Oct 08

Use RevaHealth.com Maps On Your Website

By David Roe Health 2.0, Web/Tech 3 Comments »

Today we’ve made our maps of clinics in the UK and Ireland freely available for use on your own website. You can easily include a snippet of code on your pages to show a map of the dentists, doctors or other health clinics in your locality.

For instance, here is the snippet of code to show a map of general practice doctors in Brighton.

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

document.write("<iframe src='http://www.revahealth.com/doctors/uk/east-sussex/brighton/externalmap' width='600' height='500' frameborder='0'></iframe>");

document.write("<span>Data provided by <a title='RevaHealth.com' href='http://www.revahealth.com'>RevaHealth.com</a><span>");

</script>

And here is how the map would appear on your page.

The map pins show the locations of the clinics. The prices shown are for a standard doctor consultation in the practice. You can pan around and zoom in and out to see more detail about the location of each practice, and click on each pin to see more practice information.

Using the maps on your own website is completely free and easy to do. You just need to add a small snippet of code to your page which pulls in the map and data from the RevaHealth.com server. You don’t need to be a programmer at all; anyone who can edit their own web page can do it easily.

The snippet can easily be changed to show any of the different kinds of clinics in the thousands of locations in Ireland and the UK which are covered in the RevaHealth database. You can contact us at the address below to see what types of clinics are available. For example, you could show Laser eye clinics in Stratford, Dental Clinics in Prestwick or GPs in Cork.

To do it yourself, just search for the URL of any set of clinics on RevaHealth.com as normal, and when you find the list you want, add /externalmap to the end and replace the URL in the example snippet above with the URL of your choice. Hey presto!

The clinic data is constantly being refreshed and updated by the team at RevaHealth.com and users can look up phone numbers or contact the clinics on-line.

The API is free to use, although we do ask you to show the source of the data beside the map on your site with a link to RevaHealth.com. The code snippet above includes the link:

Data provided by RevaHealth.com

which you can change if needs be. If you are interested in putting these maps on your site or have any further enquiries, please contact us at support@revahealth.com.

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Oct 05

Our Definition of Search Engine Optimization

By Caelen King Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech 10 Comments »

I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently that seem to think that Search Engine Optimization is bullshit. There seems to be a rising opinion that it is all snake oil and if people just ignored the search engines then the world would be a better place.  This is not true.

The whole reason why search engines work as well as they do is because of the huge amount of effort that publishers put into SEO daily. That’s right – without SEO the search engines wouldn’t work.

Why?

Well, what a search engine tries to do is understand the meaning of a page and subsequently display it in the search results when someone types in a query that indicates that they are looking for that content. This is phenomenally difficult to do; even with the best brains on the planet it is currently impossible.

The reason for this is that machine learning isn’t nearly advanced enough to be able to understand at the levels that humans are able to understand.

So the search engines rely on publishers to shape their content so that they can better understand its meaning. Back when the search engines where pretty unsophisticated this literally involved telling the search engine using the meta keywords and meta description tags.

As the search engines and spammers have become more advanced the means of conveying meaning to the search engines has become less overt, but no less important.

RevaHealth.com definition of Search Engine Optimization:

SEO is the science of narrowing the gap between the search engines’ understanding of a page and a human’s understanding.

You will notice from the above definition that this doesn’t include link building. That’s because we regard link building as PR. Just as old school PR was about getting your company correctly positioned in newspapers and on radio, new school PR is the same thing online.

So what can happen if you build a website that solely targets users and not search engines?

The following examples are completely legitimate ways of constructing your website that will have no negative effects on your end users, but will completely ruin your chances of being distributed through the search engines.

Let’s say you are building a listing site similar to RevaHealth.com

  1. You use parameters instead of hard URLs.  If you construct your parameters without thinking about SEO  you can easily create a website that the search engines simply won’t index.
  2. You use JavaScript to dynamically call in the content similar to Kayak. This can provide a very useful end user feature. However, if coded without reference to SEO it will result in the content not being indexed.
  3. You use a template for each page that results in the search engines thinking that each page is a duplicate of another page.
  4. You include useful additional information for the user (for example from Wikipedia) that is not original.   At best this will result in the search engine marking down your pages and at worst they might list you as a spam site and exclude your entire site from the index.
  5. You have a infinite number of combinations of search results available resulting the search engine giving up before they have crawled all of the relevant content

In Summary

Search engines are the number one means of distributing your content. If you develop a website without considering the SEO implications of your decisions, you are effectively giving the search engines two fingers. Don’t be surprised if they give you two fingers straight back.

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Sep 28

Meta Keywords and Google

By Philip Boyle Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech No Comments »

We often get asked about our experiences with SEO, usually about what worked for us and what didn’t. Keywords are a topic that come up again and again. The video above comes from Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, and it neatly summarises the fact that when it comes to Google’s main search product, meta keywords are completely ignored.

That should be the end of that then. But it isn’t.

A lot of people seem to get mixed up between keywords and meta keywords, thinking they are exactly the same thing, so the video above might be taken by some people to mean that ALL keywords are ignored by Google. That just isn’t the case.

The word “keywords” can mean many things interchangeably, but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s  refer to a set of keywords as the most important words, phrases or acronyms that your potential visitors will use to find a particular page of content on your site.

For these potential visitors to find your page, the keywords they use, or their synonyms or related keywords will have to appear on or pointing to the page somewhere. These keywords can  appear in:

  • the body text of your page
  • the URL of the page, including the domain name
  • the page title of the page
  • the meta description of the page
  • the H1 tag on the page
  • the alt text of images on the page
  • the links to the page

And that’s just off the top of my head. They can also still appear in your meta keywords, even if Google currently chooses to ignore them THERE.

You should still be doing your keyword research for each page (or set of pages) and using those keywords you identify as being the most important in the page elements listed in the paragraph above. Google even offer some good free tools to help you find out what keywords to use. I’d recommend Google’s Search Insights, Google Analytics, their free AdWords Keyword Tool, and even Google Trends. Add your own favourite keyword research tools in the comments below.

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Sep 22

Video of Caelen at BizCamp 2009

By Philip Boyle Conferences 3 Comments »

Here’s the first ten minutes of Caelen’s talk at BizCamp 2009 in the Guinness Storehouse last weekend, covering the 4 main points you need to think about when starting a web business:

  1. Who will pay?
  2. How much will they pay?
  3. How will they pay?
  4. Can you reconcile revenue to costs?

Elsewhere on the blog you can find the full set of slides for Caelen’s web revenue models presentation. He has also written up the first half of his presentation.

Personally, it was great to hear a lot of people feeling very positive about their businesses, from the brand new start-ups like Cloudsplit (Real time analytics for the cloud) to the better established companies like Realex Payments, and it was good to meet up with some friendly networking faces again – hi to @LeoFogarty, @CareersCoachEU, @UnaColeman, and @redoaktaxrefund.

Big thanks to the whole team of volunteers for organising the day in the first place and hopefully you all got as much value out of it as myself and Caelen did.

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Sep 21

Using Wikipedia Content to Combat Duplicate Content

By Marta Sawicka Stuff we've learned, Web/Tech 4 Comments »

We publish a lot of web pages on RevaHealth.com, tens of millions of them in fact. One of the SEO problems we run into because of this is that a lot of them are very similar to other pages on the site. For example our page for cosmetic surgeons in London is extremely similar to our page for cosmetic surgeons in the EC district of London. This results in the search engines sometimes thinking that we are publishing duplicate pages, even though the pages are perfectly valid and are distinct pages from a newly landed user’s perspective.

The SEO problem with duplicate pages is that Google doesn’t want to clog up its index with a whole bunch of duplicate content, so it tries to cull the duplicate content from its index. In our case it only includes cosmetic surgeons in London in its search results.

In the past we included machine generated text on each page, in an effort to describe on the page in a way people could easily understand what the content was without having to write tens of millions of descriptions by hand. However, because this particular block of text was quite similar from page to page, it hindered us rather than helped us in relation to duplicate content. So we set about trying to find a way to increase the originality of each page.

On a side note, it is possible for you to take control over your own duplicate content and to tell the search engines which page is the original or most important version of a page rather than letting them make that decision for you. You can use either canonical URLs or 301 redirects, something we’ll discuss in another blog post. For now, this is something that we do already, but as the pages are actually valid, non-duplicate pages for our visitors, we think that this shouldn’t be necessary.

So, going back to looking at how to increase the originality of the content on our pages, we took our search results for Dentists in Mexico as our test bed. For 50% of the locations in Mexico we added 2-3 paragraphs of location descriptions taken from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has relevant content that can be re-used on other sites thanks to the GNU Free Documentation License. The link to the original source of the text was included underneath.

We were hoping that syndicating content from Wikipedia could alleviate the duplicate content issue along with giving our visitors a better experience. We let the test run for three months.

The Results

Although our results shouldn’t be regarded as complete, we found that the inclusion of Wikipedia content on our search results pages had no effect on whether the page was included in the main Google index.

However, we also found that all pages with Wikipedia content that were already in the search results dropped by around 3 positions, while all control pages gained on average 2 positions!

Search engines want and reward original content. It is known that Google uses document similarity techniques to keep searchers from finding redundant content in search results. Our experiment left no doubt about it. I only wonder how will Google solve the problem in the current large scale web syndication era if it is possible to find 5 exactly the same articles on the top 5 sites in the results for many of Google searches, e.g.

http://www.google.com/#q=Get+Motivated+to+Create+New+AdSense+Content

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Sep 18

Business & Revenue Model Presentation for Bizcamp Dublin

By Caelen King Conferences, Start ups 10 Comments »

You can also check out this video of Caelen at BizCamp Dublin and his write up of the first half of his presentation on online business and revenue models.

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Sep 10

Performance Improvements by Caching Fewer Pages

By Caelen King Web/Tech No Comments »

The time it takes to render a landing page dramatically affects bounce rate. If it takes more than around 4 seconds for a visitor to start seeing your page they get bored and hit the back button.  We continually invest in engineering improvements to improve our page load times and constantly monitor key metrics, however as traffic patterns and server loads change, so do the rules of the game.

We have implemented nearly every performance enhancement possible and by far the most effective one for dynamic pages is page caching. What caching  does is store a copy of every page in the web server’s cache for a period of time. If someone requests the page during that period of time then the web server can serve it up immediately without having to make a request to the actual application.

For us this cuts a full second off of our page load time.  However, recently our page caching started becoming less effective and a greater percentage of landing pages where not in the cache, resulting in increased page load times and increased bounce rate.

The problem was that over the last six months the number of landing pages that the search engines were sending traffic to increased exponentially.  Every month Google sends visitors to over 100,000 different landing pages out of the 250,000 pages that it has indexed.

Caching 100,000 pages in itself is not problematic, however because we dynamically convert pricing on each landing page to the local currency of the visitor it meant we were in effect trying to cache a multiple of this number. At times this was as high as 60 different copies.

This caused our front cache to constantly flush the older pages resulting in decreased coverage of the landing pages.

We examined two possible solutions. The first one was adding more hardware.  This wasn’t a good idea because our problem was an exponential problem as both our landing page and countries that visitors were arriving from were increasing. We came to the realization that we had to stop caching a different page for each source country.

The problem was that we still wanted to have the performance improvements of page caching and to be able to localize into each visitor’s currency.

Our solution was to only cache a single master page for each landing page with the price in Euro. We then store the visitor’s currency and conversion rate in a cookie that we place in their browser. We use JavaScript in the browser to calculate and  display the currency.

This has allowed us to work with the boundaries of our existing hardware and implement a scaling strategy that has near linear requirements on hardware.

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Sep 04

Changes To Our Search Results To Improve Visitor Engagement

By Caelen King Web/Tech No Comments »
The old search page

The old search results

We deployed an updated version of the RevaHealth.com website last night that focused upon the usability of our main search pages. The goal of these changes is to make it easier for users to refine their search results and increase their engagement with the site.

We are closely monitoring the performance of this change and are expecting to see a noticeable increase in the number of pages viewed by the average visitor. We also expect to see a drop in our bounce rate, however we expect this to be slight. If the test succeeds the next goal will be to convert the increased engagement with the site into delivering value to both the visitor and the clinics featured on the site.

  1. We reduced the prominence of the search functionality. While the search boxes are still visible and constantly available we have discovered that the vast majority of our visitors are either interested in further refining their search or broadening it. It is rare that they want to jump into different categories or locations. Eye tracking analysis tells us that putting the search box on the right hand side of the page means that most visitors simply won’t notice it. This works as long as the page is relevant to the visitor, however some users will always land on the wrong page and having the search function available is still important.

  2. The new search results

    The new search results

    We logically grouped all of the search functionality into one cohesive unit by putting a white background behind it. Previously the search functionality comprised of three separate items that needed to be tied together into one function by the visitor. Now by strongly visually linking them we hope to have simplified this.

  3. We changed the filtering mechanism from tick boxes and radio buttons, replacing them with drop down lists. While we don’t feel the new interface is as elegant or visually appealing as the previous filtering, it is more standard and occupies less real estate. We expect that by adopting the more common practice of drop downs and not forcing our users into learning a relatively unique UI that we will increase the use of this feature. This will give the visitor better and more relevant search results.

  4. We increased the size of the title on the page and spaced it out more so that visitors who land on page for the first time can instantly see what the page is about.

  5. We added the number of clinics that are returned by a search. So instead of saying ‘All Dentists in XXXX’ we now say ‘All 212 Dentists in XXXX’

  6. We have added breadcrumbs into the header of the page for visitors that want to broaden their search criteria. We are not 100% sure about this feature and we expect to do further tests on their placement on the page.
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Sep 03

Why Do You Need an Online Enquiry Form?

By Caelen King Stuff we've learned No Comments »

Lots of clinics don’t have an online enquiry form on their website. After all why do you need an enquiry form when you can just put your phone number on your website? If someone wants more information they can just call you, can’t they? Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong.

In our guide to sales funnels for health clinics we include the online enquiry (form) as a distinct stage. It is a part of the process that brings consumers into the sales funnel proper, so it is not a step that you should consider trying to skip by leaving the form off your website. Here’s why:

  1. 24/7. Customers look at your website all the time; on the weekends and in the middle of the night. Will they get a good consumer experience by ringing you at this time? If all you have is an answering machine then the answer is no.  Most won’t bother to leave you a message, and you are relying on them to remember to call you again the next day, which they probably won’t. An online enquiry form is available 24/7, and it is easy to set up to meet your customers’ expectations (see moving prospective customers through the sales funnel).
  2. Phone calls can interrupt your normal daily business. An online enquiry form empowers you to use your staff resources as they are needed, and then to have them deal with the online enquiries when they are not so busy.
  3. The form allows you to weed out the time wasters. Many people who call the clinic aren’t really a potential patient at all. It might be that they can’t afford your services, or that they aren’t in your catchment area.  By using an online enquiry form you can weed these time wasters out and reply with a polite standard email rather than tying up your staff with another phone call.
  4. Be prepared. An online enquiry form gives you the time to prepare information for the specific query so that when you do actually talk to the patient you can meet their expectations by being able to talk directly to their concerns. A phone call does not give you this opportunity, and you can be forced to terminate the call in order to get further information. This does not give the consumer a good experience.
  5. Capture the patient’s information reliably. Everyone has had the experience of talking to a potential patient and taking down their contact information incorrectly, or maybe your computer is booting up and you write it on a scrap of paper only for the cleaner to put it in the bin. Now the patient expects you to call back and you never do – how likely do you think it is that they will call back? If they do, what sort of impression have you given of your clinic? Online enquiry forms can solve this problem.
  6. Some people don’t want to talk. Many potential patients who are early in the buying cycle are not prepared to talk on the phone and would rather remain at arm’s length for the time being. If you don’t have an online enquiry form then you are excluding them.

Hopefully you can now see some of the benefits in having a dedicated online enquiry form.

I’ll finish with one final piece of advice – even though we recommend strongly that you use an online enquiry form on your site, our own survey of consumers tells us that your phone number is also in the top five pieces of information that they are looking for on your site. Don’t forget to make it easy to find, in the header or footer of the page, and include it on your enquiry form too.

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Aug 26

The Myth of Medical Tourism – The Truth about the Globalisation of the Healthcare Market

By Caelen King Health 2.0 2 Comments »

There are no shortage of articles telling us about the scale and staggering growth of the ‘medical tourism market’. Deloitte has valued it at $60 billion, while a Research and Markets report estimates it at a lower, but still substantial, $40 billion. I have spent the last 3 years working in the field and after putting over 50,000 customers in contact with overseas healthcare providers, I have come to the conclusion that while there is a growing and vibrant international trade in healthcare services, it isn’t a market in the true sense of the word.

A market is defined as any structure where buyers and suppliers can exchange goods and services, in this instance, healthcare. Once you talk to a number of ’medical tourists’ it becomes abundantly clear that they don’t purchase their overseas healthcare from a ‘medical tourism marketplace’ at all. Instead they buy from a globalised healthcare market. In simple terms, when Annie Smith considers travelling to Thailand for a breast reduction procedure, she doesn’t compare Thailand’s cosmetic surgeons to other overseas cosmetic surgeons; she compares them to local practitioners. She doesn’t buy from the ‘medical tourism market’, she buys from the globalised healthcare market – she compares the price and quality offered by multiple clinics that carry out this procedure, both at home and abroad, and chooses her preferred option.

The fundamental mistake that analysts and pundits make is to assume that globalisation creates new markets – it does not. Globalisation combines many domestic markets into one larger market place. In the case of healthcare, the consumer is free to evaluate their options at a global marketplace and choose the clinic that meets their needs. While the location of the service provider might be a consideration for the consumer, or even a deciding factor, it does not change the fact that the services being consumed are available across multiple locations.

In some ways this globalisation of healthcare echoes that of other previously globalised markets. For example, parallels can be drawn between the healthcare industry and the automotive industry. When Carlos Ghosn became CEO of the Japanese Nissan company, he started purchasing car parts from factories in China and India. This decision was influenced by the price and quality offered, not by source location. In other ways the globalisation of healthcare is unique and some lessons will have to be learnt by trial and error, rather than by reference to historical market analysis.

One way in which healthcare is different to, for example, consumer product industries, is that the patient must be transported to the service. This has two major affects on medical tourism. Firstly, it makes it difficult for governments to apply trade barriers in the form of tariffs (effective trade barriers are already very much in place, in the form of subsidies or national insurance that apply only to domestic providers). Secondly, unlike intellectual property which can cross borders effortlessly, healthcare is not a frictionless product. The cost and time involved in travelling over large geographical distances presents a significant barrier to trade. This gives an inherent advantage to the local market. It is quality, availability of care, value for money and additional privacy that enable overseas clinics to overcome these barriers.

Healthcare suppliers who target overseas patients may regard themselves as constituting a ‘medical tourism marketplace’, but this is because they operate from a myopic, supplier-centric
view of the market. It is necessary to take a step back and view the market from the consumers’ perspective. After all it is they who define the market.

What this means for healthcare providers worldwide is that they must become aware of the options open to their patients, locally, nationally and internationally. Only then can consumers be expected to make educated decisions about their own healthcare.

Sources:
http://ryanfamily.typepad.com/files/us_chs_medicaltourismstudy28329.pdf
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c74425

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