Every day Google receives more than 1 billion search queries related to the topic of health. The field of medical copywriting is growing rapidly, and with it the requirements for copywriters are becoming clearer. The demand is expected to peak in 2030. Let’s talk about how medical copywriting works in today’s realities.
Many factors contribute to the high demand for medical copywriters. These include the growing need for engaging medical content, as well as maintaining active communication with patients. Separately, factors such as the growth of clinical trials, the development of innovative biomedical technologies, equipment, but most importantly, the trend toward healthy lifestyles. For the information of the publication Medijka.
Medical copywriting is about communicating with doctors, patients, and just people who want to raise awareness about diseases, treatments, and health maintenance. To attract an audience, you need to create content that is accurate, relevant, and creative.
Content style and composition are key. Tone of voice must be consistent with the client’s wishes, while still being readable and relevant to the audience. Medical content must be informative, rely on credible sources, engage the reader and drive them to action. Storytelling is a powerful tool for conveying the message. Important information can be conveyed through a compelling clinical case study, podcast, or interview.
Bet on insight, criticality, and education
A fortunate customer or potential employer is a copywriter with a medical background. Such a person tends to have a tendency to analyze information, think critically, and interpret the results of clinical studies correctly. The main skill is the ability to maneuver between formal scientific formulations and extremely simple (but not formulaic) presentation of material that would be understandable even to a schoolchild.
Much depends on the ability to intelligently and easily translate complex terms into simpler ones. A text written by an experienced author will solve many problems:
- will increase audience engagement;
- sales volume;
- reaches;
- follow-through;
- will attract traffic;
- will collect more leads;
- strengthen the customer’s brand and credibility.
For example, if we write articles for medical clinics, we should remember the main thing:
MORE site visitors = MORE potential patients
The healthcare industry relies on advertising to increase sales of medical services and attract investment. This means medical copywriters must be skilled in writing both educational and promotional medical content.
The “medical copywriter + SEO specialist” tie-in
Before you start creating content, determine your purpose. Why are you doing it? Often the goal is to sell a product or service, but that’s not always the case. Medical copywriters can create educational content that is designed to increase the knowledge of medical professionals or persuade the consumer to take some sort of preventive measure to avoid developing serious illnesses. For example, publish an article about the importance of having an annual mammogram or fluorography.
If you are a practicing physician or a medical organization, you probably recognize the value of your experience, your reputation and your hard-earned credentials to practice medicine. And that’s where the questions arise:
- How do you transfer that knowledge and value into the online world?
- How to win the attention of a wide audience?
- How to stand out among the competitors?
- How to “beat” the algorithms of Google and become the first?
Today a good website ranking in Google search results is more than just optimizing keywords and setting up links. Google’s algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated and the work of SEO professionals is becoming more time-consuming. With guidelines like the EAT and the latest Helpful Content Update, it’s clear that companies must not only produce high-quality content, but also go above and beyond.
Eat and don’t choke
SEO stands behind Google’s foundational ranking factors – Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, E-A-T. Using these principles, Google evaluates the quality and usefulness of the content of medical websites. This protects the consumer from low-quality content.
The customer should seriously consider the possibilities of SEO-optimization, because it is not enough to write a note, news or article. It is necessary that the content of the site was accurate, expert and trustworthy.
And in this sense, the tandem of “medical copywriter + SEO specialist” works best of all. The medical copywriter, who has personal experience in the topic he covers, will write expert material, and the SEO specialist will use possible tools for promotion and optimization of the site.
Life or Money
We learn from Google’s Search Quality Evaluation Guide (SQEG) that health sites fall into a select category called “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL).
According to Google’s definition, YMYL is a web page that can “potentially affect a person’s well-being, health, financial stability and safety.”
Hence what we talked about earlier: medical websites must meet Google’s four YMYL requirements:
- A high level of expertise, authority and credibility (E-A-T).
- An adequate amount of core content.
- Site information that satisfies the consumer’s request.
- The impeccable reputation of the site.
To squeeze the maximum: determine the request, analyze competitors, generate TOR
At the start define the type of landing page you want the text for: a category page, a page of services, etc. Next, we turn to the semantic core and take frequently used thematic search queries that have common competitors to the output.
Having determined the queries, it is necessary to get competitors that occupy good positions in a given cluster. In our work, we use internal scripts, but you can also use free services, such as ARSENKIN TOOLS. We obtain a parsing of results and select the competitors that are the closest to us in type (do not take into account aggregators, large information portals and large network businesses).
The next step is to analyze the text block of landing pages. It is worth paying attention to such important criteria:
- the number of unique words/characters in competitors;
- the most frequently used words and additional elements (photo and video content, reference list, etc.).
To automate this stage, we recommend using Miratext, a free service. If your goal is to rewrite existing text, you can add the current text block to the relevant section. Data on it will be displayed in a separate column, which is very convenient for further analysis.
From the first column you need to remove unnecessary words:
- can, can;
- be, have;
- several, at once, etc.
Analyze the structure of our competitors’ articles and develop your own. To analyze, you can spar the h1-h6 headers of your competitors’ pages and use them to build the structure of the future text block.
The final document will contain the following data:
- list of key phrases;
- the list of phrases used by your competitors and their median values which
- you should strive to reach;
- structure of the article;
- a list of the main competitors.
Thus, we take into account not only the occurrence of the main keywords in the text of our competitors, but also do not omit other topical phrases and phrases. Such techniques will make the text most relevant to the current top. As a result, the articles will quickly reach the top 10 of search results and begin to bring in traffic.