Purposes of a Website for a Dentist or Doctor

At it’s core, a website for a healthcare provider most likely is split between two primary purposes — to provide information to existing patients, and to attract new patients. Fortunately a well-planned and well-designed website can (and should) be successful at both.

How Many Pages Should a Healthcare Website Have?

At its core a website for a dentist or a physician should have the following 4 or 5 pages:

1. Home – the homepage should welcome your visitors, briefly describe the office, and have some attractive stock photography if applicable.

2. About – the about page should introduce the patient to the office and to the doctor(s),  and should talk about how long the office has been there providing care and serving the community.  It may also be helpful to have a separate page for the doctor or doctors in the practice.

3. Services – the services page should briefly discuss what you do.  Do you provide all dental services?  Are you a dermatologist that provides specific treatments only? Because the services page can start to get very long with multiple services, it’s often a good idea to separate each major service into a a separate page.

4. Contact – other than the home page, the contact page is the most important page on your website.  You must have a contact page that has your address, phone number, office hours, and possibly a contact form so people can reach you (without you having to expose your email address to the world).

(As a fifth page you may want to have an “Insurance” page as many patients will want to know if you participate in their particular insurance plan.  In the above model your navigation would then be Home, About, Services, Insurance, Contact).

Each of the above pages should also have your phone number and address in the same location on each page (i.e. in the header or footer).

Do I Really Need a 50-Page Website for My Practice?

Yes and no.  When it comes to search engine optimization, the process by which web pages are tweaked to rank well on search engines, Google is obviously able to do more with websites that have more pages.  But when you are first starting out, your goal should be to establish a neat, clear and concise 4-5 page site that provides the basic information listed above.  Then as your practice grows, or when you decide to expand your site, you can then add more pages to get more search engine exposure.  Breaking up your services pages into a single page for each service is a great way to start, as is adding a blog to your site.

As many of us know Google makes periodic changes to their search algorithm ostensibly to make search results better. Recently Google updated what they call the “Freshness Algorithm”. Basically what this means is that Google is trying to make sure that search results for certain topics are “fresh”, and it seems that Google will now be focusing somewhat on newer content. According to the official Google blog post on the subject which you can read here this change only affects 6-10% of searches [see the bottom of the article], but this change reinforces the age-old adage that “content is king”.

Only time will tell how this change will affect search results for healthcare websites, and it seems that certain content is destined to be “not-fresh” by definition (you only graduated from dental school/medical school once). But what this change DOES suggest is that it may now be even more important to keep your eyes and ears peeled for the current trends in your field. If you are a dentist or dermatologist and you find that Botox becomes a very hot topic (more than it is already), then a guest article somewhere or a post on your own website or blog (which would be even better) about the subject may have more value now than before.

In summary, however, one thing never seems to change when it comes to Google’s algorithm changes: you can’t go wrong with well-written, high-quality content — written, of course, by you!

An important caveat to consider, however, is that if you forward one domain name to another domain name without using what’s called a 301 redirect, then you may lose some of your search engine rankings for your pages.

The reason is because when search engines rank web pages, they store the URL of the page.  If the URL of the page has changed (e.g .you’ve forwarded the domain) then when people click on the link there will be no page there (as the link will be pointing toward the OLD page).  It’s similar to not giving ar forwarding address when you move.  If you don’t tell the newspaper company that you’ve moved, all they will find when they deliver the paper is an empty house.

The technical aspects of implementing 301 redirects are beyond the scope of this video, but if you have web pages that rank well on search engines, do NOT forward your domain until you’ve discussed 301 redirects and the SEO implications with your web developer.

When Not to Use Flash

As a web designer and developer I will first and foremost argue that regardless of Flash’s future availability. core features of a dentist or doctor’s website should NOT be done in Flash. The reason for this is that some users don’t have the Flash plugin installed, and there are some people who don’t know how to install it if they need to. Thus, if you want to have an instructional demo of a procedure done with illustrations in Flash, I think that’s a great use of the technology. But be very careful about using Flash for critical  elements such as website navigation and contact information, because Blackberry and iPhone users will have a very hard time using your site because these devices can’t “see” Flash.

What’s Happening Now with Flash?

Adobe has recently stated that they will no longer continue to produce Flash for mobile devices.  This announcement does not by any stretch foretell the death of Flash on the desktop platform — but it is a factor to consider.  Since we are slowly moving to expand from the traditional “desktop” web to the “mobile” web on smartphones and other devices, it’s not a stretch to think that at some point manufacturers and developers are not going to be as likely to work with a product that has no mobile future.

An Important Note about the Mac, iPads and iPhones

I always remind my clients that the iPad and the iPhone cannot view Flash content.  What this means practically is that if there is something on your website that is only available in Flash then people using these devices will simply not be able to see your content. This caveat is ever more important now as new Mac computers are no longer going to be shipping with the Flash plugin installed.  For most computer users this is not a tremendous hindrance – Flash is not that difficult to install.  But now that Flash isn’t going to be included by default on Mac’s themselves, it’s another reason to make sure that critical website content is available in alternative formats.

What to Do Moving Forward?

Flash is a ubiquitous plugin on the PC platform, and hence I don’t predict the demise of Flash on the PC desktop/laptop anytime soon.  Clearly I believe that your website needs to be device independent and you need to make sure that all users can view your important content (navigation, contact information).  But with the end of Flash being included by default on Macs, it’s ever more important that you make sure that your website is properly visible on this platform.  I’m not recommending that practices with Flash navigation go out and redesign their sites.  I would however, use this information as an “early warning” to take a quick look at your website on the iPhone, the iPad and on a Mac to make sure things look as you expect.  The Mac still has a relatively small market share compared to PCs, but when it comes to iPhones and iPad, I believe that these devices will continue to grow in popularity.  So while Flash isn’t dead yet, I think the writing is on the wall and we all need to take notice.

Looking at this question I immediately knew that this provider was not keeping track of his conversions, and without conversion data, there was no way for him to evaluate whether or not his AdWords campaign was working for his office goals, or to see if he was throwing marketing money out the window.

Website Goals and Conversions

So let’s take a step back for a minute and talk about goals and conversions.  A goal is any task you want a website visitor to complete, such as filling out a contact form, and a conversion is what we marketers call it when someone actually completes one of these goals.  So for a dentist or physician, a good goal would be to “have someone contact the office via the website contact form”.  And the conversion would be when someone actually contacts the office via the contact form.  You can and will obviously set your own goals, but this example is a very common one so it’s worth exploring as an example.

Goals are important for organic SEO as well for PPC traffic, but for this article let’s stick with PPC (you can read this article to learn more about the difference between organic and paid (PPC) search).

An AdWords Example

So moving ahead with the AdWords example, let assume that each click from your AdWords ad costs you $2 and that you have 20 people click your ad in a one-month period – so you’ve spent $40 this month.

Now let’s assume that of the 20 people that came to your website by clicking on the AdWords ad, 2 contacted the office via the website contact form (note they also could have called the office but for now let’s stick to the contact form for simplicity).  Recall that your goal was to get people to contact the office via the contact form, and that we defined your conversion as someone actually using the form.

From only this small tidbit of data, we can make two important conclusions:

1. Conversion Rate. Using the numbers above, the calculated conversion rate here is (2/20) (reduces to 1/10) or 10%.  So this data means that for every 20 people that came to your website from your AdWords ad (20 clicks), 2 contacted the office.  Thus we can say that your conversion rate for this particular AdWords ad is 10%.

2. Cost Per Conversion. We can now conclude that for every $40 we spend on this AdWords ad, 2 people will contact the office for a cost per conversion of $10.

Making Business Decisions with this Data

Now that we know the conversion rate for this particular ad as well as our CPC, we can determine if running this ad is a good use of our marketing dollars.

The question here is simple:  “Is it worth $10 to have a potentially new patient call the office?”  For some practices the answer is yes, and for some the answer is no.

If the answer is yes, then keep running this ad.  And because we know the conversion rate is 10%, it may be a good use of our funds to aim for more impressions of the ad (that is, increase the number of times the ad is displayed).  So while last month we had 20 clicks, wouldn’t it be better next month if we had 40 clicks?  The 40 clicks would cost $80 (remember a cost of $2 per click), but at a consistent conversion rate of 10%, we can predict that 4 people will now contact the office, still at a cost of $10 each (remember — 40 clicks should lead to 4 contact form requests) .

Conclusion: Look at the Data

The key concept I want to you take away from this article is that you should look at the data from any and all of your marketing campaigns.  If you have clearly defined goals (e.g. get a contact from request from your website) and know the cost per conversion (e.g. $10), then you can easily compare your marketing campaigns and see which ones work and which ones don’t.

Think about your ad in the Yellow Pages.  How many new patients did you get to contact your office from the Yellow Pages ad this month?  Was it worth the approximately $300 you spent on the ad?  Without defined goals and conversion rate data, you can’t possibly assess whether this $300 is money well spent.  But if we look at data from the last 6 months and see that of the $1800 you’ve spent on your Yellow Pages ad ($300/mo. X 6 mo.), you’ve only had 6 new patients contact the office, then the $300 cost per new patient contact request here makes the AdWords CPC look like pennies.

More Reading

In this article I kept the defined conversions simple in order to demonstrate a concept.  If you’d like to see how I break down conversions in real-world situations, you may find this article interesting: A Practical Look at AdWords and Marketing Conversions for Healthcare Providers.

Real-Life Nuances

In the previous article about conversions I stuck to a one-conversion example. In a real-life situation I’d have more focused conversions and more data including the actual CPC for a new patient (since this data is the most critical).  I’ll stick with AdWords here but the concepts are the same for the Yellow Pages — what really matters is how many new patients you brought in in a given time period (e.g. one month). So let’s take a look a these conversions:

Three Conversion Rates

Your first conversion rate will be the conversion rate for the AdWords ad – of the 100 times the ad was displayed, how many people clicked?  If 10 people clicked, then our conversion rate for the ad is 10%.  This conversion rate will help us know if our ad is doing well.

Your second conversion rate will be whether or not people who clicked the ad performed our specified goal – that is, contacting the office via the contact form.  This conversion rate will let us know that for this particular ad, of all of the people that click the ad,  that “x” number of people will contact the office.  So let’s assume that of the 10 people that click the ad, 5 of them contact the office for a conversion rate of (5/10) or 50% (practically speaking this is a very high number but it works for our example).

Your third conversion rate will be the actual number of people who became new patients.  Even though 5 people did contact the office, did all 5 of them become new patients?  If they did that’s great, but if they didn’t, why not.  And here’s where things get interesting — you may wonder why we need three different conversion rates here and the answer is simple.  Getting someone to go from our AdWords ad to becoming a new patient requires multiple steps, so by having clear and separate conversion  rates, we can see where we are having success or problems.

What Can We Learn from All of These Conversion Rates?

-If nobody click our AdWords ads then our problem is easy to define: we need better ads. If nobody clicks the ads then nobody contacts the office and we don’t get new patients.

-If we see that lots of people click our AdWords ad but very few people contact the office, then maybe our website isn’t appealing, or our contact form is broken. In reality there are lots of things that we can look at on a website to see what works and what doesn’t and this is where Google Analytics becomes extremely helpful.   But if the ads are getting clicked but the people aren’t contacting us,  then there’s something on our website that they don’t like (either that or they are calling the office instead of using the contact form — but you would have tracking for that , too. to see if this is the case).

-If we see that lots of people click the AdWords ad and a good number contact the office, but very few become patients, then maybe our staff is not handling the call well.  Maybe we need to record the conversations to see what’s being said and to see if there are errors being made.  Or maybe these people are interested in the practice but are asking for insurance plan that we don’t take.  In this situation it would make sense to consider taking this insurance (that is — if tons of people call with a specific insurance in mind  that we don’t take — are we missing something demographically about our area?) or at least changing our ad to reflect the insurance plans that we do take.

Conclusion

Tracking conversions at every step in the marketing process is critical in order to be able to make informed business decisions and to make sure you are spending your marketing dollars in the best way possible.  It’s one thing to know what doesn’t work in driving new patients to your practice.  But it’s another thing entirely to figure out what does work,  and then to take advantage of this data and spend your marketing dollars on campaigns that you know will predictably bring patients into your office.