By now, you’re well aware that patients do their research, usually consulting Dr Google about their medical conditions before and after consulting someone with actual medical training and experience.
Patients and referrers also do their research on you and your practice. After all, medical imaging is a big decision, incurring significant costs and significant anxiety while awaiting for the diagnosis. Patients want to know they’re in safe hands. Referring doctors want to know they’re sending their patient onwards to someone who will care for them well.
What’s the purpose of a medical imaging center website?
Your website is the best place to convince patients and referring doctors of your credibility, skill, services and bedside manner. Anticipating likely questions (like fees, radiation danger, duration of the procedure, how they need to prepare) shows patients you understand their perspective.
A good website doesn’t just sit there waiting for visitors though. Once the visitors arrive (through good SEO and digital marketing activities), your website’s job is to convert them – to make them take an action you want them to take. That action might be phoning your practice, referring a patient or booking an appointment.
Your website’s primary role is to convert people into patients. That’s how it contributes to sustaining and growing your diagnostic imaging practice.
The 7 elements of a highly-converting website
1.Informational videos answering frequent patient questions
Take some time to read the most frequently asked questions about your imaging procedures or sit down with the reception or call center team to understand the most common patients concerns. Record yourself or your team answering these questions in video form and share them with your patients. “How long does a CT scan take?”, “What is a CT scan?”, “How much radiation is in a CT scan?” For example one of the FAQ videos for one of our clients, reached over 30K video views on Youtube within the first 3 months.
Making videos of the FAQ can help you significantly increase your reach to new audiences, which is one way to encourage more referrals and grow your practice. We’ve included some below as example so you get the idea.
2.Clear calls to action and conversion points
You’ll want to make sure that it’s easy for visitors to know what they should do on your website. Make sure you have clear calls to action and conversion points, such as click here to schedule an appointment or call us at 312-444-1212 with any questions. If there are different paths visitors can take, such as a phone number, online chat, contact form, or live video consultation—you may want some sort of guiding elements so they know where to click. Our prospecting CRM helps you turn your marketing into phone calls through live chats and email campaigns that connect directly with patients. Personalized follow up emails will encourage them take immediate action by calling your office now!
3. Site speed on Mobile
If your site loads slowly, people will give up and go elsewhere – in seconds. (Yes, we really have all become that impatient). One of Google’s ranking factors is page speed, which means sites that load more quickly will get a boost in organic search results. If your website takes ages to load on mobile devices, then you might want to consider optimizing it for speed (and rank higher).
4. Daily tracking and optimization
Your website is a valuable source of data about your practice. Tracking tools enable you to measure and analyse how users are interacting with your website.Three of the most useful tracking tools are:
- Google Tag Manager – a free tool to manage snippets of code (tags) on your website such as Javascript. Managing these tags well enables you to understand how your website is performing.
- Google Analytics – another free (and, frankly, essential) tool that tells you so much about your site to enable you to improve its performance. You can see:
- Session duration (how long people stay on your site)
- Pages per session
- Bounce rate (how many arrive on your page, do nothing, then leave)
- Which pages perform well
- Which pages perform badly
- How your visitors got to your site
- Which geographical area your visitors are in.
- Call tracking – this captures data from inbound phone calls. When someone clicks your phone number on your website, call tracking records their phone number and their source (i.e. your Google ad or website).
5. Build trust by being honest: use authentic photos of your team and facilities
Honesty is a critical element of trust. If a prospect feels like they can’t trust you, there’s no way they’ll schedule an appointment with you. So how do you create those relationships? Write blogs, upload videos, create explanatory infographics, share photos of the exam consulting rooms. High-quality content builds your credibility and establishes a sense of trust. It’s wonderfully useful for patient education, reassurance and familiarity.
6. User Experience
It should be easy to navigate from one section of your website to another, and information about you and your imaging services should be easy to find. When it comes down to it, users need content that is succinct, in-depth and clear. If your specialty services are not presented clearly with an option to take action and book, you will lose potential clients who are looking for information right away.
7. Avoid common mistakes
The most common mistake is a lack of mobile optimization. Make sure that your site is mobile friendly, and can be viewed on all popular devices such as phones and tablets. Another common mistake is not using keywords and content throughout your website that describes what you do. The web can help you find these keywords, but make sure to include them in your site as well. Try to use words such as Open MRI Chicago, Ultrasound Abdomen or to connect people with relevant searches. Be consistent in presenting information and lead people through each step of their process (whether they are a physician making a referral or a patient looking for diagnostic imaging). Finally, make sure that everything on your website works properly. Having broken links or error pages could lead to negative SEO ratings. These things could cost your business money by deterring potential patients from scheduling an appointment.
Get A Free Internet Marketing Strategy Evaluation
If you would like to have me and my team personally review your online marketing strategy and show you where you are ranking, where there is room for improvement and how we can work together to make this your best year ever and finally get your Internet marketing right, then click below to schedule your Internet Marketing Session now.
