Attracting New Patients to Your Practice via the Web
An online presence can attract new patients to a medical practice, but the process is a little more complicated than throwing together a simple web site containing basic practice information and clinic addresses. A successful medical practice web site combines well-thought-out content with an awareness of the practice's range and purpose.
Medical practice web sites, unlike the site of other professions, are primarily information sites, dedicated to increasing potential patient awareness about the practice. With a few exceptions, most medical practice web sites focus on attracting attention within their local communities, rather than on a national or international level.
Think Locally, Act Locally
An online music store may wish to attract a national audience, but the same is rarely true of medical practices. Most medical practices are concerned with attracting patients within specific locations, often their home town. Even medical practices which cover large areas rarely cover areas larger than a state or province.
This need to attract local attention closes some online doors, but opens others. Locally-focused web sites attract less visitors, but those users they do attract tend to be focused, targeted site users who are actively searching for the services the web site offers.
Competition for medical practice keywords is high; simply type in optometrist, chiropractor, dentist, or any other medical profession into Google and the search engine will return thousands, if not millions, of results. Few medical practices can rank high in simple searches for common medical terms or practices; there is simply too much competition.
However, once a medical web site optimizes its keywords for a local audience, the situation changes dramatically. Type the same medical term into Google as before, but also type in the name of a state, and the number of results drops dramatically. Use more specific locations such as a county, district, or town, and suddenly you have a much more focused search.
Therefore, when optimizing a medical practice web site, location is just as important as profession. The web site should contain keywords associated with the medical practice, but also include local references, and key phrases that link the practice with the surrounding area. While "pediatrician" and "South Town" may be very broad search terms individually, prospective patients searching for "South Town pediatrician" are much more likely to find a South Town pediatrician's web site.
Local and Nationwide Directories
Online users searching for local medical practices don't necessarily search using the big name search engines. Often they use local online yellow pages and directories for local searching. It is, therefore, important for a medical practice web site to be listed on any local online directory. Chamber of commerce web sites and town council sites often have listings of local businesses, and should not be overlooked by medical practice web sites.
On a national level, professional medical organizations often include practitioner directories on the organization web site. If a medical practice's practitioners are members of any online organizations, they should make certain they are included in such directories.
For Online to Offline Visits
Once prospective patients reach a medical web site, the site needs to make it as simple as possible to contact the physical clinic. Home pages should have the practice's address and phone number clearly visible, and contact information should also be displayed on every page of the site (albeit not as prominently as on the home page).
Other features that make it easier for online users to locate the clinic can include maps showing the practice's location. A picture of the practice building also helps people locate the clinic.
Many medical practices now include the option of making appointments online. This has been so successful that some clinics have actually had to limit the days on which they accept online appointments, to avoid becoming too busy.
Building Trust Through Content
Relevant, accurate content is as vital to a medical practice site as it is for any other site. If anything, extra care must be taken to ensure accurate medical content. Not only does content keep prospective patients on site, it also allows medical professionals to direct patients to the site for information. This can cut down on the cost of instructional brochures that might otherwise need to be provided.
Content may be text-based, or can take the form of multimedia videos or slideshows. Multimedia can greatly increase a patient's understanding of medical conditions and treatment options, but use of multimedia must be balanced against potentially long load times.
It's quite reasonable, and even recommended, to include profiles on the medical professionals who work in the clinic. As well as providing opportunity to show users the credentials of the practice professionals, profiles also provide a human face for the practice. Community involvement, charity work, and other local involvement can be detailed in professional profiles.
Getting the Word Out
Medical practices should not overlook the importance of traditional marketing and word of mouth when prompting a web site. The web site URL should be clearly visible on all marketing, including brochures, print ads, and business cards. Word of mouth advertising is often very effective in local communities; the more people who know the web site address, the more likely it is that word of the site will spread.
It's also possible to spread word of a new site through online message forums, and there are many available that either focus on local community or specific medical conditions. Negotiating reciprocal links with related medical sites can also improve site traffic, which in turn increases a site's ranking in the search engines.
Updates, Revisions, and News
Good content should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis. While accurate and interesting content may attract potential patients to a medical site, regular updates are what bring them back on a regular basis. As new treatments and research become available, site materials should be updated.
This doesn't just apply to medical content. A medical practice can reinforce its ties to the local community by including content relevant to the community. Local news and events with a health-related theme are a natural fit for a medical web site. Building a sense of involvement and interest in the surrounding community helps maintain a local flavor to medical practice web sites, and reinforces that the practice is within easy reach of local web users.
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Health Searches On the Web Number in the Millions
There is a huge volume of traffic to health-related sites each month, based on Web searches. This traffic base offers new online health sites strong business opportunities to capture consumer dollars.
From Yahoo!'s Search Tool: July 2006
| Health |
1,179,070 |
| Women's Health |
174,944 |
| Alternative Medicine |
68,514 |
| Homeopathy |
14,268 |
| Chiropractor |
19,005 |
| Nutritional Supplements |
32,638 |
| Wellness |
18,595 |
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