These days, even with a glowing referral from a trusted friend, most prospective new patients will visit your website before scheduling an appointment. In this way, your website supports your existing patients in their attempts to refer others.
However, if a prospective new patient is unsatisfied with your online presence, they might second-guess your offline presence. This underscores the importance of understanding the new-patient journey – the journey a potential new patient takes from the time they arrive on your website to the time they schedule an appointment (or move on to a competitor).
Focus on New-Patient Traffic
The goal of your practice website isn't just to attract as many "hits," "clicks" or visitors as possible. It is to convert those visitors into patients. If visitors aren't converting after landing on your site, they're nothing more than a wasted opportunity.
In short, you want new-patient traffic: website visitors who reside or work within 20 minutes of your practice and who are looking for a chiropractor.
How to Improve the New-Patient Journey
Engagement is the core factor in the new-patient journey. If the bulk of your visitors leave right after arriving on your site, they're not being captivated by what they see. Here are a few things to observe when measuring engagement:
- Do visitors arrive to your site and then quickly exit (known as "bouncing")?
- How many pages do they explore before leaving?
- How much time do they spend on your site?
- Do they engage with the content?
- Do you have many repeat visitors?
Keys to Making Your Website Stand Out
Ranking for irrelevant keywords could be the cause of poor engagement – but website design is often an even larger culprit. Online competition in the chiropractic field continues to increase, so it's critical that your website stands out from the crowd.
An outdated website with uninspiring content won't encourage visitors to pick up the phone. In fact, it could direct them straight to a competitor.
Remember: The No. 1 goal of your website is to help the patient answer one question: "Is this the right chiropractor for me?" Not sure if your chiropractic website answers this question? Take a look at your site and ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I have professional photos of my team, my office, and myself?
- Am I showcasing my chiropractic specialties?
- Is my website content readable and compelling?
- Do I have calls-to-action (i.e. "Click here to schedule an appointment")?
The "Money Pages"
For more than a decade, I've been studying millions of website visitors for several thousand client websites. In this analysis, we've determined which pages are the most influential in converting new patients. We call them the "money pages."
It's important to note that your website isn't for you. It's for current and prospective patients. For this reason, you might want to consolidate a few of your existing pages. Some of your specialty procedures might not be of interest to your audience; therefore, it's likely that each service won't need its own individual page.
Here are the five money pages every practice website should have (in order of priority):
- Homepage
- Doctor[s] Bio
- Contact Us
- About Us
- Chiropractic Services Offered
Your money pages are what convert new patients. Focus on these pages first before adding more to your site. If they're already included, find areas to improve the content, formatting, images and calls-to-action.
People browse web pages, so make sure your pages are easy to browse – bullet points, short paragraphs, compelling images, etc., all help.
Proof Your Site Is Working
It's important to have the mechanisms in place to know your website is producing new patients. With Google Analytics, you can find data such as the number of visitors, how visitors got to your site and how well they are engaging on your site.
But this data doesn't close the loop on the new-patient journey. By knowing which of these visitors convert into new patients, you can discover your most effective marketing channels.
Some website services have technology that allows you to input the name of each new patient into the back-end of your website. In doing so, you can see exactly where this new patient came from and the journey they took before scheduling an appointment. Here's an example:
You add "John Smith" as a new website subscriber after they become a new patient. You see that he found your site through a Google search. You also see which pages played the biggest role in converting John and other new patients.
By evaluating this data, you can see what's working and what's not working. If 90 percent of your new patients read your "About" page before scheduling an appointment, you've probably done a good job at representing your practice. If a small percentage of new patients arrive through Google, then your website might need to be better optimized for the search engines.
Do It Right
There are many strategies to improve your new-patient performance online. But the key is to see your website experience from the patient's point of view and, in doing so, include the crucial elements that improve the new-patient journey – from understanding which keywords to target to making your chiropractic website more conversion-friendly.
