Build your website to refer to potential patients - and the search engines that bring them to you.
Jessica recently considered plastic surgery. At the age of 26, she realizes that she has small rolls at the waist, and that the “little” extra girth on her hips just won't disappear, as she plans and works in her gym. Her breasts are beginning to sag a little, and they have never been as full as she would have liked.
She recognizes that plastic surgery is becoming more and more susceptible, and she no longer considers this to be in vain, but rather an alternative for all time wanting her to look a certain way.
And so she excitedly begins to study the procedures of plastic surgery on the Internet. Many aspects of her personal life on the Internet - downloading music for her iPod, ringtones for a mobile phone, etc. She is sure that if she does liposuction or breast augmentation, she will find the information necessary to make an informed decision about the procedure. She is interested in.
The search engine returns all sorts of results, including some ads for individual doctors, but she’s not yet ready to talk to them - at the moment she just wants information. She quickly visits several links and settlements on the website of the American Society of Plastic Surgery (ASPS) (www.plasticsurgery.org). There she finds a lot of information about liposuction and breast augmentation.
She notices that she may find a plastic surgeon on this site - probably members of the association, she figures - but she still wanted to visit some other sites of the “reference type” first. She also wants to see before and after pictures.
She visits Yahoo! and looking for "liposuction" and "breast augmentation." Yahoo! returns a list similar to that found on Google under “liposuction”, but under “breast augmentation” there is also a list for the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) at http://www.surgery. org. Another great link! Again, there is a lot to read, but it is important for Jessica that she knows that each of these procedures really pleases. She knows that “extreme makeup” television shows can make it all too easy.
After a while, Jessica believes that she is well educated based on the information she found on her “reference sites”, and now she is ready to look for a surgeon. The search for “find a surgeon” on two sites of the association did not give her much information about a particular doctor, although there were links to surgeons. personal websites on the ASAPS website. However, the results were based on search queries in the postal code, and she thinks the Internet can provide more information for practitioners if she searches them directly on Google or Yahoo !.
She returns to the search engines and introduces several different terms, such as "Long Island Plastic Surgeons", "Liposuction New York" and "Breast Implantation Specialists in New Jersey". Jessica is ready to go to the tristat area of New York, and she believes that search engines will reveal more information about surgeons than her association websites. And where these searches also create a lot of medical directories, it’s really after surgeons. Websites because she wants to understand what their practice is and what it is like to be one of their patients.
Doctor's websites also tend to show several patients before and after photos for each procedure. Jessica likes the fact that she can privately view the results of each doctor from her apartment - she does much more than has appointments in several practices - and she narrows her choice to two doctors, who the websites seemed to give her some understanding of their personalities. Because she believes that the procedures that she is interested in are intimate and personal, she prefers a doctor with whom she can feel comfortable.
Everybody does it
Jessica is not alone. More than 100 million consumers are searching for health information online. Jessica is accredited to use the Internet in her office, and now she uses the Internet for all kinds of personal searches. She used computers from school and the Internet was a necessity for college. She knows exactly how to find what she is looking for.
Considering that she can find all types of reference books (including medical directories) from time to time, what she really costs is the end point for her purchases: an online store or a supplier-manufacturer or service provider; s website. That she makes decisions. Now she will become a professional and she will not remain on the website for more than a second or two if she doesn’t find something interesting.
How and why are people looking
When potential patients go to the doctor’s website, they referred to it for one of two reasons: they were given the doctor’s name or practice name from another medical provider or patient, or they were looking for a provider who performed a specific treatment or procedure. Prospective patients go to the Internet for provider research; They are trying to verify the accuracy of the referral.
Because the web provides the ability to quickly and easily conduct this research, prospective patients understand that the name of the referral in itself is no longer sufficient information. At a minimum, patients go to the Internet to confirm referral information. As far as possible, they are looking for potential problems with the practitioner that could reduce the imbalance.
If a patient tries to find a doctor on the Internet, he usually starts searching Google, Yahoo! Or msn. Because the vast majority (85%) of all Internet sessions run in a search engine, this is not surprising. When choosing a medical provider, patients tend to visit several practice websites, sometimes comparing websites side by side on their screens. In this competitive environment, the information found on the doctor’s website is important.
Likewise, it is important that information be presented to patients. Right or wrong, people - patients - will be judged by what they see and feel. And when it comes to websites, decisions are based on what appears on a 17-inch computer screen. Often, the decision to stay on a website is made in less than 1 second.
Expansion of your waiting room
So, how do you advertise your website to reflect your practice and differentiate it from others on the Internet? Your homepage, in particular, serves as an invitation for patients to visit and explore your practice in depth, with the goal of starting a relationship between a doctor and a patient that starts right there.
But, first, it is important to determine what is important in your practice. Answer these questions:
o When was your practice founded and what?
o Why was it founded?
o What is unique in your practice?
o Who do you intend to serve, that is, who is your target patient?
o What are the demographic indicators of your target patient range, income range and ethnicity?
What is the expected level of education of your target patient?
o What is the perceived level of complexity of your target patient?
o Where is your practice? Is it located in a major metropolitan city, in the suburbs or in more rural areas?
o Is the practice in a specific area? Does this match the sense of the local community or is it different from others? (This is not necessarily bad, sometimes it is an advantage.)
o What is the decor of your object? Is it modern or classic? Does it have a special regional motive, for example, southern or colonial?
o Do you have a surgical center in place? Is he accredited?
o Do you have a logo or a specific font (font) for the name of your practice?
o Do you have printed literature? Does this match your other materials, such as a welcome kit?
o What are your strengths as a health care provider? Is this the place where you received your education, or where did you fulfill your reserve or your communication?
o Do you have any professional honors?
o What are your professional memberships? Do you work in any committees or head any sections?
o What are your publications? Although patients prefer to read less clinical articles that may appear in Vogue or W, professional articles can be a great “product” for search engines, indexing your practice using the procedures you follow.
o Do you publish in any publications? Do you have copies of any articles you mentioned or quoted? Have you been featured on any television or radio programs?
o Who are your best examples? Would they agree to use their photos before and after on the Internet? You don't need a lot of photos, just two or three examples of each procedure, but they should be your most dramatic examples, if possible.
o Do you have clinical data about your examples before and after?
o Do you have current patients who could provide you with a testimony? Can they agree to take pictures - not unnecessarily in a revealing clinical sense, but in something more “glamorous” or “model” mood?
Principles of website visit
It is important to remember that visitors to your website often try to present themselves as one of your patients. When they explore your site, they conceptualize what your office looks like and what it shows about you. Obviously, your office should be clean and impressive, but it is consistent with patients. tastes?
Knowledge of the target audience is key. For example, if a potential patient is rich and socially significant in the mid-50s, does your website encounter this “country club” person or greet her? If your target patient is younger and more urban or poor, your website will make her feel that she just crossed paths to another part of the city, or does she make her feel that she is going to soon look like a celebrity of pop culture after her operation?
It is important that your webmaster indicate what your website looks like. The goal is to attract and retain the target audience of patients.
The appearance of the home page is important from two points of view: the potential patient who will be linked to the inviting home page and decide - within 1-2 seconds - to visit the rest of the website, as well as search engines such as Google or Yahoo ! who will explore the home page — the most important thing — and then the other pages of your website to determine the validity of the site, compare it with other similar sites, and rank all the sites based on certain search terms.
It goes without saying that the site should be easy to use. Each website looks different, but to navigate a website must be both obvious and intuitive for the visitor.
Before and after the photo shoot should be easily accessible. Section "before and after" is often the first section to which patients come to the site of the surgeon. The path to it must be immediately obvious.
Search Engine Management
Your website should encourage search engines to link to the right information: the content is extremely important for search engines such as Google, because their goal is to provide visitors with background information about the search query entered by them.
In fact, content is one of the reasons why association sites are so highly rated in terms of search for plastic surgery procedures. And although potential patients visit the association's websites and read about the procedures there, more detailed information about the procedures that are reviewed on the website of the practice makes them feel much more comfortable with the practice.
Your webmaster should include HTML links on your home page so that search engines can follow them to other pages on your website, where there is more detailed content describing your procedures. In addition to HTML links, the webmaster will use several strategies to increase your visibility or ranking of websites in various specific search conditions:
o Page titles should contain keywords that you want to index, and each page can have different headings, which gives indexes with several search engine pages. Page names can be specified in the "blue bar" at the top of the screen.
Help tags “H” are ways to attract the search engine to specific areas of your website in priority order so that the engine can determine what is most important on the site.
Meta tags are a factor in determining page rank.
o Since search engines cannot “see” photos and illustrations, alt-image tags can be used to link to images and graphics that search engines might otherwise have missed.
o Classified by geography. It is important that your webmaster focuses on your geographical area of practice. If your specialty is not unique or you are already known nationally, it will not help you if your practice is in southern Florida and your website visitors are in Seattle or Chicago. Specialists who own websites know that the easiest way to filter search results is to use seekers & # 39; city, region or zip code combined with search terms. Therefore, make sure that the titles and tags of your website include the area in which you are located.
Think about how visitors can search for you specifically: will they include the name of a city or will they look for a state with rights, for example, New Jersey, because it lacks one big city? Is the patient likely to go to an area as big as Southern California or South Florida, or will the term “Los Angeles” or “Miami” suffice? The correct combination of procedure and location will force you to the visitors you are after.
o Consider pay-per-click advertisements. Search terms ads that include your city, region, or state are not as effective as organic search results, but the positions of advertisements can be monitored and they can provide visibility in certain search conditions. Such ads are displayed at the top right in the blocks on the search engine page.
Be easy to find and difficult to leave.
You do not need to put in a huge amount of time, but some understanding and effort will help website visitors find your website and become “intimate” with your practice - even before they call you the first time. The idea is to help a patient like Jessica find you, and then captivate her with her style and appearance as soon as she appears. Make it difficult for her to leave her website.
This may seem like a simple concept, but this is the difference between an effective website and a billboard in your basement. Don't delay: the next Jessica is most likely looking for a plastic surgeon on the Internet right now.
