If your online marketing efforts haven’t been meeting your practice’s goals or if you have yet to build an online presence for your practice and want to be able to reach new clients in 2020, then here are the most important parts of an online presence that your practice must implement to stand out in the new year.

Professional Website Design and Services

As the web has evolved, so have clients’ expectations. They now expect a professional design that functions seamlessly on any device. Visitors will usually form an opinion of a business based on their website within 15 seconds of visiting it. After that, they will decide to stay or go elsewhere.

Web design is complex, but there are a few principles you can implement right away. The first place to start is to make sure that your website is easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to engage with.

Easy to Read Fonts

The fonts you select for your website should be simple and easy to read. Fonts like Arial and Verdana are available on almost any computer by default and commonly recommended for readability on screens.

Color and Design

Choose colors that are easy on the eyes. Save bright colors for your call to action buttons (e.g. “Schedule Appointment”). Don’t worry about blank or white space; it makes the website easier to read and navigate.

Images That Impact

Include images of your practice, doctors, and office staff. Imagery can often grab a visitor’s attention more effectively than text alone.

Clear Call to Action

If visitors can’t tell what the next step is, they’ll quickly leave your website. Prompt them to fill out a contact form, schedule an appointment, or read helpful content.

Mobile Responsive

Over half of all web traffic takes place over mobile devices, like a smartphone or tablet. A website that’s not built for these devices will be difficult or impossible to use.

Mobile responsive design is a website that is built to adjust itself to any screen size and any device. This gives you a single version of your website that loads quickly, is easy to maintain, and stands out in Google Search results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Even if you have the best website out there, Google still needs to be able to find it. So how do you show up on Google and move towards the top of search results? There are hundreds of factors that get you there, but these are the most important ones:

Quality Content

Content must be relevant to the lives of visitors or else they will realize that what they are looking for can’t be found on your website and will go elsewhere. As you get to know your clients more, fine-tune your content to better suit their needs.

Repeat Traffic

Visitors are likely to come back to your website regularly and share your content with others if it contains valuable, relevant content. Google also considers repeat traffic to be a good sign that your website is helping its visitors and is more likely to reward this kind of website in search rankings.

On-Page SEO

The words that you type into the Google search bar are called keywords. On-page SEO optimizes the content of your website to more closely match the keywords that people use to search for a provider or more information about your services, making it more likely for them to find your website first.

Dwell Time

This is the average amount of time that visitors spend on your website. When they spend more time on your website, Google assumes that they are engaged with your website and found it to be more valuable.

Business And Healthcare Listings

Your practice website is your online “home base,” but many clients will first come into contact with you outside of your website. Search engines, social media networks, mobile applications, and healthcare directories are where up to 58% of prospective new clients will find your practice.

Listings management services increase the effectiveness of these channels by allowing you to manage all of the information about your practice from one central source. By having a centralized source of information, you prevent inaccuracies and duplicate information from frustrating clients and causing penalties in search engine rankings. 

Updating contact information and hours of operation across all your channels can often be completed in seconds.

Social Media Management

Social media networks like Facebook represent a vast referral network of clients for your practice. Establishing a social media presence for your practice allows you to reach new clients and stay connected with existing clients.

You can build a large network of potential referrals by sharing updates about your practice, distributing helpful content, notifying clients of holiday updates, and more.

Many prospective clients use their social media accounts to search for a local practice or ask their friends and family for a recommendation.

Secure Websites

Google has been making changes to help its users understand the need for a secure internet. They now label all websites that don’t use HTTPS (the protocol that secure websites run on) as “not secure” in the Chrome web browser. Other browsers are implementing similar features.

Google has sent a clear message that they expect website owners to have secure websites by default.

Websites that don’t have security enabled will likely experience a penalty in search engine rankings. Considering that an estimated 70% of page-one Google rankings are secure websites, any practice that is not using HTTPS should ask their web hosting provider to enable it or switch to a hosting provider that has HTTPS enabled by default.

Secure Forms and Emails

It’s necessary to keep all online communication safe and secure within HIPAA guidelines. Secure emails and HTTPS-secured website forms protect your clients’ private health information, keep your practice HIPAA compliant, and reduce the risk of a potential data breach.

Look for a communications platform that keeps all emails, documents, and forms protected, even if the recipient doesn’t have a secure email address.

Key Takeaways

• Clients expect websites to use modern, clean designs that function seamlessly on all devices.
• Over half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so be sure your website is mobile-friendly.
• Clients and Google expect websites to be secure so personal information stays safe.
• Quality content and on-page search engine optimization can improve your search engine rankings over time.
• Social media management and healthcare listings maximize the online reach of your practice and help you present a positive online reputation clients can trust.

TherapySites and our products were developed to make it easy for you to focus on helping your clients, rather than spending your time on technology or marketing.

Try it out and see for yourself why we are the leader in online therapy marketing, and why over 100 therapy associations are proud to call us partners.