The Internet is one of the easiest places for consumers to find information about products and services they are looking for. Gone are the days of looking up businesses in the yellow pages or newspaper. Search engines make finding the right information you desire quick and easy. Whether it's at home on the couch, or on a cell phone while you wait in line at the grocery store - people are constantly searching the web for information.

That's why it's important for you, as a healthcare provider, to have an online presence. If potential customers can't find your business online, they will probably never find you, and your competitors will reap the benefits. In today's Internet savvy world, you can't just have a website, you need to build a website that will be seen and that will attract new patients to your office. So today we're taking a break from talking about optometry EHR, and reminding you how important it is to build a strong website. 

Beyond Optometry EHR:
Don't Forget About these 4 Things When Designing Your Website

Make Yourself Easy to be Found

75% of Internet users never scroll past the first page of search results when looking for information online. In order for your page to appear on the top of search results you'll need to put in some effort towards search engine optimization (SEO) when building your site. SEO is essentially the targeting of certain words and phrases that people search for to help make your site more relevant and appear before others in certain searches. It involves targeting certain words, building links, writing meta and image descriptions, and much more. We could create a whole separate blog just talking about SEO and best practices, but in the mean time we will point you towards a couple of articles that will help you understand the basics and hopefully apply some of these practices to your website!

• Business Insider: 10 Basic SEO Tips to Get You Started
• Redesigning Your Website? Why You Need to Think About SEO from the Start
• The Beginners Guide to SEO

Give Your Visitors the Info They are Looking for

It's not enough these days just to have a website. It needs to be modern looking and visitors need to be able to find the information they are searching for quickly. So what's most important to your patients? Contact info? Office hours? Accepted insurance payers? Prices? The list goes on and on. Really take the time to sit down and analyze how you navigate through your site now, and how it could be improved. Do you frequently get phone calls asking about the same information? Perhaps that's a good place to start when determining what information is the most important for your website.

Be Interactive

Today's world moves at a very fast pace, and many people who are looking for information online, are also looking to get things done online. If they are already at your website chances are they don't want to pick up the phone and call you to get things done. Do you offer a way for visitors to schedule appointments online? Do you provide an email address or question/comment form so that people can send information to your office easily? Making your website more interactive is going to allow your staff to spend less time on the phone with patients and customers who have questions or are looking to schedule an appointment.

Make it Responsive

If you're really going for it and are hiring out the design of your website, this is probably something you'll be able to do. But if you're building your page on your own and don't have a ton of coding knowledge, this could be tricky. A responsive website is one that shrinks and adapts how it looks on different devices such as cell phones and tablets. With different screen sizes and resolutions websites can look very different on each device, and it's important that your website looks good on desktop and mobile platforms. In fact, nearly 63% of cell phone owners use their phone to access the Internet!

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