How An Updated Website Can Drive Traffic to Your Practice
If you want to be relevant and respected online, you need to consistently deliver fresh content directly to your target audience. While your social media presence is crucial, and paid ads are helpful in generating leads, an updated website should still be a top priority. But why is website content for healthcare marketing so important? Explore the reasons why keeping it fresh can drive traffic to your practice.
Why an updated website is crucial to drive traffic
Improves SEO rankings
Perhaps the most important reason to keep your content current is to improve search engine optimization, or SEO. Having your website discovered by potential patients is essential in growing your medical practice with marketing. Search engines have web-crawlers and bots constantly seeking out new content to index in order to include it in users’ search results. When content continues to be delivered from the same source (your website), your ranking is gradually improved. Content should also be high quality and relevant, or Google’s algorithms will filter it out, as they want to ensure content provides clear value to its searchers.
Keeps users engaged
When you consistently provide quality content, you can build a base of loyal viewers. In healthcare, there are a plethora of topics that can be discussed to engage users. When your visitors are engaged, they are more likely to spend more time on your website, and more likely to book an appointment at your practice. “Dwell time” can be defined as how long a user will spend on your website. Keeping users engaged with interesting and informative content will increase your users’ dwell time, which is another factor that can improve your rankings.
Visitors value new content
Think about some of the things you might search for that you would want to see the most recent information about. If you are searching for football scores, new car reviews, or a new laptop to purchase, you do not want to see results from 2010. You want the most relevant and updated information possible. The same concept applies when it comes to healthcare. While some areas might not require recent updates, the user will still feel peace of mind knowing what they are reading was recently published and not outdated. Symptoms of certain illnesses or treatment options available can change over time, and a searcher wants to know that the information they are getting is current and accurate.
Establishes your site as an authority
When you continually provide quality information on these topics, you improve your credibility and establish your website as an authority. Not only does this mean you will improve your ranking and be found more often, it means you have a trusted voice on the internet. This established trust is what will ultimately lead visitors to contact your practice about becoming a new patient.
Other factors to improve rankings
When it comes to website content for healthcare marketing, . Not only should the layout and images be relevant and user-friendly, but the site’s functionality and accessibility are also important factors to consider. When it comes to your medical website design, you want to take into consideration who your audience will be. In most cases, it will be a combination of current patients and potential new patients. Your design should include clear direction for either party. For example, for existing patients, you may have an online portal where they can schedule appointments and view personal history, so you want to make it easy for them to locate this area. For potential new patients, you want to include a clear call to action that directs them to call or book an appointment.
Loading time
If you were to perform a website audit, one of the things you would want to check for is loading time. if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and 80% of those visitors will not return to that website.
This ultimately kills traffic to your site, which plays a negative impact on your SEO ranking. Conversely, if the site loads fast, people will keep coming back. This plays a positive role in your rankings since Google’s algorithms will recognize its popularity and adjust your ranking accordingly.
Quality content
Google ultimately wants to provide the best content for its users. In order to do so, they have many approaches to filtering out lackluster content from their searches. Conversely, web-crawlers are constantly on the hunt for quality content to give attention to. When you provide your readers with quality material sprinkled with appropriate medical SEO, you deliver exactly what search engines need to see in order to improve your ranking and .
Organic SEO / Real content
Over the years, people have come up with numerous approaches to “trick” Google algorithms into giving them a better placement. Google is constantly changing and updating their algorithms to prevent this, and ensure real content is getting the attention it deserves. Changing date stamps and other small changes are ignored, and keyword stuffing is identified and left out of searches. However, with the rise of image-based searches, updated keywords, tags, and images are still crucial.
Take the next step
In summation, innovative and modern healthcare marketing calls for an updated website with fresh, relevant, and quality content. If you are ready to take the next step to establish your website as an authority, guidance support from medical marketing experts can help. for a complimentary consultation.