How To Use Your Therapy Website To Attract More Patients

Highlights 

• Attract more patients to your website with a professional, updated design.

• Maintain an active blog to attract readership, build trust, and showcase your expertise in your field. 

• Promote your website through social media and other digital platforms.

• Use gated content to grow your contact list.

To attract more patients to your medical practice, you have to draw them to your website and then turn them into patients. A good strategy for growing your practice accomplishes both of these things.

There are several key methods you can use to bring people to your site, including regular updates and blogging. Then, you have to keep them there by maintaining a low bounce rate. Finally, use gated content to grow your email list and convert visitors into patients.

The following is a more thorough overview of these strategies to help you use your website to attract more visitors and convert them to patients. 

Maintain a Professional Website 

In 2021, 75% of patients looked online to find a healthcare provider. Having a professional website is not optional anymore for optometrists who want to attract patients. 

But simply building a site is not enough. It’s also important to keep it updated. A well-maintained site is more likely to rank high on Google’s search engine results (SERP) page.

A site that is well maintained and updated is also more appealing to visitors.  A professional-looking website will add credibility to your practice. If your design, contact information, and content are out of date, you will miss out on potential patients.

Blog

In addition to maintaining your standard site pages, your practice needs a blog. Blogging may not seem like an intuitive activity for a medical practice. However, given that most patients conduct an online search when researching providers, quality content is your most effective way to build your brand in your community and attract new patients. 

Here’s why: The majority of web pages that appear highest in Google search results are blog posts. When people conduct an online search, they are usually looking for answers to a question or basic information related to their query. 

Blog posts, when well designed, provide this type of content to a specific type of user. According to CognitiveSEO, Google is likely to crawl your site more often if it consistently finds new content.

Additionally, here are a few key things you achieve with a well-developed and regularly updated blog:

• Establish credibility and authority. Your blog posts allow you to showcase your expertise on particular health topics and treatments. 
• Build relationships and trust. A blog is also your best device to deliver fresh content that inspires people to come back to your site. You can invite people to subscribe to your blog so each new article is delivered to their inbox or feed reader. As your readership grows, so will your reputation in your community.
• Bring in patients. An effective call to action on each article is a great way to turn blog visitors into patients. A call to action can direct users to book an appointment, contact you for more information, download a freebie, or whatever you would like a reader to do next.

Have a Solid Strategy to Attract Visitors

The most successful practices have a comprehensive content marketing strategy. Here are a few common tactics to consider.

• Social media. Social media is a powerful tool that will help you build a following and direct users to your new articles. Each time you publish a new blog post, share the blog content on your social media channels — or a brief description of it — with a link to your website to learn more. Offer “follow” and “share” buttons each post to make it easier for people to engage with your content. Publishing shareable content is one of the most effective ways to promote word-of-mouth advertising at little cost.
• Reviews and testimonials. When choosing a healthcare provider, 74% of people surveyed said that online reviews were very important to them. Good optometry practice management software will have marketing tools that let you reach out to your patients to solicit social media reviews. You can then, with patient permission, publish reviews as testimonials on the home page of your website. 
• Digital advertising. Paid ads on Google, Facebook and other digital platforms or social media help you reach a larger audience of targeted prospects. Direct readers to your site by including the link to your website or blog. 
• Write guest posts. Contribute articles to relevant medical websites and include your web address in your byline. 

Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Getting people to your site is just half the battle. You also have to keep them there long enough to convert them into patients.

SEO experts use bounce rate to measure the time that users spend on your site before they “bounce” away. Your goal is to create content that’s engaging enough to keep readers on your site as long as possible.

The following are effective strategies to optimize your bounce rate and make your site more “sticky”:

• Recommend other internal content. At the end of articles, include a “related articles” feature that encourages the reader to read similar articles on your blog.
• Use visuals. Use infographics, videos, and images to catch the eye and keep users on the page longer. 
• Simplify navigation. Don’t overwhelm people with complex menus and navigation. The easier it is to find useful items, the more likely it is people will look. Ideally, you want people to find what they’re looking for with one or two clicks. 
• Optimize page load speed. If your site is too heavy, it takes too long to load and people won’t wait. Google weighs load speed heavily when ranking sites.

Build an Email List

Your website’s primary objective is to turn visitors into patients. A very effective way to do that is to gather contact information from users to use as your marketing list. The easiest information to gather is an email address, as people are usually more willing to share that than a phone number or mailing address. 

One of the most effective ways to gather email addresses is to use gated content. A good gated piece is a compelling resource that’s not readily available elsewhere that members of your target audience would find valuable. Examples of good gated content are eBooks, tips and techniques users can try at home, checklists, and templates. 

On each blog post you publish, include a call to action that directs the reader toward a landing page where they can download the resource in exchange for their email address. 

To expand the value of your contact list, invite prospects to share information about the types of communication they would like to receive. Topics may include additional content similar to what they have read or resources related to a specific treatment. Inviting this information helps you avoid overwhelming people with too many emails, which causes unsubscriptions and email avoidance. 

A good way to maximize your gated content is to also create compelling posts for your social media channels inviting followers to download the free content on your site. 

Conclusion

The strategies discussed here have proven successful at helping health organizations attract website visitors, reduce bounce rates, develop contact lists, and bring in new patients. If you implement them effectively, your practice should experience similar success. It does take time, but consistent quality and attention to your content pays off.

As a medical provider, your primary objective is to deliver the most effective healthcare possible to your patients. 

ClinicSource can help you do that. ClinicSource is an EMR and practice management system created by therapists for therapists. This solution dramatically reduces the time you spend on administrative tasks to free you up to spend more time with patients. 

Book a demo today to learn about the many ways ClinicSource can help improve your practice and boost your bottom line.