Tips to improve your clinic's website
A website isn’t as fun to maintain as your social media, but keeping it looking great could be the difference between a full diary and a sparse one. Your clinic’s website is your 24-hour shop front. It’s a space where you can inform and educate visitors, bring together testimonials and set yourself apart from your competition (see my article in last month’s Aesthetic Medicine).
A great website is effortless to browse on a desktop, mobile or tablet device. It also looks professional and delivers everything that a potential patient is looking for; be it your treatments, prices, conditions you treat, names of practitioners, contact details, or something as simple as how to get to you. If your website is the first impression a potential new patient gets of your business, you want to do everything you can to ensure it’s a positive one. Conversely, a bad experience on a website may reflect on the clinic; your competition might have a slick website that takes more bookings than yours because yours feels dated.
You should be using your clinic website to curate your content, educate, sell products, take bookings and any other interaction. It is also somewhere to push traffic from all other marketing efforts, e.g. social media, PR, email marketing, events, paid advertising, print media and influencer marketing. These marketing efforts are joined up by your website, which reflects your brand.
Maintaining your brand
Your brand is the impression that other people have of you; not your logo and colour scheme. A great brand makes patients stay loyal to a clinic or practitioner, which keeps regular bookings coming in. Conversely, an inconsistent brand between your website, social media and physical space may appear unprofessional.
People will want to see themselves reflected in the imagery on your website. If you must use stock imagery, use a mix of ages, ethnicities and genders. Have strong imagery on your website that makes your clinic look professional and inviting. It’s also a good idea to include pictures of yourself and your team, so people feel like they know you before they even step into clinic.
Welcome home
Your homepage needs to make an instant impression, to quash scepticism and show people they’re in the right place for what they need – they’ve clicked a useful link. Social proof, such as reviews, accreditations and media, is reassuring. The same can be said for any landing pages you use for paid advertising – the first impression counts and you don’t want to lose visitors instantly. Checking your website analytics for the time on page and bounce rate will let you know if something is wrong, though not what is wrong.
While navigating around your website, make sure you include enough calls to action (CTAs). People like to be told what to do, so when reading about a treatment or a new
event you’re holding, make it clear and simple what you want browsers to do next i.e. book in for the treatment or come along to the event. When using a CTA and directing to a contact page, it is best practice to have multiple ways of getting in touch with your clinic: phone, email, contact form, live chat, WhatsApp and so on. People will use the contact method they are most comfortable with, so presenting them with a choice means they are more likely to make that initial contact, rather than forcing people to use a phone and losing business.
Get your privacy policy, cookie policy and T&Cs all in check – if your website doesn’t inform visitors that you are using cookies, such as tracking cookies or advertising retargeting cookies, you are breaking the law. Including all the key legal business information in links at the bottom of your website takes seconds.
Remember the reader
Google is the number one resource for getting organic traffic (free search traffic) to your website. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving search rankings to increase traffic and hence, leads. Making sure your site ranks on Google is great, but ensure content is written first and foremost for your patients, not to spam search engines. Google’s algorithms are getting smarter at reading your site, so you don’t need to force “dermal fillers Coventry”, for example, into all of your pages.
Understanding what your searcher’s questions and queries are, and solving their problems, is a better bet for SEO. Writing in a professional, confident tone that addresses the queries browsers might have is key. Patients are being educated on treatment as fact, so making sure your writing is easy to read and delivers the information they seek is really important. I always recommend Grammarly, a writing tool that allows you to check the spelling, grammar and tone of a piece of text.
Website red flags
No website is a “bad” website, but here are some things to keep in mind that might turn visitors away:
Looks disorganised – If a website is hard to navigate or looks like it was thrown up in a rush
Bad on mobile – At least 52% of web traffic is visited using a mobile device (smartphone or tablet). A website that doesn’t condense neatly into a mobile screen will suffer with a high bounce rate (the amount of people visiting and navigating away)
Carelessness – Such as typos, images that don’t compress properly, no navigation, broken links, no contact form
Multiple treatments on one page – Having seen some websites that have three lines of text about each treatment on one page titled “treatments”, I can tell you that you are losing business by not providing enough education on each individual procedure you provide. Dermal fillers and toxin can be used in so many applications, so it makes sense to detail each of these, especially for visitors that are fairly new to aesthetics
Thin content – While search engine optimisation isn’t an exact science – rather a continuous improvement – writing treatment pages that are rich in content (500+ words) and media will both benefit your patients and your SEO
Keep up to date
If your website was last updated however many years ago you had it built, this could be causing problems. A neglected website that ignores things like design, mobile-responsiveness and brand puts itself at risk of harming your business. But the main reason you should regularly update is for security. Your security needs to be updated regularly to keep information secure.
Websites can get hacked or spammed, meaning it could be blacklisted for Google rankings. Web browsers now alert visitors to potential harmful websites, and this break in trust can harm your business, for both new and existing patients. Other reasons to update:
- You may lose enquiries if your website doesn’t appear to offer a treatment which you now do, but haven’t put a treatment page up for
- You may get asked about staff members that no longer work there
-You may have moved premises or changed contact details or social media accounts
-Keeping an eye on your website means you are unlikely to lapse on domain names and plugins
-A blog last updated two years ago might still get read, but it is best practice to keep fresh content going up to get noticed and deliver more traffic to your website
Take some time to check your website on multiple browsers and devices – and make sure you review your website regularly. Don’t have the time? Designate the task to a member of staff, or get your marketing agency to conduct this for you. You want to make the best first impression for potential patients, so don’t allow your website to let you down.
Alex Bugg works for Web Marketing Clinic, a family-run digital agency, which specialises in medical aesthetics. They build websites and deliver award-winning marketing campaigns for doctors, nurses, dentists, distributors and aesthetic brands. Contact her on alex@webmarketingclinic.co.uk or follow her on Instagram: @webmarketingclinic