Building your Medical Billing Company’s Brand – 5 things you can do
For Medical Billing companies to stay competitive, you need to manage your brand’s online presence and reputation. And no, it is not as expensive as you think. Unfortunately, most medical billing companies have invested little time and effort in building their online presence.
1. Build and Enhance your website
Your website is the first place to start when you start building the brand of your billing company. While most billing companies have a basic website in place, ongoing content addition requires discipline and the ability to combine content, technology, and design. Try and dedicate a few hours each week to enhancing your web presence. Here are a few tips to improve your website.
Tools to build your website
Use a website builder that you can understand easily. Tools such as WordPress, WiX, Squarespace, HubSpot, etc., provide excellent builders.
Ensure that your website has a fresh, modern look and is mobile friendly.
Write Engaging and Original Content
Talk about how your billing company combines people, process, and technology to deliver value to your physician clients.
Talk about your people. Remember that you are in the service industry and, therefore, who you are, your educational qualifications, and professional credentials matter.
Write about your values and mission about the billing industry. Share best practices and case Studies from your experience. Add Testimonials
Highlight all your services and niche services such as scheduling, credentialing, and more.
Blogs
Blogs are essential for many reasons. Merely listing your services on a website is not enough. Go beyond and develop content that improves your search engine performance and keeps your website fresh.
Design
Invest in professional photos of your people. Try and create a consistent brand image through colors and website design elements.
Pay for images from image libraries such as Deposit Photos.
Do more with videos.
Integrate access to your technology
Visitors to websites that have tools or have login access to software tend to be much higher than those without these features. If your practice management platform or your patient portals are on the cloud, ensure that you provide access to the same via your website. Each visit counts!
Market your site
Improve visitors to your website through social media marketing, referral sources, email marketing, and email signatures.
Provide forms to capture data about your visitors and respond to them as soon as possible.
You may consider investing in Google AdWords as well.
2. Measuring and Optimizing your Billing Company’s Website
Most of our billing company clients have not done an excellent job of optimizing their website. Here are a few tips:
Measure your website performance
Web technology is flush with jargon and metrics that profess to show you how your website performs. As a billing company owner, you have to be informed about the tools you use as each of these requires investments. We recommend that you use the following tools.
Alexa Page Rank. While there is no single tool that tells you how your website will perform for specific keywords, Alexa provides an estimate of your page rank. Good sites have a page rank of 500K or less. If your score is above 500K, it’s time to invest some money in improving the build of your website.
Search Console, Webmaster tools, Search Engine Optimization, and more blah... Perhaps the most powerful tools are the ones that are provided by the search engines themselves. Fortunately, most of these are free.
Google Search Console.
Submit your site to Google Search Console
Create a sitemap and submit it to the search engine. Most website builders come with an automated site map generator.
Search Engine Optimization
Get your basics right. Define all elements of your webpages clearly – Logo, Page Title, clear and unique meta description, Heading 1 for each page, and add social sharing images.
Add a favicon to the website.
Advanced users can create social media sharing images for specific channels by using OpenGraph codes.
Technical SEO. Most websites today do not utilize technical SEO, and therein lies your most significant opportunity. Technical SEO is a set of codes that define your organization, your social media channels, your products, job postings, blogs, and more to the web crawlers. We recommend that you use tools such as https://technicalseo.com/tools/schema-markup-generator/ for generating technical schemas.
Submit your site to other search engines such as Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, Baidu, etc., using their Webmaster tools
Google Rich Results. Test each of your pages on Google Rich Results tester. Rich results help you identify and enhance pages to get into Google’s rich and featured snippets.
Google Analytics. Monitor your traffic using Google Analytics.
Additional Tools. You can also subscribe to tools such as SEM Rush, SEO Profiler, and Alexa Paid Subscription.
3. How Billing Companies can utilize Social Media
Billing Companies can use social media to connect with clients and prospects. Please note that an integrated web and social ecosystem makes a website perform better than the others.
Integrated Web and Social ecosystem
Create an integrated digital and social ecosystem by:
Creating social sharing images for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Social Sharing images help
Marketing your social profiles by adding them to your email signatures and your website
Ensuring all your social profiles link back to your website
Ensure that all your posts lead back to your website
Improving your follower base
Here are a few tips to improve your follower base.
Post regularly
Improving your billing company’s follower base on social channels can be costly
Involve your staff in your social media marketing initiatives to help amplify the reach of your content
Post your content in groups as well
Engage with your followers by replying to comments and liking their posts
Invite your customers and prospects to follow your page
Integrate your business contact list with your mail contacts and link it to your company’s profile on social channels
4. Online Listings
As search becomes more localized, Google and other search providers are endeavouring to help businesses get better results from their local area through focused tools such as Google My Business. The Golden Rule for all online listings is to ensure that you manage all your online listings, and keep them up-to-date. Whether it is information about your office location, or your products or web pages, managed listings give you the control to update information as often as you need to.
Google My Business
Perhaps the best-kept secret in local search optimization, Google my Business, can be a real differentiator for billing companies. The tool captures information about the address, business description, products, and even allows you to post updates. For small businesses, the tool can also build a free website. While we do not recommend the free website feature, as it does not allow you much flexibility with design, a completed Google My Business listing will enhance your business outcomes significantly.
Bing Places
Bing Places tightly integrates with Google My Business. A Bing Places profile can be easily configured once you complete your Google My Business Profile.
Apple Maps Connect
Claim your location on apple maps connect.
Yelp
Pretty popular in the US, Yelp also provides free business profile features that billing companies can use.
Other Business listings
Once you have your profile information handy, you can use that to update multiple locations quickly
It may not be a bad idea to try a listing service such as www.yext.com for a year or so.
5. Online Reputation Management
Many sites and applications provide users with the ability to give reviews. Facebook pages have review features, and so do your google location listings. Several Job sites also provide business reviews – negative reviews may hamper your ability to hire quality talent.
Respond to reviews promptly. Engage with reviewers to understand why they rated you high or low and make course corrections where appropriate.
Build a team of Social Media Ambassadors.
Recognize that you cannot build a brand alone. The more engaged your team members are on social channels, the more your brand is likely to strengthen. Watch for signals in your google analytics data, LinkedIn and Facebook performance data, and make corrections each week.
