Creating a website for your private practice is an essential element of building a digital presence that can help you cultivate relationships with existing patients and connect with new ones. However, simply publishing your site online isn’t enough. For your site to drive results, you need to check all these boxes.
Build Pages that Target Local Keywords
A one-page website is a start, but it’s probably not going to offer your business a lot of value in the long term. In order to be an effective marketing tool, your website should have a few pages:
- A homepage that introduces your practice to the community
- An about page that introduces your team and talks about when your practice began, your mission, and your values.
- A contact page where people can use a web form to send you a message and find your phone number, hours, and address.
These represent the fundamental aspects that make a website functional and somewhat valuable. From there, building on that value will help you accomplish two goals: First, you’ll offer a lot more information to your visitors. Second, you’ll naturally be able to incorporate keywords that will help your website appear in search results.
Once you have the basic pages in place, take the time to create a main “Services” page and then multiple nested/child pages — one for each of the primary services you offer. On each of the services pages, you’ll be able to target a relevant local keyword, like “eye care in Woodland Hills.”
After creating the dedicated service pages, your next step in local SEO should be creating pages around each of the communities you service. For instance, if your practice has more than one location, you should create a page for each of those locations. Meanwhile, if you have a mobile service, you should create a page for every community you go to. Even if you just have one location, creating a page for the top neighborhoods/towns where your patients tend to come from will help you get in front of the right people.
Develop a Strong Call-to-Action
One of the final web pages you need to add to your website is a landing page around whatever call-to-action (CTA) you plan to incorporate throughout your website. Many practices will use “Schedule a Free Consultation” as their CTA, which means you could use your contact page as the landing page. However, you’ll get the best results if you build a separate landing page that caters to those who are following through with the call-to-action and are looking to schedule.
People can access your contact page from anywhere on your site, which makes it a readily available page. They may be going straight there to send you a message, but they may have found you through a blog post and after reading, are interested in booking a consultation. They can use the normal contact page to submit their request, but if a dedicated landing page that reinforces your expertise and caters to their goal (i.e., scheduling) is linked to other website pages like blogs, it will improve conversion rates.
While it’s not feasible to create a new landing page for every person who may be following through with your call-to-action, you should consider the most popular services you offer and create specific landing pages that align with them. For instance, a dental office might have a landing page dedicated to teeth whitening and another one for veneers. These pages not only help the individual complete the CTA, but they help you reduce friction in the process while targeting keywords. Plus, you can use them in advertising campaigns later on.
Connect Your Social Media Pages
A simple addition you can make to your website is a place in the header and footer where you link to your practice’s various social media pages. These links will give visitors a place to get the latest news about your practice and connect with you beyond your website.
On articles and blog posts, you can also incorporate social share buttons that make it easy for a visitor to share your content with their own network, which is a great way to leverage word-of-mouth marketing.
Offer an Email Newsletter
Driving traffic to your website isn’t easy, which is why making the most of every visitor you get will help you maximize your return on investment and help you tackle other marketing goals. For example, if you add an email newsletter signup box to your site, you can capture some of your website visitors and turn them into subscribers.
Without an email newsletter, anyone who comes to your website could potentially disappear without a trace. Unless they contact your practice, you will have no way to ever reach them again. Even if they come back often, the absence of an email newsletter can cause a disconnect.
As soon as you start building your email list, you have a direct link to patients and people who may be interested in becoming a patient in your practice. In your emails, you can include news, announcements, offers, and helpful advice that will bring value to the individual even if they aren’t yet a patient of yours. In the long term, these emails will help cultivate relationships that will grow your business.
Invest in Content Marketing
Once you have a website, the very next thing you should do is add a blog section. Not only will your blog provide a place to post press releases and announcements about your practice, but it’s also a place to target keywords that drive traffic and engage visitors old and new.
Content marketing is the act of naturally promoting your business as a topic expert by providing high-value information on a given subject. So, dentist offices can kickstart their content marketing strategies by posting about dental health, optometrists about eye health, and so on — it’s truly that simple.
As you publish to your blog, you can track your rankings for relevant search terms using a tool like Google Analytics. You can also drive traffic to your blog posts by sharing them with your email list. Plus, you can share your blog posts on social media, which gives you a social post for the week and drives engagement.
Update Your Site Often
The last thing you should do when using your website to market your practice is to keep it up to date. Some of the aspects you’ll want to stay on top of include your team members, location, hours, and services. However, updating it with exciting news and announcements, like community contributions, is also valuable.
While it will take some time to build your web presence up to the point where your site is generating organic traffic on its own, it will be worth the investment in the long haul.
