The New Reality

Your website is the portal to your practice success

In today’s digital world, all of your marketing endeavors drive prospective patients to your website. This is both good news and bad news. While it’s good that prospective patients, including word-of-mouth referrals, are checking you (and your competition) out online before calling your office, it can come back to haunt you if your website fails to engage people.

The bottom line? Your website had better perform. It is imperative that it reflects the image you want to project, highlights the services you want to provide, portrays who you are, converts prospects to consultations, is better than your competition’s website and is found when potential patients search the Internet.

It’s Not About the Technology

Each time you launch or update a marketing campaign, the image of your medical practice is on the line. In digital mediums such as your website, your professional image, philosophy and business will be portrayed online forever. Therefore, the message conveyed by your website should be carefully and professionally crafted, protected and managed — just as you do with your traditional marketing. Your webmaster may be a wizard in Java and your 20-year-old receptionist may be able to make Facebook sing, but unless they are professional marketing experts with experience marketing premium medical practices, you shouldn’t let them, or the technology, dictate your website strategy.

Website Essentials

As the hub of your marketing campaign, your website should be the showcase of your practice’s sterling qualities. To achieve this, it needs to be visually attractive, with a coherent marketing message geared toward the concerns of patients. Your website represents you and your practice — so it needs to be aesthetically pleasing and show patients what they can expect when they get to your office. Your website’s marketing message should clearly tell patients what’s in it for them if they choose you!

The Foundation

Here are the elements your website must have to successfully convince patients that you are the best choice:

Easy to Navigate. Make it easy for prospective (and current) patients to find the information they are looking for. Information on procedures should be easy to find.

Facilitates Contact. It must be easy for prospective patients to find your contact information and to make the contact. Make sure your phone number and contact forms are visible — on every page, above the fold — and ensure that your forms and links work!

Prominent Call to Action. If you don’t ask them to call or email you, they won’t.

Key Procedures. Be sure to mention the procedures you specialize in, particularly those procedures that you want to promote.

Search Engine Friendly. Even a beautiful website is not worth much if no one can find it. Make sure that your SEO company is an expert in your specialty — and that it keeps up with search engine changes (in 2013, Google changed its search algorithm approximately twice a day).

Mobile Friendly. Between 30 and 40 percent of healthcare search is being performed on mobile devices. Your website needs to be compatible with this growing trend.

Blog. If you don’t already have one, add a blog to your website. Your blog can be set up to automatically add a post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn every time you blog. A note of caution: If you aren’t willing to post fairly often, this may not be a good option for your practice. However, your blog posts don’t have to be a time sink for you or your practice; a good Internet marketing company can create timely, engaging and successful content for your blog.

Last but not least, make sure to keep it consistent. It’s very important that you integrate your marketing across all of the marketing platforms you currently use, from brochures to radio to social media. Your logo, color palette, messaging and other visual features should be consistent.

Contact Ceatus today for information on how to make your website a portal for success!

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Read about our Case Study of the Month

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Read about our Case Study of the Month