Expanding your patient base and attracting new patients is vital to the survival of any medical practice.  While you may be busy currently, you will always need new patients.  Old ones will move, change health insurance, die or transfer at a typical attrition rate.

Most people go online to search for local physicians when they are feeling out of sorts or need an appointment. So ask yourself, “When viewers come to my website, are they excited enough to pick up the phone and make an appointment or click the site to do so?”

The Pew Internet reports that almost three quarters of Americans seek health information online.  Your website must be captivating as well as efficient to convert tire-seekers to new appointments.

Benefits of an Optimized site

An optimized site will:

  • Be easy to navigate and be user-friendly
  • Provide information about you and your practice
  • Lend credulity
  • Establish authority in your field
  • Give location, directions and contact information
  • Initiate familiarity and establish trust (with photo images and videos)
  • Boost return of investment from medical marketing
  • Provide content (including videos of services or techniques)

These days, if a site is hard to navigate, or is visually confusing, people don’t dig for the information.  They click away from the site and go to the next medical practice on the list.

Besides being easy to navigate, patients need to feel that the information that they provide is secure.  Accreditation seals and trust seals ensuring cybersecurity legitimizes your site.  In Forbes, according to Actual Insights, trust seals boost credibility for three-quarters of users online.

Contact page

Make it easy for someone to reach you without the added step of a phone call.  A mere click will navigate the viewer to your contact page but don’t make it unwieldly and cumbersome.  No one wants to spend ten minutes filling out your form.  Having less than 5 fields is acceptable, if much over that, a prospective patient won’t bother.  According to Unbounce, there was a greater conversion by an incredible 120% by cutting the fields down from eleven to four.

Talking of phones, have your telephone number prominently on every page.  As the viewers navigate through your site to various pages, they may not want to keep returning to the home page to find the number.  Remember, making it easier, makes the likelihood of a call, that much greater.

Keywords

Don’t forget to have keywords on your site.  Ask yourself what words people use to search for you on Google and the other search engine sites.  If you don’t have these words prominently within your site, the search engines won’t know who you are.  And if they don’t….your prospective patients won’t either!

Contact

Would you like a free review of your website to see if you are stellar or just ineffective and humdrum?  If so, contact me, Barbara, at 516-647-3002.  I would be happy to discuss it with you!