7 Tips for your Medical Website Design

The design of your medical website says a lot about your values, your mission and how you approach treating a patient. It can also make a huge impact on the amount of foot traffic that walks into your office and books appointments.

There are several keys to making sure your medical website design is optimized for search engines like Google or Bing. You also have to be clear on a single main message you’d like to convey to prospective patients who visit your website. Do you pride yourself on a particular medical discipline? Do you promise to get patients in and out in a certain amount of time or limit time spent in the waiting room?

Aside from having a unique value proposition that you can share on your website, it’s important to know that people who come into your office are suffering and in pain. Often times, they are looking for the quickest possible solution to their problem. You are the solution. That means you have to design a medical website so that all of the calls to action and the ability to book an appointment is really easy. When people are hurting they want to act quickly and they don’t want to think about how to do it. Incorporate ease-of-use into your website design and you’ll get more new patients than other medical practitioners around you.

Feel free to keep reading and go through the major ninja tips that will position your medical website design ahead of the other options in your local area. It’s time to get more patients walking into your office than ever before!

The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Medical Website Design

Let’s talk more about the idea of making it easy to navigate your website and providing a simple way to book an appointment.

Any time you want to provide a call to action to your prospective patients, make it clear and simple. “Book an Appointment Now”, “Come in and See Us”, “See Dr. Johnson Now”, “Book Now”. You don’t have to be a copywriting genius to make this work. Another tip for a good way to show off a call to action is to make an appointment booking button a color that contrasts the background. Yellow, red, green or blue buttons work the best.

You also want to make sure that you have call to action on every page, or at the very least one clear appointment booking button in the top navigation bar of your website. Since people read books and websites from left to right and top to bottom, the upper left corner of the website is the best place to have a big appointment button or link.

Another option for making a call to action clear is actually to offer up a newsletter to prospective patients as soon as they land on your website. This can be a pop-up that promotes different health tips or advice, or gives people something in exchange for their email address. You can also promote booking an appointment here. This makes it super easy to engage with your office and your messaging. It also means you can keep in touch with patients who have yet to book an appointment with you.

Collect Keywords

Keywords are the terms your prospective patient types into search engines. There are two types of keywords. Keywords can either signal an intent to take action or an intent to do research. It’s important to know the intention of the person searching for your clinic and cater to that in your advertising. This is especially important for something like pay per click advertising where your ad appears directly above or beside search results.

This is because the more you can speak to the individual with your marketing and advertising copy, the more your advertising will convert and the less you will pay per click. You don’t have to understand all the nuances or ins and outs of this. Just know that understanding whether your prospective patient is looking for immediate help or just doing research can help you come up with better ads.

Obviously if your prospect is searching for a medical practitioner nearby using the name of their local city, they are already committed to getting help in person. If they are just searching for home remedies related to curing a cough or back pain, they may just be researching.

One good way to look up keywords related to your medical practice is to use free keyword planners. Google and Bing offer the opportunity to buy pay per click and video advertising at mere pennies per impression and they offer free tools that give you a list of keywords you might want to consider targeting. If you find the idea of planning out your own advertising campaign to be stressful, let an agency do it.

Figuring Out Your Brand Story

Creating a brand story is a common theme within any branding and marketing strategy. As a medical practitioner, you don’t have to be a branding and marketing expert. After all, there’s a shortage of doctors and medical professionals across North America, which means there’s already plenty of demand out there for your services. Still, creating a brand story means telling your personal story. Tell your prospective patients what drives you. Why are you passionate about your practice? What made you want to become a practitioner? What can you offer to people that other practitioners can’t? What makes you stand out?

The more you can answer these questions within your messaging on your website, the more likely a prospective patient is to book an appointment and come meet you in person.

Tell a story that is personal and human. At the end of the day treating somebody’s medical issues is a very personal thing. It involves a high degree of trust and understanding. It needs to include a high level of openness and communication, and ultimately, the patient needs to feel confident in your abilities as much as you might be confident in your own abilities.

Be Mindful of Mobile Traffic

The most powerful computer the average person owns these days sits in their pocket. It’s called a smartphone. When you’re having your website designed by a professional or digital marketing company, consider that a big chunk of your traffic will come from mobile devices. As such, it goes without saying that your website needs to be mobile responsive. One quick way to make sure this happens is to ask your website development team to use a WordPress theme and building your website. Generally speaking, most if not all WordPress themes are mobile responsive.

Having a mobile friendly website means that there is no need to zoom in and out of a website with your thumbs to read everything. It should be easy to scroll up and down and side to side to view content and book an appointment. Mobile marketing is perfect for people that are on the go and driving by. Imagine a prospective new patient not feeling well as they pass by your office. Having a sign outside of your doors that says you’re accepting new patients can be enough to bring this person in for an appointment. And of course we all know that people look at their phones while they are driving, even though they shouldn’t be, so having a mobile friendly website allows them to look you up when they’re in the area and looking for help.

It’s also important to consider that these days people are more likely to own a smartphone than they are to own a computer, so pursuing mobile traffic and having a mobile friendly website is worth the trouble.

Stand Out from Other Practitioners

Face the facts. Most people only visit their general practitioner at the moment that they have an issue. They don’t do a regular checkup. They hate sitting in the waiting area. Sometimes they don’t take their medication as prescribed, or sometimes they don’t feel like they got a proper diagnosis.

How can you solve these problems and let people know that you care? What point of difference can you offer that other practitioners can’t? Or at the very least, what points of difference can you highlight that other practitioners don’t.

Standing out from the crowd means doing what other practitioners don’t do. It means understanding your patient’s journey. How did they feel before they even knew they are going to come into your office? What are the common problems they face regardless of their particular medical issue? How can you become the first person they call whenever they have a problem? What do you look for in your medical practitioners that other practitioners don’t provide?

The more you can put yourself in other people’s shoes, the better you will be at fostering trust with new patients. It doesn’t just make you better at marketing your services, it makes you better at prescribing the right treatment and ultimately restoring the health of your patients.

Come from a place of service. Remember why you chose to become a medical practitioner in the first place. It wasn’t just for the money or the career advancement. It was to make an impact on people in a very personal way. Keep your wits about you and show people how much you care. It will pay off in the long run.

Content and Social Media Marketing

These days it’s your medical practice is not on social media and you don’t have a proper content marketing strategy in place, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to build your own tribe of loyal followers. If you deliver enough value and come from a place of service, your followers will become patients. No question about it. Facebook, YouTube and Instagram are all great places to get started.

YouTube it works particularly well for medical practitioners because you can sit in front of a camera and give people advice just the way you would if they were sitting in your office. You can also show off the different techniques or treatments you use to help people ease their pain. This works especially well for chiropractors, physiotherapists and athletic trainers that help optimize the movement of the body.

Sure being on social media doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the design of your website, but it should if you’re connecting things together properly. Your social media buttons should be all over your website. It’s also important to make it easier for website visitors to share your content on their own social media platforms. This gets you more exposure without spending any extra money. It also makes advertising on social media platforms more effective.

Other Medical Website Design Ideas

Here are some other quick tips that might help you with your medical website design. Consider that your marketing collateral and all of the off-line marketing you do should be a reflection of what you’re doing digitally. The colours you use, the branding, the quality of the material you choose should all be a reflection of one consistent tone and voice.

Also, make sure you start a blog and update it regularly. Blogging is a great way to provide people with content that never gets old and it’s also a great way to help rank you in search engines. Search engines love websites that get updated with fresh and unique content on a consistent basis. A blog is also a great way to establish yourself as an authority, to share your own story, and to share the success stories and testimonials of your patients. That’s huge and gaining the trust of new prospects.

Implement these strategies and you’ll be ahead of the game. Most medical practitioners won’t implement half of these things, but if you’re working with a robust digital marketing agency that offers all kinds of services like reputation management, website development and search engine optimization for instance, you’ll have no problem ranking your medical practice, maintaining a beautiful website and most importantly helping people who really need you.

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