Three digital focus areas for your clinic
Thinking about doing a digital detox in 2020? Don’t! Certainly not in your professional life, anyway. Now is the perfect time for a digital “retox” to get everything in line ahead of the new year, so you can prepare for another year of business knowing your clinic’s digital marketing is working for you.
There are three key areas you should focus on to tidy up and get ahead.
Website audit
Why: Your website is the number one source of clinic information available, so it needs to represent you well and be up to date.
When was the last time you read your website? We’re not talking about browsing, checking a price or a procedure, or even showing it off to a friend. We’re talking about the last time you read each page with a fine-tooth comb, checking for errors.
Consumers scan read websites rather than digest every word, looking for the pieces of information they need, but factual errors or missing details can cause your clinic problems.
If you list prices on your site, it’s vital that you regularly check them. Incorrectly priced treatments online create a bad customer experience and could lose you that lead entirely, especially if you don’t count the old listed price as a goodwill gesture.
If you’ve not updated your website in a year or two, you may have dropped and introduced new treatments, taken on additional staff or opened new locations. Writing new pages can be daunting, but make it more manageable by first writing down every new page title you think you need to add with three key points of information you want the page to get across.
When it comes to the finer details of treatments or important information, think about what information you’d deliver at consultation. By breaking it down like this, you’re likely to write the best and most thorough copy that converts more site visitors to patients.
A note on consistency
Check every existing page – are there at least 400 words on each? Does each page feel consistent, as if written by the same person?
While it may seem easier to take the copy provided by your treatment or product supplier and paste it to your website, this not only makes your site sound like it’s been written by 10 different people (because it then would be), but it can be counter-productive to your search ranking. Duplicate copy, with no added value, tells Google that your page is not useful because that exact same copy is already out there, and so the site is filtered out of search results.
Is there a clear call to action on each page – is it easy for the user to transition from taking in this information to booking a consultation? Even a simple link to the contact form at the bottom of each treatment page is better than tucking it away in the menu.
Does your website make it easy for prospective patients to contact you? Are there multiple channels (email, phone, contact form, live chat, etc.) directed from more than one page?
Analytics
Why: Google Analytics gives you the metrics you need to measure the performance of your website. By making use of analytics, you can compare performance before and after any edits you make, offers you add, or even social media posts you share.
Ensure you have Google Analytics installed. It’s a free tool that gives you deep insights into the visitors to your website. You can see where your web traffic is coming from, which pages are being visited, and how many visits convert to enquiries. Use this information to see which of your marketing efforts is driving the most traffic and bookings, which pages are performing best and where best to invest your time and money.
Take notice of your bounce rate; this is where people are leaving your site after visiting just one page. You could get masses of web traffic, but a high bounce rate suggests something is wrong with the page that people are visiting then leaving. It could be a visual issue – the page might not have a clear navigation around the site (inserting internal links to other pages on your site can improve this), or the call to action might be weak. A single, clear instruction such as “book a consultation” or “download our skincare guide” works much better than having three or four messages scattered across the page.
Google my business
Why: Google has provided you with a totally free and simple way to increase your clinic visibility. It’s easy to optimise to increase your local presence.
Google My Business (GMB) is great. It allows people to connect with your business, find you on Google Maps, leave reviews, and ask questions and more. This local listing is powerful, and an integral piece of your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.
Don’t just set it up and leave it though; if you utilise the functionalities such as reviews, Q&As, photos and posts, you’re feeding Google more information about your operation. This effort, or optimisation, is rewarded with better search visibility.
This acts as your local listing and mini-homepage when somebody searches for an aesthetic clinic or treatment near them, but doesn’t click on any of the results (known as zero-click searching).
It also provides some basic insights into your business, like how many people see your listing via search and Google Maps, which search terms were used to bring up your GMB listing, and the ratio of direct views (from people who searched your business by name) to discovery views (people who were searching for a specific product or service).
Content (AKA your blog)
Why: Digital marketing 101 says that a blog for your website is great for your SEO, social media and more. But without a plan, you’re wasting valuable time by thinking on your feet.
Content marketing is so important in an internet age because it delivers value and education to patients; produces great original content for social media; and signals to search engines that your website is valuable.
If you find this kind of thing difficult to do yourself, your patients and staff can be very useful. Think about the treatments and conditions you or your team are asked about most, and then write about them. It’s that simple. For example, if you’re constantly asked about acne, rosacea, pigmentation and scarring, there are at least four “introduction to…” blogs right there, before you’ve got into posts about specific treatment protocols.
If you haven’t got the time to write – 500 words should be the minimum for your articles – then commission an industry expert to do this for you, and edit it yourself for the right voice and consistency with the rest of your website.
Most of our medical aesthetics clients opt for at least two blogs per month, but to get started you can even commit to just one per month. Planning your titles and subheadings is key. Start with an attention-grabbing headline and write short paragraphs, breaking these up with subheadings that indicate the flow of the text. The vast amount of content online means that attention spans are getting shorter, so people aren’t reading every word you write.
Internal links to other pages and posts on your website are a great way of improving the reader’s experience. You can direct them to relevant treatment or condition pages in your text, for example. It’s a good idea to set these links to open in a new window so that readers can easily get back to your post and carry on reading.
Include keywords in the URL, headline, first sentence, meta-description, image alt-text (Google can’t “see” pictures, so we have to describe them), and in most, but not all, of your subheadings.
End with a call to action – what do you want readers to do now they’ve finished reading? Fill in a form? Purchase a product? Book a consultation? Be clear.
Where can this content be shared?
Social media posts
Convert it into a short video summary
Post on Google My Business
Send in an email newsletter
Share treatment or condition guides with patients before consultation/after treatment as part of your service
Use in-depth, original case studies as press releases
New Year digital retox checklist:
Review website content
Connect Google Analytics to your website
Set up Google My Business
Fill your GMB with photos, videos, Q&As and encourage reviews
Plan a content calendar by sketching 12 ideas for posts
Write or commission a blog post
Share blog across social media and email and post to GMB.
Alex Bugg works for