Credibility and trust are especially important in the healthcare industry, as prospective patients want to know they’re in good hands before committing to a healthcare provider of any kind. If you want to build a strong connection with your audience and attract more patients for multiple locations, you need good healthcare web design and development for your practice.
In this blog, we dive into healthcare website redesign benefits and how good medical web development and design can elevate your online presence.
What’s Covered:
- Core Objectives and Benefits of Healthcare Web Design
- UX/UI Tactics for Medical Sites
- Technical Implementation
- SEO and Performance Optimization
- Content Strategy and Personalization
- Analytics and Continuous Improvement
Core Objectives and Benefits of Healthcare Web Design
To guide your approach to healthcare web design, you need to set some clear goals for what you want to achieve with the design or redesign.
To inform your goals, you must consider the patient experience and what your audience wants to see from you. Some patient experience goals include speed, clarity, and trust.
If your current website doesn’t achieve these goals, it may be due for a redesign. Some healthcare website redesign benefits include:
- Improved User Experience (UX): A sleek web design makes it easier for people to navigate a site and find precisely what they’re looking for, with clean layouts that are both user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing.
- Increased Accessibility: Websites must also be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), using appropriate color contrast, image alt text, transcriptions, and captions for videos, and other features that make the site easy for anyone to navigate.
- More Conversions: Effective web design also guides more people along their journey to becoming patients, ultimately leading to higher-quality conversions.
UX/UI Tactics for Medical Sites
In your medical website design and development, there are a couple of key considerations, including:
Accessibility and Compliance
Your website should be compliant with the ADA, WCAG, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to maintain accessibility while meeting privacy requirements. Disclosing your privacy policy on your website is an effective means of doing so.
In meeting WCAG guidelines, your site should be highly accessible through:
- Alt text descriptions for all images, videos, and audio content describing the content
- Adaptable designs that can cater to each user’s unique needs
- Distinguishable colors, audio control, contrast, fonts, and other elements
Visual Hierarchy
In bringing more prospects to conversion, you must also establish a clear visual hierarchy that’s conducive to a good UX.
For example, you should incorporate various trust signals that convince your website visitors that you’re the right choice for them, including everything from security seals and SSL certificates to patient testimonials and professional accreditations.
Also, include clear and persuasive calls-to-action that are direct, clearly indicating what a visitor will get when taking the desired action.
Detailed clinician profiles also help build credibility, putting a face (or multiple faces) to your practice.
Technical Implementation
In addition to web design, you need effective web development on the technical side to keep your site running.
There are a couple of key aspects of web development for healthcare sites.
One involves selecting the right content management system (CMS). In the healthcare sector, there are some critical factors to look for to facilitate both accessibility and compliance.
For example, your CMS should be highly secure to protect all sensitive data, ideally a closed-source, proprietary CMS. This CMS would give you all of the customization and support you need to successfully manage your site.
You must also consider whether to use a headless or traditional architecture for your CMS. Traditional CMS systems bundle your frontend and backend, the presentation and content management side, respectively. Meanwhile, headless systems offer a bit more flexibility by keeping the frontend separate from the backend, a structure that typically offers more control over the frontend for effective medical web design.
Scalable Medical Web Development
There are some additional elements that can keep your healthcare website design and development more scalable to foster your practice’s growth.
One way to keep your site scalable is to implement a component library. This tool consists of multiple pre-designed UI components that include forms, buttons, navigation bars, and other reusable assets that are compatible with each other. In turn, you can save a lot of time on the design and development as you expand and redesign your site.
Another consideration is a micro frontend. While traditional frontends are monolithic, micro frontends break the frontend into multiple modules that allow for individualized customization and development. Different teams can then manage each micro frontend.
Additionally, you should take an API-first approach to development, which involves prioritizing and defining the API design over other aspects of the web application. Doing so could provide you with well-structured APIs for reuse and repurposing, offering even more efficiency.
SEO and Performance Optimization
To help you get the most from your healthcare website design and development, you need to incorporate good search engine optimization and overall performance optimization.
When developing your SEO strategy, local SEO will be essential for each location. In the process, you’ll be targeting “near me” and other local keywords.
Here are some key items to consider:
GMB Profiles
One big aspect of local SEO is creating a comprehensive Google My Business (GMB) profile for each of your locations. This profile includes your NAP (name, address, and phone number) along with a description of your business, hours, and a list of services.
Having a well-optimized GMB profile can signal to Google that your site is reputable and worth ranking. Also, be sure to ask clients for reviews and respond thoughtfully to them when appropriate.
Structured Data
In addition to your GMB profile, you should optimize your site’s structured data using Schema.org markup. This element describes to search engine bots what your website and individual pages are about, giving them context to better understand them. Taking this step can significantly boost SEO.
Metadata
Also, you should have a medical web design metadata strategy in place to help rank locally. Metadata refers to the title tags and meta descriptions that users see in search results. Title tags should have locally targeted keywords that help your site show up for local queries, while your description should include a call-to-action, business details, and contact information.
Performance Optimization
Your website’s performance can impact both the user experience and SEO, making it a crucial component to optimize.
There are some essential strategies you can use to develop a high-performance website that appeals to users and search engines alike.
For example, you can use lazy loading to load assets as users scroll down a page, which can make the loading process more efficient and shorten page load speed.
Another factor is image optimization, which involves compressing files to ensure images take up as little space as possible.
Taking these and other steps can help your website comply with Google’s Core Web Vitals. These metrics measure critical elements of a website’s user experience, including loading times, interactivity, and visual stability. You can find your Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console, where you can see how your site performs for each metric.
Source: Google
Content Strategy and Personalization
An effective content strategy is one of the most important elements of web design for medical practices. High-quality content offering a personalized experience will help you establish trust and convert more patients.
Let’s look at a couple of content types:
Dynamic Content Blocks
Using dynamic content can help you tailor your promotions, service lists, and health resources to each potential patient. For example, you might offer promotions that are locally targeted to an audience within a particular practice’s service area.
Meanwhile, you might have different landing pages discussing specific services based on where the prospect came from, whether it’s an ad, a social media post, an email, or another source.
Patient Education
In giving prospects what they need to make an informed decision regarding their healthcare, you can develop all kinds of educational content.
Blogs, FAQ pages, and multimedia patient journeys could all bring more people through to conversion as they come to trust you over competing practices.
Analytics and Continuous Improvement
In optimizing web design and web development for healthcare, you must consistently measure performance and optimize accordingly.
The key performance indicators (KPIs) you track will depend on your goals. These goals could include increasing brand awareness, attracting website traffic, boosting conversions, and others.
Based on these goals, you might look at the following KPIs and metrics:
- Appointment Bookings: The number of appointments booked against your goals could indicate how well your conversion efforts are performing.
- Bounce Rates: The bounce rate is the percentage of people who immediately return to a search engine results page (SERP) after landing on a page, with a high bounce rate indicating that your page might be irrelevant or of poor quality.
- Local Search Rankings: Tracking rankings could show you how well you’re performing against competitors and potentially show you what areas of local SEO need work.
When optimizing your content’s performance, be sure to perform A/B testing. This process runs two versions of the same content pieces with a single element different between them. The elements you test could include everything from form layouts and button copy to navigation labels and creative designs.
The content that drives the most engagement will then inform you of what might work across all locations.
Get the Best Medical Web Design With Ignite Visibility
If you’re in need of truly effective healthcare web design, Ignite Visibility is ready to provide you with a fully tailored strategy for your practice. We’ll develop a high-quality website that connects with patients for all of your locations in a comprehensive strategy.
Here’s just a taste of what you’ll get with our web design and development services:
- A well-designed and optimized site for each location
- Local SEO efforts to connect with audiences on search engines
- Real-time analytics and reporting to measure the results
- Continuous optimization to help you stay on top
Want this and more? Reach out to us to learn all about our full-scale digital marketing solutions and what we can do for you.
