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10 Things to Consider When Buying Your Medical Website Posted by Tyson Downs on 1/6/15 3:22 PM
A Doctors Website is the Central Part of Their Online Marketing Strategy What is one of the main challenges of any healthcare practice? Attracting, and retaining your ideal patients, right? Sure you may get your fair share of new patients, but are they you ideal patients? Attracting awesome new patients is typically the goal of an online marketing strategy. To that end we are going to touch on 10 things that you need to consider BEFORE a website redesign (or new build for that matter) for your healthcare practice. To attract and keep website visitors, your website will need to both look appealing and function as expected. Duh, right? Your website should work in tandem with your social media program, lead generation system, email marketing, sales strategies, and brand awareness. Websites for doctors can be challenging to say the least, in part due to time constraints, and high expectations.
It's important to remember there are a number of factors to consider when building a new website or having a doctors website built. In this post we’ll go over ten ways you can ensure that the redesign or new build out of your medical website is a success.
1. What Are Your Current Numbers?
Before you even take the first step to design your new website, you’ll want to learn about your numbers for your old/current website. Your old metrics will tell you a lot about your clients and your business, and it will give you a blueprint for what you need to improve on your website redesign. You can get insight into your website’s current numbers by adding an analytics tool such as Google Analytics or HubSpot’s closed loop analytics. Here are some of the things you’ll be looking for when you look over your current metrics: Number of visits and unique visitors Time on site Bounce rate SEO rankings for your keywords Domain authority Number of form submissions and new leads Total sales generated
You can’t create a plan without having a good idea of what was going on with your website before. These numbers will give you a much more accurate picture of what was happening with your website, and from there, you’ll be able to create a much more effective, concrete plan on how to fix it. Make sure that you write all of these numbers down or save them, because you’ll want to reference them throughout the process.
2. Figuring Out What Your Goals Are It isn’t easy to figure out what your goals are if you don’t have your current metrics. That’s why it was so important to look up your current website’s metrics on Google Analytics and write them down. Let’s look at the metrics you’ll be referencing again: Number of visits and unique visitors Time on site Bounce rate SEO rankings for your keywords Domain authority Number of form submissions and new leads Total sales generated These metrics might not look it, but they are all interconnected on some level. For example, if you want to increase total sales, you’ll want to increase time on site while decreasing the bounce rate. You’ll also want to increase your total number of visitors and increase your site’s SEO rankings for individual keywords. For example, you might want to rank higher for the “Los Angeles Doctor” keyword, so that when people search that term, your website will come up as a result closer to the top. Metrics help you determine if you are meeting your goals. After evaluating the metrics for your old site, you will want to come up with some goals—such as “increasing the site’s traffic by 50 percent after half a year.” Once you have your new website, you can use these metrics to determine if you’re meeting those goals.
3. Avoiding Mistakes While there are plenty of ways for your website redesign to succeed and bring you the traffic you want, there are also plenty of ways for the redesign process to go wrong. During the redesign process, you can easily lose content or pages that are highly successful. For example, if you delete a page on your website that has a high number of inbound links (numerous other websites have linked to this specific page), then your website will likely lose valuable ground on the search engines. You will always want to keep the search engines in mind, which is something that many web designers don’t do (and online marketers do). So before you make a potentially permanent mistake, check out exactly what content you are working with and determine if it is going to be valuable or not before it is removed or changed.
4. What Is Your Competition Doing? Obviously, you don’t want your business to worry about your competitors to the point of obsession. However, while
you don’t need to obsess about your competition, you do need to be aware of them and what they are doing. Start by checking around 3-5 competitor websites and noting what you think works for them, and what you think doesn’t work. Then try running their website through an online evaluator tool such as Marketing Grader. Marketing Grader will use metrics and other tools to tell you the strengths and weaknesses of the specific website in question, which can provide you with invaluable information. You’ll want to check and see if the strengths and weaknesses that you listed for your competition line up with what Marketing Grader noted as strengths and weaknesses of each website. This will help give you some objectivity where it comes to evaluating competitors’ sites.
5. What Is Your Value Proposition? After you have had a look at your competitors and determined how you want to design and craft your own content, you’ll want to start with a value proposition. Your value proposition should be the statement that brings together all of your content under one umbrella neatly. From your value proposition, you should be able to describe all of your website’s content and features in a manner that makes sense. Value propositions are very important because, invariably, there is going to be a significant number of people that end up on your doctor website who have never heard of you, or don’t even know how they got there. You have to come up with a way to keep these visitors on the page, and that’s by clearly and concisely describing what your practice is about. Viewers who are still interested in your services are going to stay on, while those that aren’t will leave. But with an attractive design and a clear value proposition, you’ll vastly improve your bounce rate and conversion rate.
6. Designing Your Site
When a doctor is designing their website, (or more commonly, having one designed for them) they often get caught up in the trap of designing a site that fits what they, the business owner, wants. But when you mold your business to our own personal tastes, you are missing the point, along with a bunch of potential business. You aren’t crafting a website for your own personal tastes; you are crafting a website that will attract your target audience and get them to purchase your goods and services. You need to learn more about your target audience, such as their demographics and online behavior, so that you can make effective website design choices that will ultimately interest them. You wouldn’t market psychology services the same way you market a dentistry, and the differences come from knowing your audience and what they want. In order to get the most out of your website, you’ll have to segment your customers. Separate them by “buyer type” and give them identifying characteristics. At a dentist’s office, perhaps there is the 30-year-old executive with enough money for elective surgery. Or at a doctor’s office, there is the older patient with a significant number of government benefits. Once you’ve identified your ideal patients, you should identify their needs and the behavior they exhibit. Are they searching for your website through social media? Are they only using Google in order to reach your website? These are all questions you will want to answer.
7. Optimizing Your Site
Optimizing your website means getting the most out of your site’s value online so that it gets seen. What’s the point of having a great website if nobody can see it? By using strong SEO tactics, you can get value out of your website while increasing its reach to new customers you perhaps never even considered. The most important aspects of SEO are traffic, inbound links, and keywords. If you are going to redesign pages that are already highly ranked, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t lose the existing content. You’ll also want to make sure that you create a 301 redirect (place a forward) for web pages that have a lot of inbound links, so that those links go directly to your new, redesigned page, instead of being lost in oblivion somewhere. On your individual pages, you’ll want to make sure that you focus on 1-3 keywords you want to do well in. On those individual pages, you’ll use keywords multiple times, and link to other pages inside your website. Internal linking is an excellent way to build up the integrity of your webpages.
8. Your Calls-To-Action Whatever you are selling, you need a call to action to encourage a particular behavior, or action, in the potential customer. The action could be purchasing your goods and services, or it could be as easy and low-risk as downloading a brochure.
Calls to action don’t always have to be about paying immediate money; you could have a call to action for a free consultation or an email newsletter subscription that keeps the visitor informed about your business. You’ll want to make sure your website is properly stocked with calls to action so that you can capitalize on the traffic you do get.
9. What Is Your Content Strategy?
If you want to truly capitalize on your website and keep it vibrant and organic, you need to make sure you have updates on at least a semi-regular basis. The goal is to get potential patients finding you through searches online. One of the best ways to ensure that they can find you is by providing answers to their questions on your website. A great way to do this is through blog posts. By creating awesome content. This can be done through a blog or a newsletter, or even press releases or site updates. Maintaining a blog is the best way to keep your content updated—you’ll be creating the type and amount of organic content you need to get new visitors and keep them. Having a constant flow of new content will also help tremendously on the search engines when it comes to internal links, inbound links, and keyword usage.
10. Figuring Out the Rest There are a ton of little tools you can use to optimize your website and maximize its capabilities. You’ll definitely want to create a blog, but you also will want a landing page with calls to action in order to generate sales. An RSS subscription will allow your website’s content to quickly be pushed to other websites, which can link back to you and your site. You also might want to invest in social media and reaching out to people on Facebook or Twitter. Social media buttons
should ideally be on each page, so that viewers can quickly link with your social media pages if they see something that they like.
CONCLUSION: Throughout the process, you’ll want to stay on top of your metrics to make sure that your website is performing the way that you want it to, and that it continues to be on track to reach your goals. Every so often, your goals might change, and you might have to change strategies as well. To sum up, the most important concept behind website redesign is to make sure that your website is performing on your terms, so that it has the best chance of attracting visitors and converting those visitors into patients. After all, what good is a website for doctors if it doesn't perform? Have a website tip, share it below!
Topics: Web Design