Urgent Care Website Design Features
With competition getting heavier and heavier in the world of Urgent Care Medical Marketing, you need a well-designed website to rank well and convert website viewers into loyal patients.
Dedicated Urgent Care Centers are becoming more and more popular in the United States. While they have been in some areas of the country for decades, many people are only a 15 to 25-minute drive away from this crucial healthcare resource. Urgent Care Centers often fill the gap between Primary Care Doctors, who treat long term conditions where you make non-emergency appointments to get a medical concern checked out, and emergency rooms, where you go when you have life-threatening injuries or illnesses. Urgent Care Centers treat non-life-threatening injuries or illnesses who cannot wait for their primary doctor and need treatment now. But want to avoid the high costs and long waits of an emergency room. With this need rapidly being filled by independently owned and operated urgent care centers and nationwide branded facilities, competition in healthcare in this area is stiff.
With competition getting heavier and heavier in the world of Urgent Care Medical Marketing, you need a well-designed website to rank well and convert website viewers into loyal patients. There are several features your urgent care center website needs to have to be competitive. The expert team at PatientGain.com can help design a useful website for you using some of the design features below. When we work side by side with you to create your urgent care website, you can expect incorporating some of these design features.
1. Responsive Website & Mobile Friendly
A responsive website is a website that will automatically move its design elements around so it can be presented on any sized screen. No matter how large the desktop computer screen size is, laptop screen, tablet, or mobile phone, a responsive website can be easily read and is user-friendly. By now, responsive websites are widely accepted as the best way to make a website “mobile-friendly.” Search engines prefer websites that are mobile-friendly and will give it an organic rank boost. Why? The vast majority of internet traffic is done through mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets. If you were to look at your website’s analytics, you would likely see over half of your traffic comes from mobile devices, if not three-quarters. This mobile trend is not likely to decrease but only increase over time.
Previously, some urgent care centers would have a dedicated mobile site. So when someone visited their website from a smaller screen, the website would detect that and instead redirect them to a mobile-only site. Generally, these sites had less functionality, less information, and could not provide their regular website’s full experience. It was also challenging to keep them up to date. If you were to update the content page on the website’s desktop version, you would have to check the mobile website to see if an update was needed there. Mobile-only sites are inefficient and often hurt your overall organic rankings. Responsive websites are a much better choice for your urgent care center.
2. Secured With SSL
Your medical website needs to be secured with SSL. When a website is secured, it will use HTTPS to begin the web address, and most browsers will denote it with a locked padlock in the URL. Websites that are not secured will often see an unlocked padlock and sometimes a warning to turn back. Given urgent care centers are often receiving PHI data from current and potential patients, their website needs to be secured.
Under HIPAA laws, you are responsible for the protection and privacy of medical information you receive. Failure to do so will often result in fines and expensive corrective action. Without SSL security, anything sent to you via your website could be hacked or stolen by cybercriminals. Health information is often considered to be much more valuable than credit card data. A credit card can be canceled and reissued; your accumulated health history can not. You should treat any information sent to you via your website to be Protected Health Information (PHI), and therefore, to protect your business, it needs to be secured.
3. Medical Engagement ChatBot
Chatbots are programs that mimic human conversation and help website visitors find information or accomplish tasks. Many retail websites have been using ChatBots to help their customers find things to buy, information about orders, or other general information about their company. The healthcare industry is starting to adopt medical engagement chatbots to convert more web visitors into patients and help answer a simple question to free up staff to handle more difficult patient issues. Chatbots can be programmed to answer various questions and provide answers or capture contact information if a patient asks for something that isn’t in its repository of answers.
One of the most significant advantages of a chatbot is that it does not go home at night, take a vacation, and can handle more than one patient at a time. So instead of a patient getting a busy signal or leaving a message and waiting to hear back from your staff, many issues can be taken care of right away. This makes your website more efficient and helps get more people through your urgent care center’s front door. Some of the most typical things a medical chatbot on an urgent care center’s website can answer or help with include:
• Giving Directions
• Making Appointment
• Listing Available Services
• List Hours of Operation
• Give Contact Information
• Take A Message
4. Promotions Page & App
Like any other business, there will be times where you want to promote something at your urgent care center. You will either be offering a discount on a specific service or just highlight a more popular service during that time of year. For example, as fall approaches, you may want to highlight or offer a discount on sports physicals. Urgent care centers can have difficult time managing their promotions page when they get swamped treating patients. They may forget when to put up these specials and when to take them down. Some make the mistake of not putting an end date on their promotion, making for awkward and unhappy customer interactions when they bring in what they think is a deal only to find out is expired months ago.
Ideally, you should have a “Promotions App” on your urgent care website. From your business dashboard, you can upload, activate, and deactivate your promos quickly. No longer do you need to ask a web developer to update content, remove content or update a picture talking about a special You can quickly flip them on and off like a light switch. You should be able to set end dates, so they automatically are removed or show as being expired. This saves you time and keeps your staff stress in dealing with irritated patients. Finally, your promotions app should capture contact information from people so you can market to them later regardless of whether they come in with the special.
5. HIPAA Compliant Contact Form
HIPAA compliance is vital for any healthcare facility, including an urgent care center. HIPAA law makes it clear that you are responsible for secure communication between you and a website visitor, regardless if they are a current patient or not. For this reason, you should not have your email address on there for doctor and patient communications. This is not a very secure way to communicate, plus there are email spammers out who will scrape that email address off the website and fill your mailbox full of spam email.
What you need to facilitate secure communication between a website visitor and an urgent care center is a contact form. Assuming your site is protected with SSL security, and it should, when they send a message to you through a contact form, that information will be encrypted. Hackers may intercept it, but it will be nothing but a jumble of numbers and letters. Cyber Criminals can take names, addresses, phone numbers, and even the messages, including personal health information, and use it to commit fraud. Protecting your patients’ privacy is not only your responsibility, but it will build trust between your center and them, making their care even better. Finally, having a contact form allows people to leave a written message and contact information, rather than leaving a voice mail that someone has to sit down, listen to, and take notes about. All in all, a contact form is an excellent addition to your Urgent Care Center website.
6. Online Scheduling
Many medical practices, not just urgent care centers, use online scheduling to increase their conversion rates. Online appointments give patients more control in their health care decisions. It allows them to schedule their appointments when they want and when it fits into their schedule. Best of all, much like the chatbot, online scheduling is always available to make an appointment. If an urgent care center uses appointments, someone who wakes up with the flu at 2 am can make an appointment the following day to be treated at an urgent care center. They do not need to wait days for their primary care physician, risk their health, or prolonging their suffering.
An excellent online scheduling system will be very user friendly. Patients, new and regular, should easily select the reason they are visiting, the time they would like to be seen, and communicate their symptoms. Of course, this information should be transmitted over a secured website using SSL and should be synced with your EMR, so your staff is not copying and pasting over the information, again and again, wasting time. This ensures that no one accidentally double books time in your schedule, leading to a patient’s negative experience. However, if used by your facility correctly, online scheduling can give your website a significant advantage over competitors. Even Google Business Profiles recognizes the importance of online scheduling by providing space for businesses to link to it. This link is published online, along with their regular website address.
7. Navigation Bar
The navigation bar at the top of an Urgent Care Center website is an often-neglected design feature. Some owners want every single page listed in a navigation bar, and that might work if you have a handful of pages. However, if your Urgent Care Center’s website has a vast amount of content and information spread out over many pages, this isn’t practical. So many pages listed in a navigation bar will be unwieldy and present a negative experience. It would be best if you were strategic in what you include in the navigation bar and what you do not. Again, if you only have a handful of pages, this isn’t a problem. However, as your business grows, you should continue to add content to it to maintain your rankings, which will eventually be something you confront.
Your navigation bar should have five or six things to click on that will drop down six or seven additional choices. If that navigation bar category has more than seven content pages, create new landing pages that list all pages. You may have a “Services” tab on your navigation bar at your Urgent Care Center. Pick the top six or seven most popular services to give visitors direct access to those services. Create a “more services” selection that sends people to a page that lists all services in an organized and visually appealing way. This approach will make your navigation bare more effective in converting visitors.
8. Optimized For Speed and Conversion
Finally, your website needs to load quickly. Not only does this make for a positive user experience, but Google will give your website a higher organic ranking if it loads quickly. Generally, for every second your website does not load, you lose more people. They will click on the back button and visit your competitor. With that in mind, you need to make sure your website loads as quickly as possible. And just because your website loads quickly today means it will be as fast next month. Site speed is something that constantly needs to be monitored to ensure nothing is gumming up the works.
Increasing your site speed often means optimizing your website. The most common culprits for a slow load speed are photos and videos attempting to load every time someone visits. The images you use need to be high quality, but they do not need to be print quality, taking 2 minutes to load completely. Reduce the size of your photos and move any videos to a video hosting service, like YouTube. From there, you can embed your videos into your website and also get your images to load quickly. Finally, examine the codes you are using on your website. If you use various tracking codes, pixels, or other things that need to load up before your website loads, this could slow it down. Sometimes codes begin to conflict with each other or need to be updated, slowing down your website. Keep your site speed up, and you will keep your conversions up.
PatientGain.com embraces all of these design features mentioned above. We use these and other features to build the most efficient website possible that will work for you to convert website visitors into new patients. Call our team today and let us show you some examples of other Urgent Care Centers, whose website we created and maintain. We’ll work with you side by side to create a branded Urgent Care Center website that meets your needs!
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4 Good Examples of Medical SEO for Urgent Care Clinics
Search Engine Optimization – SEO For Urgent Care Centers produces excellent results for hundreds of Urgent Care Clinics, from coast to coast.
Example 1 – Medical SEO for a patient searching for “urgent care near me okc” – In Oklahoma City. You will notice that first 4 results are from the websites – This is due to high quality content and hence high SEO ranking for this urgent care.
Example 2 – Medical SEO for a patient searching for “urgent care el cajon ca”. High quality content is extremely important for high SEO rankings for your urgent care.
Example 3 – Medical SEO for a patient searching for “nearest urgent care maui” – This patient is looking for any urgent care, close to her. In this results first and the second results are from the same urgent care. So this urgent care is likely to have more patients.
Example 4 – Medical SEO for a patient searching for “pediatric urgent care orlando”
Healthcare Advertising VS Healthcare Marketing
Many healthcare professionals confuse Healthcare Advertising with Healthcare Marketing.
Advertising is just ONE of the many “things”, “programs” or “techniques” launched to achieve a successful Marketing Program. So Medical advertising is one, but very important part of Medical Marketing for a practice. For example if you are a pediatric physician with focus on urgent care for children, and your goal is to acquire more patients, you may want to “market” your practice in 20 mile radius for potential parents of patients who may seek Pediatric Urgent Care. For this effort you would typically have many things to do :
Step 1: Sign for the building
Step 2: Business cards
Step 3: Doctor’s bio printed and promoted to local primary care physicians
Step 4: Providing free “meet-and-greet” for parents of potential pediatric patients
Step 5: Collaboration with local schools for “low-cost” physicals for school athletes
Step 6: Mail drop in 5 mile radius using USPS mail and flyers for parents of potential pediatric patients
Step 7: Networking with other local businesses close to your own location
Step 8: Using social media campaigns
Step 9: Making the lobby of the clinic a pleasing place for parents of potential pediatric patients and for children
Step 10: Referral program to market using existing for parents of potential pediatric patients
Step 11: Launching your online strategy to market your practice
Step 12: Offline advertising offline for your healthcare practice
Step 13: Online Advertising for your healthcare practice
Healthcare Advertising Defined
Advertising for doctors can be offline or online. Offline advertising for doctors refers to Billboards, Newspapers, Paper Yellow Pages, Ads in Cinemas, Radio Ads.
Online Advertising for doctors refers to advertising focused on internet based mediums. For example:
- Google search advertising
- Facebook display ads
- SEO / Search Engine Optimizations
- Website conversion techniques to improve the actual patients generation from your website
- Advertising on Instagram
- Email marketing
- SMS/Text based marketing
- Display advertising
PatientGain.com is a proven medical marketing solution, includes apps, websites, SEO, HIPAA compliance and account management.
To learn about What is the Foundation of Medical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Doctors
To learn about How SEO Works For Doctors Websites, this is a good starting page.
To learn about Short-cut SEO for Medical Practices, this is a good starting page.
To learn about Pricing and cost of SEO services for medical practices, this is a good starting page.
To learn about How Much Do Doctors Spend On Advertising?
To learn about Medical SEO Voice Search Optimization For Doctors (BERT)
To learn about Local Medical SEO For Doctors
To learn about Mobile SEO For Medical Websites
To learn about Zero-Click SEO for Doctors & Medical Practices
To learn about Benefits Of Medical SEO Marketing
To learn about Key Items For SEO Evaluation of Medical Websites
To learn about Avoid Risky Plans – Use Proven Medical Marketing Strategies
To learn about Medical Marketing Using Emotionally Compelling Offline Media
To learn about Pre Launch Medical Marketing Checklist for Doctors
To learn about Medical SEO vs. Medical Advertising – Which One Is Better?
To learn about Is Your Medical Website Design “Future Proof”?
To learn about Medical Website Conversion Strategies
To learn about Medical Website Content Marketing Strategy
To learn about How to Acquire New Patients for Your Medical Practice
To learn about Medical Website Applications
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