5 steps to a great website for healthcare professionals
It’s common for healthcare professionals to start their own practice, but it can be overwhelming to figure out the best way to market your services. A key benefit that a lot of therapists don’t realise is that a good therapist website can be so much more than an advertising tool for your new practice. To help you get started, I’ll cover the key elements you need to include for a website that is effective and informative.
1. The benefits of having a website for your healthcare practice
Let potential clients know they can trust you to help them
Trust and credibility are more important for professional health practitioners than in almost any other industry. If a client doesn’t trust you or believe you’re credible, they won’t think you can help them. Think for moment — have you ever looked up a business online to check they’re the real deal? One thing you can do to increase the likelihood of referrals going on to use your services is to have a website that reinforces that trust and proves your credibility.
If you’re wondering why you need a website at all, know that not having a website makes it difficult to establish trust — a potential client has no way of learning enough about you to know you’re a good fit for what they’re looking for. A bad website can also lose you patients if it isn’t communicating trust and credibility from the get-go — don’t stress, read on to learn how your website can prove your worth!
Back up your initial word-of-mouth referral base with an online presence that is easy to find.
Most psychologists and therapists have two key referral networks: GPs and former patients. Having a website gives interested patients the chance to learn about what services you offer and how they can book their sessions with ease while also validating your referral base so other healthcare professionals know you exist.
The added value of your website is the opportunity to open up a third avenue for client referrals — internet search. As an example, it’s common for GPs to do a quick internet search when giving a new referral for an external specialist — if your website is appearing in search results, you could be getting new referrals from healthcare professionals who don’t already know you, widening your network and coming in to play as a great alternate source of patients if referrals from your client base dry up. Likewise, patients looking for a specific service in their local area could also be finding you via a Google search — but only if you exist online and are able to be found.
Make it easier to run your private practice
Your systems are the hub of your practice: your admin assistant, your communications manager, your accounts assistant, and your sales rep all in one, but without the expense of having all of those roles on your staff. And all of these systems can be synced to each other and automated through your clever website, making it easier to run your practice and a better experience for your clients.
2. How website strategy and planning is key to growing your practice
Most psychologists, therapists and allied health consultants start in private practice through word-of-mouth referrals. If you’re good at what you do (an I’m assuming you are) these early referrals will come easily and will continue to flow as you hone your offering on the back of your growing level of experience working directly with your own patients as the owner of your own practice. But this word-of-mouth network is finite and certainly has it’s limits. In fact one of the main reasons pschologists and therapists tell me they hire me is because they worry their lead network won’t last forever, and want to start building that backup source of clients.
That’s where your website and overall digital strategy comes in to play.
Keep doing what you’re doing, just digitise it too
Having a digital presence doesn’t mean that you have to learn new ways to find clients; this can be overwhelming for health practitioners who are rarely exposed to the business end of having to source patients when working as employees for a larger practice. But you can leverage your digital presence to work for you in familiar ways that you are comfortable with. In a nutshell, it’s still word-of-mouth. You’re just using the power of the internet to get more clients directed your way.
Your website strategy should mirror your business strategy
What you need is a website strategy that directly mirrors your business strategy. And if your business strategy is still fuzzy, your website is actually the perfect framework to help clarify what your vision for the practice is, what your key services are, and what your ethos is — because the website forces you to communicate this succinctly to interested patients and clients.
Your website shouldn’t just be a giant business card that sits there doing nothing. For most healthcare practices like yours, that means a web strategy that will:
- Include a navigational structure specific to your practice and goals — not just copied from a template without customisation.
- Focus on 2–3 calls to action that will make your goals happen. For most therapists and coaches, this will be learning more about you and your solution, booking a free discovery call, and booking a paid consultation. And create a process for automating those actions. More on that later…
- Your strategy and content structure should take advantage of all the social proof — referrals and reviews — you’re getting. So what you’re doing with this strategy is using your existing word-of-mouth referrals to a) invoke trust in the potential clients landing on your site and b) generating more happy patients (because you’re awesome) and more referrals from all the people out there on the internet. Whoop!
3. Content to include on therapist websites
Your website content (text, images, videos — literally everything that sits inside the frame of your website) should connect with the people who land on your site and assure them that you know exactly what you’re talking about.
Empower website visitors to find key information about you and your services
Give clients a transparent view of your schedule, rates and process. Your clients don’t want to have to phone you for this info, it should all be available for them to find in their own time and on their own terms.
Also make sure patients can easily find your contact information including the address for your treatment rooms. If a client has misplaced your address and is on their way to an appointment, the first place they are likely to look for it is the contact page on your website, so make it easy for them.
Give people more information about how treatment works and why therapy or your specific specialty is beneficial. If someone doesn’t understand how this will work or what it entails, then they won’t get any benefits from your sessions at all. Nor are they likely to book an appointment in the first place.
There are a lot of design considerations specific to healthcare practices that should always be taken into account as well, including a higher care for accessibility and data security. Check out my companion post Design essentials for healthcare websites.
Demonstrate trust through social proof
Social proof is evidence from other people that you’re great at what you do. You should include testimonials from happy patients on your website! It helps potential patients know they’re making the right choice by working with you. Make sure you are building testimonials (ideally Google Reviews) and case studies into your process. Web pages with great testimonials and social proof built right in to their web design far out-perform other pages. So don’t have a single page where you hide this golden content — put them on your home page, put them on your servcies pages, put them everywhere! I’ve seen amazing client stats on this, and Sprout Social explains this psychology really well.
Show your expertise
Let patients get a sense of who you are — crucial when trying to build connections with those you want to help — by writing articles and posting them on a blog page on your site. Offer up valuable insight into your knowledge of the latest research, medical news, well being resources, quality-of-life improvements, support groups, and lots of other good stuff straight from your brain that connects with your people through effective education on your blog. This doesn’t need to be overwhelming, it’s just sharing what you know and reinforcing your expertise.
4. Leveraging your website to make it easier to run your healthcare practice
Connect your systems and take advantage of automation
You can save a ton of time and staff hours by integrating these key systems with your website:
- Ability for clients to book an appointment
- Ability for clients to pay
- Ability for clients to sign a digital contact/agreement
- Automatically create the new contact in your practice management software (there are a number of Medicare-compatible options that don’t cost an arm and a leg)
- Automatically send clients initial communications to help them feel at ease — particularly crucial for clients in the mental health space.
Automatically have that appointment booking appear in your practice management system. Then automatically shoot a reassuring email out to the client to confirm their appointment and tell them where to go, what your Zoom link is, and what to expect from their session with you. Automated tools can be great to help you build client relationships with less one-on-one effort, but without losing the personal touch.
Add revenue streams by offering group services or training for other therapists, psychologists or health professionals
Web training programs and courses can provide a great additional revenue stream for many practices. These sorts of programs can lead to recurring revenue that isn’t reliant of the traditional money for time structures that you are used to, making them a great asset to alleviate financial stress, as well as being a significant asset in the overall value of your practice.
5. Building lasting relationships with your patients
Automated communications to enhance client well being
There’s a lot of repetitive information that can be personalised and provided automatically to help the individual feel confident that they’re in good hands. I’ve had really great feedback from psychologists and other mental health professionals I’ve worked with about how setting up automated email sequences have helped to support and reassure the individuals they’re working with.
Sometimes even just a great set of email templates that react to each stage of the patient journey can go a long way to alleviating repetitive tasks in the clinic, but also help to ensure your clients feel well looked after before, after and in between appointments. Emails can be sent after each session to reinforce progress made, or might be in the form of motivational emails between appointments. You can supplement these with personal notes, or add personal one-liners to an email template to help keep it specific, but a template is a great start to make it easier to build these relationships without taking up all of your time out-of-hours.
Use your email list
When I start talking to health workers about email lists, there is often a misconception that an email list is only useful for marketing purposes. I understand the hesitancy and agree that salesy emails to your patient list are just plain wrong and frankly completely unethical.
You can continue to share your knowledge with your clients beyond their time with you in a genuine way. Make it easy for your clients to stay up to date on the latest practice news and insights that are genuinely of value to support them and their personal journey. As long as everything you’re sharing is helpful, trusted information, then your clients do want to hear from you! And continuing the relationship you have started with them can help to consolidate that sense of well being and provide assurances that their trusted therapist is on hand for support should they need it.
To conclude this ‘what to include’
The information in this post should help you think about how to leverage your website and digital strategy to make it easier for people, Google, and the patients (or potential clients) that come into contact with your healthcare practice. If you’re ready to take control of these aspects of your business, check out our web design packages or start learning more by signing up to the Box Clever newsletter, where you can learn more about how to make your website work harder for your business.
