Member-To-Member Marketing Advice
How Does Your Web Site Rank?
Many Academy members are involved in maintaining and supervising a practice Web site. Web sites are dynamic, consuming projects that require constant attention. Your Academy would like to assist with this non-medical responsibility by providing some new perspectives to use when adding to or redesigning your site:
Define goals
The first question a physician should consider when evaluating an existing practice Web site or planning for a new site is, "What do I expect from my Web site?"
"Why do you have a site? What's your goal? What's the point of having it?" asks Bill Gatewood, a Web site designer with Webitects in Chicago. "People expect you to have a Web site, but it's important that you know what you want the Web site to do before you spend a lot of time and money on it."
Webitects, a Web design and development firm, has been designing and building Web sites since 1995. They employ usability studies and user research to customize individual sites.
When contemplating a new Web site, design professionals first present questions such as these: Is there information that you want to share with your patients that could be more efficiently disseminated through the Web site rather than having them call your office? Will your site be strictly informational, such as announcing what insurance is accepted, office hours and practice specialties? Or are you planning a more ambitious site, or one that will end up being an integral part of your marketing?
"It's best to determine what you're trying to communicate through your site before you get to the point where you're trying to optimize its placement in search engine results," Gatewood explained.
Be realistic
One of the main mistakes many organizations and individuals make is forgetting what it's like to be a real user, according to Gatewood. Often, organizations focus on the minutia of layout and visual design. Instead, when the site is being built, people should remember that they only have a second or two to communicate something a user finds useful, Gatewood advises.
"When people browse the Web, they are usually skimming for specific information," Gatewood said. "They're not contemplating a painting at the Art Institute. The Web is a brutally efficient medium, and it's completely user controlled. If the viewer doesn't see what he needs, he is going to hit the back button and return to the search results."
Keep in mind how people actually use the Web and make communication as efficient as possible, Gatewood recommended.
"The people who are looking for your site are going to want to know your hours, what insurance you accept, if you accept new patients, and how long it takes to get an appointment," he said. "Make this information easy to find. Don't fixate on having the right stock photo of smiling people—that isn't important."
If a member wants their practice site to present more than just the basics, Webitects recommends focus groups to help create a more successful approach to designing the site.
"Focus groups are another way to learn as much as you can about the real needs of people who are going to use the site," Gatewood said. "If you can deliver on that, then you're on your way to having a successful Web site."
Help Google find you
For large practices and institutions that want their Web sites to be ranked higher by Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo, Gatewood said a fair amount can be done in terms of the content itself, unrelated to how it is presented.
Links and rankings both relate to one of the major challenges with "search engine optimization," or increasing your site's visibility in search rankings.
"My best advice is to have unique content," he said. "Webitects has done a lot of work with medical associations as well as Children's Memorial Hospital, and we have noticed a propensity for these organizations to buy "canned" content because they believe it's necessary to offer some clinical content. ‘We treat disease X, so we need to have some information about it, but we don't want to write it.' The problem with that approach is that dozens of other sites use that same exact content. From a search engine perspective, the unknown site is not going to rank very high because it's not unique and the search engines can tell it's not unique."
Sometimes content that is not unique is ranked highly. However, a site like Mayo Clinics or Web MD is going to rank higher than a site of a small practice using the same canned content. High profile sites have extensive traffic and extensive links on various sites leading to them. Many experts believe the only way to win against this sort of search engine competition is to make your site appear as unique as possible.
The rational behind the rankings the search engines generate are proprietary and not publically available. Professionals who consult on search engine ranking have been known to get a "feel" for how the rankings work through trial and error. They make changes to test how various approaches affect rankings.
"It's still a black box in terms of how they really work," Gatewood said. "However, one thing that is known to increase ranking is the number of other sites that link to your site."
Judge your success
There are a number of ways to judge success, all of which depend on your goals. For example, simply measuring whether site traffic is up is a measure of success. Or measure whether the information on the site is reducing the number of calls, which may imply fundamental questions are being answered by the Web site. Information on insurance and frequently asked questions on simple health matters also help reduce calls.
Borrow our patient information
Looking for general information about conditions and treatments to use on your practice Web site? Webitects recommends members create unique content. But if you don't have time to create your own patient information, consider re-using content from your Academy. Academy-created patient information is available in the "Conditions & Treatments" section. Information explaining the specialty to the public is also available on the "What is a Physiatrist?" page. Academy members may link to these pages from their Web sites or copy the content into their Web sites; attribution is not required.
Want more practical information on how to present information on a Web site? Gatewood recommends reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
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