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  • When Patients Use Google to Find an Eye Doctor

    By Jean Shaw
    Selected and reviewed by Neil M. Bressler, MD, and Deputy Editors
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    Journal Highlights

    JAMA Ophthalmology, December 2022

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    What happens when potential patients conduct a Google search for “eye doctor near me”? Soares et al. examined this issue and found that, in most counties in the United States, ophthalmologists are underrepresented in the search results.

    For this cross-sectional study, the researchers used a Google application programming interface to search the phrase “eye doctor near me” from the centroid of every county in the United States. They then used CMS data to estimate the real number of ophthal­mologists and optometrists in each county. The primary outcome was the mean proportion of ophthalmologists listed by the Google search as compared with the real proportion of ophthal­mologists.

    A total of 2,955 counties from all 50 states and two territories were includ­ed. The national Google proportion of ophthalmologists was 28.91%, which was less than their real proportion (37.58%). Ophthalmologists were underrepresented in 33 of the 52 states and territories (67.3%).

    To counteract this imbalance, the re­searchers recommend that ophthalmol­ogists actively pursue search engine op­timization (SEO) marketing techniques to boost their online presence. As they point out, when it comes to physician websites and online patient education material, “Great content alone is no longer the determining factor for being featured in internet searches. The prop­er SEO keywords need to be embedded within the content.” (Also see related commentary by Jayanth Sridhar, MD, in the same issue.)

    The original article can be found here.