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Patients search for a department, not a hospital
The most common mistake in hospital marketing is a single website and a single Google listing for the whole institution. A patient with knee pain does not search “multi-speciality hospital”; they search for the condition or the specialist, and Google shows them a map of who treats it nearby. If the hospital’s orthopaedic department does not exist as a page and a listing in its own right, it does not exist to that patient.
So the work starts with a page for each department — what it treats, who the doctors are, how to book — and, for the larger ones, a Google Business Profile of its own. It is unglamorous and it is where most of the patients come from.
The reviews decide between the three on the map
Once the map shows three hospitals, the review count and the rating decide the call. Reviews for a hospital have to be asked for — at discharge, by the department, with a link that takes thirty seconds — and every one answered, including the angry ones. A calm reply to a complaint about waiting time is read by every future patient and does more for the hospital than the ten quiet five-star reviews around it.
A hospital that does this by department will usually see its review count and its OPD enquiries move together within a few months.
Ads for the procedures worth advertising
Paid search works for a hospital when it is run per procedure — knee replacement, cataract, IVF, a health-check package — in the hospital’s catchment, with a landing page for that procedure and call tracking so the cost of each booked patient is known. It does not work as “hospital in Bengaluru”, which competes with every hospital in the city for a patient who will choose from the map anyway.
Chord Road Hospital in Bengaluru is the example we usually give: department pages and search work first, then targeted campaigns for the procedures the hospital wanted more of, and appointment bookings followed within the first six months. The order mattered — the campaigns worked because the pages and the listings were already there to land on.
The phone, and what happens after it rings
Everything above brings the enquiry to the hospital. Whether it becomes a patient depends on the next ten minutes: whether the call is answered, whether the person answering can book the right department, whether a WhatsApp enquiry gets a reply before the patient tries the next hospital. Most hospitals lose more patients here than to any competitor’s marketing.
Kerur Pain Clinic in Belagavi is a smaller example of the same thing: local search and a presence on the platforms where patients ask questions brought enquiries, and the clinic’s speed at answering them turned those into appointments.
Where to start
Not with a campaign. Start by counting where last month’s new patients came from, by department. Then build the department pages and listings, ask for reviews at discharge, and measure the gap between an enquiry and a reply. Ads come after that, for the procedures that can pay for them. A hospital that does the first three has done most of the work, and can do them without an agency.