One of the first interactions that most prospective patients have with your practice will be through your website. An active and engaging web presence is essential to your business’s success. However, knowing you need to build a high-performing website and actually creating one are two very different things, especially if you have little knowledge or experience with website design and search engine optimization.
Our seasoned digital marketing agency has experience helping medical professionals in every field, from plastic surgeons and med spas to dentists. In a consultation, our team can explain the basics of developing a medical website designed to connect and convert today’s changing online consumer as well as strategies to optimize your web presence. Here are some key elements for building a user-friendly web platform and strengthening your brand.
One priority when building a website for any kind of business is to make the site aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and easy to navigate. This applies to visitors as well as Google (Page Experience Update). This may sound simple, but in practice, constructing a site that fulfills all of this criteria is trickier than it seems.
Logic is key in ensuring your medical website has a functional, “don’t make me think” design. This includes having a clearly visible navigation bar at the top of each page, often with drop-down menus that list related subpages (rather than hiding links under a hamburger menu that requires more clicking). For instance, if a user lands on a plastic surgery site’s homepage and does not immediately see the procedure they want, they should be able to intuitively navigate and reach the target destination page with only one or two clicks.
Likewise, it is crucial for your website to not only display correctly on mobile devices, but also to enhance the mobile experience. Remember, mobile navigation and usability is very different than on desktop designs. Responsive layouts should adjust to the specific device a visitor is using and be designed with graphics, content, engagement elements, and navigation strategies that maximizes each user visit.
The algorithms that make up Google’s search engine are difficult to understand, even for experienced SEO experts. However, major updates have given website designers who know how to leverage them an opportunity to elevate your organic visibility.
As mentioned earlier, the Page Experience Update demonstrates Google’s desire to rank websites and pages that its users will find engaging. Even more recent, the Helpful Content Update further emphasizes the need to develop websites that not only look appealing, but also deliver visitors original insights and high-value information.
For example, Google broadly works by scanning every word of text on a website’s various pages not only searching for keywords and queries that a user might search, but also using advanced AI to understand and compare relevant content. The goal is to identify original, insightful, and “helpful” websites and content that address its users’ search queries.
Accordingly, having an updated blog section on a plastic surgery or dental website can be a beneficial design feature. The key is to develop useful original content that isn’t over-optimized for SEO purposes or taken from other websites and “tweaked” enough to avoid being seen as duplicate content. Effective blogs give Google more authoritative information to work with and increases the number of search results your site appears on.
Perhaps the most crucial elements of lead-generating medical website design are strategically developed “calls-to-action” (CTA) throughout the page. This is particularly important with long, scrolling mobile pages.
Increasing conversion also means offering more than one next-step action, such as “Schedule a Consultation”. Text or hyperlinked graphic CTAs should prompt readers to call for answers, sign up for your newsletter, download useful guides or tips, ask for pricing, inquire about a special, or take another form of concrete action to engage with your practice. This will not convince every reader to follow through, nor should you expect it to, but it will increase your conversion percentage of visitors into leads that adds up to a lot more revenue over time.
Assistance from experienced SEO professionals can be vital to effectively implementing these website design tips for your medical practice. Get in touch with us today for a consultation.