You finally took that leap and launched your own healthcare practice. It took grit and guts to get there, and it’ll take grit and guts to keep it going. Now that it’s open, you need to find a continuous flow of patients to fill your practice and keep your business above ground. Or, maybe you've been practicing for a while but are ready to scale and bring your practice to new heights. Regardless of the circumstance, there are some bulletproof healthcare marketing strategies that will get new patients flowing in your doors from a digital audience.
A healthcare marketing strategy defines how healthcare organizations attract patients, build trust, and drive engagement across digital channels while staying compliant.
Unlike general marketing, healthcare marketing prioritizes clarity, accuracy, and confidence at every touchpoint. Patients are not just comparing services. They are evaluating trust, expertise, and ease of access at every step of their customer journey.
A modern digital marketing strategy for healthcare brings together SEO, local visibility, content, and reputation management to support the full patient journey. When executed well, healthcare marketing functions as an extension of your patients’ experience.
Below I've distilled some healthcare marketing ideas and techniques you should be looking into in order to increase the relevance of your healthcare practice online.
Your site is likely the first interaction your potential clients will have with your healthcare brand online. A sloppy, buggy, or thrown-together website can give the impression that your practice is also sloppy, buggy, and thrown-together. In order to nail this first impression, be sure to invest in a well-crafted, visually appealing site that is easy to navigate, provides useful information, and demonstrates your practice’s expertise. A good site is the foundation of an influential online presence.
It should go without saying, but your site needs to look professional and inviting. In today’s digital age there are many avenues to building a website. Though it’s tempting, it’s worth investing in quality over budget when it comes to your site design. In addition to the fact that the average user sees quickly through cheap site design, a good site structure is essential to keep up with your healthcare business as your company scales. It’s important that your site reflects the top notch service and quality you provide.
The good news for you: many of the healthcare sites out there look quite outdated. By updating or creating a well designed site, you can stand out with relative ease.
When people get to your site, it’s for a specific purpose. In your case, people are looking for a healthcare provider that they can trust, with answers to questions only a doctor can answer. They have a specific problem, and they are looking for solutions.
If your website isn’t clear about the value each page brings (or worse, it promises value but doesn’t deliver) that confusion will reflect poorly on your practice. Be clear, be helpful, and put the user-- your potential patient-- first.
Facebook ads can be powerful for your healthcare marketing strategy, but you’ll need to put some thought and strategy into them. The FB ad platform isn’t one that typically brings results by blasting as many users as possible with your ads. The power comes instead from the very specific, granular targeting that can be done. Maybe you focus on sports medicine and want to run a campaign targeted to men and women, aged 20-40, with a particular interest in CrossFit. On Facebook, that’s easy. What if your practice caters to a higher-end clientele? No problem, you can target via income, net worth, home value, location, etc.
Paid social media marketing, such as with Facebook Ads, can be a powerful tool in an online strategy. The key is running tailored campaigns to specific personas. As you refine who you are targeting, you can lower your overall cost of running ads because you aren’t wasting money commercializing to people who will have little interest. To help get you thinking of what campaigns you should run on Facebook, here are some of the targeting options.
If you are embarking on running some social media ads yourself, be sure to read up on all the ins and outs of Facebook’s ad platform and how to use it. There are many options and it is easy to get overwhelmed on your first go. Adspresso has a great guide to get you jump started that can be found here.
Most industries have directories that list professionals within their industry. These directories often put in a lot of time and money in order to rank well for many profitable keywords, which means they are a resource you can use to increase the weight of your own domains. Use these healthcare directories to your benefit while you are getting your site ranked for your chosen keywords.
In most instances, directories will be free (or cheap) and have an easy to fill out form. You will use the form to submit information about your practice to be posted on the public directory.
For example, Healthgrades.com has a comprehensive directory that you should leverage to your advantage. It ranks for many healthcare-focused keywords.
You can create a free Healthgrades.com profile here. It will look something like this:
This is a great way to take advantage of all the hard work Healthgrades has put into their site and rankings. And, it’s mutually beneficial. Healthgrades relies on healthcare practices to add themselves to these lists, and you rely on them to aid your ranking positions and lead generation.
Here are a few more healthcare directories that you should be on:
All of the above directories rank for many “healthcare provider in...” type keywords. If this method works for you, don’t stop there! There are many more directories with online clout than the ones listed above. Do a quick search for “healthcare provider in” + “city” to see which directories show up for the city you want to rank for. Be sure to leverage the directories that rank for your target terms first.
Google My Business is incredibly important if you want to show up for local results in Google. I’m sure you’ve seen local results many times, but maybe you didn’t realize it was a part of the Google algorithm that you can leverage. Here’s what a local result looks like when you search “chiropractor SLC”:
The local box will show different businesses that fit what you are looking for. There are many factors that go into showing up for these, but Google tells us that it comes down to 3 core factors:
So what exactly does Google mean by these?
Relevance is pretty self-explanatory. It refers to how closely your local business listing matches the search someone types in. By doing a thorough job filling out Google My Business and optimizing it to match the queries you want to rank for, you’ll increase in relevance.
Another pretty easy one, distance illustrates how far a person is from your business. In a recent report from Hitwise, it is reported that nearly 60% of searches are now performed through a mobile device. Google will calculate where a user is through their device and use this distance as a factor when providing results.
This is the part where optimization comes in. Prominence tries to gauge how prominent your business is in the offline world and reflect that in local listings.
Many factors are taken into consideration here. Links, local citations, reviews, and your position in traditional SEO results all factor into how “prominent” you are.
You need to verify your business with Google My Business. This is a fairly easy process. After you set up your Google My Business page, Google will send you a postcard with a verification code. You will then enter the code into Google My Business to verify your business listing.
Next, make sure all of your details are up to date and add 3-5 pictures of your business.
After you’ve added some great photos of your business, double check the category that you’ve declared for your business within Google My Business. It is important that you have categorized your business properly.
Thoughtfully fill in your introduction and title of your business in Google My Business so that it represents your business well.
Reviews are very important in local search marketing. Read and thoughtfully respond to reviews about your business. Reviews can make a huge impact on your business for better or for worse. It is beneficial to keep them under control through responding and genuinely taking care of your customers.
Citations are your mentions on various directories on the web. These directories are sites such as Yelp, The Yellow Pages, dexknows.com, chirodirectory.com and more. Building these by hand can take a lot of time, so many companies hire out for citation building.
If you embark on building citations by yourself, make sure you keep all of your information consistent across all of the directories you submit to. Nothing is worse than getting a bunch of citations that have conflicting phone numbers or addresses that you need to go through and clean up.
Traditional SEO for a healthcare practice, sometimes searched online as healthcare SEO, can be immensely powerful. SEO for those who are unfamiliar stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the act of optimizing the elements of your site so that you rank better (closer to the top) within search engines. The idea is that if you are a healthcare provider in Las Vegas, then you want to show up when someone searches “healthcare Las Vegas” within Google or other search engines. And, you want to show up as closely to the top as possible, so more users will click to your site over your competitors’. Performing SEO for your healthcare practice will do more than just generate customers, it will help you build a brand. Here are some of the benefits to investing in SEO.
As a healthcare provider, you are highly skilled in an area where most other people are not. Furthermore, you invested good money in becoming an expert at your craft. Use that expertise to grow your brand through content marketing.
What do I mean by content marketing? You should be consistently publishing content that brings value to your potential patients in a way that only you, as the expert, can. If you’re wondering: “Well, what should I write about?” This is where the keyword research that I mentioned earlier comes in. Keyword research will teach you what people are searching for and how many people are searching for it. In many cases, these search terms represent the questions that your potential patients have for you.
For example, if someone is experiencing upper back pain, they may search “upper back pain” in Google in order to research what the causes could be. Here is a snapshot of what the traffic looks like for some keywords regarding upper back pain.
Quick notes -
As you can see in this example, there are many people searching for the keyword “upper back pain” or some variant of it. We also learn that these keywords have relatively low difficulty being in the 20-30 range (out of 100, 100 being the most difficult).
If you, as a healthcare provider, created a piece of content regarding “upper back pain” and optimized it for the above terms, you could begin generating quite a bit of online exposure.
As you begin to show up for searches in Google you will be seen as an authority. The more searches you rank for, the more people will associate you as an authority.
A great example of this is Dr. Josh Axe of Draxe.com. Dr. Axe began by founding the Exodus Health Center in Nashville, helping thousands of families reclaim their lives through improving their health. Furthermore, Josh helped his own mother reclaim her health and beat breast and lung cancer. Realizing that he has a special set of skills, he set out to help more people using the amplification of the internet.
When Dr. Axe started early on, he wrote many pieces of content and published them on his site. Dr. Axe began ranking for many keywords and has since grown to become the “second-most-visited natural health website in the world.”
Here is Dr. Axe’s current site:
Josh’s site currently ranks for over 1.6 million keywords and generates over 7.5 million monthly visitors (as per Ahrefs).
Dr. Axe is an inspiring case study of what can be done through the leverage of SEO to build a strong brand with immense authority.
Managing your reputation online is at the heart of retaining a good brand image. Google your brand frequently to see what people are saying about you. Better yet, create a Google Alert for your brand name and be notified each time you are mentioned. This way you can jump in and resolve concerns and strengthen your brand.
Patients often research providers across search results, review platforms, and third-party healthcare directories. Monitoring what appears in these spaces helps organizations understand how they are perceived and where gaps in trust may exist. A strong healthcare marketing strategy includes proactive brand monitoring.
Give thoughtful responses to reviews and mentions to show your accountability and reinforce credibility, which is especially valuable when patients are evaluating alternative care options. Over time, this consistency supports a more resilient healthcare marketing strategy by building confidence across digital touchpoints.
For many patients, the first interaction with a healthcare organization happens online. This is often referred to as the digital front door, and it plays a vital role in any healthcare marketing strategy.
A patient-centric digital experience removes friction. Websites should be easy to navigate, quick to load, and clear about services, providers, and next steps. Patients should be able to understand their options, find answers to common questions, and take action without confusion or unnecessary barriers.
A strong digital marketing strategy for healthcare treats the website as more than a brochure. It functions as an access point for care, guiding patients from research to an appointment with confidence. When the digital front door is built around patient needs, marketing efforts convert more effectively, and trust is established before care even begins.
Back in 2012, we did things very differently at 97th Floor. One aspect of our company was that we used to have the team come in at 8:00am on the dot and make them leave at 5:00pm. They had some flexibility of course…they could take a 30 minute lunch or a one hour lunch! I vividly remember lecturing one particular team member that he had to take at least a 30 minute lunch.
My intentions were good; I was just doing what I was accustomed to and I thought it would be good for his health and productivity to take a break. However, at the same time we were really pushing hard to build our brand as a results-based marketing agency. We wanted clients to hire and pay us for our strategy and results, more than our hours and deliverables. Sure, we had (and still have) projects that were billed hourly, but the majority of our clients were hiring us for our skills as an agency. What they were after were results, not hours.
It was really hard back then—and still is sometimes—to get companies to view us in this light. That’s when we started asking ourselves, “Why should clients judge us based on results and the true value we bring to them if we judge our own team on how many hours they sit in their chairs where we can watch them?” Oh and don’t get me wrong, we were much worse than just tracking their every minute. We tracked basically everything you can imagine that really doesn’t matter. We couldn’t expect our clients and prospective clients to be different than us.
We ultimately learned that the culture we breed at 97th Floor directly impacts our brand. We quickly (but not abruptly) started changing our policies and environment to help facilitate the culture that we now wanted. Today, team members are judged on their results and the value they bring to 97th Floor only. They have 100% autonomy, and in turn they give the company 100% accountability. This example, along with many other major improvements to our culture, has allowed our brand to be about results-based marketing.
Most companies haven’t figured this out yet. They are doing things the old way: coming up with what they want their brand to be, and then spending money to force it down their customers’ throats. And sure, that works to an extent, but it won’t last in the long term. Today, your culture is the main influence on your brand.
People are increasingly doing more and more research about companies before they buy. They ask their friends. They scroll through social networks. They read reviews. People don’t buy from Zappos because the particular shoes are better quality than everywhere else. It’s not even for the free, fast shipping. The shoes are the same on the other site and many other sites offer free, fast shipping now as well. They buy from Zappos because their brand is all about superior customer service. That was Zappos intent and they built that by creating a culture based on excellent customer service. Just ask Tony Hsieh.
There are many famous examples of companies with strong brands, and they were created through the company’s culture. Sure, the marketing and ad dollars helped, but the main driver was the culture.
All companies love to tout that their people are their number-one asset, and it’s for good reason; the people are what drive a company to success or failure. However, you constantly see companies that treat their employees terribly and let their culture go to garbage. Just browse around on Glassdoor and see for yourself. In the past companies could say one thing and hide everything that went on in their office from the public. Not anymore. Not in the increasingly transparent world we live in.
Today’s workers are knowledgeable and empowered. Top talent isn’t joining those companies with terrible cultures, and any top talent that is at those companies are quickly leaving. Now, if you don’t have a solid company culture, everything will start going south quickly. Your employees will be disengaged and do shoddy work, which will lead to your disgruntled customers shaping your brand for you. Your employees aren’t going to be brand ambassadors outside of the office, so customers and potential employees will stay away from you. Your employees and customers will create your company’s brand no matter how hard you fight back. The only way to fix it, or prevent it, is to focus on cultivating a healthy company culture.
The positive side of this is that the opposite is true. If your culture is thriving, your employees will do great work, they’ll be brand ambassadors even outside of the office, and your customers will spread your positive branding as well. Basically, however you treat your employees, they’re going to pay it forward to your clients.
These days I don’t worry so much about our branding. Instead, I spend my focus and energy on our culture. We make sure our policies and our environment are conducive to the team, and strengthen and add to the culture. I know based on our own experience and the experience of many other companies that as long as the culture is right, almost everything else, including the brand, will take care of itself. Our company culture is the best test of the strength of our brand.
So start asking yourself questions. Do you want your brand to be known as up to date and cutting edge in your space? Is your culture one that encourages people to constantly be learning, testing, and growing? Because if your culture isn’t pushing your brand in the direction you want it to go, start making changes now.
97th Floor has come a long way since 2012, when lunch schedules seemed like an issue worth addressing. Now, our major concern is providing the best service to our clients. As long as we're accomplishing that task, the hours don't actually matter. After all, culture is what will carry your company into the future, but only if you step back and let it.
Give your employees a culture that supports and strengthens them, and they'll give your brand a future worth working for.
At 97th Floor, we’re committed to building a culture of caring. From volunteering at local community centers to the #20helps campaign, part of our award-winning organizational culture is focused on supporting local communities.
Started in 2015, a new charity initiative began at 97th Floor with the goal of donating 1% of our gross revenue to charity. Each December, employees have the opportunity to select a charity of their choice and 97th Floor will donate a portion of the 1% to that specific charity.
“I'm very fond of our charity program as it involves all of our employees,” CEO Chris Bennett explains. “I think a lot of people don't give or do as much as they'd like because they don't know where to donate or sadly, if they can trust the charity. Our program solves that for our employees.”
Since its inception, 97th Floor has donated over $100,000. Ranging from local charities to national nonprofit organizations, here’s where we’ve donated to over the course of two years:
Furthermore, these charities are near and dear to 97th Floor employees, who also had the opportunity to explain why they selected a specific charity to donate to. Here are some of their responses:
“I’m extremely passionate about Arctic Rescue and what they do to save the lives of these amazing dogs. Maren, the founder has dedicated the last 20 years to saving these neglected, abused and abandoned dogs and finding them loving forever homes.”
“I was impressed by the stories I read from the people that were on the receiving end of charity: water. To the charity, it’s not just about making sure that people have water, but about building the future of individuals and communities all over the world.”
“I have worked with JDRF several times in the past, and everything I have seen has spoken very well of them. They use their funds on research to search for, not only a cure, but also treatments and products to improve quality-of-life for those with Type 1 Diabetes.”
“I have been fortunate enough to have the best opportunities and have a family that could provide me with all the basic needs and more growing up. There are many people in the world that are not fortunate enough. So I chose World Vision because it helps underprivileged people from different countries that can’t even get basic medical needs.”
Through this charity program, 97th Floor has inspire its employees to look for ways to give back to the community as well as share with each other why this charity is important to them. As Bennett reflects, “It's one of the best days of my year to login to our Google Spreadsheet and see all the charities being added by our employees and reading their stories as to why they chose that charity.”
Keyword research is at the heart of all the work we do at 97th Floor. In this webinar Director of Marketing Operations Paxton Gray shares advanced keyword research techniques that provide the ground work for solid strategies that garner results, whether for high volume brand awareness or specific product conversions. Whether novice or a pro, you're sure to glean some remarkable and actionable insights.
Get the free downloadable Advanced Keyword Research Template below!
What You'll Find in this Webinar:
[1:28] Who we are
[1:33] Who we work with
[1:41] What we do
[2:10] What is a keyword? 15% of Google search has never been searched, everyday.
[2:45] The Search Demand Curve: Fat Head, Chunky Middle and Long Tail Keywords
[4:15] Google's #1 objective
[4:35] Google Micro-Moments: The consumer journey and you
[5:08] Advanced Keyword Research: What it is, What it's not
[6:07] Think strategy, not specifics.
[6:45] All about expert Paxton Gray
[8:40] Benefits of keyword research
[10:01] Keyword Research: Step 1 "Find Keywords"
[11:20] Keyword Research: Step 2 "Gather Data" and Pillars of Keyword Research Data
[13:23] Tools for pulling data (free and paid)
[15:21] Keyword Research: Step 3 "Analyze Data"
[16:01] Keyword Research: Step 4 "Group by Intent"
[17:00] DEMO and template overview
[36:00] Q&A
[47:00] Next Webinar "How to Get the Most Out of Google Analytics"
[48:24] Questions, comments, concerns? Hit us up at up@97thfloor.com.
Here at 97th Floor, elevating brands we believe in is part of our culture. In light of this, I thought it would be fun to analyze the digital marketing of a brand whose product I like and am very familiar with and really enjoy. That brand is YNAB.
What Is YNAB?
YNAB stands for You Need a Budget and when answering the question, "what is YNAB?", it's important to understand what YNAB does. It is a computer program used for budgeting and tracking expenses. The software takes a different approach from tools like Mint, which focus on pulling all of your bank accounts and credit/debit card transactions into one place where you can categorize and review transactions after they happen. This reactive approach works for many people and was actually my tool of choice before I discovered YNAB.
YNAB takes an opposite, more proactive approach to finances. By educating users on how to properly plan where each dollar will go, while also providing the technology to track spending, YNAB puts people in charge of their finances. A couple of years ago, a colleague mentioned it to me in a conversation and I’ve used it ever since. It is incredible for keeping track of spending and overall being on top of your finances.
But this isn’t an advertisement. If you want to know more about the program, YNAB has an excellent intro to the finer details here. For now, I’d like to take a step back from what YNAB can do, and instead focus on the digital marketing side of things.
For a while, I’ve wanted to dig into YNAB’s online marketing efforts to see what gems I could offer them as a “here’s to YNAB” type toast. As I dug deeper, I realized that YNAB has done an incredible job in building a devout YNAB community online. It is a difficult task to create a cult-like following (which I mean in the most positive sense) around your product. YNAB has created thousands of YNAB ambassadors by leveraging communities on Reddit, Facebook, and other social media sites, and through effective email campaigns.
But while YNAB is doing great things in the community building space, I want to shift the focus to what they could be doing with organic digital marketing to reach even more people and add another channel to fuel their community. For this post, the focus will largely be on SEO-related potential.
To begin, let's take a look at where YNAB is at organically. YNAB ranks for 6,069 keywords in the top 50 results as per Ahrefs. Again, one thing that is immediately apparent is how great of a brand YNAB has built (I’ll probably echo this many times throughout the post). Its brand search for the keyword “YNAB” generates around 130,000 monthly searches alone. Add the rest of its branded keywords and you have a very substantial amount of branded organic traffic.
YNAB also ranks for many non-branded keywords, albeit not nearly as well. There are many opportunities to push up these peripheral keywords so that they bring in significantly more search volume. We’ll get into this in greater detail further down in the analysis.
Part of YNAB’s building such a strong brand is due to leveraging the passionate following that surrounds the online financial niche. Some of the biggest communities on Reddit, like r/financialindependence, are related to finances, such as the following:
Reddit.com/r/personalfinance - 10,235,956 subscribers
Reddit.com/r/frugal - 628,703 subscribers
Reddit.com/r/financialindependence - 183,573 subscribers
The YNAB online community has done an excellent job siphoning traffic from these various subreddits into their own YNAB Reddit community (Reddit.com/r/ynab). The YNAB Reddit community, or subreddit, has over 30k subscribers. Many subreddits are created and die before they ever get enough users to sustain growth—the Reddit.com/r/budgetfirst/ subreddit, which was created by a group of YNAB Reddit users after YNAB switched to a subscription-based model, is one such example.
Despite the challenge of creating a sustainable reddit community, YNAB has managed to create a community that not only wants to be more involved in the YNAB ecosystem, but also help others in their pursuit to financial freedom. Gotta say, 30k hungry brand ambassadors is never a bad thing to have.
Ahrefs indicates that YNAB is increasing in referring domains quite healthily. The data below raises the question: where is YNAB getting their links from?
One thing I found right away, is that YNAB has some great links on what I like to call “feeder sites.” “Feeder sites” are sites that have content that is syndicated by many other large publications. Finding valuable feeder sites can be immensely powerful for SEO due to the amount and the quality of links that can be obtained.
Below is an example of what this feeder process looks like that YNAB has benefitted from.
An article was placed on the Reader’s Digest’s site, RD.com, entitled “34 Little Life Skills Everyone Needs to Be a Grown-Up.” RD.com is a feeder site to MSN.com as well as a handful of smaller sites. You can see that MSN.com syndicated the same article here. This means that for the effort of creating one very high-quality post, you can net a handful of links, sometimes from some large publications. This can be immensely powerful, and can lead to great jumps in increased rankings,
In the last few months, YNAB has received links like these:
And this is honestly only naming a few of the total links built recently.
YNAB is in a great position. It has the benefit of being able to target money-management communities with its methodology while at the same time targeting sites that focus on cell phone apps. This widens the targetable audience for the amount of websites YNAB can get links from. More links equal more authority, and when properly used, convert into better rankings and more traffic.
YNAB gets numerous mentions on both large and small publications. It is in the great position of garnering many mentions through its thousands of devoted fans. Typically, sites struggle with gaining more authority, therefore, they need a lot of high quality and well-targeted link building.
One note, however, is that many of the specific blog posts on YNAB’s site don’t get as much link love as the core YNAB pages (homepage, feature page, etc.). YNAB would benefit from additional links to their established blog posts, as well as to new posts as they are published. With the right content paired with YNAB’s community, this kind of link building should be cake.
YNAB has opportunities to generate much more organic traffic through their currently ranking pages. In order to diagnose how many opportunities there are, I pulled all ranking keywords (positions 1–50) from Ahrefs. Second, we needed to segment the data in order to see rankings in specific ranking buckets. I segmented rankings by keywords in the top 3 positions, positions 4–5, positions 6–10, page 2, position 21–50, and page 3+ rankings. I did this for every URL on the site in order to gain an understanding of each page and its rankings. The results looked something like this:
From a glance at the spreadsheet above, you can see a particular URL and what keyword positions that it ranks for. This makes it easy to determine which URLs simply need a bump in optimization and authority in order to generate traffic increases. This also allows you to forecast how big the traffic increases will be.
Let’s go through an example of how this data can enable us to take traffic-increasing action.
We see in the above screenshot that the blog post “How to Pay off $26k of Debt in 18 Months on a $35k per Year Income” ranks for 4 keywords in the top 1–3 ranking positions and 9 keywords in positions 4–5. The keywords in positions 4–5 represent around 520 monthly searches. This is what we see on the keyword level.
Looking at the average difficulty of these keywords, as well as taking into account that this post ranks as it does with not many links, YNAB could bump these 9 keywords up into the top 3 with only a handful of inbound links. This would increase the traffic of this page to somewhere between 100–150% with minimal effort. Sure, this is merely a couple hundred visits extra, but considering the minimal effort it would take, it would be worth it. Furthermore, you can see how this strategy can scale across the entire site. YNAB could increase overall traffic to the site by a large margin simply by taking advantage of this strategy applied too many of their blog posts.
The Google Featured Snippets box can be incredibly powerful to leverage. I want to show you how YNAB could leverage it to rank in a position essentially above position #1 (sometimes referred to as position #0). For context, the Google Featured Snippets box was debuted in Sept 2014, and was created as a vehicle for putting relevant answers in user’s hands much more quickly. For example, if you search “how to budget and save money” in Google, you will see something like this (highlights in red are mine):
You can see in the above screenshot that bettermoneyhabits.bankofamerica.com occupies the #0 position in Google’s featured snippet. This gives bankofamerica.com a strong advantage over americasaves.org in positions #1 and #2. Not only does bankofamerica.com have an augmented snippet, it also rank above position #1. This position can generate much more traffic than position #1.
Another value in ranking in the Google Featured Snippets box is that you can circumvent the climb to the top and be picked for a top page ranking, even if your site technically occupies a different rank land somewhere else on page 1. A detailed post on the specifics of how to do this can be found here.
YNAB already ranks on the first page for a handful of keywords that have the Featured Snippets box, but someone else shows up for the Featured Snippet. Because YNAB already ranks on the first page, it could implement some on-page changes and increase its chances of stealing the coveted Featured Snippets position. This would drastically increase the traffic YNAB receives from currently ranking keywords. For example, YNAB ranks in the 10th position for “how to pay off debt." This keyword generates around 5,400 searches per month. At the 10th position, YNAB doesn’t pull in that many of the 5,400 searches. However, if YNAB ranked in position #0, it would pull in a large percentage of that traffic.
Here are some of the keywords that have Featured Snippets YNAB could steal:
The process of optimize live posts is fairly simple, although it takes diligence. Cole Rieben, one of our Campaign Managers here at 97th, has a great post on what changes can be made in order to boost a site into the Featured Snippet spot (found here).
Without a doubt, creating new, high-quality, keyword-targeted content is one of the most rewarding actions YNAB could take. Content should be created for the user first, but in order for it to be valuable, it must also be findable. SEO done well is the perfect marriage between solid content and the ability to have that content found when users are asking questions. Keyword research can further help you understand exactly what kind of content people are looking for. It is an insight into their needs. Think about it, these people are asking questions already, we just need to meet their question with the best answer.
YNAB has created a lot of content. Most of it is fairly short and doesn’t rank for a ton of keywords. In addition, there are so many budgeting-related questions being asked daily. If YNAB can answer these questions with their grade-A philosophy and budgeting tool, it would be a huge win-win. Users get the answers they need, and YNAB grows.
To analyze what the market looks like in terms of budget/finance related keywords, I pulled a lot of data—like, over 111,000 unique keywords worth of data.
After researching the keyword level data, we needed to organize it to make it useful. The goal in leveraging all of this data is to understand a few things.
The first is keyword groupings of well-ranking URLs in the finance space. These URLs are from many other finance related sites. The data allow us to understand what keyword groups Google ranks these pages for. Secondly, I want to understand what it took for these sites to rank well
97th Floor was recently ranked on Entrepreneur's Top Company Cultures list, a comprehensive ranking of U.S.-based businesses exhibiting high-performance cultures created in partnership with culture management software and service provider CultureIQ®. The Top Company Cultures list has placed 97th Floor as the 26th in the Small Company category. 97th Floor is recognized for creating an exceptional culture that drives employee engagement, exceeds employee expectations and directly impacts company success.
CEO Chris Bennett says, “Company culture is our top priority and we find investing in our employees is the best application of our resources. Strong culture not only attracts the best candidates but encourages and entices the best work.”
"Great company cultures don’t happen on their own. They’re the result of great leadership, and a conscious effort to make everyone on a team feel engaged and important,” says Jason Feifer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur. “The honorees on our 2017 list are proof that strong cultures make even stronger companies. Entrepreneurs at all levels can draw inspiration from them.”
The full list, presenting a total of 153 companies categorized as small, medium-sized or large companies—with 25-49 employees, 50-99 employees and more than 100 employees respectively— is available on Entrepreneur.com. Core insights, behaviors and attributes that have helped to shape the high-performing cultures presented by the top companies are shared alongside practices to help other companies develop their own workplace environments.
"A high-performance culture leads not only to employee engagement but also to measurable business results," says Greg Besner, founder and CEO of CultureIQ. “These organizations show us that great companies start with great culture.”
The rankings for all companies were determined using CultureIQ's methodology for measuring high-performance cultures. Employees at each company received a survey of multiple-choice questions and the answers were used to assess a company's strength across 10 core components of culture–collaboration, innovation and communication to name a few. The companies with the highest scores became the Top Company Culture list in ranking order. To be considered for the ranking, a company must have at least 25 employees, have been founded before Jan. 1, 2015 and be headquartered in the U.S.
To view 97th Floor in the full ranking, visit entm.ag/TopCultures
97th Floor was announced in the 2016 fastest growing company in Utah by MountainWest Capital Network (MWCN) (www.mwcn.org) at the 22nd annual Utah 100 Awards Program Tuesday. The annual program recognizes the 100 fastest growing Utah companies, the Top Revenue Growth companies, and the “Emerging Elite” companies.
The 100 fastest growing companies in Utah are selected from thousands of eligible applicants throughout the state and represent a cross-section from all industries.
“It is clear Utah is one of the hottest places in the country to start or run a business,” said Paul Skeen, chairman of the MWCN Utah 100 committee. “As a strong indicator, we had a record number of Utah companies vying for the 100 fastest growing companies in Utah along with about a 400 percent increase in the number of Emerging Elite nominations. It is a pleasure to recognize this year’s Emerging Elite companies along with the Utah 100 fastest growing companies.”
The percentage of revenue increase of each company between 2011 and 2015 determines the Utah 100. Those companies with the largest dollar amount of revenue growth in 2015 make up the Revenue Growth winners. The Emerging Elite are selected from among companies with less than five, but more than two years of operation that show significant promise for future success.
About MountainWest Capital Network
MountainWest Capital Network is Utah’s first and largest business networking organization devoted to supporting entrepreneurial success, and dedicated to the flow of financial, entrepreneurial and intellectual capital. For more information, visit www.mwcn.org, LIKE us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @MWCN and LinkedIn.
From Quick Answers to the People Also Ask section, featured snippets have been at the top of numerous result pages and top of mind for many digital marketers and online businesses. First position in Google search is no longer adequate, especially when almost any competitor on the first page could qualify and leap multiple positions to snag the prime real estate above the first organic result. The result pages that have featured snippets tend to have two important elements, an entity and an attribute related to that entity. Here is a diagram Google used to explain the concept in their patent for Inferring attributes from search queries:
While these results are not new, there are still tons of opportunity to be had. For starters, they’re being rolled out to more international SERPs as time goes on. There are still plenty of US queries for which Google will eventually display a featured snippet. Below are the findings of three consecutive studies performed by Stone Temple Consulting whose data from 855k test queries support the assumption that there is still more growth to be had.
Is Optimizing for a Featured Snippet Worth the Time and Effort?
Before you go any further, and before I get into optimizations and prerequisites for showing up in a featured snippet, you should weigh the potential gains from your efforts. For some markets there aren’t currently any featured snippets present. Don’t forget that Google is still rolling this out to new areas and for more terms. So I would still encourage research and optimizing pages that rank high for potential featured positions. The payoff may not be immediate though.
In most cases where the opportunity currently exists, tests have shown an unexpected increase in click throughs. The assumption is that having a featured snippet on the result page for a query would reduce the clicks to the first position url and subsequent urls. Matthew Barby’s sample of Hubspot urls showed the opposite with an improved amount of click throughs to result #1 that followed the featured snippet. His analysis showed that the urls that displayed in a featured snippet saw a higher click-through-rate than ones that only displayed in regular first page results.
Where to Optimize
I would first start by digging through Google result pages where your site ranks #1. If there are featured snippets on any of those result pages that aren’t pulling from your site then there is great opportunity for some upgrades to your page. If your site ranks for a large amount of queries in position #1 then focus first on the higher volume terms. While it is very possible to grab a featured snippet position if you aren’t ranking #1, there are two separate studies showing that about 30% of featured snippets pull from the #1 result. The graph below was pulled from a study run by Moz on 10k keywords.
The second study was run by Stat with 1 million competitive keywords. While they found a similar result that about 30% of featured snippet results pulled from the #1 ranking page, they do call out that 70% of featured snippets came from results other than the first organic position. Even more interestingly, they found that a small percentage of queries sourced their featured snippet from positions beyond #10. I would recommend downloading their whitepaper that explains their findings from analyzing 1 million high-CPC terms.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers illustrates this nicely as he proved this to work for Moz and the question phrase “What is page authority?.” Another site lept over Moz’s #1 result for the term to capture the featured snippet position.
The Moz team noticed that Drumbeat Marketing did a great job of directly and promptly defining page authority and answering the question. Moz promptly upgraded their copy with the question in the header, and to read as follows:
Not long after, they captured the prized featured snippet display for that query while maintaining rank in the first position.
The next area of focus should be on any other keywords your site ranks for on the first page. You could waste a lot of time researching all the keywords you could potentially rank for but your time is most wisely spent on first page positions based on the data from industry tests.
How to Optimize
Now that you know which pages need your attention you can determine which type of featured snippet to rank for. Is it a list? Is it a paragraph answer? Is it a table with information? Google very plainly communicates in their explanation of featured snippets that page markup won’t be a factor in qualifying for these positions.
Where does the answer summary come from?
The summary is a snippet extracted programmatically from a webpage. What's different with a featured snippet is that it is enhanced to draw user attention on the results page. When we recognize that a query asks a question, we programmatically detect pages that answer the user's question, and display a snippet as a featured snippet in the search results.
How can I mark my page as a featured snippet?
You can't. Google programmatically determines that a page contains a likely answer to the user's question, and displays the result as a featured snippet.
So the best thing you can do is upgrade your content to fit the query's featured snippet. In Stat’s research they discovered that paragraph answers are the most common type of featured snippet and displayed that way for more than 80% of the million terms they tracked.
Optimize for Paragraphs
The paragraph featured snippet displays pages that have answer oriented copy as well as the question in a header. Google will only pull a few sentences, so make your answers brief but directed at the searcher. In most cases Google will pull the copy from text they deem most valuable to the user. As such, I have run into an interesting scenario where Google actually selected partial information from a list and displayed it in paragraph form. Below is the result page for “home protection plan”. You will notice that the answer is displayed in a paragraph form, but the page it pulls from actually has it listed out.
The same approach should be considered for the People Also Ask section. Once research is done on related questions, follow the same pattern of addressing the question and exclusively answering it below the header. In most cases you will be building out questions and answers on your landing page and not a designated FAQ page.
Optimize for Lists
The featured snippet that displays a list is one of the more recognizable types and usually occupies more real estate on a result page than paragraph answers. These types of answers tend to show up for how-to’s, cost breakdowns, as well as numbered and bulleted lists of all kinds. To rank for this type of featured snippet you may want to adjust some copy to introduce a list. Do your best to use the term or phrase in the heading of the list. It is important that it stays relevant and increases the value of the page. Another thing to keep in mind, especially if you win these positions, is that you leave the user wanting a little more. Give them a reason to go to your page. Recipes can be a great chance to do this as each step usually involves more details that can’t fit.
Stat’s research also found the use of <ol> tags on pages are 41.6% more common in featured snippets than in regular results. They saw the use of <table> tags nearly 22% more common in featured areas than in regular results. This brings me to the next type of featured snippet.
Optimizing for Tables
Optimizing for tables really comes down to displaying data or information that may already exist on your page a little differently. If you currently have a list on that page but there is an opportunity to grab a table snippet then find a way to compare the list to another list or just display multiple attributes at once. As mentioned above, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that you are using <table> tags on your pages.
The most important area to focus on for optimizing your chances of being featured is your on page copy. Backlinks and other external factors for ranking become less important the closer your page is to the first position. Remember that before you optimize any pages you will need to research the Google result pages for keywords you rank for on the first page. The benefits of more clicks are definitely there, and you can always do more to direct the user to your page with enticing copy. This is definitely an area of optimization that you will want to return too often as Google expands to new markets and includes featured snippets in more result pages.
It’s been a good year for us at 97th Floor. Between being named to Inc. magazine “50 Best Placed to Work in 2016,”, a nod to our focus on employee engagement and culture, and today being announced on Inc. magazine’s 35th annual Inc. 5000, the most prestigious ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies, we’re feeling fine.
And why shouldn’t we be? After all, companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Domino’s Pizza, Pandora, Timberland, LinkedIn, Yelp, Zillow, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees of the Inc. 5000.
The 2016 Inc. 5000—unveiled online at Inc.com and with the top 500 companies featured in the September issue of Inc. (available on newsstands August 23)—is the most competitive crop in the list’s history. The average company on the list achieved a mind-boggling three-year growth of 433%.
Our’s was 218% and we rank 1706 in the overall lineup of privately-held companies.
The Inc. 5000’s aggregate revenue is $200 billion, and the companies on the list collectively generated 640,000 jobs over the past three years, or about 8% of all jobs created in the entire economy during that period. Companies are ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2012 to 2015. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2012. They had to be US-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2015. The minimum revenue required for 2012 is $100,000; the minimum for 2015 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons.
"The Inc. 5000 list stands out where it really counts,” says Inc. President and Editor-In-Chief Eric Schurenberg. “It honors real achievement by a founder or a team of them. No one makes the Inc. 5000 without building something great—usually from scratch. That’s one of the hardest things to do in business, as every company founder knows. But without it, free enterprise fails.”View the complete Inc. 5000 list here.
"I always felt strongly that by building a company that focused on the work—both as it relates to the client and to team work—that the rest would take care of itself. Being recognized as an Inc. “50 Best Places to Work,” while making the Inc. 5,000 fastest growing list in the same year is great proof of that,” said Founder and CEO Chris Bennett.
97th Floor was certified as a great workplace by the independent analysts at Great Place to Work®. 97th Floor earned this credential based on extensive ratings provided by its employees in anonymous surveys. A summary of these ratings can be found at http://reviews.greatplacetowork.com/97th-floor.
Great Place to Work® is the global authority on high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Through proprietary assessment tools, advisory services, and certification programs, including Best Workplaces lists and workplace reviews, Great Place to Work® provides the benchmarks, framework, and expertise needed to create, sustain, and recognize outstanding workplace cultures. In the United States, Great Place to Work® produces the annual Fortune "100 Best Companies to Work For®" list and a series of Great Place to Work® Best Workplaces lists including lists for Millennials, Women, Diversity, Small and Medium Companies and over a half dozen different industry lists.
"We applaud 97th Floor for seeking certification and releasing its employees' feedback," said Kim Peters, Vice President of Great Place to Work's Recognition Program. "These ratings measure its capacity to earn its own employees' trust and create a great workplace - critical metrics that anyone considering working for or doing business with 97th Floor should take into account as an indicator of high performance."
“According to our study, 100 percent of 97th Floor employees say it is a great workplace,” says Sarah Lewis-Kulin, Great Place to Work's Senior Editor.
97th Floor employees completed 35 surveys, resulting in a 90 percent confidence level and a margin of error of ± 4.51.
Employees at 97th Floor had a fun afternoon trading in our spreadsheets and computer screens for parachutes and soccer games. With the help of United Way, 97th Floor was provided with the opportunity to volunteer at the South Franklin Community Center, just 20 minutes south of our Lehi location. JuliAnne Tanner, Major Gifts Specialist at United Way, says that “the SFCC serves an at-risk population. Each family in the area presents a unique set of challenges. Volunteers really are making a difference in these kids’ lives by establishing educational priorities, developing healthy habits, and building a stronger sense of community attachment, all of which lead to better life decisions.”
From the moment we walked into the South Franklin Community Center, the children were eager to play. We headed outside where we taught the kids a few new games. In return, the kids taught us a thing or two about how to properly launch plastic balls from a parachute, and how to quickly slide through a hula hoop. By the end of the afternoon we all left with a few new friends.
I love SFCC’s mission to serve both children and families in the area. This program gives the children in this at-risk population the chance to meet and interact with other community members. Paxton Gray, Director of Marketing Operations at 97th Floor, said of our time volunteering, “[It] is important not only because it helps others in our community, but also because it simultaneously connects us with people outside our normal circles. Connecting one-on-one with others is essential for a strong sense of belonging on both sides and is the backbone for a supportive and charitable community.” It supports the child, which supports the family, which then supports the whole community. 97th Floor came to mentor these kids, but we left equally served from the children’s reminder of the happiness and joy that can be found in life.
L-R: Josh Moody, Christopher Fosse, Joe Robledo, Samantha Brown, Maggie CallLead Enterprise Digital Marketer and Director of Research and Development Josh Moody recently received a "Marketer of the Year" Stevie from The American Business Awards. Additionally, his team won accolades in the category for "Marketing Team of the Year" at the NYC broadcast show. The award-winning team is comprised of marketers Joe Robledo, Kade Call, Samantha Brown, writer Christopher Fosse and designer Maggie Call.
"I really do think they're the best at what they do. One thing that I like is they’re always pushing forward, they’re always pushing to be innovative in every single sphere of work."
Earlier this month 97th Floor was also announced as Inc.’s The 50 Best Places to Work in 2016, where over 500 companies were judged in three categories, including how well companies look after their staff’s financial security (retirement, insurance, benefits, PTO), employee feedback and performance innovation.
