Smarter web design strategies for healthcare organizations

In a world where 80% of internet users have researched a health-related topic online, establishing your online reputation as a healthcare organization has never been more important. As such, any respectable healthcare company must have a beautifully designed website that potential clients can access in order to find out information within minutes. A website that is simple to navigate, intuitive, and a delight for users to use as they are searching for information online about your health business.

A great website will help increase conversion rates, and also build up trust in your brand, an essential marketing goal for any organization.

Despite this, the most powerful principles of designing a healthcare website are still vastly misunderstood. Even some of the biggest healthcare organizations out there are failing to provide their website with the care and attention it needs to reach its full potential.

If you’re looking to improve the online presence of your healthcare organization, designing your website with the needs of your users in mind should be your number 1 priority.

Here are just a few things you should be thinking about during the designing process.

Use Data Visualisation Techniques

Data visualisation is a healthcare marketing strategy that involves promoting your brand through powerful visual artifacts like infographics, graphs and videos in order to make your stats and success stories easily digestible, from a visual point of view.

These statistics should be displayed clearly on your website on appropriate  pages to promote your services, and encourage potential clients to engage with your brand.

For example, if you are a healthcare organization focusing on counselling mental health patients, you may display a graph that shows an 80% success rate in reducing the stress of your clients.

Statistics like these back up claims made on your website, but they also increase trust with potential clients, which is crucial in increasing website conversion rates.

People are also more likely to engage with images, where information is easy to understand, instead of reading through large amounts of text.

Provide Clear Information

It’s not uncommon for people to leave their doctors office feeling just as confused as they did when they went in. They may have a diagnosis, but the professional failed to explain it in a way that allowed them to fully understand the details of said illness.

This is a problem around the world, with over half of participants in one UK study unable to understand common medical terms. This study found that these inabilities lead to miscommunications between patients and physicians and prevent informed consent from taking place.

If you are introducing your healthcare organization into the online world, it’s crucial that you work to break down barriers created by medical professionals in face-to-face consultations.

Medical information should be presented in small, manageable paragraphs that are easily deciphered and do not contain medical jargon that so many fail to understand. Your website should also convey empathy and reassurance with the readers who will visit your website.

For example, check out this Chicago medical billing website. From the get go, you can see how all healthcare services are presented in simple terms, where images and text are used interchangeably to avoid user fatigue. Secondly, from the homepage itself, any reader can see exactly what the service provider offers, what’s covered, and how to get in touch with this company. This is what is called in marketing ‘snackable content’ delivered to a healthcare audience with the needs of the user in mind.

Not only will this type of information architecture be useful for those who are visiting the site before engaging with a medical practice, or with the aim of doing so, but it will also be useful for users who come to online resources to fill in the gaps from what they have been told online.

Make Your Design Mobile Friendly

One of the biggest pitfalls when it comes to healthcare website design is that many organizations fail to consider how their site will perform on mobile devices.

When you consider that over 50% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices, you can see why this is a big problem. It’s an even bigger issue when you consider that most people will search for medical advice online, as we mentioned earlier in this article, meaning you can almost guarantee that some of your traffic will come from mobile devices.

Most agencies will offer you the ability to assess how your design works on different device types and resolutions before a website is officially live. If not, it won’t take long to check your healthcare organizations’ website on your mobile phone and tablet devices prior to the launch to make sure things are fully optimised.

Sites that aren’t mobile responsive will also perform lower in Google rankings, so it’s well worth double checking if you want your website to achieve its full potential.

Maximise SEO Potential

With nearly 75% of Americans saying they would be willing to attend medical appointments online, optimising your healthcare organization’s website for search engines is one of the most important things you can do. You want your website to be ranked near the top of search results so you get seen by the right people at the right time.

There are many ways to maximise your websites SEO potential.

The most popular method is to invest in content marketing, something that is extremely beneficial for healthcare organizations.

This involves writing informative, long-form content including popular keywords that will draw in customers directly from search engines. Linking back to previous articles published on your website will also help, as it increases your reliability and usefulness in the eyes of Google.

Your healthcare organization’s website design is also incredibly important. You want to make sure that your site is responsive, mobile friendly, and easy to navigate.

Sites that are difficult to use will increase your bounce rate and show Google’s algorithm that you don’t have much to offer in the field you are trying to become a competitor in.

In addition, make sure you have the proper analytics strategy in place to measure the performance of your site. At the end of the day, if you do not know how visitors are using your site, where the drop-off rates are at and how to improve the overall funnel to maximize the engagement of your users, all your efforts will be in vain. So take the time and invest in analytics software, even if that means installing something as simple (and free!) as Google Analytics tagging on your site.

Clearly Display Your Contact Information

You might be surprised to learn that many healthcare organizations have failed to consider the placement of their contact information while designing their websites. It’s probably not intentional, but if your customers cannot find an easy way of contacting you in a few clicks, then you need to improve your design.

Most websites will have a ‘contact us’ page. This will include the email, address, phone number, and perhaps a contact page. This should be linked in the menu bar at the top of your organization’s website, as well as in the footer, so that it can be easily accessed at all times.

Another thing to do if you want to increase conversion rates is to place a call to action on your landing page – or home page. Something as simple as ‘book an appointment today’, or ‘call for a consultation’ may convince a patient to get in contact, even if they weren’t considering it beforehand.

This article comes from Digital Authority Partners, one of Chicago’s premiere healthcare consulting firms.