There are a lot of metaphors out there to describe digital marketing, but at Crystal Clear, we like to think of your medical marketing as a recipe. While our cloud-based Social Patient Center software is the mixing bowl of lead management for your medical practice, your website is the base of the recipe that helps it all stick together.
How Can I Make My Medical Practice Website Stand Out?
Right now, there are over half a billion active websites on the Internet, so making sure your medical practice website stands out in the crowd is the first step to getting more traffic and converting that traffic into paying patients. Anyone can throw a website on the Internet and call it a day, but it takes a little bit of know-how to make a website that converts, is mobile-responsive, and that responds well from a search engine perspective.
Our digital marketing specialists at Crystal Clear have decades of experience in the ever-changing industry of digital marketing, and we know how frustrating it can be for doctors, surgeons, and other medical practitioners to establish and grow their digital presence.
Medical Practice Website Design that Converts
If your practice has a specific color scheme at the office, it’s important to have that translate onto your medical practice website as well. This not only ensures that your website is “on-brand,” but it also creates consistency across all of your marketing and helps strengthen your brand visibility. But there’s another important part of website design – the ability to convert potential patients into actual patients in your waiting room.
What many doctors don’t realize is that website design is not all about colors and graphics. You also have to make sure that your website is designed for conversion – in other words, making sure your potential patients can fill out an online form or contact you as quickly and efficiently as possible. Within that half a billion websites are other medical practice websites in your area that are waiting to compete with you for your target demographic. Having a website that is well-built and designed for conversion can make the difference between filling the seats in your waiting room or watching those people walk into your competitor’s practice.
Statistically, the average website only converts at about 1-2 percent. Crystal Clear’s websites convert at about 6-15 percent. Don’t roll the dice with this critical aspect of your digital presence!
Content that Your Patients Can Relate To
Even after you build a medical practice website that has a beautiful design and converts, the journey to making it stand out doesn’t end there. Once you get a potential patient’s attention, you have to make sure you keep it so they don’t click away from your site. The national average attention span is at about 8 seconds, which makes it mission-critical for your website to have strong content marketing.
Content marketing is one of the most underutilized and misunderstood aspects of the entire digital marketing recipe. It’s one of those ingredients that doesn’t seem necessary until you bite into the finished product and immediately realize that something doesn’t taste right. Far too many doctors and medical practitioners think it’s enough to simply copy and paste manufacturer content onto their website. While it’s a good idea to use marketing assets such as before and after photos, videos, and logos, content should never be reused, even if you have permission to do so.
While borrowing content is an easy way to fill the pages of your website, it is not the best way to execute your content marketing strategy. It can even hurt your search engine rankings to the point where your website stops showing up anywhere near the first few pages of results.
How do you prevent that from happening? The good news is that it’s not rocket science to get good content on your site, you just have to remember that there are two audiences you are catering to: your potential patients and Google.
Your patients want to see website content that:
- Is personalized to the practice
- Relates to them and the concerns they are facing
- Relays the benefits of choosing your practice
- Gives them a call to action
Google wants to see content that:
- Is 100 percent unique with no plagiarism involved
- Has adequate word count
- Has proper keyword densities
- Utilizes SEO best practices
- Has photos and videos
In addition to the actual content pages on your medical practice website, your content strategy also extends to your blogs and social media posts – each of these components are designed to drive traffic and boost your SEO in a different way, and it’s important to know how each component functions and how to utilize it the best way. If you’re not sure, contact us today to find out!
Search Engine Optimization and Your Medical Practice Website
If you’re not sure what SEO is or how it functions, don’t worry – you’re not alone. The importance of SEO is just recently becoming understood from a search engine perspective, and you don’t have to be an expert to understand why your medical practice website needs it in order to give you the leading edge over your competitors.
At a basic level, Search Engine Optimization refers to making sure your site shows up in the search engine results. For example, if you are a rhinoplasty surgeon in Orlando and someone searches “rhinoplasty Orlando” or a similar search term on Google, an SEO strategy works behind the scenes to make sure you show up either on the first page or close to it.
Remember, it’s everyone’s end goal to be #1 on search engines for whatever procedures or treatments you specialize in, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Google’s algorithm is always changing, which is a double-edged sword when it comes to your medical practice website. It can seem intimidating to have to keep up with Google and the ever-changing rules of what types of sites it prefers, but the good news is that if you put in the legwork with us of establishing your targeted keywords, you will be miles ahead of those who choose to ignore or put off their SEO strategies.
Is Your Medical Practice Website Visible on Mobile Devices?
When you open up your website on a desktop computer or laptop, it may look great and be easy to scroll through and navigate, but does that translate when you open it up on a smartphone or tablet? Web sites are not automatically built to show up on both; there is a unique set of coding that has to be involved before this is successfully executed, and it matters more than you might think. Those searching for a service on a mobile device are going to look for a site that is easy for them to navigate – are you prepared?
Cut Through the Noise with Crystal Clear Digital Marketing
The Internet is one big race of those half a billion websites trying to catch the attention of your potential patients. The challenge of cutting through the noise and making sure that your medical practice website stands out is only becoming more difficult, but we are here to help you ensure that the home base of your digital marketing strategy is modern, visible and easy to navigate on any mobile device, and is designed with your brand AND your conversion rate in mind. Don’t just put up a website, put up a medical practice website that pops and wows your potential patients with Crystal Clear Digital Marketing. You’ll be glad you did!
Contact us today to get started!
