Your Medical practice websites should be an ever-changing beast that requires constant attention. With so many changes and the ever-growing nature of Functional and Integrative Medicine practices, you need to make sure you have everything in order in 2018. You can look at this as a checklist of sorts.

Secure Your Site

Make 10% sure that your website has a digital certificate. In July 2018 Google will start marking websites as unsafe if you do not have an SSL Certificate. Talk to your web developer or host to make sure your website is secure and is set up correctly. This might take a few hours and cost you some money, but it is well worth the investment. You do not want to have your site marked as unsafe. It will also give your website a little SEO boost.

Make sure your Medical Practice Website is Responsive

Responsive websites are basically a website that responds to the device the end user has on their hand. A phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. I am sure you probably already have one, but if not, it is time to get a new website. 

You are a Specialist – Prove it

Most Functional Medicine Practices specialize in certain treatable conditions. List all of the conditions you treat and make sure you have a page for each of these conditions with enough content to inform your potential patients to make an inquiry to use your services. Simply having a list of what you treat is not enough and does not instill confidence in potential patients.

Write Regularly

If you want to get great SEO and a boost in traffic you do not need to hire an SEO Expert. In fact, for the most part, it is money completely wasted. You need to just spend a little time (less than an hour) learning about SEO and putting a strategy in place. Great Medical Practice Websites are ones that continually inform their patients and potential patients (Your audience) about what they do why they do it.

Set Aside Time

If you truly want success, then you have to have a strategy and that begins with setting aside time each week to write. Telling yourself you are going to do something, and actually doing it are two entirely different mindsets. Make a time each week, where no one is to disturb you to write articles. For a Medical practice website, a good little formula starts with the following:

• Conditions you treat
• Treatments you give
• Outcomes they can expect

If you have your Treatable Conditions pages set up correctly, you could have articles you write also automatically populate these conditions pages.

Have an SEO Strategy for your Medical Practice Websites

Your SEO Strategy begins with a list of keywords and key phrases you want to rank higher in Google and other search engines with. You then implement these keywords and key phrases into articles, that makes sense to you and your audience. Over time you will see an increase in traffic numbers. It is a long-term strategy and you won’t get immediate results. But within a year or two, you will see traffic increase dramatically.

Q & A Short Videos for your Medical Practice Websites

Create 1 minute short Q & A videos. Every single patient that sits opposite you in your room asks the same or similar questions to the one that came before them. If one in every 10 people who visit you ask the same type of questions, imagine the millions of people around the world that need that answer. Write notes about all of these – with a view to making a short video. Shoot the videos yourself. Get a firm to translate the text,  then publish these videos as a series to YouTube, Instagram, Twitter etc.

Shareable Content

The videos mentioned above are a perfect example of shareable content. This is the gold standard for social media. If you can continually create content people will want to share, then your audience will grow exponentially. It might take some time, but it will work.

Medical Practice Online Consulting

Think about allowing online consulting. As your audience grows, you want to be able to reach out to as many people as possible to help them. Google has Google Hangouts, which allows you to do one on one or group consulting. You can even record and share privately these sessions with your audience.

Online Courses for your Medical Practice Websites

As your audience grows, you might want to think about creating some online courses people can pay for and access in their own time. These only need to be a series of videos and documents that users can download. Some of these best LMS systems allow users to pay, access and start from where they left off each time they log in to your site.

Know your Medical Practice Websites Performance

Most people know a little about Google Analytics. But the tool I use more often is Google Webmaster Tools. This tool once configured tells you everything you need to know about the performance of your website on Google. It will show you broken links, broken images, mobile performance and also where you are listed in the Google Search Engine under specific keywords and key phrases. An invaluable tool!