Introduction
Your medical practice website is the front door of your practice online. It is the foundation of your medical practice marketing because it impacts several different marketing objectives.
Medical Practice Website Objectives
1. Builds Your Reputation
The design of your medical practice website directly impacts your potential patients perceive your “brand”. Therefore, the quality of your medical practice website design should reflect the quality of your practice and patient care.
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2. Collects New Patient Leads
Your website is where potential patients can reach out or request an appointment more than ever.
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3. Educates Potential Patients
As patients invest more time and energy into researching their health and researching providers, your website is a crucial strategy in educating potential patients.
4. Making Your Practice Discoverable Through SEO
Lastly, your website is how you will grow visibility for your medical practice by ranking and driving traffic to the site.
How Medical Practice Website Design is Unique
One common mistake that some medical practices make when building their medical practice website is working with an agency or partner that doesn’t have medical practice marketing experience.
The best practices that apply to other industries don’t readily apply to medical practices. In addition, Healthcare marketing has its unique challenges, from HIPAA compliance to tracking and lead handling.
Here are just a few of the many ways that doctors must handle medical practice websites uniquely from other industries.
- A medical practice website must build empathy with the patient.
- Medical practice sites must educate about more than just the doctor.
- They must be localized to the area the practice services.
- They must serve both new and existing patients.
- New patient lead handling must be done in a HIPAA compliant manner.
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- 5 Reasons Why Your Medical Practice Website Should Be WCAG/ADA Compliant
- No SSL Certificate On Your Website? Here’s Why That Could Be Terrible For Your Inbound Marketing
Medical Practice Website Design Tips: 5 Must-Have Features
So what makes a great medical practice website? It’s not just about building a site that looks good -, over the last decade, we’ve worked with numerous medical practices across many different specialties and learned what drives the most practice growth.
These 5 “features” cover the items we most frequently see missing from medical practice sites and are crucial to growing a practice in 2022.
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1. A Fast-Loading and Mobile-Friendly Website Design
It doesn’t matter how great your site looks; if it’s slow, it’s hurting you. Page speed is essential for a handful of reasons.
First, it’s essential for SEO. Google uses page speed to influence how your site ranks in the search results, as well as the quality score it gives your ads.
In addition, page speed is essential to drive new patient leads. If a site takes too long to load, patients will leave before filling out a form or giving you a call.
According to recent studies, did you know that 40% of consumers will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load?
The reason page speed is so important? Because most of the potential patients visiting your site will be on mobile devices. It’s not just page speed but how well your site displays and works on those mobile devices.
Google uses a system called “Core Web Vitals” to determine how mobile-friendly a website is, through three primary metrics:
- LCP (largest contentful paint) – how long it takes the most significant element on the page to load.
- CLS (cumulative layout shift) – how many elements on the page move when viewed on mobile.
- FID (first input delay) – how much time before the site can be interacted with.
Image by Web.dev
2. Deep Content Around Conditions and Treatments
Patients are often still researching when they come to your medical practice site. To move them closer to becoming a lead, you need to do more than just talk about your practice and physicians. You will need to provide a deeper understanding around the conditions and treatments.
There are a few ways this comes to life – we recommend a “conditions” and “treatments” section to every medical practice website. But it’s also esssential to consider what information needs to be on these pages and how deep they need to be.
You can never tell where a patient may be in their journey, so you want to cover all the bases and address those who are both the beginning and end of their journey. Those at the beginning may have a new diagnosis and are looking for some more context about why.
But the best way is to structure the site content based on the most frequently asked search result questions that patients may have:
- What causes X condition?
- Is there a cure for X condition?
- How much does X treatment cost?
- How long is the recovery period for X?
In addition to answering these questions, you also need to bring your unique POV to bear. Don’t just create the same content they could find on WebMD. If you have a unique point of view on a condition or treatment, share it!
3. Multiple CTAs to Drive Higher New Patient Lead Volume
If you only have a phone number and a “contact us” form on your medical practice website, you’re doing the bare minimum. Next, make sure your phone number is present throughout the entire site. In addition, you want to establish both primary and secondary calls to action (CTAs). Your primary calls to action are the action you want visitors to take.
For most practices, those include:
- Call Us
- Request an Appointment
Secondary calls- to action should move the patient closer to scheduling an appointment if they’re not yet ready to call or request an appointment and are critical to practice growth. Here are a few examples of secondary calls to action that we’ve used for other specialties to generate a higher volume of new patient leads.
- Spine & Orthopedics: Pain Assessment Survey
- Fertility: Register for Informational Session
- Addiction Treatment: Download Treatment Guide
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4. A HIPAA Compliant CRM to Ingest New Patient Leads
One of the most significant issues we see with medical practices is that they aren’t using a CRM to capture lead forms submitted on the website and instead are emailing those leads to the front office. Not only is this not HIPAA compliant, it sends sensitive information into your inbox, but there’s no visibility into how the leads your marketing generates are being handled.
High-performing medical practices will use a HIPAA compliant CRM to store leads that are submitted. These systems also give you more insight into where your leads are coming from and how they’re being handled. This simple addition to your practice website is crucial for running a modern medical practice.
More like this: HIPAA Compliant CRM: Why Your Medical Practice Needs This
5. Video to Increase Dwell Time
Lastly, if you want your medical practice site to stand out, we recommend including more video content on the site. That’s because, for medical practices, video does a much better job of telling a story and building trust with potential patients than copy. But it also has some side benefits, including increasing the time spent on your site, an essential signal for SEO.
But we’ve also found that adding video to the content on your site increases lead conversion rates as well. Patients are far more likely to pay attention and understand when you explain a concept via video.
More like this: Guide to Video Marketing for Doctors: How to Get Started
Conclusion
Wondering where to get started? These 5 must-have features will differentiate your practice site from competitors, but how do you get started? There are a few options in the marketplace, everything from website builders for doctors to custom-built websites that cost a fortune and will be outdated in a few years.
Explore our current medical website theme library here!
At RUNNER, our Practice Right Website service gives you the best of both worlds – a high-converting website built on years of experience working with medical practices across specialties. In addition, it’s affordably priced as a monthly expense rather than a large one-time fee, and you’ll have the opportunity to redesign every two years.
If you’d like to learn more, request a consultation and speak with one of our medical marketing experts to learn what a partnership with RUNNER would look like.
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