Search

I don’t know about you but I’m starting to like some of the things Google is doing to search. These days when I go to search for something, it’s almost as if Google knows who I am and where I’m at. The results are becoming eerily specific to my needs. In the old days (about a year ago), when I searched for “ice cream Durham,” Google would pull up a million irrelevant links about ice and cream and Durham North Carolina. Today, when I do the same search, Google gives me “Durham Dairy Serve” located in Durham, CT. Wow. that’s exactly what I was looking for! How did they do that? Does Google know that I live in Durham, Connecticut and I was looking for the phone number to Durham Dairy Serve? The answer is most likely YES.

The specificity of search these days is in part due to advances in social and contextual search. What does that mean and how does it apply to health care, home care, long-term care, or senior living? Let me give you an example:

Let’s say a prospective client is searching for “assisted living communities North Carolina”. In older versions of search, she would find a ton of links to anything related to “assisted living” and “North Carolina.” She would certainly find links to an overwhelming number of assisted living facilities, their  homepage, address, phone number, and maybe a rating. In new iterations of search, she will find assisted living communities located right near her along with their address and a map, a view of their recent photos on Facebook, activity calendars, and the option to contact the facility directly, see their ranking on Yelp and CitySearch —along with photos, tweets, what your friends may have said about them in your private social networks, and a quick and simple way to compare them with other similar facilities in North Carolina.

The bottom line is that health care companies need to be paying close attention to their entire web presence (website, social sites, external ratings and reviews sites) because this is what people are going to discover when they search. If your website is out of date, if you have no social presence or one that is dormant, and if you have ratings and reviews out there that you don’t even know about – all of it can bite you when that prospective client finds you on a search engine these days.

New search technologies will most certainly make our lives easier, AND they will create great challenges and opportunities for companies who want to attract and impress a new breed of web savvy customers.