Habits of Medical Doctors Thwart Paid Listing Efforts

March 31, 2011

Health Care IT News reports “Most Doctors Ignore Paid Search to Access Health Content: comScore.” Ah, more bad news for Google and others basing their business on charging health professionals for content.

Because we patients search for general terms, we will often explore the paid results. Doctors get a lot more specific, and those definitive parameters are best addressed with the organic, not paid, results. Physicians are also less likely to spend time browsing on their topic; they get what they need and get out. Furthermore, doctors tend to trust government content for its authoritative and exhaustive content. As the article concludes,

With doctors searching in an organic way, rather than using paid search, the research shows that companies need to build brand awareness and effective SEO strategies to attract physicians to their Websites, comScore reports.

The idea of pay walls is interesting but making money online is still a difficult task for many organizations. Stephen E Arnold, owner of this blog, collected some of his writings about online in this PDF. The pricing observations remain valid—20 years after summarizing some of the challenges of online.

Cynthia Murrell March 31, 2011

Freebie

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