PracticalDermatology

Your dermatology website most likely plays a key role in creating awareness about your practice and driving the traffic of new patients. Particularly, with the popularity of mobile devices to access the Internet, the role of a website has become more central to practice marketing.

Your website design constitutes the foundation of how your site functions, how navigable the site is, and how aesthetically appealing it is for new visitors. Over a period of time, it is important to review your site design and determine whether it needs an overhaul or an upgrade. The following are some major factors that can influence your decision to opt for a website redesign.

Your Website is not Delivering Desired Results

Sometimes it is possible that your website looks attractive and professional, is functionally superior and has multi-screen resolution and mobile compatibility, but it is still not giving you the results you expect. The ultimate goal of your website is to increase your practice visibility in the local areas and generate higher traffic of patients.

Even if your site may be receiving a high number of monthly visitors due to good SEO strategies, if the conversion rates are poor, it may be necessary to consider website redesign. Ask yourself the following questions and review the data provided by Google Analytics to determine what kind of direction is required for your site redesign:

• Does your website include a call to action?
• Does the call to action prompt visitors to take the desired action?
• What is the bounce rate of the website or how many readers quickly leave the site after visiting?
• Do your landing pages encourage visitors to explore more of your site, or are they only aesthetically attractive without providing much real value?
• How much time on average does a visitor spend on your site?
• Does the site include images, videos, and infographics or it heavily text-oriented with complex jargon?
• Is your website in sync with the professional quality of your practice and provide a fitting introduction of your practice to your target audience?

The Goal of Your Website Has Changed

It is possible that when you originally launched your website, you aimed to create awareness and let people in the local areas know about the existence of your practice. Over time, this purpose may have already been fulfilled to a large extent, and in turn may have given rise to a larger purpose of increasing the number of people who actually visit your dermatology practice.

The scope of your practice may have expanded over time and new technologies and procedures may have been introduced, while the older techniques may no longer be much in use. If the transformation at your practice has been substantial, it may not be enough to make cosmetic alterations to your site to reflect the change. Your goals may be best served in such case to have a completely revamped site design.

Your Site Does Not Incorporate Google Upgrades

In the last few years, Google and other search engines have made dramatic algorithmic upgrades to completely redefine how they rank websites in their search results. Intuitive navigation, speedy site download, responsive website design, efficient sitemap, mobile-friendly site, long tail localized keywords, and high-quality content are now critically essential elements for a successful website.

If your website still continues to be thin on content, lacks mobile compatibility, works with old keywords, has broken links, and includes numerous inbound links from unrelated, low quality or dubious sources, your website may be ready for a complete site design overhaul. Without an efficient site design, your time and effort spent on SEO activities will not make much of an impact, and your site may consistently rank low in search results.

Your Online Competitive Environment Has Changed

With changing consumer aspirations, many of your local competitors may have already given their sites the necessary overhaul. Take a look at your competitors’ websites and objectively evaluate the differences. If the competitor sites offer a superior experience to the visitors along with latest, updated content, while your site still continues to reflect the old trends, it may be time to consider site redesign.

The requirement to revamp your website assumes greater urgency if you find that for all or most of the mainstream localized keywords your competitors’ websites are ranking higher than yours in the search results. If you allow this situation to continue, your practice runs the risk of losing its dominating position in the local area and giving away the entire online competitive advantage to others.

Your Content Strategy is Outdated

In recent years, the content has emerged as the undisputed king that drives the search rankings as well as conversion rates for your dermatology website. You should have a separate Blog section that offers regularly updated content related to your field. This will improve the number of repeat visitors because they have something new to receive each time, and improve reader loyalty.

You should create a strong interface between your social media accounts and your website. This will allow for seamless movement of visitors from your social media channels to your website. Your website should periodically offer privileged, downloadable content such as white papers and e-books as well as educational videos and graphics. If all or most of these content elements are missing on your site, you should get ready for a site redesign. n

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of dermatologists.  With a team of 140+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dermatologists who know where they want to go get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855 598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.