So you’ve built this awesome website and now you’re ready to start attracting new patients. You make it live and sit back, waiting for the appointments to start rolling in. But just like when you were 15 and waiting for your crush to call… the phone just doesn’t ring. (Oh wait, that’s just us? Moving on.) Where did you go wrong? What could you have done better? Is it you? Is it them? Why does my health care practice’s website not attract patients?
You are not alone. The process of reaching patients is a challenging trek. It’s not easy, you have to build an engaging website, battle for organic and paid search space and grab the attention of leads. How can you make it through the second two steps though, if you haven’t successfully completed the first step? It’s time to take a good hard look at your website and poke holes in its weak spots.
Tip 1: Look at your website from an unbiased perspective. If you designed your website you probably put a lot of time, energy, money and tears into it, so it might be best to get an outsider’s opinion. Get an online reputation and website evaluation done by someone who knows what to look for.
Tip 2: If you want to do the research yourself because you’re determined like that, start out by doing a crawl of your website to look for any error codes, missed meta descriptions or empty title tags. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is simple and easy to use if you know how to read the reports. You can download a free version here.
Tip 3: Hubspot also has a free website grader you can use to evaluate your website. Don’t get too hung up on the 1/100 grade they give you, but it can give you a very topical idea of how your website stands up against others. This can help you see how well Google sees your website as it searches for an onsite blog, lead generation forms and meta descriptions.
Tip 4: Don’t stop there, you can stalk your competition too! See how well they are doing online so you have an idea of how well you stack up against them. Knowing your enemies’ weaknesses can sometimes help you prevail. I’m fairly confident this was a lesson from Disney’s Mulan or The Art of War, but it still rings true in healthcare marketing.
Tip 5: Do some good old fashioned searches. Think like your potential patient. Ask yourself what their needs are and what they would type into Google to find your practice. If you aren’t coming up in the organic searches or your Adwords ads aren’t showing up, take note. You need to capitalize on those missed opportunities and find ways to incorporate those key terms into your website content so you will show up in potential patient search queries.
You too can act like a website marketing pro. Another bonus tip is to never stop learning. Subscribe to our blog and other tech websites to stay up on best practices to continuously improve your website, whether you are a medical practice, hospital or healthcare organization.