thinking more deeply about zero-click and SEO as a whole.
Why SEM still matters in healthcare search strategy
Search strategy has long been a holistic exercise. Search represents the most important time to reach mission-critical patients on their journey as they use search to move from thoughts to actions. We tend to think of searchers as hand-raisers, declaring their intent to seek out, for example, the best cardiac care in their city.
SEM is the most direct way to reach patients at that critical point. But it’s the point at which your competitors are also most likely to want to reach them as well. SEO also influences both patient and marketer at this point, affecting SEM costs at the same time it provides organic results that also heavily influence the patient’s journey.
This is the essence of the search strategy balancing act: figuring out how aggressively to invest in SEM and where, while simultaneously testing and refining the approach to appealing to patients with content. It’s rarely just one or the other, and we have to take into consideration where competitors have placed their bets.
Building a healthcare search strategy that balances SEM, SEO, and AI
Zero-click is changing the dynamic in SEO, though not eroding the use of traditional search as early predictions indicated. We now need to think about how content is feeding not only traditional organic search results, but also how it affects AI blurbs that patients will undoubtedly take into consideration ahead of digesting search results. On top of that, Google is selling ads adjacent to the AI results.
But that’s not quite the case yet in healthcare. It’s a sensitive category, and as such, Google has been understandably cautious about letting AI results influence what could be life-or-death patient decisions. All but the most delusional tech bros would agree that’s a reasonable approach to rolling out AI that still regularly experiences hallucinations. So AI responses to health searches tend to be triggered in lower-risk situations like choosing between two OTC multivitamins.
Just because Google may be playing it cautious doesn’t mean we can ignore AI results entirely.
Desktop AI search tools will still answer all ranges of health questions, happily pontificating about the health benefits of adding more antioxidants into your diet, or recommending specific hospitals and telling you what to look for in a cardiologist if you ask.
Sight lines into how this might be replacing traditional search are less clear. What is clear is that we need to think about our search investments in this context.
Search strategy in healthcare… now with AI
Healthcare marketers tend to think search strategy was already too complicated without the added AI variable. Where to invest search dollars – in SEM or SEO – is highly dependent on competitive presence, both nationally and within the geographies in which marketers operate.
To stick with our cardiology example, top organic results relevant to a service line could be affected by any number of competitors both direct and indirect. Localized cardio care content can face competition from national content publishers, Rx and OTC drugmakers, reference publications and other hospitals, to name a few. If too many competitors chew up the category whitespace, SEM can look like a more attractive investment while planning a campaign.
A similar mishmash of competitors can be bidding on key search terms in a cardiology service line’s geography. Balancing these competitive concerns while maintaining your own presence in cardiology is the essence of search strategy for healthcare marketers. In an environment where algorithm changes, website refreshes, or new category entrants can change the game significantly, hospital marketing teams can be constantly shifting what search terms they chase with SEO versus what they pay for in SEM.
If healthcare eventually follows other less-sensitive categories like retail or consumer technology, AI will rebalance the scales by eroding SEO with AI results that push organic results down the page. It will also alter the landscape of SEM by offering AI-adjacent ad opportunities.
Optimizing healthcare content for AI and traditional search
One of the first issues that comes to mind is how to optimize content for AI. While AI engines may derive authority from many of the same sources search engines do – Wikipedia and Reddit spring to mind immediately – the dynamic is changing as desktop AI moves from a closed training model to one that more frequently searches the open web for more current information.
One thing that becomes obvious after some thought is that our search strategies will need to incorporate and prioritize the various AI engines against the search engines and each other, which means more content customization to ensure AI can parse it and use it.
Healthcare marketers will also eventually have to balance the cost and effectiveness of AI-adjacent ads with the usual SEM ads that will likely be featured less prominently as AI pushes them down the page.
The bottom line
I want to reiterate that many of these developments in AI haven’t yet happened. Healthcare will be handled by Google and other search players with the kid gloves it deserves while AI continues to develop. Safety concerns lead to laggard behavior that is typical of the category, but prudent.
It isn’t, however, too early to think about what these changes will bring when we structure our search strategies and the investments they’ll require. SEM is still alive and well. But a smart healthcare search strategy means pairing it with SEO and AI to stay ahead of the curve. Healthcare marketers should take advantage of the time they have.
Unlock Health is a full-service marketing communications agency that helps healthcare organizations make authentic connections with patients and communities. Every minute of every day, someone books services they need as a result of our work with clients.
