Your practice's website is a critical piece to your optical marketing strategy. The absence of a website makes you virtually un-findable to new patients. And a poorly designed website can hurt your brand image and put up some red flags when new visitors are deciding whether or not to make a first time appointment with your practice.That's why we put together a list of ten things that could be hurting your practice's website and online image.
Is Your Website Missing Any of These Important Features?
Email Opt. In
If you utilize email marketing for your eyecare practice (and you should be), having an easy way for website visitors to opt. in to your emails is a great way to continue growing your patient base. You could even offer a discount on their next appointment or product purchase if they subscribe to your list.
Easy Navigation
You need to make it easy for patients to find the information they're looking for on your website. These days, our attention spans are pretty short and if we can't quickly find what we are looking for, chances are we will move on to the next website to find it.
About Us
New patients probably want to learn a thing or two about your practice before booking their appointment. A few important pieces to an about page for your practice include photos of your staff with names and short bios, and a brief history of your business. Other things you might want to include are pictures of your practice and community events and organizations you're active with.
Contact Info
Your site visitors need to know how they can reach out to your practice to schedule an appointment or ask questions. Make sure your phone number, email address, physical address, and hours of operation are available on your site.
Map
Along with your physical address, having a Google map image with your practice location helps patients quickly visualize where you're located. If you're not sure how to get started with adding a map to your website, you can check out Google's instructions here.
Links to Social Accounts
Having links to social accounts from your website gives your visitors another channel to keep in touch with your business. This way, once they leave your website they can still get updates and be reminded of your practice through Facebook and other social communities.
A Logo
Even as a small business, it's important to have a recognizable brand. If your website is missing your practice's logo along with consistent design elements, like colors and fonts, it's going to be hard to build a cohesive brand across all fronts. Your website is the perfect place to start.
Customer Testimonials
When word of mouth referrals are one of the best forms of practice advertising, you might as well get a few of them in writing. These testimonials on your website could help reduce any hesitation of a patient scheduling a first time appointment.
Quick Loading Pages
Most of our patience these days is pretty limited, especially when it comes to the Internet. If your website takes too long to load your visitors are going to say, "see ya," and you might never get them back to your website.
Mobile Design
Over 31 million US Internet users will go online via a mobile device in 2016. Having a mobile website is just as important as a desktop version of your website. Responsive design allows your website to be best viewed from any device. If you haven't put your hands on your website design in a long time it might be worth checking out your website from a mobile device to see how it looks and functions.
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