Healthcare Website Optimization Tips for Success

Are you on the road to success for practice's website?

One of the best selling points your imaging center might have, is your quality of service. Now, it's time to see if your website showcases the same level of quality you hold your staff to. In healthcare marketing, search engine optimization and having a patient-friendly website is key.

To ensure that your website is being effective, you’ll want to go through and check all the moving parts. You don’t need to hire an SEO specialist or spend a ton of money to evaluate your website.  As long as you know what to look for, you can get started today!

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Modern Style

Be honest with yourself, does your website look modern and sleek? Does it reflect the kind of high quality, technologically advanced medical care you provide? If your website looks like a high school student designed it in their computer class circa 2003, with sparkling and spinning graphics, it might be time to update.

Updated Content

If your website has said the same thing on the home page since you launched 5 years ago, Google probably doesn't even know you exist. You need to update your webpages with new content regularly. Adding a blog to your website can help you add fresh content without overloading your on-page content.

Keyword Optimized Page Titles

If a patient went on Google and typed in “MRI in Tampa fl” you would hope that your Tampa based imaging center would come up first in their search results. If you don’t have the terms “Tampa” or “MRI” in your page's title though, it’s very unlikely.  Think about the search terms your patients would use and be sure to incorporate them into your content.

301 Redirects

If you've recently revamped your website or moved to a template site like Wordpress or Squarespace, it's possible that some of your old URL links might have changed. To make sure links out on old social media posts or in old blog articles aren't broken and leaving your visitors perturbed, set up 301 redirects so that the old URLs go to similar new pages rather than pages that don’t exist anymore.

Alt Image Description

Appropriately used images on your website or blog posts are great, but make sure that you have added image titles and descriptions to them so they aren’t just taking up space and are working to grab the attention of Google for terms you're hoping to rank for organically.  This way they help to boost the power of your page.

Google Analytics

Do you have Google Analytics set up? If you answered ‘no’ to this question, then go in time out. How are you tracking the success of your website? How do you know if people are actually using your site? You can’t improve if you don’t know where you stand.

Calls to Action

Make sure you have a call-to-action on each appropriate landing page on your website. These should be accompanied by a contact form giving patients the opportunity to request appointments online, ask questions if they are unable to get on a phone or just to get more information.

Want us to do an evaluation of your website? Fill out the form below!

How to Analyze Your Healthcare Website Like a Pro

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.

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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.