1 Create A Mobile-Ready Website
Many people, and especially your potential clients and patients, will want to access your website through their mobile phones and tablets. That said, ask the web designer to ensure your website is easily accessible on both desktop computers and mobile devices. The site also needs to function the same as its desktop version on the much smaller devices.
The website’s buttons and font size need to be easy to click and read too. Its menu, among other features, should be easily accessible on all types of screens. Failure to do so will only see a good number of potential clients/patients seek help elsewhere.
2 Have All Featured Services Highlighted On Your Home Page
As obvious as it may sound, you need to understand who your target audience/patients are, and the services they might/are most interested in. You however, don’t have to highlight every treatment on the homepage, but the specific ones your clients will be looking for. Start by creating a section for 3-4 services and treatments that your practice offers.
Highlighting all the practices/treatments covered under your practice is one of the best ways to market your clinic. If your services are covered by Medicare Supplement plans for 2021 ensure that your clients know. A good example of highlighting your services is a podiatrist offering effective ways to remove painful bunions. It could also be a Urologist offering no-scalpel vasectomy to reduce a patient’s recovery time?
3. Have An Active Blog Area
Blogs provide a great platform to market your dental or medical website. The best thing about having a healthcare blog is you can use it to inform your target audience/patients on various issues while marketing your practice. Blogs are thus an excellent source of website traffic and double up for local SEO. Most people in health practice don’t utilize this marketing strategy, one of the reasons they hardly show up on the top pages of a search result. Others create blogs but don’t spend enough time posting fresh content or interacting with audiences.
It’s worth noting that SEO and content marketing are interconnected. One cannot do without the other, which is why it would be advisable to not only create engaging medical content for your patients but also optimize the medical website for both search engines and organic visitors. You can choose to use either video content, written content, or both on your blog for improved exposure.
4 Create A Staff Page For The Various Practices Offered
It’s natural for patients to search for specific information on a provider’s website before making contact or scheduling an appointment. That said, you need to have a section/page created outlining the services on offer, and the responsible practitioner for each, if possible. It would also be advisable to have a dedicated page designed to outline each provider’s credentials, bio, and other accomplishments. The audience/potential clients need to have an assurance that they will be attended to by an expert before scheduling an appointment or making a call. The staff’s page and their bio will, however, satisfy their curiosity.
5 Proper Keyword Research And Medical SEO
Your website is the foundation of a solid SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Website content is, however, never complete without proper keyword use and medical SEO. That said, you need to invest a bit of your time and resources to research on converting and competitive keywords relevant to your niche. Experts recommend doing this before the website content is created. This is the only way you will be able to interweave the keywords naturally as well as have the appropriate theme for the practice.
A keyword analysis is essential, especially with the market getting more competitive by the day. It would be best if you had an idea of what your target audience/patient will search for when looking for information about a specific ailment or treatment. Expert keyword research is thus essential if you are to get higher rankings on Google and other search engines.
Page-by-page SEO is vital for your website’s success. The SEO strategy needs to compass everything from meta descriptions, correct H-tags, optimized images, and backlinks, among others. An SEO site audit might also be required if the medical website has been around for some time and only needs a few tweaks to improve its performance. Simple updates can go a long way in boosting your ranks on Google.
6 Feature Patient Testimonials
Reviews and testimonials are some of the biggest traffic drivers today. Most of your patients will first check testimonials and customer ratings before they can book an appointment. It would thus be advisable to allow clients and patients to leave a feedback/testimonial after trying your service. This way, potential patients will have an idea of what to expect even before setting foot to the clinic.
In addition to most of your potential patients (70%) checking your current ratings and reviews, Google and other search engines use these reviews when ranking websites. Reviews and testimonials can thus be used to improve rankings online. Look for ways to encourage customers/patients to leave a review and rate your service based on personal experience.
7 Make It Easy For Patients To Book An Appointment
The wake of technology has made people inherently lazy. Most patients will want a straight-forward and easy way to book an appointment without having to enter lots of personal information online. That said, you need to have a portal where patients can book appointments fast and easy.
Make the appointment request portal or form easy to find and readily available for all. You can add a link on the footer, sidebars, or create a section on the webpage’s dashboard. This way, a potential client will only have to click on the link to access the appointment request portal. Adding a pop-up functionality allowing the audience to book an appointment without necessarily leaving the current page would be a welcome idea too. This functionality should be made available on both the desktop and mobile versions of the website.