Every medical practice wants their medical website design to bring them highly qualified new patient leads that will convert to paying new patients. That is the most common business goal we hear from most top surgeons, dentists and doctors here at Inbound Medic. It’s also the reason why businesses spend so much time and money on their websites.

But how will you achieve this result?

Well, you achieve this result by getting over yourself and remembering that your medical practice website is not designed for you. It is designed for your ideal patients whom you want to convert as paying new patients.

There is a massive difference between those two healthcare website design goals. If you want your medical practice website to produce the business results you want, then it is important for you to stop focusing on your own ego and spend more time thinking about who your ideal patients really are and what they really want.

Here are 6 main criteria that you need to focus on to ensure that your medical practice website is designed with the correct inbound marketing principles to help you attract and convert more of your ideal new patients every single month.

Is your medical website design sales-driven?

While healthcare leaders at most medical practices have or understand the importance of having a website, they fail to understand the essential function of a website. If you are thinking of your medical practice website primarily as a marketing tool, you are myopic in realizing its growth and business potential.

In order to best understand your medical website’s true business potential, you need to reframe your mindset to start thinking about your website as a sales tool.

If you train it properly, your website becomes your number one rockstar salesperson. It is going to be there working for you 24 hours a day and 7 days a week without you having to pay them a full-time salary. And it will never complain or ask you for overtime pay. As more and more of your ideal prospects visit your website, it will inform and educate them of your services and inadvertently prep them to schedule an appointment with you, while simultaneously recording valuable data as pertaining to your ideal patients.

Your website could have 2,000 visitors or 10,000 or even more — the quantity of traffic does not affect its performance. Instead of hiring 100 salespeople to bring you more new patients, your website can do an even better job than that.

Now if you start thinking like this and understand your website’s true business potential and sales function, here’s a question:

Have  you truly invested enough towards it?

To ensure your healthcare website design serves as a new patient-generating conversion engine for you, it is important that you and everyone on your team realizes your website being the ultimate resource in your new patient acquisition. Secondly, your website visitors should be able to self-identify as your ideal prospects easily.

You accomplish both by ensuring you are directly answering via your website all the questions that your medical practice receptionist or sales team are tired of repeatedly answering over the phone or in person. If your website is not answering the most burning questions of your ideal patients as related to your medical services, then you have failed to create the perfect medical website designed for inbound marketing.

Is your medical website design patient-driven?

How well your medical web design converts to new patients every month depends on how well you know your ideal patients. Fluffy filler content will repel your dream patients as you will fail to come across as a trusted expert. As a result, every word on your website should be there because it serves the purpose of adding value to your ideal patients’ most burning questions.

Your service pages and blog posts should be written in a question-and-answer format. Think of your medical practice website as your state-of-the-art question-answering system. And your goal through this technology is to educate your website visitors on every question they could possibly have related to your high-niche and high-value medical services.

Using detailed, well-written, high-expert content to educate your prospects is the best way to build trust with them, while filtering out less qualified prospects who may not be the right fit. Either way, the number one reason anyone chooses to give you their business is because of trust. And your ideal patients will respond to a humanistic touch in your digital presence.

You need to get inside the minds of your ideal patients to think of answering all the questions they will ask you during your sales process. Do not shy away from tackling difficult questions like pricing. You must ensure that the information you provide on your website is accurate as you will not be able to build trust on a foundation of lies.

Is your medical web design Google-driven?

Other than centering your healthcare web design around your ideal patients, you need to master becoming friends with the search-engines. And when we say “search-engines”, we are really specifically concerned with Google.

While it is true that you need to develop a holistic SEO strategy catering to all the search engines out there (Yahoo, Bing, etc), 99.9% of your new patient acquisition will happen through Google. Hence, by purely focusing on mastering your healthcare web design around strictly Google-driven optimization strategies, you automatically win with all the other search engines.

Becoming really good friends with Google is not as difficult as most make it out to be as they have the same end-goal as you do — offering value and a high-quality experience to your ideal prospects. However, the one thing you do require through this process is Zen-like patience. If you are a brand new domain without having built any domain authority, it will take you a minimum of 6 – 9 months of developing your trust and relevancy scores before your website qualifies to rank on Google Page 1.

Other than ensuring that your website content is answering the most pressing questions of your ideal dream patients, there are several technical components to how we structure your information architecture that will help Google best understand the kind of visitors it should reward you with.

As such, it’s not merely about writing “great content”, but making sure you are organizing this written content in specific “content hubs” while developing medical topical clusters around commercially valuable keywords surrounding your high-value medical services. This helps Google understand your niche expertise and measure your audience engagement. Google pays close attention to the behaviour of your website visitors through metrics such as Time On Site, Bounce Rate and Page Depth.

The core concept being that if your ideal prospects are hanging around on your website and scrolling through different pages, then they are enjoying your content and the experience. As such, Google will reward you by placing you in its prime digital real estate so you get even more visitors.

Other than your on-page information architecture web design elements, Google has increasingly started paying attention to a website’s technical SEO components. This involves designing responsive, mobile-first websites that are fast to load. You can check your website speed on Google Pagespeed Insights. You typically want a desktop score of minimum 80 and a mobile score of minimum 60.

Here is our own desktop pagespeed via Google Pagespeed Insights.

And here is our mobile pagespeed via Google Pagespeed Insights. While there is room for improvement here, this is usually good enough to get the job done. We could also always turn our website into AMP. But that involves a separate blog post covering the benefits of accelerated mobiles pages.

You need to also check your pagespeed metrics via GTMetrix. You are shooting for a minimum of B on both the Pagespeed Score and YSlow Score. Here are the results of our own website. As you can see with all our scores, we practice on our own website what we preach and execute on our client websites.

In short, you need to harmonically please both your ideal patients as well as Google in order for your healthcare website design to be aligned with the core principles of achieving tangible business results through inbound.

Is your medical practice website WordPress-driven?

In order for your medical website design to serve as your sales workhorse, you need to set it up such that it is easy and user-friendly to update and maintain on a regular basis.

The back-end admin section of your website should allow for easy creation of pages and posts, managing your permalink structures and updating all title tags and meta-descriptions. The most ideal way for you to achieve this is to build your medical practice website on a marketer-and-user-friendly CMS (content management system) designed around the principles of inbound.

Some popular content management systems include Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Hubspot and Webflow. Through our experience at having worked with every CMS under the sun, WordPress is our unanimous CMS of choice to build our client websites. Please note that this is not to say that other CMS platforms do not work.

For example, if you were selling medical products online, we would advise using Shopify as we believe it to be the best platform for e-commerce. However, WordPress delivers the best SEO and business results for service-providers who are in the client-business and want to build media-rich content-heavy websites to convert their ideal prospects into paying clients by getting them to schedule appointments with them. Here is an industry article validating why using WordPress as your CMS puts you ahead in the inbound game.

At Inbound Medic, we are WordPress experts and strictly prefer it as our go-to CMS solution to custom design and build all our client sites (including having built our own website). Hubspot comes a close second. However, Hubspot is expensive, while WordPress is 100% free — including the ability to load specific plugins to add various levels of functionality and our in-house ability to generate endless customizations.

Please remember that the end-goal of your medical web design is to ultimately serve your business goals. That is, your healthcare website design should predictably and systematically attract your ideal patients and then convert them into qualified scheduled appointments every single month. A consistent flow of these appointments with your most ideal patients who are most qualified to buy your high-value medical services is what will result in your medical practice growth.

As a premium medical website design agency, it is our ability to deliver such tangible business results that bring us a deep, quiet sense of satisfaction. And we have mastered delivering this business result as an art and a science by sticking with our “Power Of One” philosophy by choosing to only work with the one and most Google-friendly CMS — WordPress.

Is your healthcare website design analytics-driven?

Marketing is not a jukebox where you put a quarter in and get it to start playing your song. Marketing is more like making fine wine. You need all the right ingredients in exactly the right proportions blended in a strict formula and allowed to ferment and mature over a sustained period of time. This kind of production requires active measurement through every step as you can only manage something you measure.

As pertaining to your medical website design, you need to stay on top of multiple data-points across various platforms to gain awareness surrounding your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The top sources of data that you need to stay on top of include Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Google My Business.

We like to separate your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) into External Revenue-Generating Metrics and Internal Data-Driven Metrics.

Your External Revenue-Generating Metrics involve the ROI numbers that concern you most as a business owner. These are the total number of qualified scheduled appointments generated via phone calls and webform inquiries (your leads), the total number of these appointments that convert to paying patients and the total amount generated in sales through these new patients every month.

Your Internal Data-Driven Metrics are your total monthly organic visitors (via Google Analytics), total month organic impressions and clicks (via Google Search Console) and your Search and View metrics within Google My Business (to name a few of the most important).

Getting organized in terms of systematically harnessing and analyzing this data leads to true marketing intelligence that drives actual conversions in business terms. So if your medical marketing services are not getting you the results you want, please do not point fingers and blame others (or even Google). Go back to your data. Sit with it. And the answers will come.

We have created our own state-of-the-art analytics platform that aggregates all your healthcare website data from all the various data-points (like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google My Business) and displays them in stunning visuals, charts and graphs for you to stay on top of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Is your healthcare web design conversion-driven?

Conversion design optimization is important because it allows you to lower your new patient acquisition costs by squeezing out more value from the organic traffic that you are already getting.

The whole point of investing in your medical website design is to schedule more qualified appointments and convert more paying new patients every single month. As such, if your healthcare web design is not optimized for conversions, then you are dropping the ball at the very last step. And all that time, effort and money spent in your medical marketing ends up with a big zero.

If your ultimate goal is to generate more sales, then your medical website design must support a strong conversion rate of complete strangers turning into qualified new patient appointments.

Every single page of your medical practice website should have a purpose to channel your prospective new patients to their logical next step in their journey with you. If you fail to map out the patient conversion journey of every page and post of your medical website design, then you are leaving such conversions up to chance.

Yes, it takes work. It takes a lot of time. You need Zen-like patience to sift through large volumes of data. However, once you solve the conversion design optimization puzzle, you end up generating more sales than you imagined.

Final Closing Thoughts

While most medical leaders and healthcare experts have mastered sophisticated skills at diagnosing and treating complex medical conditions, you have probably received minimal to zero training in terms of systematically growing your high-niche medical practice with data-driven precision using sophisticated digital healthcare marketing strategies.

Your medical practice website is your first impression to the world at large. Please ensure that it is representative of what your ideal patients desire for and allows them to find what they want easily, while providing them so much value that they can’t help but trust you.

If you execute upon these foundational inbound principles, we promise that your medical website design will deliver results.