With 2009 behind us and 2010 just beginning, its time to re-evaluate your marketing efforts in order kick off the New Year with continued success for your medical practice. The Internet is booming with patients and competition, and learning how to position your practice in front of both should be the focus of your New Year’s resolution.
If you learned anything about the best practice marketing for your website in the past year, then you should know that in order to gain new patient acquisition, your website needs prominent placement on major search engines, like Google and Yahoo! When implemented properly by a professional medical web design firm, advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising can deliver more traffic to your site than ever before. But your marketing endeavors can’t end here. The following online marketing strategies can help launch your practice forward in 2010 and drive new patients to your practice.
Tap In To Social Networking
Your practice needs to be positioned where your patients are; and your patients are participating in ongoing online conversations via the increasingly popular social networking websites, like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube. But Facebook and Twitter aren’t just for catching up with friends anymore. In fact, businesses around the world are plugging into these important channels in order to share and obtain information with a mass audience of existing and potential clients.
With the recent explosion of social media, never before has it been so easy to engage with your current and prospective patients. Set up a profile for your practice on the leading social media sites and establish a following of patients and contacts that actively engage in your site’s messages. You can even feed your practice blog into your Facebook and Twitter, a great way to point your social media followers back to your practice website.
Keep Your Website Fresh
One of the worst things a doctor can do is build a website and let it sit. Search engines reward sites that maintain fresh, updated content, and sites that are continuously maintaining their website’s information will earn higher rankings in the search engine search result pages than those who don’t. Multiple factors contribute to how early your website will rank in the search results- quality of content, meta tags, keywords and the age of your live domain. But even more effective lately are blogs.
If you haven’t already, consider adding a blog to your website. Establish yourself as a leader in the medical field by posting about your expertise and credibility. Patients will appreciate the personal engagement, and if you post regularly, search engines will reward your new content with increased online visibility. You can also help keep your website up-to-date by simply uploading new photos, updating patient testimonials and revising content throughout your site. It’s easy to do, and you’ll reap the benefits of increased traffic to your website.
Reach Local with Local Maps
When people search for goods and services in their town, where do they turn? The Internet. After all, why would a patient waste precious time turning through countless pages of a phone book when they could simply type “doctor” and “city” for accurate, instant results. Patients are searching locally for doctors online, and you must take advantage of new local search techniques if you want patients in your neighborhood to find your website.
Google has acknowledged this trend in local searching and has developed its own local search directory that lists businesses in a map interface that appears prominently above the natural search results when a local search is performed. Now when patients search for doctors in the search query, Google can match the searchers IP address to a geographical location, providing the most relevant searches in the maps results. For instance, if a patient searches for “doctor Springfield” on Google, 10 medical practices in the Springfield area will appear in the local maps results (Google 10-pack), each with its own local business profile. Because there are unique algorithms for earning placement in the maps results, it’s important your practice is partaking in a local search optimization plan from professional medical web design experts. With consistent and accurate submission of your practice information to numerous online directories, optimized profiles and positive patient reviews, your practice can look forward to increased exposure in the local search results and more patients at your office.
If your website brought success to your practice in 2009, then continue to keep your website on top of new and innovative web solutions. And if the past year wasn’t as promising as you had hoped, look optimistically into 2010 with an improved marketing campaign that encompasses local search optimization, blogging and social networking. It’s never too late to maximize your site’s performance and drive new patients to your practice.