How to ensure your website adds value to your business

Able to generate leads, brand awareness and increased customer engagement, a well-designed website can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses across a variety of industries, including healthcare.

As a business owner, quite often building and maintaining a website can be seen as something you don’t have the time or resources for. However, any investment in your website (and digital marketing activities) can — and should — be a key driver in business growth.

Your customers have more choice than ever before — with the ability to jump online and research your competitors instantly. This means it’s integral for you to create an engaging and effective online experience that grabs a potential customer’s attention.

A website can help you:

Having a strong digital presence means that you can also reach your customers in a more consistent and engaging manner. And increased engagement and site visits allows you to educate your customers, positioning you as a thought leader.

To develop an effective website that’s able to do all of these things, there are a number of ingredients that a website should include.

Before diving in, it’s important to understand what business problems a website can solve, and where it fits in with your overall digital strategy. Is it to provide detailed medical information and position your company as a thought leader in healthcare? Promote your products or services? Or do you want to simply take patient bookings?

Planning and designing your website with an audience-first mindset will ensure that you can clearly address their needs from the get-go. Solving your customers’ needs is the perfect lead generation tool, helping funnel potential patients towards your solutions that fit exactly what they need.

For all businesses, but particularly in healthcare, you need to make sure your website functionality and content is accessible to everyone, whatever their ability or situation.

Understand the website experience for people with limited abilities

Some key elements of website design that can affect accessibility are:

Accommodate for those with a cognitive impairment

When developing any aspect of your website, you need to also accommodate for users with a cognitive impairment. This might include (but is not limited to):

Consider how and where your users are viewing your website

At present, the vast majority of web users do so via a mobile device (approximately 70%). Which is why it’s important to consider how and where your users are viewing your content. Perhaps they’re on a mobile phone while using public transport, or sitting on the couch at home with the TV on in the background. Either way, to ensure the best — and most accessible — experience possible, you should:

With opinions formed by website visitors within 50 milliseconds, it’s integral that you have some eye-catching visual content on your website.

Visual content may include infographics, authentic imagery or even videos. Videos in particular can help those in healthcare showcase their various solutions, identity and brand story in an engaging way.

These attractive visual elements can grab a consumer’s attention quicker and keep them on your website longer. Any visual element needs to be mindful of people with limited abilities, such as low vision, as well as responsive design, as previously discussed. Ensure all images are marked up with correct alt tags (text descriptions of the image), so they can be read by assistive technologies, such as a screen reader.

To generate consistent value from your website, it’s integral that your messaging and branding across all platforms are the same. If your website presents something different to your brochure, which is again different to your brick-and-mortar branding, this sends mixed messages to your consumer.

With consistent messaging, you’re able to build and sustain a healthcare brand across all marketing and client-facing touchpoints.

From the pamphlets in your waiting areas, to your social media accounts and back to your website, your branding should represent your business’ personality, and what your services can do for your customers.

This means your content needs to be optimised for voice search, which involves using more natural language in your copy. Voice searches are conducted with real questions, such as “Alexa, where can I find an x-ray clinic in Southbank?”, rather than someone typing into Google: “X-ray Southbank”.

Ensuring your website has the right long-tail keywords needed for voice searches is another way you can ensure your website adds value, future-proofing your healthcare service for emerging tech trends.

While building a successful website may seem like a chore, it is a proven resource that can generate value for your healthcare business. Not sure where to start? A few quick win opportunities are:

Related posts:

Install the McAfee Antivirus on your device and complete the activation using mcafee.com/activate link. For any query related to McAfee Antivirus Activate, then contact our customer support team.

My name is Sunny Alexander-Johnson, and I’m Henry James, and we’re writers for Dark Sides of the Truth magazine. Wednesday night at Philly’s, a restaurant in downtown Austin, as usual, consisted of a…

Ever wondered how blessed we are to manage plethora of things with such ease by just a click of a button? Think about our ancestors, they had to slog to do all their chores. They barely had easy…