Month: October 2012

Whether you’re writing for your practice website, your blog, an office newsletter or a flyer, the content included on your marketing materials will play an important part in communicating who you are and what your practice can offer to your existing and potential patients.

When writing copy for your medical practice, keep these tips in mind.

Keep it short

When writing for your patients, remember to keep sentences and paragraphs concise and to the point. Too much text on a page is intimidating and will lose reader interest.  Content should be long enough to give value and brief enough to avoid boredom.

Choose headlines wisely

Compelling headlines can make a strong point, guiding your readers to the information they are looking for and compelling them to keep reading and take action.

Enhance with images

Augment the text on your webpages, newsletters or blog with relevant photos or images. Writing about your new office equipment? Introducing a new staff member? Include photos to supplement the content. Your readers will thank you for the visuals.

Avoid medical jargon

Remember, you are writing for your patients, not your colleagues. Keep your audience in mind when communicating through various marketing materials, otherwise you may lose them to confusing medical terminology.

Optimize for search

Search engines are constantly crawling your webpage content so make sure the content on your website is targeting the keywords you want to rank for by using best practice SEO.

Proofread

Don’t forget to edit your work for grammar and spelling errors. Obvious mistakes throughout your content are frustrating for readers and can reflect poorly on your practice.

By taking these writing tips into account, you can help create quality, compelling content for all of your marketing channels that retains reader interest and encourages patients to take a specific action.

Need help writing your website content? Contact an Officite Web Presence Advisor!

It’s as true of medical websites as it is of fashion blogs and news outlets—one of the first places a new visitor will look for information on your site is your About page. People who come to your website are potential future patients, and your About page is where they’ll go to find out who you are, where you are, what your doctors are like. Then, they’ll use that information to determine whether or not they will come to your practice. How can you draw them to your office before they click away? What information should your About page include? What matters most?

Here are some tips to get you started on the path of a winning practice About page!

Approach: Know Your Audience(s)

Not everyone who comes to your website is alike. Some are completely new to your practice; some are existing patients; some are your employees. By understanding what each of these audiences is after, you will become better able to meet their needs. Take time to outline who it is you’re trying to reach with your website and what your goals are for them (example: you might want new visitors to call or to schedule an appointment)—this will guide your website approach. When you know what you’re aiming for, it’s easier to hit it.

Content: Answer Questions

Whoever the visitor, he or she probably wants to know something about you and/or what you do. Use your About page to give answers. If you’re not sure where to start, think through these typical questions that new or existing patients might have:

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• When did you start?
• Where are you located?
• Why should someone come to your practice?
• What do you offer?

In addition to answering these questions, anything that will enrich visitors’ understanding of your practice is helpful.

Style: Be Concise

A strong About page will be concise—usually between one and two paragraphs, says Six Revisions.–in order to grab readers’ attention quickly. When you drone on and on about nuanced details of your practice history or perspectives, you’ll lose readers. Instead, start with the most important, attention-grabbing information first and work your way down to the more detailed, specific info that many readers will find less interesting—and keep it brief. Likewise, make it easy for readers to scan your content and still come away with a sense of your main message.

Value: Tell the Truth

Don’t oversell your strengths in a way that will seem disingenuous. Stay away from superlatives, exaggerations and sweeping statements, and opt instead for objective facts, statistics and truth. Whether you’re just starting out or are fairly established, there’s always a temptation to want to make your practice seem bigger and more successful than it is, but try to resist it.  Show your readers who you really are and let them come to you with expectations you can make good on.

Based on these tips, how’s your practice’s About page looking? Could a few simple changes help you turn new readers into new patients?