Why Doctors Need To Upgrade Their Website
The new normal has changed the way everyone is doing business. Considerably more time is spent online researching, shopping and interacting than ever before. How healthcare services are delivered is changing too. Many physicians are deferring preventative visits. such as annual physicals, to help decrease the risk of transmission to patients and healthcare workers. When possible, patients often elect to convert in-person visits to virtual visits. With telemedicine becoming more common, upgrading the practice’s website just makes sense, after all, this is often the first impression a potential patient has of a physician or facility.
Reaching a new demographic
There are many ways to reach new types of patients from flyers to ads to commercials. While these have all been effective methods in the past, more people turn to online when researching a new physician or medical facility than anywhere else. With pay-per-click (PPC) ads, content marketing and the use of social media hashtags, healthcare professionals can now target more specifically than ever before.
Do you need a blog?
Absolutely. Create blog posts 1-3 times a week means the facility’s website is getting updated 1-3 times a week. When a well-developed, secure website is updated regularly and consistently, Google will rank the site higher than a stagnant site. Writing a blog about the types of procedures or treatments provided will bring more traffic to the site and will rank the physician as an expert in these topics. A blog that is written with best SEO practices in mind, will result in organic traffic of people looking for exactly these topics. This type of blogging is called content marketing. Although content marketing is time-consuming, these regular posts have a great ROI for many months and often years to come.
Do people read blogs?
The answer is yes and no. An article that’s written from an SEM perspective will be providing very specific information for the reader. Many users scan articles, read headlines, gravitate to statistics and look at links and move on but do very little reading. The amount of time the average person spends on a webpage, regardless of length, is 5-18 seconds. People tend to skim instead of actually read articles.
How can social media help physicians?
Effectively running a social media campaign is very time-intensive. A lot of time and interaction is needed to grow a large following. However, if a social media feed is always providing useful content, the growth will happen very quickly. Reposting blog articles to social media with the appropriate hashtags can attract an entirely new demographic. The same blog articles can be reposted with different captions and hashtags to generate more interest and traffic.
It’s time to upgrade your website
Websites should be upgraded or refreshed about every 24-36 months. A site that is older than that looks dated and will not give users a good impression. Think of a website as a lobby or waiting room and update accordingly. Dead plants and outdated magazines have no place in a waiting area just like outdated links and older style user interfaces don’t belong on a website promoting state of the art technology and healthcare treatments. Having a robust online presence, blog and corresponding social media channels is the easiest and most effective way to attract new patients.
