According to a study by Brightlocal.com, 97% of all consumers go online to find a local business. Maybe even more shocking, according to a study at Stanford, 75% of people judge a company’s credibility based on the design of their website. Your medical practice website strategy needs to reflect the quality treatment your practice gives. You may be the greatest dentist, psychologist, or medical professional globally, but if the perception of you by those who don’t know you are not high quality, you’re perceived as not being very high quality. In this post, we will discuss how your medical practice can create a website strategy that positions you for success and improves your potential patient’s experience so that they choose you for care.
Your Website Needs to Be Professionally Designed
The first principle of a great website strategy is aesthetics. Your dental website, your psychologist website, or your medical professional website needs to look great. Here are some tips for building a great looking website:
- Review your competitors in your city. If you’re a dentist in Miami, type into Google “dentist Miami” to see the top ranking websites. You can also type in other cities to get an idea of how great your competitor’s websites are across multiple cities.
- Hire a company capable of building a beautiful website – Ask to see a few of their designs.
- Hire a company that builds websites for medical professionals – Ask to see they have worked with a few medical professionals
Your Website Needs to be Clear and Concise
Once a potential patient gets to your website, your website needs to reflect exactly what you offer to help them with their problems. If the patient needs a foot doctor, they better understand what you’re a foot doctor. These days patient experience and engagement are important.
Here are a few things you can do to make sure that your website is clear and concise:
- Make sure that the area first seen on your home page has an image that reflects your main service, as well as a title that reflects how you help patients.
- Create valuable content, such as blog content, that helps educate and answer questions your potential patients may have
- Use language that reflects the tone of the subject you work with and lingo that reflects a professional practice.
Photo by on Pexels
Your Website Needs to be Easily Navigable
Creating an easily navigable website is extremely important for both potential patients and Google when ranking your website. It is best practice to create a “shallow” structural hierarchy when creating your website sitemap.
You should organize your services in “buckets” if possible and keep these buckets as easily understandable as possible. A dentist or may have 3 main buckets: cosmetic dentistry, pediatric dentistry, general dentistry.
Another tip is to create a URL structure that matches your hierarchy so that a user can understand where they are on your website. For example, your-website.com/services/cosmetic-dentistry/teeth-whitening/ maybe a great structured URL to help a user understand how “deep” they are in a website. In general, it’s best to keep these pages as close to the home page as possible, don’t create pages that fall down a rabbit hole: they are difficult for users to find and difficult for Google to find.
Your Website Needs to be Findable
Speaking of findable, your website needs to be able to be found. For medical professionals, such as dentists, dental SEO is a powerful marketing strategy. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process that helps rank a website’s pages on Google Search and Google Map results.
In the competitive medical industry, it’s important to choose a website company and an SEO company that knows what they are doing. In the case of BartX, we help build websites that will rank well for SEO. After a website is built with the many SEO best practices in place, it typically takes 9 to 12 months for a medical website to start ranking well for keywords in their city, depending on your city’s keyword difficulty and competitiveness.
We highly recommend not hiring a company based on pricing, as all SEO is not created the same. The level of service of someone who charges $500.00 per month is most likely going to be drastically different from a company that charges $1250.00 per month. We highly recommend hiring a company that can show you case studies of proven results, as well as giving you those company’s contact information so that you can discuss with them.
Here are some services that a successful SEO company may offer you:
SEO Audit – An audit is necessary to see how well your website is optimized, how your local competitors are doing, and the best keywords to target in a strategy. If a company does not offer this service, it probably won’t be very effective in its strategies.
Website optimization – This includes both technical optimization and on-page SEO optimization.
Written Content – Creating written content is a core principle of SEO; Both service and blog copy.
Map Optimization – Map optimization is important for local medical practices because Google typically places 3 map locations at the very top of their results. In addition, the map feature is used heavily on mobile devices.
Off-page SEO – This includes creating guest posts, backlinks, and other strategies to get your pages ranked highly.
Social Media – Social media is typically an add-on service from SEO, but it can help your SEO rank better if done properly.
Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash
Your Website Needs Trackable Analytics
The next strategy your website needs is trackable analytics. Once you start building different marketing strategies out, such as email, SEO, online ads, and social media, you’ll need to know which efforts directly drive leads and revenue to your medical practice.
We highly recommend getting Google Analytics and setting up “Goals” to track leads and phone calls to your practice. You can do this by creating a thank you page that only is reachable from a contact form. Then, you can add this URL to your Google analytics goal set up. It will start tracking anyone who lands on the thank you page, and then you’ll be able to track where they came from.
Your Website Needs to Provide Ways to Contact You Easily
Once your patient lands on your site, they decide that your medical practice looks credible and that you offer the service that they need, they’ll probably start looking for a way to contact you.
We advise our medical clients to have multiple ways for clients to contact them. Some of these ways include:
Contact Form Online
Your practice should have an online contact form with multiple buttons sending a person there at a minimum.
Phone Number
Like an online contact form, at minimum, your medical practice should have a phone number listed in multiple places.
Live Chat
We strongly suggest having managed live chat on your website so that those who don’t want to fill out a form or call have an easy option to get in touch with you.
Get More Information
For dentists, read this complete guide: marketing strategies for dentists
For psychologists and therapists, read this complete guide: marketing strategies for therapists
To learn more about healthcare marketing, download our ebook: https://getreferralmd.com/medical-marketing-strategy-guide-for-doctors/
BartX Digital Helps medical professionals build custom internet marketing strategies to beat out their competitors and get more patients. Contact us to see how we can help your practice.
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