Why Medical Website Design Matters for Your Practice’s Growth
A website shouldn’t be hard, right? You won’t get any arguments from me on this topic. Websites should be simple, but the reality is that there’s a great deal of strategy, consideration, and skill that goes into designing a website that feels easy to the end-user.
And this is exactly why great medical website design matters so much to the growth of your practice.
- You want to establish trust as quickly as possible
- You want to provide visitors with the resources they need simply and intuitively
- You want them to take action (Fill out a form, make a phone call, subscribe, etc.)
Without great design — where design means aesthetics and structure — you’ll have visitors leaving your website in frustration, creating a negative perception of your practice’s brand. You’ve lost an opportunity. And a lost opportunity often means lost revenue.
So, what does great medical website design look like? The kind that turns visitors into patients and helps you apply your skills and reach your practice goals? Let’s get into it!
Key Features of High-Converting Medical Websites
A clean, professional design
Now, I understand that “clean and professional” is in the eye of the beholder, but the point here is to convey the experience that they’ll receive in your practice in an online forum.
If your practice is a medical spa, then your site should feel like a spa. The same goes for all medical specialties. Give your site visitors the essence of their experience in your care. Visiting an outdated site will immediately conjure up feelings of outdated care and equipment, and will likely cause you to lose an opportunity.
Simple, intuitive navigation, fast loading pages, and mobile optimization
If someone doesn’t know where to go when they’re on your site, then they’re not staying.
Our team spends considerable time creating site maps that help define a person’s journey throughout your website. This helps to ensure a few things:
- That visitors know where they are and where they’re going on the site
- That you, through your content and site structure, are pushing them in a specific direction
An important thing to remember is that people aren’t necessarily arriving on your site’s homepage. So no matter how they’ve ended up there (organic search, social media, email, a paid campaign, etc.) they need to know what’s next and how to get there.
This is where great medical website design is an absolute must!
Every page needs clear, contextually appropriate Calls To Action. Every page. Tell visitors what to do. Make it simple and make it clear, and don’t give them too many options. This will confuse people, and might cause them to not do anything at all.
It’s tempting to think, “Well, what if they don’t see _________?” so you offer your site visitors a few more options. Resist the temptation. Keep your message clear and your CTAs focused.
And don’t forget about page load speeds. Things like large image files sizes, inefficient code, too many plugins and other backend factors can really slow your site down. People are impatient, only giving you about two seconds before they go back to searching. Make sure your website designer is someone you trust!
Last thing on this point: Make sure your site is optimized for a variety of devices, like desktop computers, phones, and tablets, so the site experience adapts to the individual user. A website designed for desktops experienced on phones can be a real opportunity killer.
SEO-driven content and site structure
Your site’s SEO architecture is critical in helping folks find you on the web. (Not to mention helping people find what they’re looking for within your site!)
Search engines evaluate your site’s structure and index its pages in their databases. If they can’t index your pages, then your site won’t be able to rank!
Your site’s map, which we mentioned above in the navigation section, is an important part of your site architecture. It defines the organization of your pages and the internal links that connect certain pages within your site.
Your site architecture, when done effectively, also gives search engines the appropriate context needed to differentiate pages within your site. This means that people are presented with the correct page during a particular search.
But it’s not just the architecture that matters — the content on the page itself is critical!
SEO practices have evolved considerably over the years, but one thing continues to be true: Publishing quality content will help search engines give your site and authority while driving traffic to your site.
What’s “quality” mean? It means you’re giving people the information they’re looking for — relevant, useful information that’s reflective of what they’ve been searching for.
It’s not about keyword stuffing or any other outdated form of trying to game search, it’s about presenting people with information written for people by people.
This requires a marriage of keyword research and your professional expertise, where you’re gathering important keywords and queries and turning them into something original. Again, this is where you can give visitors a real sense of your practice experience.
We always advise our clients to never get too distracted by their competition. It doesn’t really matter that someone else in your market might offer the same products or services. There’s no one else like you. Your team is unique. So is your delivery of care.
Our ability to articulate that on your site, make emotional connections, and drive them to take action is what will ultimately create new patients for your practice. Speaking of…
Patient testimonials and reviews
We can say that we’re the best choice until we’re blue in the face, but we’ll never be as credible as a real-life patient praising our care.
They build trust. Establish authority. Reassure us that the right decision is being made. It’s powerful stuff.
That’s why high-converting medical websites feature patient testimonials and reviews. They’re the icing on the cake of a site that features well-structured, action driven services pages, in-depth blogs, easy-to-access appointment forms, and the like.
Instead of having a single, dedicated page for reviews, why not feature service-specific reviews directly on the relevant service pages? Make it easier for people to make decisions by overcoming their objections before they’ve fully materialized.
Of course, getting those positive reviews and testimonials requires great care and an organized process for requesting and publishing them. If you don’t already have an operational strategy for reviews and testimonials, we can help!
There’s a hidden benefit of reviews and testimonials outside of their being a part of great medical website design: This patient feedback will ultimately help you raise your standard of care, if let it. The great reviews will reinforce a standard of care you want to maintain, and the less than stellar reviews will (hopefully) help you evaluate your systems and processes.
A higher standard of care means happier patients, happier patients means more positive reviews and testimonials, and more positive reviews and testimonials means more authority on the web, which means more site traffic, and so on.
These are just some of the key features of high-converting websites. There’s so much more about medical website design that I want to share with you. (And I will, in the next installment of this series!)
Next Steps: How Formada Can Help Your Practice Grow
Your practice deserves to grow. You’re an expert in your field. You’ve built a practice that delivers great care and results. We want to help more people find you!
What’s next:
- Contact us today to learn more about a site audit!
We’ll evaluate your site and help you understand how you can have the high-performing, high-converting site you deserve. Don’t wait. Get your site audit set up now!