So, your medical practice has a website. Does this mean anything to your business if no one is visiting it? How do you generate traffic to your website? Even more importantly, why would you want people to visit your website? Will they benefit from it? And in turn, what will you get from someone looking at the webpages?
Unless the five Ws below are clear on your end, your website will be like a white elephant. It’s nice to have but useless.
Three Ways to Make Your Medical Practice’s Website Work for You
1. Answer these 5 Ws
Why did you create a website?
Surely, you had a purpose before you signed a contract with a web provider to come up with your page.
- Did you plan to use it solely to market your practice and services?
- Did you want to educate your patients using blogs, vlogs, and podcasts?
- Or did you intend to add value to your practice with a functional website that can schedule appointments, orient potential patients to your practice, and give your patients the chance to pay for services or check their health charts online?
What did you intend to put on your practice’s website?
You’d know the answer to this if you knew your “Why.”
- If your purpose is for marketing your services, you’d want to have all the information about your services on your website, with external and internal links that would prove credibility and evidence to what you’re providing.
- If your purpose is to educate your patients, you’d have blog posts with quality content that tackles issues that your patients often experience. You’d allow comments to gather patient feedback and needs, so you can address them in your next blog posts. Your website will be dynamic and will even have shareable posts and pdf files that your patients can download and forward to their friends and families.
- If your purpose is to allow patients to schedule their appointments, engage patients virtually, and check their health charts and histories, then your website will have pages and tabs for them to do this easily. Your website will also have the capability to allow patients to register online.
Where did you intend to capture readers?
For people to find your site, you have to get the word out there. The following are the most common sources of leads:
Google Search
Landing on top of Google’s search rank is probably the most challenging thing to achieve for most websites. Your website needs to fulfill Google’s criteria of authority and excellent content. If you’re new to health care marketing, that’s going to be tough. Establishing your authority entails many backlinks to your website. Meaning, other sites are posting content with links leading to your site.
How does this happen?
Only if your website has content worth linking to. If you’re giving out useful information that other bloggers find worthy of sharing, then they’d link back to you. The more people link back to you, the more Google deems you as an authority in that topic or field. So it’ll take a while before you end up on Google’s first page. But don’t despair. There are more ways to get your practice’s website noticed and working for you. See the next two ways:
Social media
Make sure you have an online presence where your target audience is typically found. Ask your patients which platform they visit often.
Do they want to connect with you on Facebook and read articles relevant to their health issues, which they can share with their friends and families?
Are they more comfortable with Instagram, Nextdoor, or Linkedin?
Emails and newsletters
Emails are now part of your patient’s contact information. Some of them even prefer to be contacted this way. Make sure you inform your patients that part of the reason for using their emails is to send them newsletters, marketing materials, and information in the form of blogs and the like. Embed links to your emails that would lead your readers to your website. This entails writing engaging topics that would hook them to click on that link. This will increase your traffic and therefore, online presence. And it would contribute to your Google ranking.
When and how often do you plan to update your practice’s website?
A stagnant website won’t increase your traffic. Nobody wants to visit a website that doesn’t have fresh content.
Do you have a dedicated staff who can post regularly and send out newsletters? How often do your patients want to read updates? Would monthly newsletters get more readers than weekly or daily ones?
Too many updates can saturate and tire your readers. Your email may end up in their trash bins. Too little may put you in the forgotten land. Find the sweet spot and stick with it.
Who will engage your readers and take care of captured leads?
If you’re not up to doing this yourself, then find someone capable of writing fresh content and can capture your voice, and market your practice. And once you convert prospects into patients and they contact you for appointments, make sure you don’t lose them.
One of the weaknesses of digital marketing is having no one in charge of following up captured leads. Read our last blog post on how to avoid digital lead pitfalls.
2. Create high-quality, informative content
In our several years of experience in digital marketing, we’ve known that nothing beats high-quality, informative content as a proven tactic in gaining loyalty.
Why?
- Because your patients value content that helps them deal with their health issues
- Because they see you as an expert on the field due to the robust information you give on the subject matter
- And finally, because they trust you based on the information and value that you give
3. Highlight on your services
A website is nothing but a tool to market your services. No matter how fancy your website may be, if your services don’t deliver, it’ll fail in all aspects. Service and practice reviews matter. And you won’t get great reviews unless you practice healthcare marketing beyond the basics.
Don’t have time to market your medical practice to find more qualified patients? We can help! Schedule a practice review here for a health care marketing plan and more on how to make your practice’s website work for you.