The third speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Natalie Tutzer, whose focus is on search engine optimisation (SEO) in the field of healthcare information. Finding reliable healthcare information online is fraught, and academic and non-commercial sources (such as authoritative patient guidelines) often lack visibility compared to material from commercial actors, in part also because many such materials are distributed as the online equivalents of print products – as PDFs – rather than as native Web content.
Can SEO measures make such content more visible online, without adjusting the – iteratively developed and authoritative – content itself in any way; and is it possible to make such materials more relevant to the search queries that actual people use to search for such information? Natalie’s case study here is a German Website with information on high blood pressure; it explores both technical and content SEO steps.
Content SEO examined common keyword clusters in search queries and related these to content on the Website itself, finding that some high-volume keywords were very difficult to find due to poor user experience design, while some keyword clusters were entirely absent from the Website.
Basic SEO measures should be standard for reliable online health information, then; this includes converting PDFs to native Web content. Keyword research looks like a useful tool for the further optimisation of content discoverability.
