Creating a website is easy. That is why having a successful medical website is a challenge. Today, there are literally thousands of tools that will allow virtually anyone to have a website for practically any reason. The biggest challenge to our medical website development company is differentiating for our clients between having a website and developing a medical website that successfully promotes the desired services and brings patients to the practice.
The biggest mistake that practices make is that they hire a designer and then go back to the practice with the expectation that at the end of the project, patients will flock to their site. The reality is there are a lot of very nice medical websites that get few if any visitors each day. That is because the clinic did not have a full understanding of the steps necessary to have a successful medical website.
The steps are not complicated, but they are involved and require a real commitment on the part of the clinic and their website partner. Additionally, the steps are never finished but are more like being on a treadmill. Even after completing the steps, some of them must be routinely revisited to insure that they have kept up with the competition.
The general steps are:
- Planning
- Development
- Implementation
- Plan Evaluation and Update
- Success
Planning
The foundation of the successful medical website is understanding what the website should do and what is involved with achieving that goal. You must articulate what you want to achieve and how you are going to measure the success. This should be the guide from which all medical website development work stems. If you have not done this basic step, almost any website designer or self design program will work, because looking good becomes the only criteria.
During the planning phase, proper expectations should be developed. Development and implementation of a successful medical website takes time. It is much more involved than simply having a website developed and making it available to the world wide web. Patience will be a virtue. Very few overnight successes occur in marketing websites and those are usually in niche or evolving markets. This condition may still be true for a practice in an area with a smaller population, but for large metropolitan clinics, the market is very competitive. Education is the third part of plan development. A successful website should be built around what potential visitors are searching for. Proper key word research and planning must be done. Analysis of successful competitors and finding under served markets will speed a medical websites track to the top.
Finally, commitment of all involved individuals will complete a solid foundation for building and maintaining a successful medical website development plan. Each principal in the business, the contracted development and marketing firm, and each involved employee must understand what is involved and be committed to the website's success.
Development
With proper planning, the rest becomes as easy as following a good road map. The development often is the focus of the greatest number of resources and effort. I would challenge you to consider development of the site to be the easiest part of the process. That is, if proper planning and implementation have been committed to.
Development is simply taking the existing plan and utilizing proper design techniques to build a structure and design that is appealing to both human visitors and search engine spiders. Then take the same criteria and apply it to generation of content. The content and design should funnel visitors to take an action that has already been defined in the planning stage.
Finally, the developed site should be tested and retested. It should be spell checked and proof read by multiple people. It can then be uploaded to the server and made available to the rest of the world. Certainly, there is a lot more that goes into developing a good website, but we are focused on making a good website successful!
Implementation
Rarely have I seen a medical clinic spend too much on website development. But more often than not, I have seen medical clinics spend their entire budget on development and let a beautiful medical website sit on the web with no implementation or marketing strategy thus, producing no meaningful traffic.
Implementation involves promoting the site and tracking the traffic to analyze the success of the traffic. If no one knows the site is there, it is only there to serve the ego of the owner and the developer! A few things that can make a big difference for a website are:
- Add the website address to all printed materials (patient forms, print ads, brochures, etc)
- Send an email to all of your colleagues, patients and friends to let them know it is available
- If appropriate, ask them to bookmark your site in their social network site (MySpace, FaceBook, Etc.)
- Ask each of your vendors (you are spending money with them) to link to your site from their corporate site. Many have a directory of their customers and would gladly do this
- Continually update your content and add new content
- Make sure your site is submitted to DMOZ (DMOZ.org) and the local search of Google, Yahoo, and MSN
- Find other relevant (they promote or discuss subjects relevant to your practice and website) websites with which to exchange links (or even better to provide a one way link to you)
- Plan evaluation and update
The only way to know you are successful is to evaluate. This is where the treadmill starts. Even after you have achieved success, it can only be maintained in a competitive environment by continued analysis and refinement.
If you have properly established goals and tracked your traffic, it should be reasonably easy to establish the level of success your medical website has achieved. These evaluations should be routinely scheduled and carried out. The results of the analysis should provide the road map of activity needed to either maintain your site's success or take the next step toward success.
Your analysis should not only be of your own site but also of the medical websites that are performing the way you want your medical website to perform. There are tools available that allow you to get a snapshot of almost any site's traffic, page rank, and search engine results success. While copying their content will be punished by the search engines (and the law) emulating their successful techniques is quite acceptable.
You should also have a method of tracking the server that hosts your site. All servers go down occasionally, but if yours is down more than rarely, you should consider finding a new place to host your site. After all, if the site is not accessible, it does not matter how high you showed up in search engine results. You will also not maintain good search results long if the search engines identify your site as being regularly not available.
Success
By now you should be able to see why patience and proper expectations were emphasized early on. A successful medical website involves a lot more than simply developing a site and making it available. Additionally, continued success is not guaranteed. To maintain success, you must commit to doing the things that brought you to the top to begin with. Some keys to continued success are:
- Add fresh content and update existing content
- Generate new quality links to your site
- Monitoring of and contributing to local social networks to see and respond to what others are saying about your site and your services
- Add new features
- Looking for new search terms that may be under served and develop new content to attract those searches
Success is a never ending quest, but one that is attainable and maintainable with a plan, proper expectations, commitment and patience.
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