Google Update: Improving Health Searches – But other industries should take note too!

Roni Zeiger, MD, Chief Health Strategist at Google announced yesterday some incredible changes that are improving health searches – but every industry should be taking note of how Google have responded in this industry – read on.

Looking at some of the numbers of searches for health related terms in Google’s own Adwords Keyword Tool, there are literally 1,000’s of searches every day for health related issues.

Following Google’s own research though, they have found that searches that often contain the symptom – such as “Abdominal pain on my right side” – are then often followed by a search for the relevant health condition.

What Google have done to help improve health related searches, is to present a list of related health conditions right above the search results, linking to content on the web that might help.

This list is purely generated from the data that they collect and analyse in their super brain algorithms and should not be seen as a diagnosis. As Roni says on the Google blog “The list is not authored by doctors and of course is not advice from medical experts.”

This is a great way of Google making search easier for us, but also a huge opportunity for those in the health sector to ensure that they are talking about symptoms as well as related conditions. Remember, to be ranked in the search engines for the terms that will drive all the traffic you want, produce content related to what people are actually searching for.

Improved Health Searches – How do we all need to respond?

To Health and Nutrition Related Businesses: If Google are cutting out the search for health related conditions, ensure that you are talking symptoms and conditions from now on.

To All Other Businesses: If you want to be found in the search engines, remember to write and optimise your content for what people are actually searching for in the search engines, not what you think they are. This is often two very separate things.

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