Where your medical practice is found on a Google search can have a profound effect on your level of success.
Like any business, a doctor’s practice needs customers. Patients and referring GPs rely heavily on searching Google to find the best options nearby. The first thing they look for is who is available in their local area.
With more and more reliance on the internet, and with ever increasing competition between specialists, ensuring that your practice is the one found is becoming more and more critical to the success of your practice.
A key thing to remember is that – regardless of whether it is in a medical or other field – potential patients or referring GPs usually only look at the first page of Google’s search results.
The first result on page 1 gets typically about a third of the enquiries. After that, the drop off in enquiries is quite sharp. The second practice listed down the search results gets 15-20% of the enquiries, third gets 10-12%, and fourth through tenth on the first page get progressively less and less share down to about 2% in 10th place. Page 2 of the search results gets next to nothing.
If you practice in an urban area, and if you have a new practice with an equally new website, you might be starting off much further down in the results than page 2. Appropriate text needs to be added to your new website, and many other things need to be done to get your website up there ranking with the best of them. Especially for competitive areas, not the least of these is to ensure you have an abundance of patience. Climbing through the ranks of competitors can take many months, especially if competitors are also simultaneously seeking to improve their own rankings as well.
From Google’s perspective, keywords in particular place your website in amongst your most likely competitors. The thing is, when people search the internet for different things, they tend to search for similar word combinations. Good SEO companies have the tools available to identify what sorts of keyword combinations your website should have in order to be competitive. For example, if you are a radiologist, you might have the term ‘radiogram’ plastered all over your website and never get an enquiry because everyone searches for ‘xray’. You need to use terms that people actually use, and these aren’t always what you might expect.
In a nutshell: It’s important that your website is ranking for the correct keywords, is properly set up, and has at least a few good backlinks from other websites. Minimum.
Having your website found on Google is one thing, but if a potential patient or GP clicks the link they found and finds a website hideously out of date, or one with broken functionality, or even one that seems ok but has a badly designed logo, conflicting colours, poor quality images, or illogical layout, they will click that back button quick-smart and look again until they find something more trustworthy. Not only does your website need to perform according to Google’s requirements, but it also must look professional from a customer’s point of view.
Design is a funny thing. Many customers may not be able to identify why exactly they don’t like a website, just that something didn’t feel right. You don’t want a website that gives the wrong impression.
To get your practice front and centre when people are looking for the service you provide, get in touch today.