Healthcare websites enable doctors and nurses to focus on saving lives as people can find most of the information they need about their problems online.
This has created a great opportunity for healthcare businesses to establish an influential online presence. To be a leading provider of healthcare and help as many people as possible, medical businesses must use a variety of techniques to generate traffic to their websites and convert them to sales.
Here are 4 ways to optimize your healthcare website.
Create A High-Converting Landing Page
The first way to improve the design of a healthcare website is to create a high-converting landing page.
The landing page of any website is unlike any other. It must not be designed to navigate your reader to the necessary information and elicit an action from the user (usually in the form of a sign up, or contact form).
To that end, a healthcare landing page must be built to attract new customers and convert leads. Reserve most of your content for the inner service and information pages.
If you’re unsure if content should belong on the landing page, question if its purpose aligns with the purpose of the landing page itself. If it does not serve the visitor, remove it.
Typically, a landing page must include:
- A headline
- A description of the service
- A supporting image or video
- Social proof
- A lead capture form
For example, customer testimonials work great on a landing page as social proof to help convert viewers into buyers. In fact, Bright Local’s consumer review study discovered that 78% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while a further 50% will visit their website after reading the positive review.
The focus on the landing page must be on the reader rather than your business. It should be aiming to reduce friction, preventing the visitor from taking the required action.
Keep it simple and stick to the bullets above.
Provide Valuable Content
High-quality content with valuable and relevant information will make your business rank high in Google’s search results, increasing the number of leads and sales for your business.
According to Content Marketing Institute, small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than competitors without a blog, showing that people love to find information online. Furthermore, 77% of all internet users read blogs.
When designing a healthcare website blog, keep in mind that all content must be up-to-date and provide value to a reader.
There is a lot of possible information that you can give to readers about healthcare so be strategic about when and where to share your expertise.
For example, content on the landing page should be focussed on lead generation, such as offering a free trial or a valuable guide. This will help you nurture your customers until they are ready to buy your products.
On the other hand, service page content should focus on how you can benefit the customer from purchasing from you. Once they have finished reading the page, the viewer knows what they’re going to do next very quickly; they’re either going to buy, subscribe, leave or contact you.
As a healthcare website, you want to them to convert so it’s vital that you call to actions make this clear. Which brings up the next point.
Include Clear Call to Actions Within Content
Next, you must make sure that your healthcare website design includes clear call to actions (CTAs) on the landing page.
No matter what the action is, it must be easy for the reader to know what to do next. For healthcare websites, this will either be to contact the business or to buy a product.
In terms of how many call to actions you need, this will depend on the goal of the landing page.
If you want multiple CTAs, each with a different purpose, it’s recommended that you use multiple landing pages. On the other hand, if it’s a single CTA that leads to the same point, more than one use is more than acceptable.
Interestingly, HubSpot found that using anchor text for your CTA increased conversion rates by 121%. This is likely because that they don’t look like adverts, which most people tend to ignore and blend in with the content.
Furthermore, CTA anchors give the customer exactly what they’re looking for straight away.
Once the CTAs have been included in the content, they should be tracked on their effectiveness. After all, if readers aren’t converting, there must be something wrong with the CTA.
Employ a strong analytics program to improve the efficiency of the CTA.
Make It Mobile Friendly
A healthcare website must be easy to use on a mobile device. According to Digital Authority Partners, over 50% of all web browsing in 2018 was done from a mobile device.
If your business does not have an optimized healthcare website, people will leave yours and find a competitor’s that is user-friendly to complete the sale.
The information must be easy to access and above all else, easy to read. Remember, people use healthcare websites to find information.
Another reason why you need a mobile-friendly website is that it looks professional and, with the way that Google forces other websites to adapt to mobile use, expected from an online business in 2019.
Your business will look like it hasn’t kept up with the times, again leading to people leaving the page and using a competitor.
As an example, a study conducted by 33sticks showed that a lead generation form that was optimized for mobile experienced a 67% increase in conversion rate when compared to the control non-optimized version.
One way to optimize a healthcare website for mobile is by including the viewport meta tag. This controls how the website will show on the user’s device. If the page opens as the same width regardless of the screen, it’s going to be difficult to read the text without zooming and continually scrolling across.
Also, ensure that all the buttons are large enough to work on a mobile device. It’s easy to click a button with a mouse but on smaller screens, it can be harder to deal with.
This article comes from Kyros Insights, a loyalty marketing analytics company
Good reaaad! I think some of the tips that you mentioned can also be applied in other websites not only for health website. I will definitely follow these very useful & detailed tips! Thanks for sharing!
I agree, Kyra, you could definitely use this list for other websites…but I also think health websites are sometimes less likely to follow these basic rules of website marketing. I also agreed that the content must be up to date, and while there’s certainly health news and medical studies coming out all the time, health blogs are also easily filled with valuable personal health advice that’s also evergreen.
Definitely some awesome, universal tips that apply in healthcare and beyond. I’d also encourage healthcare website creators to not be afraid of using tools like medium or squarespace to help them with design, layout, and mobile experience. In terms of valuable content, I’ve noticed that content focused on giving high level overviews of common diseases is pretty saturated – it may be more valuable for specialists to provide more detailed content on their specific specialty (eg a dermatologist writes about the hows and whys of acne treatments).
We have found a lot of success with focusing on our website and blog when most healthcare companies are focusing on social platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. We also work with tools like GMB, so we are findable in local search and map results. What content management systems do you find work the best out of the box?