Is Your Healthcare Website Designed To Drive Growth?
Having a website for your healthcare organization is a given. You want people to have a place where they can learn about you and your products and services.
But is your healthcare website everything it can be? Does your website drive business growth? Are you creating the best possible experience for your visitors?
At Formada, we see websites as a foundational element of a successful marketing strategy. Your website and your paid, social, and organic tactics should all be working together to create more opportunities for your business, and ultimately drive the growth you need to achieve your goals.
If you’re looking to build a new website or are ready for a website refresh, here are five essentials for having a top performing website for your business.
It’s All About The Experience
Your website, just like any other tactic in your marketing strategy, is a direct reflection of your brand. And what’s beautiful about a website is that you have total control over the way in which you position yourself in the marketplace.
This means more than just your message. Make them feel welcome, informed, and confident before they’ve ever stepped foot in your business! This means deep consideration of your end-user, and then taking that knowledge and creating a site that’s inviting, easy to navigate, and helps them take action.
Experience Fundamentals:
- A user-centric sitemap — The moment someone feels lost on your website is the moment they leave your website. Your site should be simple to navigate while also pushing your visitors to the next, most logical step (e.g., deeper information on a specific topic, appointment booking, contact forms, and so on)
- Visual consistency — All websites have a visual hierarchy and language. Well-thought out designs help people make choices without having to think too deeply about them. Make buttons the same color and shape. Limit the number of page styles to avoid confusion. If an element looks “clickable,” it probably should be. If your website isn’t consistent, it will create confusion.
- Prioritize accessibility — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are designed to ensure that people with disabilities are able to access and make use of websites. It’s especially important that all websites adhere to these standards in order to accommodate users across the spectrum of abilities. Formada ensures that all our websites are accessibility friendly.
- Design for desktop and mobile — It’s crucial to design your website on a platform that is friendly to both mobile and desktop users. Whether your clients are using a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone, you want them to have a consistently positive perception of your brand. Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly create negative experiences and will push visitors away.
Seriously, It’s Really All About Patient Experience!
How easy is it for your end-users to take advantage of your services? If you’re an appointment-based business, can they make an appointment directly through the site?
If not, you should consider adding this feature to your site. People love the convenience of these tools. You’re reducing their time spent waiting on hold, they can book appointments before or after business hours, and it gives your team less to manage and more time to focus on your client experience.
Relatedly, incorporating a secure client portal on your site is a great way to improve user experience by giving them a secure place to store their client history, preferences, results, as well as a way to communicate directly with the business and its specialists.
I would also encourage ways of getting client feedback, either through a review program or subject-specific surveys. This can help you better understand overall business performance, specific employee performance, service satisfaction, and more.
Not every piece of feedback will be positive, but all feedback can lead to a more positive experience, so engage with critical feedback with an open mind and open communication.
Content Is Key
In our experience, too many businesses launch a new or refreshed website and then don’t regularly update it until they’re ready to completely revamp the site.
And that’s a shame, because a healthcare website that is regularly updated with relevant, useful content will perform better with search engines and with your visitors.
Content Fundamentals
- Different pages have different purposes — Remember, your services and products pages have very different purposes than blogs or client resource pages. Structure them according to their respective goals to improve your results. For example, use a succinct, action oriented strategy for your products/services pages and use an in-depth, educational approach with blog entries.
- Write for people, but don’t forget about search engines — Search engines like Google like it when you regularly publish content that is relevant and useful. Web crawlers will periodically evaluate your content, rewarding those pages that are relevant to user search queries. The better your content, the more relevant it is for search and the more useful it is to end users. Content helps you build authority, increase traffic, and create new opportunities for the business!
- Leave no stone unturned — There are all sorts of ways to add new, relevant content to your site. Your website is not limited to products/services pages and blogs. Don’t forget about FAQs, How-Tos, videos, podcasts, transcripts, and more. They all add value to your site’s experience, visibility and usefulness.
Don’t Neglect Local SEO
Yes, an overarching keyword strategy is an absolute necessity when it comes to your healthcare website, but don’t overlook niche opportunities in favor of the most competitive search terms.
To be clear: Don’t ignore the most competitive keywords. They’re fundamental to your business but pose difficulty when it comes to create differentiation for your business.
We would encourage you to, either on your own or with the help of a content specialist, conduct keyword research as well as content audits of your competitors in order to:
- Identify content gaps and opportunities
- Compile long tail keywords and queries
- Create a content plan that distinguishes you from competitors
But that’s not all. We would also encourage you to remember the importance of your Local SEO strategy.
Your Local SEO — which contains elements of an accurate, up to date Google Business Page, contact information (names, addresses, and phone numbers), locally relevant content, location pages on your site, and claimed listings across other directory sites — is key in driving traffic to your website.
Don’t Skimp On Safety And Privacy
Health and medical websites often contain private information that is required to be protected.
Any and all patient or client data must be handled in a manner that is HIPAA compliant. We recommend that you work with web developers who are well versed in creating and maintaining safe, secure websites in order to protect user data.
These developers should also build your site in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) format in order to ensure that sensitive data will remain secure and encrypted.
Anyone encouraging you to build your site in a less secure manner is putting your clientele, and your business, at risk.
Let Formada Be Your Healthcare Website Partner!
The Formada team are experts at building custom, secure, and effective websites that can help create significant opportunities for your business.