Digital Patient Acquisition Step 1: Promote Every Service You Offer
Every service needs its own content page. Patients are looking for information about your services that is detailed, educational, authentic, and in a language they understand.
What should I focus on when promoting my medical practice?
Your medical practice is there to serve your community. However, unless a family member works at your clinic, you will need to tell everyone what services they can get at your facility. To promote your medical practice, you need to promote every single service you offer. Patients are looking for information about your services that is detailed, educational, authentic, and in a language they understand. You would be surprised how many medical clinics offer amazing services, but do a poor job promoting it on their website. The experts at PatientGain.com can help identify what parts of your website need to be improved to promote the services you offer properly.
Question 1. Does every service needs its own page?
Answer: Yes
We have all seen this terrible mistake on a medical website before: A list of words or phrases underneath the headline “Services We Offer.” Your medical practice is not a menu at a restaurant or a whiteboard inside an auto body shop. For your website to rank well online in organic search results, you need more than a couple of words per service. You need each service you offer to have its own well written, unique content page. You will help improve your overall search rankings and better educate your potential patients regarding the services you offer.
So why not have a long list of services with a sentence or two to describe them? Wouldn’t a couple of sentences for many different services provide plenty of content for a webpage? True, if you wrote a few sentences for a dozen or two services, you would have an impressive page in terms of word count. However, this is not a very valuable page for several reasons. First, a couple of sentences about a service is not going to help improve your search rankings. If a search engine is looking at your website, which has three sentences about x-rays versus a competitor’s site with three paragraphs, your competitor is going to look more relevant and authoritative compared to you. Second, a page that lists all services with a few sentences talking about each service lacks focus. The page is great if people are looking for “Medical Services,” but most potential patients are looking for specific services like “Physicals” and “X-rays.” Finally, having a page per service makes it easier to navigate, more efficient, and cost-effective to manage search engine ad campaigns.
Question 2. How many words should I write for a service? What if I don’t have much to say about a service?
Answer: You should aim for 500 to 1,000 words per service for a content page.
The more you write, the better you are served. One thousand words is often a desirable goal to aim towards when writing content for services. If you are struggling to figure out what to write about a service, consider a “Questions and Answers” format, also known as Q&A. Think about the most common questions patients ask about the service. Write those questions out and then provide the answer below it. There are several advantages to this approach. First, this will help you fill out your content page with valuable, unique content. Second, it will help educate your patients about the services you offer. Finally, in many cases, these are the same questions a patient will type into a search engine when looking for a healthcare solution. If your website has the exact question someone asks with a lengthy answer below it, your site will seem relevant and authoritative to a search engine.
Question 3. Do I need to review and update your content periodically?
Answer: A well-written content page will serve you well, but it needs to be maintained.
A well-written content page will serve you well, but it needs to be maintained. The content will become stale over time if it is not updated. You do not need to completely rewrite your service pages every 12 months, far from it. Constantly rewriting content makes it difficult for search engines to understand what your website is trying to say. However, expanding and updating parts of your content shows engines that you are keeping everything up to date. If a service you offer changes slightly or the procedure is updated, it needs to be reflected in your content. It will help your overall search results. The continual updating of your service pages will help maintain their relevance and authority on a subject.
It isn’t uncommon for a medical practice to realize that one content page needs to break up into several pages. For example, you may have a page about physical examinations. However, over time, you put more information on there about DOT Physicals, Immigration Physicals, and School Physicals. It would now make more sense to split that page up into three different service pages. Implementing this change will make those words more relevant to your website since they each have their page.
Question 4. Do content pages need images or videos?
Answer: Yes. Every page should have an image or a video, with proper tags.
Pictures are a vital component of any service page. Ideally, they need to be relevant be to the service you offer and show off your medical practice. Stock photos can work; be sure not to use any that appear similar to other competitors. Otherwise, you will lose some credibility. Hi-res, real images of your clinic make the best image to connect with potential patients. Avoid using any actual patients in your picture to protect their privacy. It is fine to use other employees or family members as “stand-ins” for these photos. Photos you use on your website should be:
• Crisp and not blurry
• Framed well so the picture has a focus
• Optimized for web, so it doesn’t slow loading speed
• Uses the “Alt text” tag to tell search engines what the images are
• If appropriate, has a caption to describe what is going on
If possible, try to include infographics onto your website. An infographic is a visual image used to represent information, usually in a chart or diagram. However, please do not copy and paste an infographic from another website without permission and siting where it comes from.
Promoting the services of your medical practice is a key part of marketing your business to your community. Generally, the more content you have on your website, the more important and relevant you will appear to search engines. Expanding on the services you offer is a great way to accomplish this goal.