Your practice website gets only a few moments to make a strong first impression on visitors who could be your patients/potential patients. Is your website’s content making a right first impression?
Just 10 seconds is all it takes for any visitor on your website to decide if they want to stay on it or move on to the next one. Researchers with Microsoft Research observed and recorded the browsing habits of 2 billion page hits from 205,873 different websites and came out with this conclusion. Isn’t it thought-provoking?
It’s probably true for all of us. While browsing through any website, we make a decision within seconds to stick with it or not. If you come across an interesting website with engaging content, you are more likely to spend time on it. The same is true with your prospective patients. More and more patients are looking online for convenient, useful information that’s right at their fingertips. They are digitally empowered healthcare consumers. To keep them on your practice/hospital website, you need to provide the right content in the right way. Here are few simple yet profound practices to keep in mind while outlining and implementing your website content strategy.
Maintain enough content on each page
Develop your website as you would raise your own baby – keep a focused strategy for each page of your website. An important aspect is to provide enough content for every page. Think of each page as a homepage and develop it with best-quality content capable of engaging anyone who lands on it. Essentially, this is important because there will be many times when a patient/prospective patient will enter your site and may not land on the homepage but on some other website page through a search term, social media, blog or inbound link. Additionally, keeping your website updated with fresh content on regular basis gives an SEO advantage. Writing relevant content and optimizing keywords increase the chances that Google, Yahoo, Bing or another search engine will index your site and, therefore, it will rank higher.
Think out-of-the-box and be creative with content
Content is more than text. It should be informative as well as user-engaging at the same time. Variety is the spice of life. Users look out for innovative ideas on the Internet that deliver them the information they are seeking. Webpages should include images, infographics and videos to attract more patients to your website. You can also include a patient education library with accurate and unbiased scientific information for the patients. On every webpage, you can also provide links for the integration of social media to your website for sharing, an important component for your online presence.
Focus on health and wellness through website content
Is your website just about your hospital/practice? If yes, then this can be a serious content marketing blunder. Whatever you put on your website should be able to create an emotional touch with the readers. So ensure that the website content is a healthy mix of your practice/hospital information and educational information. Develop and post content that satisfies readers’ needs and quest for information. You can frequently post tips and general information about health, fitness, food and well-being. Irrespective of their health issues, there are a large number of people who search for these topics for achieving better health.
Avoid using medical jargon in the website content
Keep the content simple and use informal language so that readers are able to connect with it. Any layman who doesn’t have knowledge about medical terminology will be better-able to understand and retain simple language. Avoid using complex words as they are meaningless to consumers/patients.
Your practice is a unique entity with its own unique brand strategy, goals and principles. You spent years earning that reputation for yourself. Go sky-high with a website that accurately reflects your practice and the kind of healthcare services you offer. All these tips to write better website content will contribute to your site’s relevance and help boost your rankings. This will ensure that your patients – current and new – obtain a correct impression about you, your practice and your online reputation.