Many European and American medical centres and private clinics are popular in Russia. Also the amount of the monthly searched keywords, regarding medical services or medical centres, is huge. So, an active online advertising of medical services would definitely attract more Russian patients.
Medical tourism from Russia
Russia has also own medical centres, but due to the free of charge medical insurance, the services in many public clinics are not at the high level. If Russian patients have a choice to pay high medical honorary in Russia or abroad, they will choose the European clinic. The reason are better standards, high technology, more research and medical experiences.
Popular countries for medical tourism
Russians trust the medical quality in Israel and Germany. These both countries stay on the first positions among the most visited countries for medicl issues. Turkey, Singapore, Swiss, France and further Eastern Europe countries such as Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and Lithuania follow.
Cardiology, orthopedics…
The most searched keywords in Russia have a focus on such medical fields as cardiology and cardiac surgery, oncology, eye surgery, orthopedics, plastic surgery, neurosurgery and other fields, that require high-end technology for medical treatments and diagnostics. Last trend are also check up programs and medical rehabilitation.
Russians as a target audience for medical advertising
In order to come to the medical center, the visitors must first of all know that it exists, what services it provides and which specialists are employed there. Such information should be placed on the corporate website. But the biggest challenge is- to make this website get found in the Russian internet.
1. SEO for medical sites
More as 7 million users search for “medical services abroad” and other related phrases on Yandex- the biggest search engine in Russia. If the corporate website is optimized for SEO (search engines), it will be shown on the first page of the search results. That will have an impact on the amount of visitors and potential requests.
There are several parts, how to make the website optimized for search engines:
- Onpage SEO
- Offpage SEO
- Onsite SEO
In further blogs we will explain the differences more precisely.
2. SEA / SEM on Yandex
The other opportunity is to run contextual paid advertising on search engines like Yandex or Google. It calls Search Engine Marketing or advertising (SEM / SEA).
In this case it doesn’t matter, if your website is fully optimized for search engines. To have the right language (Russian or English) is mostly enough for such commercial promotion.
The advertisement will be paid for every click on the ad. The text/image ads with the link to the corporate site, contacts and the short description of the medical center / clinic would be shown to those user, who was searching for related keyword phrases.
Example: Keyword phrase “orthopedic clinic in Israel”
It is important, to analyze results from paid search advertising in terms of optimization on conversion: requests, calls, other activities. That is what our job is. Our digital marketing agency optimize all marketing campaigns on actions, in order to save your
3. Social Media as advertising channel
From one of our clients, orthopaedic centre, we have heard this interesting issue: Potential patients asked on the telephone “why the clinic is not such popular in the internet and there is only the corporate website, no other references from other resources”. After opening of the professional Clinic Fanpage / Community – with requests, support, further information about the clinic and doctors- the situation has been changed.
Social Media channel became very important source for potentially important requests. There users could see, that 1) the clinic really exists 2) what kind of services it offers 3) which technology it uses 4) what other patients say about it. In albums we have placed pictures of waiting and treatment rooms, in discussion forum user could ask special questions and post their mrt results, we had chats opened some times a week, etc.. This all work was in Russian language and operated from experienced marketing managers.
There are different Social media networks in Russia: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, MojMir.ru. Facebook is not the first choice or Russian social media users. So if you decide to present your services in Russia, check all opportunities first. If you still have some questions, don’t hesitate to ask us.
Online Marketing in Russia 