Your website is your digital storefront for the busiest marketplace in the world: the Internet. It’s lined up next to an endless stream of other websites vying for attention and needs to be attractive in this increasingly competitive landscape.
Research shows that you have 10 seconds to convince a website visitor to stay and learn more. Those first few seconds are priceless, and your modern website should be designed to quickly communicate your services and your appeal.
Does your website achieve this? Are you considering a website facelift? Whether you’re ready for a total overhaul or just a few slight changes, try to incorporate the features below to make your website stand above the crowd and turn visitors into patients.
Smooth Navigation
When a visitor lands on your website, they should easily be able to access the information they need. Your business name, main value proposition (i.e. what you offer), areas you serve, and contact information should be readily available on your homepage. Any other information needs to be clearly labeled and easy to find.
As a hearing healthcare professional, you’re often serving an older population that often isn’t always experienced in navigating the Internet. The idea is to design your website – both your desktop and mobile versions – with them in mind.
Consistent Branding
Your brand consists of the look and feel of your business on your marketing materials, website, and in your office. Everything from your logo and selected images to the very language you use to describe your services help shape your brand. When done right, your brand is instantly recognizable and helps to grow your business simply by becoming familiar and attractive.
So how do you build your brand the right way? By choosing a style that you can maintain consistently throughout your marketing materials, website, and physical location, and then – sticking to it. The most important aspect of building a brand is remaining consistent over time.
On your website, you need every page to exude the look and feel that your brand is describing. Since your website is mostly a visual storyboard for your business, this means you need to select the colors, images, and written content that have the same feeling that you’ve designed your office to give. When initially developing your brand, it’s helpful to hire a graphic designer to help you make a cohesive statement about your values through the logo and color palette you choose.
Staff Biographies
When prospective patients browse local hearing care providers’ websites, they’re most likely to jump to the “About Us” and “Services” pages. Naturally, they want to know if you offer the kind of care they need, but more importantly, they want to know if it will be a comfortable experience. Especially when dealing with the tricky nature of patient hesitations towards hearing healthcare, having as much information as possible about your care team can go a long way in easing the fears many of these prospective patients are grappling with.
Staff profiles are the gold standard in this regard. Instead of generalized statements about your entire team (below a group photo, for instance), staff biographies give website visitors detailed information for each of your care providers. Your “About Us” page and any biographies associated with it should all be aimed to convey your practice’s warmth and commitment to patient comfort and success. Include plenty of information about training and experience, and share it in a friendly and welcoming tone. When positioned next to a smiling headshot of your care provider, any concerns about who will be evaluating their hearing quickly vanish.
Patient Reviews
Online reviews are playing an increasingly important role in consumer decisions. With more than 97% of respondents saying they read online reviews for local businesses in 2017, there’s no better time to actively encourage your satisfied and happy patients to leave you an online review (which we go into more detail about here), and to leverage those reviews once they come.
The best way to maximize the reach of your positive online reviews is to also publish them on your own website. You can certainly post private testimonials on your website (after gaining consent from the patient who sent it), but you should also include any other encouraging reviews you’ve received on popular review sites like Yelp, HealthGrades, Google, and Facebook. You work hard for every positive review you receive – and few marketing strategies are as persuasive as a series of recommendations from satisfied patients.
Easy Contact Options
It’s easy to think that just adding your phone number and email address on your website is enough to get patients to reach out to you. And sometimes, it’s correct. But these days, people are becoming used to more convenient routes of contact. Is your phone number clickable, for instance? And will it automatically trigger a call once clicked? Does your website have a contact form where visitors can send you a message without needing to copy your email address into their own email server?
Small features like this can make a big difference in the numbers of conversions your website is creating for you. People are quick to “jump ship” and go for another website in an effort to reach someone with prompt answers. Remember that figure from before? You only have 10 seconds to convince them to stay and learn more. Easy contact options give them one more reason to stay.
Active Blog
Maintaining a blog with regular postings adds value to your website in two distinct ways: it gives visitors a compelling reason to linger on your website to learn about topics related to their situation, and it naturally boosts your website’s overall search engine optimization (SEO) and helps it rank better in search results.
An added benefit is that by displaying your knowledge through a variety of articles related to your work and the services you provide, you’re demonstrating your expertise in your field. This alone can turn website visitors into patients as they lose any doubts about your ability to help them overcome their hearing health concerns.
Mobile Version
Last, but definitely not least, is the need for a mobile-friendly website. You’ve heard us say it before, and it’s worth repeating: your website will be left behind if it is not optimized for mobile users. This is mainly because search engines like Google are focusing on a “mobile first” approach to ranking websites, meaning that websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will be ranked much lower as a result.
With more than half of online users perusing the Internet from a mobile device, it just makes sense that your website caters to them as much as the other half of (desktop) users.
Having a strong online presence can make a huge difference in your business’s success. A steady stream of new patients can easily come from a well-positioned, well-designed website. We love watching our client’s schedules fill up after implementing our complete digital solutions for them. If you’re ready for a website that actually gets found and converts visitors into patients, contact us to learn how we can help.
