In the modern digital world, the first place where people who need medical attention search for healthcare providers is the internet. Even as patients secure appointments, they still look at the website for the hospital they’re scheduled to visit.
As such, healthcare professionals who have poorly designed websites risk losing patients to those that have a strong web presence. Like a physical medical office where you’ll find different interior decor depending on the specialization of the doctor, your website should reflect your practice and appeal to the population that you serve.
Whether you practice as an individual or as part of a hospital, having a well-designed website for your organization or practice can significantly attract patients and impact your business and reputation as a medical professional. If you’re looking to market your healthcare services with great web design, here are five tips to help you do so effectively:
1. Design An Interactive Medical Website
A highly interactive website is a must-have for any healthcare professional. With most patients now scheduling appointments from their homes, you’ll need to prioritize web interactivity to stay competitive. Developing a medical website that’s highly interactive enables you to boost patient engagement and ultimately boost conversion rates.
There are several things you can do to make your website interactive. These include featuring strong call-to-action buttons like schedule an appointment, file a prescription, or request a referral to encourage patient actions. Adding such calls-to-action buttons will give your prospects seamless experiences.
Better still, you can enhance the interactivity of the medical website by creating interactive forms where patients can input important information like details about their health conditions and insurance. You could also develop a patient portal that allows patients to edit their personal information like contact details, health data, and insurance details without having to call the office.
2. Design A Mobile-Friendly Medical Website
Compared to previous years, most people use mobile devices like smartphones and tablets to search the internet. Besides this, mobiles users are more sensitive—one bad experience is enough to turn them to do business with a competitor. As a healthcare professional or a designer working with a client in healthcare, you need to ensure that your website is responsive on mobile devices to give your prospects and customers positive experiences.
A good medical website should respond to the screen size of the user’s device. This will enable them to interact with the content on the device of their choice without being inconvenienced. A mobile-friendly website also enhances your visibility on search engines. This ultimately places the website right in the hands of your prospective clients.
To connect with patients via mobile devices, optimize the homepage by keeping readers engaged. The best way to do this is to feature quick links or FAQs about you or your client’s practice on a long scrolling page. You can also add a hamburger navigation menu to enable mobile users to access relevant content easily.
Also, make it easy for website visitors to click and call by placing a strategic Call button in the navigation bar to enable them to reach you or your facility from their mobile device.
3. Design An Easy-To-Navigate Website
Another way of enhancing digital healthcare marketing using web design is to make it easy for visitors to navigate your medical website. The navigation structure is an important part of intuitive web design. When patients can’t find their way around a website, they’ll be pushed to seek help elsewhere due to frustration.
Ideally, maneuvering through the different sections of a medical website should be easy. You can make healthcare marketing more effective with web design by featuring a menu that utilizes a hierarchical structure and displays the different pages on the website.
Though each medical website will have different pages, some common pages that should not miss are the “Contact Us” and “Services” pages. Ensure that the navigation structure has clear and concise titles that reflect the content you have on each page. Also, utilize clear calls-to-action in a way that takes visitors through the different pages of the website.
Ensure that the call-to-action buttons on your website lead visitors to high-priority pages like the patient portal, donation form, and booking system. This would boost online bookings and push patients down the sales funnel.
4. Boost Website Performance With SEO
The most effective way to increase traffic to your medical website is to optimize it for search engines. To do this, you’ll need to apply techniques like on-page healthcare SEO. This means optimizing the images and content that you place on the website.
When you optimize your website for SEO, you boost its loading speeds. This means your visitors won’t have to wait for minutes for the site to open on their computers or mobile devices.
There are several things you can do to boost the website’s performance. These include compressing images to make them lighter to increase the speed with which your web pages load. You can also add title tags and metadata descriptions to the web content to boost the site’s ranking on search engine results pages.
5. Reflect Your Brand Identity On The Website
There are numerous factors that patients consider when choosing a healthcare provider–one of them is branding. To increase your visibility and ensure that patients don’t confuse your brand, ensure that your brand identity is clearly reflected by the website.
The best way to ensure that the website differentiates your practice from other competitors’ is to have consistent design elements across the web pages. Consider using two or three colors that connect with your prospects.
For instance, if you target a diverse audience, use neutral, warm colors on the website. On the other hand, opt for bright, playful colors if your practice specializes in kids.
Fonts are also an important aspect of your or your client’s brand identity. Keep them consistent throughout the website. Additionally, place your logo strategically on all web pages and use images that reflect the healthcare services that are offered on the website.
Final Thoughts
In this digital era, a website is the most effective way to market healthcare services. Like any other business, the way you design the website can make or break you or your client’s healthcare business. To drive organic traffic to your website and boost conversions, apply the five tips discussed in this post.
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