5 Tips for a Great Healthcare Website Design Built for ROI
By Jocelyn Van Saun
December 13, 2022
5 Healthcare Website Design Tips to Increase ROI
Gone are the days when patients asked their neighbors for healthcare provider recommendations. Today’s digitally-savvy patients find information on practices from online directories, blogs, and social media. There are almost 5 billion people on the internet and digital marketers publish 7.5 million articles a day.
Healthcare practice leaders wonder if there’s any purpose to yet another website full of helpful content that sits among millions of others. Will anyone find it? That depends…
The Challenge of Getting Found
Organic traffic has the potential to bring you a return on investment (ROI) the effort you put into your healthcare practices’ website. But it’s also important to know how challenging it is to make that happen. Almost 91% of websites get no traffic from Google’s search engine. Another 5.63% earn fewer than 10 visits.
Few know how to build traffic and recognition in their specialization. But starting with a solid design foundation can help you reach a larger audience, making you the go-to source for specialized healthcare information in their field.
How to Create Healthcare Content Worth Sharing
The right thoughtful, planned, and optimized healthcare practice content can inform communities with accurate information, earn trust, and grow your bottom line. Whether you want to increase brand awareness or generate leads, you’ll have a higher website ROI when you learn how to design a medical website for your patients and drive search engine traffic, while concentrating on helping readers find what they’re looking for along the way.
With the right content and web team behind you, it’s possible to drive organic traffic to your practice. Look at the Cleveland Clinic. They earn 12 million monthly visits—60% from organic search traffic. You may not have the name recognition or budget to pull off Cleveland Clinic levels of success, but all hope should not be lost.
Website design is the foundation for attracting and keeping readers on your site. Since Google includes page experience as a ranking factor for your website, good design is foundational to earning a top position in the search rankings and attracting new traffic.
Here are the simplest ways to improve your design for more visibility, more extended visits, and, in the end, higher ROI.
5 Design Tips to Increase ROI on Your Healthcare Website
- Design for fast loading times. Huge files, such as videos and high-resolution images, load slowly, leading to frustrated readers who navigate away from a page. When this happens, Google learns searchers dislike a page and replaces it with one they’ll interact with longer. Users exiting a page quickly, called bounce rate, increases by 32% when the time it takes for a page to load grows from one to three seconds.
- Think about the mobile experience. By 2025, 72.5% of people will access the internet on a mobile device, not their desktop computer. No matter what device your patients use, they want easy-to-read information with all the essentials. Use good visual hierarchy, avoid mouse-over effects, and test interactive elements to ensure they work on all devices.
- Prioritize simple, beautiful design. Ninety-four percent of website first impressions focus on design elements. So, to help patients stay and think highly of your brand, coordinate visual elements with streamlined branding.
- Pare down elements. The internet can be overwhelming. Value your visitors’ time and needs by using priority menu items and a search bar to get them where they need to go. Over 84% of web designers say overwhelming design is the most common small business website pitfall.
- Ensure patients can contact you. Prominent contact information, addresses, phone numbers, and new patient appointment-making calendars and intake forms can help your readers feel confident, increasing your ROI.
Healthcare Website Design Examples
1. Nirschl Orthopaedic Center
Socius Marketing helped Nirschl Orthopaedic Center rise to the top of local search results and generate 58% more organic traffic.
Since starting in August 2019, Nirschl gained page one Google rankings for 126 new focus keywords and has seen a 118% increase in SEO-driven patients, making online search the primary driver of new visitors to their website. Read their success story here.
2. Coastline Orthodontics
Based in Jacksonville, Florida (with four locations), Coastline Orthodontics saw significant increases in key metrics when they focused on web design and seized opportunities.
New patient numbers and ROI from digital leads skyrocketed with a new web design. Additionally, after new monthly reporting from a trusted partner showed how many calls they were missing (and when), the practice implemented a new strategy, causing missed call percentages to plummet.
Conversions from their new website also tripled their new online leads. Web traffic more than doubled. And their search rankings on Google improved by 93 overall—145 on local searches and 106 on mobile. Read their success story here.
Discover How Socius Can Improve Your Website Design
Healthcare practices that want the most out of their websites should focus their design efforts on patient experience. Streamlined design helps readers meet their needs quicker. That helps them think more highly of providers. And it helps Google and other search engines understand the value of your site, so they can send more readers your way.
Design isn’t every practice’s in-house specialty. Socius’ team of marketing experts has been building new websites every day since 2006.
To partner with Socius on a design that can improve your healthcare website’s ROI, learn more about the services we can offer your practice.
