Whether you are a family doctor or a dentist, you need to promote your practice to people who need your services.
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Apart from spending on ads and maintaining a social media presence, it’s also crucial to build an engaging and highly responsive website. Here’s everything you need to know about creating a website for your medical practice with our Medical WordPress themes.
Why Build a Website for Your Medical Practice?
It matters to have a presence online. These days, people rely on search engines like Google to find the healthcare services they need. They are going beyond phone directories to find the right clinics and medical institutions.
Create an amazing website for your medical practice renders you invisible. You won’t be able to compete for patients and establish a solid online presence.
More importantly, a website enables you to demonstrate your credibility as a practitioner. You can use it as a platform for educating your patients, from treatment programs to diseases specific to your practice.
In addition, a medical practice website allows you to engage patients directly. It provides resources and tools that can help patients learn more about your services and schedule consultations.
To make the most of your medical practice website, it’s important that you learn a few keys to building one that can support your clinic or institution. Let’s look at a few crucial steps to building an engaging, informative, and convenient website.
1. Know which features to include
The most common feature to include is a fill-form for scheduling consultations. You will also need to include a direct line to your office phone as well as an email form. Another feature you can add to your website is a resources section.
This page should include downloadable forms and documents, clinical workflows and procedures, as well as information about the insurance carriers you honor.
You should also include other features that focus on your practice. You can add video presentations of the services you offer and testimonials coming from former patients.
A complete page of your services, tools, treatment programs can also help with patient education and brand awareness.
You can let your patients know that you are using a medical transcription service and a patient portal to deliver online services more efficiently.
Depending on the goals of your practice, you will Create an amazing website that makes it easier for patients to engage or make important decisions.
2. Find a great hosting service
Now that you have a good idea of the features to include in your website, you will need to find an ideal hosting service to support these features. A quality web host can help with maintaining your website and provide enough space for customization.
Specifically, a good hosting service grants you access to a wide range of web design and web development tools. Other than that, it also makes your website load faster and become more responsive to visitors.
Settling for a bad web hosting service will only hurt your online presence. It will suffer from slower page loading and greater vulnerability to cyber attacks.
You also get inaccurate data about website visits and conversions, or no visits or conversions at all.
Low-quality hosting services are cheap, but when it comes to providing patients with excellent online experiences, you are better off paying for a quality web host. Look towards HostGator or BlueHost which have helped medical practices like yours thrive online.
3. Invest in good web design
A well-designed website can help with keeping visitors engaged up until they are ready to convert. It allows you to deliver information about your services effectively. On top of that, it leaves a lasting impression on patients.
Good web design is anchored on a few key principles. Navigability makes it easier for visitors to travel from one page to another. Harmony, from a design perspective, refers to how different visual elements work together to engage visitors.
Apart from that, there is also brand consistency. You will need to incorporate the identity of your medical practice into the look and feel of your website.
It takes skill to come up with a custom website for your medical practice from scratch. Fortunately, there are industry-specific themes and templates you can use as a basis for your website.
Be sure to pick one that offers a wide range of customizable options. You also need to check if the theme will make your website look just as good on smaller screens. A mobile-optimized website allows you to engage patients who are browsing on their phones or tablets.
As you Create an amazing website, try not to cram too much information into a single web page. You will want your patients to consume the content piece by piece.
There has to be a balance between text and graphic elements so people won’t have a hard time consuming your content.
4. Write engaging content
Your website wouldn’t be complete without well-written information. Text content not only helps with guiding visitors through your website but also provides valuable information.
One thing’s for sure, clear and concise information can help your website perform better when it comes to engaging visitors.
Writing great webpage copy is not just stringing words together. It requires skill to come up with descriptions, articles, and calls to action that deliver value and impact the decisions of your audience.
The key here is to treat your web pages as investments. You will want each word and each sentence to produce results. Moreover, you wouldn’t want to bury your visitors under too many industry-specific terms.
You can demonstrate credibility without having to throw around technical language. The best way to simplify things is to write webpage copy that is informative and consumable.
If you don’t have the time to handle it yourself, consider hiring a professional copywriter who has a background in healthcare. The right person can help you create content that patients find valuable.
When it comes to writing blogs, you will need to spend time researching ideas that generate the most traffic and add value to your brand.
Try writing online articles that talk about the latest developments in your practice. You can also provide lifestyle tips. If you are a dentist, you can write a guide to help parents train their kids to brush their teeth.
5. Optimize your website for search engines
The market for medical services is always competitive since healthcare is a fundamental human need. With this in mind, it would be difficult for your medical practice to gain online traction.
You are basically going up against other medical services providers in your area who often appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Since visitors are more likely to visit websites that are on the top of the search results, you will need to develop an effective SEO strategy.
There are a number of actions you can take to let Google place you at the top. For one, you need to make sure your website loads quickly and has a straightforward UI. Websites that keep visitors engaged for a long duration often get top-ranks in the SERPs.
In addition to that, you need to post as many pieces of content as possible. Writing a medical blog is crucial along these lines since it allows you to rank for specific queries.
If you are operating a psychiatric clinic in Florida that specializes in treating anxiety disorders, include keywords such as “anxiety treatment in Florida” in your latest blog.
A well-crafted keyword strategy can help you produce content that will make your practice visible to the right people.
Apart from onsite optimizations, you can further increase your online presence by earning backlinks. These are links that redirect users from one website to another, telling Google that your website is authoritative and that it deserves a higher rank.
Consider contributing guest posts to platforms such as The Art of Healthy Living or Nerd Fitness that allow you to link back to certain content on your site. You can also share your content on social media and build networks with healthcare bloggers looking for quotes and stats.
6. Secure sensitive information
Before launching your medical practice website, you need to address data security.
If you are using your website to schedule appointments with patients, you need to make sure their data is protected from cyber-attacks.
Putting aside the impact that hackers and malware have on your reputation, your practice is also required to comply with industry regulations outlined under the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
You also need to comply with international data privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation.
Consider getting an SSL certificate and ensure that your website is equipped with the latest anti-virus and anti-malware tools.
It might take a while to put your defenses in place, but it’s necessary if it means protecting your practice from legal and ethical consequences.
Create an amazing website for your medical practice is essential to promoting your services to patients. It’s an investment you wouldn’t want to overlook, especially if your goal is to become a key player in the industry.