Get the Most out of Your Medical Website
By now everyone knows the importance of a website, and how it can literally drive tons of traffic to your business, to help you enjoy business growth and much greater success. This is certainly true of medical websites as well as for other types of businesses because people are often obliged to search for medical services when looking for a new primary care doctor, or for specialist services.
You might think that your site is performing well because you’ve invested with a web design company that specializes in search engine optimization, so your site has all the latest appeals to get it ranked highly in search results. But what actually happens when users get to your website? Is all the content on your website an accurate reflection of your practice, your medical philosophy, and the kind of care that patients can expect when they visit you?
There are any number of important little features which a potential patient might pick out of your website, which persuade them to call you for an appointment, and if those features are not prominently displayed or unavailable, they might just as easily abandon your site and move on to the next one in the search rankings.
No matter how much money you spent in optimizing your website, it still has to provide the appeal and the information a patient is looking for once he/she gets there, or it just won’t be performing very well. Here are some recommendations on how you can get the most out of your medical website.
Make Your Site a Virtual Image of Your Medical Office
Once you do have all the basics provided for, you should ensure that your website is an online version of what your medical practice is in real life. Those basics which you provide to users should include prominently displayed phone numbers and services, which can easily be picked out of a text, preferably at the top of the page, so that it’s not even necessary for a visitor to scroll down.
After that, your website should show everything about the staff that will be encountered at your office, the services which you provide, and how satisfied your patients are with the services they receive. This last item is very important because nothing can sway a user to make a purchase or to avail themselves of a service, faster than finding out that others like themselves have been very satisfied with your product or service. Customer testimonials have proven to be by far the single most influential component for persuading someone to take action.
Another aspect of the virtual representation of your office is to prominently display your logo in several pages of your site, with the color scheme for your logo being the same as that reflected on your business cards, and any other type of signage you use for promotion.
It wouldn’t hurt to also include a photo or two of the actual accommodations at your medical office, for instance, a friendly receptionist welcoming all visitors. Another feature which patients really love is to be able to schedule an appointment online because there is nothing more convenient than this since it eliminates the need to make any phone calls.
Modern medical person inputting diagnosis into an online database
Practical Usefulness
However, not everything about your website has to be designed to be advantageous or beneficial to the visitor in some way. Assuming that you have made your website as appealing as possible as a virtual representation of your actual office, you should also attempt to gain some practical benefit from your website as well.
One great way you can do this is to solicit information from potential patients who are interested in making an appointment so that some time can be saved at the office. For instance, you can ask them to fill out information about prior medical records, and medication dosages which they are currently taking, the symptoms they are experiencing, and even some family medical history.
This can help to avoid having them fill out pages and pages of information in your office, which will more than likely diminish the whole experience for them. Even though they would be filling out the exact same information on their computers while visiting your website, they’re doing it in the comfort of their own home, and not taking up time at the office, so as to lengthen the duration of their visit.
If you’re having an entirely new website built for you, make sure that its design is responsive, so that it will be represented well on all mobile devices. This is more critical than ever because the majority of Internet searches are now conducted on mobile devices rather than on desktop machines.
Tell the Story of Your Practice
People love reading a good story, and it’s something that stays with them much better than traditional advertising or marketing, so don’t be afraid to tell the story of your staff personnel, and a little about your own journey to the medical practice.
It can be very appealing to humanize your staff members by describing hobbies and interests, as well as any particular specialties they may have. Photos of your staff are a must, but short videos would be even better because videos have quickly become the most powerful drivers of action in all of marketing.
When visitors to your site understand that you and your staff members are real people just like them, it goes a long way toward establishing a personal connection, with people they can actually relate to.
