If you’re like the vast majority of consumers, you look up a certain brand or company online before purchasing their products or acquiring their services. It’s now common practice to check out a company’s website or read reviews before deciding on anything.
That being said, your dermatology practice’s online presence makes the first impression for the bulk of potential patients. Your website will be the first taste your future clients get of your business. Since your website is an extension of your brand, it’s essential for you to have a website that could turn a potential client into an actual client.
Your website needs to portray the kind of service you offer and how you treat your patients. It needs to embody your credibility, professionalism, and your expertise in dermatology. Your homepage is a critical factor in getting more patients.
Now that we’ve covered the importance of your website, let’s discuss the best web design tactics for dermatologists, such as yourself, to implement.
Always Have a Plan
The first web design tactic to creating an awesome and effective website is to come up with a clear plan. This plan should include how you want your website to look and how you want users to move through your site. Think about your target audience, the feelings you want users to have as they’re browsing through your site, and what the most important information is. And don’t forget to incorporate lots of calls to action to contact you!
People now have shorter attention spans. Your website needs to be able to hold the attention of your visitors. A poorly organized or designed website can easily put people off, especially when there are other dermatologist websites that are better.
Homepage = Judgment page
The reason why your homepage is important is because it receives the bulk of people’s judgment. Your homepage is where visitors determine their first impression of you and decide whether or not to look further. If they like what they see, they’ll keep looking and reach out to you if they need your services. If your homepage is the equivalent of a messy and unattractive waiting room, you may have a problem with people walking away. And that’s much easier to do online.
Your homepage needs to be able to convey credibility and a clinic worth trusting. Some of the ways you can do this are including glowing testimonials from previous clients, using high quality images of your office or you and your staff, and offering clear information about your values and experience.
Structure and Organization
Having an organized website can be equated to having an organized clinic. Both silently communicate to potential patients that you are trustworthy – an essential component to gaining a dermatology client.
Your website users should be able to find the information they’re looking for easily. In fact, the rule of thumb is to not have any information more than 3 clicks away. This means that if you want more information than what goes on the usual Home, About, Services, and Contact pages, you will need to group and label it logically.
Take into account the common needs of people who reach out to you. For example, on the site above, we created “For Patients” and “For Physicians” pages to make the information easy to find based on who was browsing.
Having an organized website also plays a big role in SEO. High quality content that flows logically and is organized well is becoming an important component when it comes to getting higher search engine ranks.
Catch Attention with Great Headers
Using headers ties in to having an organized website. Make sure at least a few headers contain the keyword you would like that page rank for, and Google will have an easier time recognizing the type of information that’s on that page.
And don’t underestimate the power of a clever, catchy header to keep users moving down a page. If you can make the header interesting as well as accurate and search engine-friendly, you’ve struck gold!
Make Your Move with Calls to Action
Calls to action play an important role in triggering potential patients to acquire your expertise. That’s because when it comes to internet users, if you want them to do something, you have to ask them.
To write effective calls to action, you need to know the pain points your clients were experiencing before they found your solution. How do you do that? Ask them! It’s always a good idea to know exactly why a client searched out a dermatologist and why they chose you out of all their other options. Use these reasons and the problems your patients were experiencing to write motivating calls to action.
Here are a few examples:
Block the Blocky Paragraphs
You may want to make your website a wealth of resources and information for potential clients. That’s great! Let’s just make sure users want to read it.
Websites don’t exactly read like books. Internet users far prefer small, digestible pieces of information over long, bulky paragraphs. Even if the information is relevant and interesting, an unbroken chunk of hundreds of words makes people leave web pages.
If you want to keep people engaged, do yourself a favor and make white space your best friend. You can accomplish this through
These things are easier on the eyes and make it easier for users to get the information they want fast.
Don’t Make Your Patients Wait
Everyone hates a slow website. No one wants to waste time waiting for a site to load, medical emergency or not. Here are some tips for how to keep a website up to speed:
To Conclude…
A lot of dermatologists are still overlooking the benefit of digital marketing for their practice. Some are intimidated by it; they forget that websites are actually a necessary element for modern day marketing.
If your website is little more than a business card at a web address, consider expanding your online presence and incorporating these web design tactics for dermatologists. In order for your business to succeed in 2019, you need to be where your future patients are – online.