Medical Website Design Company Tips For Doctors and Medical Practice Managers
Your medical website is one of your biggest weapons to capture and convert potential patients into regular patients in your medical marketing arsenal. Unfortunately, many medical practice owners and doctors may not know what goes into a website and what makes a “good” website. Modern medical website designs are also intelligent and focused on “conversions”
For a medical practice, your website is as critical to your business as your doctors and staff. You obviously would not have a healthcare business without employees, but it would be impossible to run a successful business without a website. Your medical website is one of your biggest weapons to capture and convert potential patients into regular patients in your medical marketing arsenal. Unfortunately, many medical practice owners and doctors may not know what goes into a website and what makes a “good” website. They probably have seen sites they like, but can’t quite identify the elements that stand out. Below are the top elements your website needs to have to be successful.
Updated Visual Design – Focus on Modern Designs
The more visually appealing your website is, the more likely people are going to stick around and explore it. Research shows that you have very little time to make an impression with a website visitor. Some studies show that this is less than a second, so you need to make a great first impression. Employ excellent, engaging, compelling, and visually appealing graphics on your website. With that said, you do not want to visually overload your site visitors with movies, animation, and moving text. Pictures, graphics, and text should be your priority. Do not fall into the trap of not checking back in on your design after your website is published. If you have not updated your website in five or ten years, it’s going to look dated compared to other newer websites. Keep it fresh and up to date!
Stay Current. Check Competition
You should not be updating your website design every month or even every year. However, you should examine your website yearly and compare it to other competitors. Look at local competitors and other businesses in your field in different places in the country. If you begin to notice some patterns and things your website does not have, you may want to reconsider updating it. Some medical practices update everything at once, while others make small changes little by little. Which one you select depends on your marketing plans.
User-Friendly Navigation
Your website is not going to do you much good if visitors cannot quickly get to the published information. When someone visits your site for the first time, it should be clear where they need to go for more information. Having a robust, but easy to use navigation bar is essential. If you have a large website with many, many webpages, consider not listing all of them in a navigation bar. Highlight a few top pages and then group the rest into different themed landing pages where further links can be displayed. For example, if your medical practice offers pediatric care, urgent care, and Med Spa services, each of those “categories” should have their pages with links to service pages. Finally, make it easy to get back to the “Home” page without jumping through too many hoops.
Best Way To Keep Your Website User Friendly
Testing if your website is user friendly should not be done by you or your staff. You are intimately familiar with your website, and therefore you will subconsciously find it easy to find the information you are looking for. Instead, write down the top services you offer and ask friends and family to explore your website and take notes. If someone is having a problem finding a service or information, chances are potential patients are as well.
Unique, Engaging, Informative Content
The content on your website is going to make or break it. Search engines will not be able to rank you unless you have professionally written, detailed, and unique content on your website. For website visitors and potential patients, it needs to be informative and easy to read. You certainly do not want to load it up with medical jargon, but you will still want to include some keywords for search purposes. The more engaging content is, the more someone will stay on your website. The longer visitors linger on your website and consume the content you have written, the better this will look for search engines, increasing your rankings. Take care to include the target keywords and phrases your target audience uses when making their health care decisions.
Review Content
You should regularly review and update your content throughout the year. This does not mean updating a service page every month with rewritten material. Instead, review content once a year and make sure it is still up to date or if any revisions or additional details are needed. If you find you are offering a service that does not have an excellent service page associated with it, write one!
Facilitate Communication Between The Patient and Medical Practice
A website visitor and potential patient should not have to spend time trying to find how to contact your medical practice or where it is located. Make the phone number, location, and hours of operation evident on every page of your website. It does not need to be in big, bold letters on every page, taking up the screen before someone scrolls down to read. However, consider putting it at the top and bottom of your website for people to see. Once they find the information they are looking for and decide to pick your business for their healthcare, they should not have to click to find out how to call.
Engage Patients
Some medical clinics have HIPAA compliant ways for patients to message a clinic directly. PatientGain offers this app.. Recently, many have adopted virtual video visits for patients to diagnose and evaluate some things from the comfort of their homes. Keep in mind that everyday new technology is becoming available in the healthcare industry. What wasn’t practical a year ago may be easily accomplished today!
Use Patient Engagement Apps
A static website certainly works well, telling someone about the services being offered at a medical practice. A website that engages a potential patient or allows a patient to engage with it will have a higher conversion rate. One of the most common ways a patient can engage with a website is through online appointments. This saves them the time to call the facility and try to figure out an appointment time, allowing staff to concentrate on more difficult problems. Online scheduling also gives them the power to make their own health care decisions. An engagement chatbot is the most common way for a website to engage with a patient proactively. Automatically popping up and saying hello, a chatbot can assist patients in getting the information they need about services or accomplishing a task, like emailing the facility.
The Best Way To Engage Patients
While online appointments and chatbots can be beneficial, look for any way your website can solve a task for a patient that eliminates a phone call to the clinic.
SEO Friendly Website
Your website needs to use current best practices when it comes to SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization. Having well-written content and all of the behind the scenes web work will ensure your website searches well online. Some of the things you do not see on a website that can impact rankings include alt tags for photos and meta tags. Another boost to SEO includes if your website is mobile-friendly. Regardless of what device is viewing your website, it should load quickly and be easily navigable. The best way to keep your website SEO friendly is always to be working on your website’s SEO aspects. If it has been years since you worked on the SEO aspects of your website, it is probably outdated. You must keep up to date on the newest SEO Trends and suggestions to make sure you stay ahead of the competition.
Site Speed
Although site speed is a factor in SEO, this is so important it needs to be talked about in detail. Site speed is critical to a successful website. The longer it takes for your website to load, the more likely someone will click on the back button and visit your competitor’s website. Each second that ticks by during a website upload mean more and more visitors are leaving. To ensure your website loads as quickly as possible, make sure your images, or optimized and nothing, like movies or animations, are loading directly to the website. Increasing the site speed of your medical website will lead to higher conversions and better overall organic ranking. Best way to maintain good site speed 1) The optimization of images, graphics, and videos is critical. Images need to be optimized for the web, especially for mobile devices. You are even more likely to lose a website visitor on a mobile device than a desktop screen. 2) Ensure pictures are scaled-down, they do not need to be super high-res for your website. Videos should be hosted on video hosting platforms. Also, check to make sure there aren’t various “codes” that need to run first before your website loads up as they can cause lag if they are old and not updated. 3) There are numerous free tools available online that will test your site speed. Test your site and your major competitors to see how fast their website loads. If there is a vast difference, work immediately needs to begin.
The Journey of a Website Visitor
When designing your website, you need to consider the journey of the potential patient who visits your site for the first time. When they land on your webpage, is your website organized in a way that makes sense? Ideally, you do not want someone to continually start their journey all over again when searching for information. Grouping the pages of your website so that they are interconnected and easily navigated is critical. For example, if your medical practice handles urgent care and pediatric care, there are likely some services that straddle both of these medical topics. One such service would be x-rays. You would want to avoid a service page about x-rays that only exist in the “Urgent Care” part of your website. It may cause those searching for pediatric services to start their journey again or believing x-rays are unavailable for their children. Instead, create two pages talking about x-rays: One detailing x-rays related to pediatric care and the other to urgent care. Why not just make one for both? The more detailed and specific content you have, the smoother a visitor’s journey will be, and the better your overall organic rankings.
The best way to determine a patient’s journey: 1) Create a list of as many reasons as you can for someone to visit your medical practice. 2) Map out and visualize what pages they would have to visit to get the information they need to seek treatment or diagnosis at your clinic. 3) Analyze that map and see if any bottlenecks can be fixed or shortcuts that could be created.
Website Conversion
If you are getting a lot of website traffic, but your patient count is struggling, your website is not doing an excellent job at converting website visitors into patients. Your site is going to be one of the leading generators of patients to your medical clinic. If visitors are just “window shopping,” something is missing from your website, or they are not finding what they are looking for during their exploration. There are several reasons why you could have trouble converting web site visitors to patients. They could include:
• Not having the content or information they are looking to convince them you are the right place for their healthcare
• Not being able to find the content on your website from the landing page they arrive at, be it a home page or another service page
• Your target keywords for online paid ads are targeting the wrong audience or inadvertently capture the wrong audience for your website
Best way to determine what converts best: 1) Use A/B testing on your website to test new features, content, and website journey. 2) Be mindful not to change too much at once, or you will be unable to determine what change did the most good. 3) A/B testing is best done when both versions of a website are active simultaneously. It is not suggested you test one version of a website one month, and then another the following month. Outside factors may corrupt the data giving you an incomplete picture of what is going on when potential patients visit.
Matching Your Branding
You will be making your overall medical marketing decisions by selecting and sticking to your brand. Branding includes many things, such as colors, fonts, logos, slogan, and voice. Your selections need to be consistent in your office, marketing materials, and website. The colors on your website should be the colors you have at your medical clinic and any brochures. While you may update things like your logo and slogan over the years, make sure those updates are applied to your website. You will lose credibility if the logo on your website does not match the logo on any discharge papers.
Best way to maintain brand standards: 1) Develop a brand guide that anyone involved with your marketing efforts can refer to when working for your clinic. 2) The brand guide should have the answer to every question someone might have when promoting your medical practice. 3) Specific instructions regarding fonts, colors, logos, slogan, and voice should be spelled out and any additional resources linked, so they have access to marketing assets.
Your medical website is the key to your success and building your business. A well-designed website will help maintain and grow your patient count. Call the experts today at PatientGain.com and speak with our team about how we can design a website to meet your needs!
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