Is your plastic surgery website doing its job? If you’re a plastic surgeon, your website is the most important tool in your digital marketing arsenal. Your website acts as a salesperson, a receptionist and a consultant simultaneously. At every stage in the customer journey, your website should gently guide visitors along the path toward becoming new patients.
Are you having difficulty building a website that meets your practice’s sales goals? Our plastic surgery website design services are the best you’ll ever find — because digital marketing for medical professionals is all that we do.
If you’d prefer to do the work on your own, this is the guide for you. Building a successful plastic surgery website requires just three things: a great design, great content and a way to capture leads. A great design gives your potential patients the best possible experience. Great content establishes your expertise and gets people interested in your services. Capturing leads helps you turn visitors into new patients.
Let’s get started!
A User-Friendly Design
The Problem: People Want Fast Access to Information on Any Device
Mobile devices generate more than half of all web traffic. People love the fact that smartphones give them constant access to the Internet, and people are very likely to use their smartphones when searching for local businesses.
No matter what device a person uses to browse the web, he or she expects quick access to relevant information. Your website needs a clear, logical navigation structure that simplifies the customer journey by gently guiding each user to the next step in the process of becoming a new patient.
The Solution: Serve People Better With Logical Navigation and Responsive Design
The best way to please both mobile and desktop web users is with a responsive website design. A responsive design automatically reorganizes layout elements to suit the needs of the screen size used to view it. On a mobile device, images automatically become smaller. Information that would normally appear in the website’s sidebar moves to the bottom of the page to make the page’s main content more prominent. Responsive design is the most efficient way to serve both mobile and desktop users.
To determine whether your website has a logical navigation structure, try asking for feedback from volunteers. If you are the designer of your website, you can’t judge the navigation impartially because you already know your way around. Volunteers will tell you if anything about your website’s structure is vague or confusing.
We have a few general tips for improving your website’s navigation:
- Use descriptive keywords for navigation options. A navigation option such as “Our Services,” for example, doesn’t tell the user anything about what he or she will see after clicking the link. “South Florida Plastic Surgery Services” does a better job of informing the user. It also increases the density of an important keyword phrase.
- Move less important links to the website’s footer. Links to your website’s privacy and legal policies are important for compliance, but they also direct attention away from links that generate profit.
- Condense your navigation structure to eliminate options that you don’t want users to click. Your website’s structure should focus on making information as easy to find as possible and making the next step in the customer journey — whether it’s calling for an appointment or completing a form — as prominent as possible.
- Eliminate clutter in your website’s sidebar. Most mobile users won’t see the sidebar content, so vital information doesn’t belong there. Unimportant information also doesn’t belong there because it distracts from important links. You can use your website’s sidebar to provide additional navigation options that may help desktop users find relevant content more quickly.
Great Content
The Problem: In This Business, Less Does Not Equal More
Some business in low-competition markets can often get by with small websites. A restaurant in a small town, for example, only needs to let people know that it exists. When people are hungry and don’t want to cook for themselves, they’ll visit. Things aren’t so easy for plastic surgery websites. As a plastic surgeon, you serve patients who are often affluent, demanding and have plenty of options. To capture their business, your website needs to do more than list your hours and services.
The Solution: Write Content That Engages Website Visitors
The content on your plastic surgery website should inform, engage and educate prospective patients while establishing yourself as a trusted expert in your field. Some of the topics that you can cover in your website’s content include:
- Explaining how different plastic surgery procedures work
- Comparing different surgical and non-surgical options for resolving aesthetic issues
- Discussing recent innovations and developments in plastic surgery
Each time you write an article, you should endeavor to make it the best article on its topic that you can possibly write. An article that only does the bare minimum in addressing its topic will look much the same as all of the other articles on Google’s search results pages. If you can create an article that addresses its topic more thoroughly than any other article online, you’ll receive more attention from Google. You’ll also impress the people who read the article.
The Three Benefits of Great Website Content
The first benefit of content is that it increases the number of keywords on your plastic surgery website. More keywords give your website an opportunity to appear among Google’s results for a greater variety of searches. Although keyword presence isn’t the only factor influencing Google’s search results, your website has no chance of appearing in the results for a query if it doesn’t have a document addressing the query.
If you try to create the Internet’s best resource on a subject every time you write a new article, you’re not only creating a good experience for website visitors. You’re also creating a resource that’s likely to receive links from bloggers, journalists, and website owners. Website owners will not link to your practice’s “About Us” page. It’s also unusual for commercial content to receive links. Great informational content does receive links, however, and inbound links can help to increase the search engine ranking of all of your website’s articles.
The final benefit of website content is that it can generate leads for your practice. Informational content is useful to readers, but it doesn’t often generate immediate sales. When people view your content early in the customer journey, you need to capture their contact information so you can continue marketing to them. We’ll discuss lead generation further in the next section.
A Lead Generation System
The Problem: Plastic Surgery Research Takes Time
For many people, the decision process leading up to receiving plastic surgery is a slow one. Think about all of the different questions that people may ask themselves:
- I am not satisfied with my appearance. Should I resolve my dissatisfaction by getting plastic surgery?
- Which plastic surgery procedure is the right one for me? Are there less invasive options that I should consider instead?
- Which doctors are best known for performing the procedure that interests me?
- What do people typically look like after undergoing the procedure that I’m considering?
- How much will the procedure cost?
- What is the typical recovery time following the procedure?
- I am certain that I want to undergo the procedure. Which doctor should I choose?
With such a lengthy decision-making process, a potential patient may view many plastic surgery websites while conducting research. Unless your name comes up when that person is ready to choose a doctor, someone else will receive his or her business.
The Solution: Capture Leads During the Research Stage
Your plastic surgery website can capture search engine traffic if it contains information useful to potential patients early in the research process. Most of the time the people who view informational articles aren’t ready to choose a doctor yet, so you need a way to stay in touch with them until they are. You can do that by adding forms to your website to collect visitors’ email addresses.
Collecting email addresses from website visitors isn’t always easy, but you can increase your chance of success by offering a reward. Suppose, for example, that you have an article explaining the benefits of a less invasive alternative to a full facelift. The procedure is relatively quick and doesn’t require full sedation, so you can offer a slight discount from your normal fee for the procedure and still earn a profit. Offering a discount is a great way to collect leads from your article.
Once you’ve captured a lead, you’ll need to stay in touch with that person. Sending periodic messages keeps your practice at the forefront of a potential client’s mind and helps to ensure that you’re still in the running when that person is ready to choose a surgeon.
Contact Crystal Clear Digital Marketing today to get started with your plastic surgery website!
