In today’s digital-first health care landscape, patients increasingly turn to search engines as their first step in the health care journey. Yet many health organizations are missing a crucial element in their marketing strategy: comprehensive search research.
While most health systems focus on traditional marketing channels and basic SEO, understanding the full scope of search behavior can transform your patient engagement and acquisition strategies.
Driving patient engagement in health care
Health care consumers have fundamentally changed how they interact with health systems—they’re more informed, selective and digital-savvy than ever before. For example, recent studies show that 77% of patients start their search for a new provider by reading online reviews, and 65% of patients say transparency around health care service costs is critically or very important to their overall satisfaction.[1]
While patients increasingly seek transparent pricing, convenient scheduling and detailed provider information online, health systems often have fragmented digital experiences that don’t align with how patients actually search for and evaluate care options.
How to supercharge your health care strategy with search research
Search research isn’t just about keywords and rankings anymore—it’s about understanding the complete digital patient journey and creating meaningful touchpoints along the way.
Leveraging search data, health care organizations can uncover valuable insights about patient behavior, preferences and needs that traditional market research might miss. Search research can help uncover what health care consumers are searching for, and when and how they’re talking about it.
Combine these powerful search insights with your existing market research and analysis, and suddenly you begin to map a data-informed health care journey of the consumer’s digital touchpoints, and how your brand can meet those consumers with the information they’re looking for.
Here’s how you do it.
Understand patient needs and health behaviors
Understanding your audience’s search behavior reveals critical insights about their health care journey. By analyzing search patterns across platforms—from Google to YouTube to social media—you can uncover where patients seek information, which sources they trust and how they make health care decisions. This data provides a real-time view into patient concerns and information needs, often revealing trends before they appear in traditional market research.
For example:
- Self-diagnosis searches have risen dramatically, with “STD symptoms” showing a consistent 22% year-over-year increase (60,500 monthly searches) and “high blood pressure symptoms” surging over 120% since 2017 (135,000 monthly searches). Not only does this potentially highlight growing health issues, it also indicates consumers’ reliance on search to self-diagnose.
- At-home treatment searches on YouTube are also climbing, with phrases like “how to treat high cholesterol” up 125% since 2017, indicating consumer intent to self-treat and improve their health conditions without medical supervision.
Search data can also reveal and validate socioeconomic concerns:
- Concerns with medical and insurance costs have risen sharply, with “How much is urgent care with insurance” showing an increase of 307% year-over-year (2,400 average monthly searches) and 3,700% since 2017.
- Searches for pregnancy tests have decreased by 33% since 2017, indicating a decline in fertility. In fact, health statistics from the CDC confirm what this search data is showing.
These data-driven search insights will help tailor your brand positioning, marketing messages and content to meet your consumers’ top-of-mind needs.
Consider your brand’s overall digital search experience
Today’s search landscape extends far beyond Google’s traditional results page. Your targeted consumers are consuming and interacting with content across organic search engines like Google and Bing; social search platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram; and social search forums like Reddit, Quora and Facebook groups. What’s more, they’re engaging with health influencers.
Your digital presence must be optimized across these touchpoints to meet consumers’ needs. The search landscape today has evolved beyond just traditional website listings. Health consumers now encounter knowledge panels, AI overviews, paid search ads, local map packs, images, video snippets, social posts and “People Also Ask” sections. Understanding how your brand appears across these various search experiences is crucial for maintaining a consistent and effective digital presence.
Find and build ownable content that resonates
Success in health care search isn’t about competing for the most obvious terms like “symptoms” or “treatments.” Instead, focus on creating unique, valuable content that leverages your specific expertise and brand perspective. The key is leveraging a search-driven content strategy to identify ownable topics that are both relevant to your audience and unique to your organization, while providing genuine value rather than promotional messages.
Showcase your health expertise and trustworthiness
In health care, trust is paramount. Search engines and AI-powered platforms evaluate content based on E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness). Just as patients trust their doctors based on credentials and experience, search algorithms and AI look for signals that validate your brand’s content reliability and authority to provide the answers consumers are searching for.
Drive in-person patient engagement through local optimization
Local search optimization has become critical, with “near me” searches showing remarkable growth—“doctors near me” searches have increased by 1,275% since 2017, while “best primary care doctors near me” has seen a 247% increase.
To capitalize on these trends, health systems must optimize their local presence with accurate business information, strong ratings and reviews, and verified physician credentials across all ownable areas of the web, such as Google Business and Bing Places, social media pages and website location pages.
Don’t forget UX and SEO best practices
Even the most sophisticated search strategy relies on solid technical foundations to yield high website engagement. Ensure your website is technically sound, mobile-friendly and easy to navigate—poor user experience leads to poor SEO performance. Your content should be well-structured, accessible and designed to meet both user needs and search engine requirements.
Search research isn’t just another marketing tool—it’s the strategic compass that will transform how you connect with and serve your patients.
Sources:
[1] https://www.updox.com/blog/patient-engagement-statistics/
