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Is your website working hard for you? Are you getting maximum value from it?
A website is your 24/7 promotional tool that enables you to reach more customers any time, any where. Now is a perfect time to enhance your website so that it can work harder for you.
Leonie Arnebark from Reality Marketing and her team have been helping healthcare practices with their marketing and their websites for over a decade, the successful marketing consultant shares her insights below on how to get the most value from your website.
1. Think like your patients
What makes a website great depends on who you are trying to attract and the purpose of the site. When you plan, design and assess your site, step into the shoes of your ideal patients. Think about what brought them there, what they want to get from your site and remember not to make assumptions.
2. Reflects your brand
Ensure your website is in direct alignment with your brand. Colours, style, imagery, font, these all convey your brand personality and it is important to be a consistent across all communication channels including your entire website.
3. Easy to use and navigate
Make sure it is user friendly and that a visitor can get where they want to go with minimal clicks. Most importantly, can they easily and quickly book an appointment.
4. Make it responsive
With over 85% of users researching and accessing sites via their mobile or tablet device, it is now more than ever critical that your website is mobile responsive and can be easily accessed using these devices.
5. Optimise your site
It’s no use having a good site if potential patients can’t find it, Search engine optimisation (SEO) essentially revolves around how easy it is to find your site using search engines, most popular being google. This can take time to achieve but if you are persistent with it, it can pay dividends with your organic search results. Useful, relevant and fresh content is key to achieving this.
6. Call to action
Include easy to find call to actions, make it as easy as possible to make an appointment etc. Multiple highly visible prompts in this area is key.
7. Make it easy to get in contact
Ensure it is very easy for people to get in contact with you, have prominent quick contact features that can be easily viewed and are responsive, many people will be on mobile devices and want to be able to instantly connect with you. Provide quick to locate instructions on where you are, how to get there, opening hours etc to make it easier for customer, yourself and your team.
8. Have relevant, unique and up to date content
Make sure that you have current and accurate content on your website. Include items such as FAQs, blogs, about the team and other relevant information to help you quickly tell the story of your business while informing your new website visitors about what you do and offer and how you are different.
9. User friendly with no errors
Is your content easy to read? Use headings and bullet points and short easily digestible sentences. Ensure there are no spelling or grammatical errors and have someone other than the author give the site a thorough review. Visitors don’t like typos and google penalises these too, also avoid using industry jargon, keep your language as lay as possible.
10. Social media integration
Integrating relevant social media platforms into your site will also help you to better engage with your audience and increase your reach. Australia has over 18 million social media. With users spending at least 14 hours a week on social media it is not an area that can be ignored. You can use social media to continually link back to your website too.
11. Visual imagery
Good quality images and videos are a powerful asset for you site. These are fantastic for integrating into your website to assist in breaking up text and to increase visual appeal for visitors. It is important to ensure pages load quickly so be careful with large files and flash, you don’t want to slow down your site. Also make sure you have the rights to use the images and try to use real images wherever possible eg. showcasing your great work and the team in action.
12. Affiliation linking
Highlight any strategic alliances and partnerships on your website and encourage these strategic partners to include links to your website on theirs to increase reach.
13. Monitor and test
No matter how well you designed your website, you will probably still have elements that you can improve. If you aren’t already tracking your website, start doing so now and on a regular basis. You can easily use google analytics for this purpose. Google analytics is a great tool to use and is free, you can monitor quantity and type of traffic, how long and what pages were visited and lot’s more.
Wanting to enhance your website and need help to do it? Are you seeking assistance with your on-line or off-line marketing presence for your practice, please contact Reality Marketing today.
By Leonie Arnebark
CEO Reality Marketing
Your Healthcare Marketing Manager, as you need it
Authentic and practical marketing