How A Website Refresh Can Grow Your Healthcare Business
We often have clients approach us about refreshing their websites. Creating healthcare websites built for search is one of our specialties, and that includes not only new builds, but auditing, reorganizing, and improving existing sites that need in-depth maintenance.
Typically, when a client is seeking a refresh of their site, it is because they aren’t getting the traffic or conversions they need in order to meet their goals.
When Formada takes on a website refresh, we begin with a discovery session, before moving onto a site audit, then we present our recommendations, and then begin the actual update once the final scope is agreed upon.
The reason this process matters is that there are countless reasons why a website might not be meeting your expectations, and understanding the history, the challenges, and the short- and long-term goals of the business will inform how we approach the refresh, what success looks like, and the sort of recommendations we’ll make.
Effective marketing between you and your agency is a collaboration, and this process has helped us get countless sites across an array of industries back on track to effectively contribute to the growth of the businesses they represent.
In a recent website refresh project, the Formada team audited a site to discover two structural opportunities that could help the business achieve its goals:
- A redesign of the navigation menu
- Restructuring the services pages
Menus can be difficult to organize, but their readability is vital — they are one of the most important elements of your site. This is especially true if you offer a wide variety of services or products and have a lot of educational information to share on your site.
How do you present this information in a manner that is easy to find, easy to understand, and pushes the user through the site logically and effectively? You need an easy to understand site map, a strong internal linking strategy, and actionable copy on the page.
Relatedly, the services pages need to contain useful information, must be structured in an easily scannable user-friendly way with copy that is relevant and useful, and they must be designed to encourage action (a phone call, email, form submission, etc.)
Making subtle, but critical changes to these elements can have a huge impact on the growth of your business.
In this particular care, the web design team made the following recommendations to improve site performance.
Our Recommendations
- Use traffic data to reorganize the order of all services pages
- Create a more uniform structure across services pages to better readability
- Add more specific services keywords
- Consolidate certain related services to make important pages easier to find
- Add succinct services summaries to the homepage
- Create a new navigation menu to reflect these updates and guides the user
The impact these seemingly small updates resulted in were profound. Nearly double the organic search traffic! Strategically refined, intentionally restructured content will catch the attention of readers and search engines, culminating in a huge advantage for your business.
This is part of our philosophy in writing and designing great websites. We want you to grow. Your organization exists to serve your clients, and we are here to help you make more of the connections that make that possible.
When we’re creating healthcare websites built for search and user experience, here’s what we’re thinking about.
Be Yourself
Your organization has a personality. You might not be fully conscious of it (or maybe you’re acutely aware of it!), but the way your business is perceived is uniquely different from your competitors.
Tapping into your essence is what sets you apart. Your mission lies at the heart of this. Pay attention to your competition, but don’t try to emulate them.
If your organization focuses on client education, then your website should reflect that by offering information-rich blogs, instructional or educational videos, or other assets that will create a connection between you, your site, and your audience. Become the resource for that type of information. Cultivate a personality. Bring that character to life. Use that character to connect with your audience — and infuse that character into every aspect of your site.
Remember Your Audience
Great content is a must. But “great” is relative.
You need to strike a balance between your business goals, what search engines require for your site to rank well, and perhaps most importantly, the people who are going to be visiting your site.
People are looking for useful, relevant information — the answers to their questions. You can only achieve your goals by effectively solving their problems, so your site experience should be a positive one.
Should they visit your site and the language is difficult to understand, the navigation is confusing, or it takes too long for pages to load, then they aren’t going to stay for very long.
People and search engines are looking for high quality content, and luckily for you, you have complete control over the quality and quantity of content you’re publishing to your site.
Your content gives people a taste of the customer experience you provide. You’re the best in your category? Show them why. Yes, lean into the relevant keyword research, but explore them from every possible angle to create something that is unique, informative, and useful.
This is how you leverage content into creating growth for your business. But it’s not just about the content itself, it’s also about how you structure it.
Relevant, Well-Structured Content Can Drive Growth
You’ve written useful, relevant content. That’s great! But can people find it? And has it been properly structured on your site?
When it comes to creating healthcare websites built for search and for conversion, how you’re structuring it (on the front and back ends) truly matters.
But when everything matters, how do you create the correct content hierarchy? Let’s go back to one of the recommendations we shared in the beginning of the blog:
“Use traffic data to reorganize the order of all services pages.”
We can use this data in a number of ways. One, we can see that we’re getting a lot of traffic for a particular product or service. This means that we can lean more into this category to create more useful content in order to increase its visibility and capitalize on its relevance.
Another way to use this data, especially if there’s an imbalance across product or service interest, is to experiment with publishing new content that is more relevant to people’s needs in relation to those products and services.
Make it relevant, make it useful, and make it actionable — and make it so they don’t have to think too hard!
And don’t forget the structural details. Your keyword focus, meta descriptions, titles, headings, alt text, and links all contribute to how search engines analyze and rank your content.
Formada’s healthcare websites are built for search. They’re built for people. They are websites that are built for growth. Doesn’t your organization deserve this?
All you need to do is contact us! Website design, content strategy and creation, paid media, consulting, and more. Contact us today for your free 15-minute consultation. We’re here to help you grow.