An orthopedic resident is preparing for a spine surgery the following week and types “lumbar discectomy surgical technique pdf” into Google. Those five words already contain the procedure and the format they expect to get. There's no company name. If a manufacturer shows up in the results, it's because it has published the technique guide under a title similar to what the resident typed.
That search usually doesn't appear in the reports the Sales team looks at, which are built around the name of the company and its brands. Yet, added together, queries like that account for a large share of a medical device website's exposure on Google.
Two ways to reach the same site
At SAI, an Argentine orthopedic manufacturer and distributor, we split the top 1,000 queries from sixteen months of Search Console data into two groups: those that included the company's name and those that didn't.
The 152 branded queries brought in 30,762 clicks, 90% of that sample. The other 848, unbranded, added up to 3,559 clicks and 323,741 impressions, half of all the times the site appeared on Google.
Looking only at the clicks column, the brand does all the work. The impressions column shows something else: hundreds of thousands of times the company appeared in front of someone who wasn't yet searching for it by name. In that group, a click is the exception: just over one for every hundred results shown.
What people type when they don't type the brand
The strongest unbranded queries in the sample fall into three groups. There are product queries, using the name the implant is known by in the operating room: “retrograde tibial nail,” “proximal tibia plates,” “femur cable plate,” “spider patella plate,” “worm screws,” “sub twist anchor.” There are procedure or indication queries: “all-inside meniscal suture,” “acromioclavicular endobutton.” And there are document queries: “lumbar discectomy surgical technique pdf,” “alif surgical technique pdf.” In the same sample, 25 queries included the word “technique” and 11 included “pdf.”
Nothing on the list looks like a service category. Nobody searches for “medical device marketing.” People search for a product, a code, a procedure, or a document.
These queries reveal a detail specific to the industry. Someone who types “spider patella plate” or “acromioclavicular endobutton” is using the name the implant goes by among surgeons and surgical technologists, which is sometimes another company's trade name and sometimes a description of its shape. If the site only uses the line's internal name, that search passes it by.
Each type of search needs a different destination
A product query is well served by a product page: the product, its sizes, its family, and the documents that go with it. A procedure query needs a listing that brings together the families used in that procedure, because the person typing it is still choosing. A query ending in “pdf” expects to open the document, and that document is better placed inside a library, linked to the product page, so the person has somewhere to go after reading it.
At SAI, this was solved with a catalog of nearly 270 products that can be browsed by area of interest, anatomical region, product type, procedure, and brand, and with product pages that have their documents right alongside. That way, people arriving through unbranded searches land on a page that matches what they searched for.
The same review, in each company's Search Console
The exercise takes an afternoon and doesn't require any additional tools.
1. In Search Console, open Performance, choose the longest period available, and go to the Queries tab. 2. Add a query filter for queries not containing the company's name, and repeat it for each variant: the acronym, the domain, the company's own brands, and common typos. 3. Export the results and sort them by impressions. 4. Tag the first fifty queries by what they ask for: product or code, procedure, document. 5. For each one, see which page Google showed (Pages tab, with the query as a filter) and open it. Check whether the title says the same thing as the query and whether the product page or document the person was looking for can be reached from there. 6. Repeat the filter with “technique” and with “pdf.” Those queries show which documents are in demand even if nobody has asked for them by email.
The interface shows up to 1,000 rows per tab, which is enough for an initial diagnosis. Queries with many impressions and few clicks point to the first pages to review.
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