The growth of your podiatric practice relies heavily on the effectiveness and depth of your comprehensive marketing plan. To compete with other podiatrists and attract new patients to your practice, you must start with a professionally designed website- keeping it the center of all of your varied marketing strategies. Getting your practice front and center when patients are looking for podiatric services is both necessary and possible with the following powerful online marketing solutions.
Build an Online Presence for Your Practice
In an industry that is saturated by the local competition, a successful podiatrist will need to set its practice apart from the rest in order to generate new patients. How? Begin with a creatively designed website that reflects the values and quality of your practice. Patients are online searching for podiatric care in your neighborhood, but if your practice hasn’t entered the online world and its vastness, you’re missing out on valuable patient leads. A website will enable you to compete with podiatrists who are already gaining visibility online, plus you’ll be promoting your practice 24/7, reaching out to patients even when your office is closed.
An effective website must include the essential tools that patients look for when searching for a podiatrist online, making sure your website is a patient-friendly machine for easily accessed information. Include your podiatric office information, including doctor bios, hours of operation, maps, phone numbers and services. Enhance the performance of your site by providing patients with an educational library of foot and ankle information, and consider videos, photos and testimonials that highlight your work and influence conversions. But most important is presenting patients with a strong call-to-action, enticing your online visitors to contact your practice for further information.
Optimize Your Website for Search Engines
Your website is only as valuable as a patient’s ability to find it in the search engine search results. And while there are several strategies for driving targeted traffic to your site, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most fundamental and effective tactics for doing so. SEO involves fine-tuning the internal components of your website to improve its ranking in the search engines, including content optimization, strong keywords and link-building. When patients visit major search engines, like Google and Yahoo! to search for podiatrists in their town, they visit the podiatric websites that appear in the top positions. The higher your site appears for your targeted keywords, such as your town and podiatrist, the more visibility your practice will earn. And that visibility leads to higher patient acquisition.
Get Immediate Clicks with PPC
A focused pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign is another key component of online search marketing. PPC enables you to get your practice listed at the top of a search engine page in the sponsored listings, even if you aren’t earning high rankings naturally. You can then modify your campaign to create ads that are brief and enticing, encouraging patients to click on them, which directs them to your website. You only pay when someone clicks-through the ad to your website, and you choose the specific keywords and service electives you want to target, such as bunions or orthotics. When implemented properly and combined with SEO, a PPC campaign can reach patients beyond your local town to surrounding communities, maximizing the performance of your website and online marketing strategies.
Enhance Your Reputation with Facebook and Twitter
Social networking is fast becoming one of the most effective means of online communication and sharing of information available today. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media sites have fueled the growth of word-of-mouth referrals, one of the most efficient ways to build awareness for your practice and produce qualified leads. Establish a space on the major social media sites, and you’ll gain additional exposure for your practice, connect with current and potential patients and have the ability to broadcast your news or messages to your entire online network. With that being said, you’ll want to seamlessly integrate your website into the relatively new and rapidly growing worlds of social networks in order to enhance the visibility and reputation for your practice online.
Expand Your Reach with a Blog
Finally, consider creating a blog for your practice website. When managed properly, a blog can be an extremely effective avenue for highlighting your expertise in the podiatry industry, as well as a valuable means for developing a rapport with your potential and existing patients. But the greatest benefit of establishing a blog is the higher ranking it earns your website in the search results. Because each blog page is a separate web page for your site, frequent posts provide numerous pages for search engines to index. As long as you keep your blog consistently up-to-date with fresh and valuable content, you’ll notice an increase in your page rank, and this will dramatically increase your online presence and attract new patients to your site.
The benefits of a professional website combined with results-oriented online marketing solutions and strategies can bring you a higher return on your investment than any other form of marketing available today. If you want to thrive in today’s podiatric industry, you need to position your practice where your patients are- the Internet. Not to mention that when your website acts as the focal point for all of your marketing efforts, you’ll maximize the performance of your site, which translates to more patients for your practice.