Best Practices with Website Standards in Aesthetic Medical Practices
John Powers, PhD
Director of Education and Research
Aesthetic Business Institute
As is the case with most businesses, the phrase “time is money” is a stark reality for every small business, and in particular with an aesthetic medical practice, your website is a crucial component of your marketing and business strategy. This is very likely the first impression a potential client will have of your practice, and it is essential that your website represent your brand in a consistent and professional manner.
An Aesthetic Business Institute’s Flash Poll helps establish some standards for aesthetic medical practice websites.
Fresh Web Content
Frequent and quality updates allow your practice’s website to be a living entity – by adding engaging, current content on a regular basis, you reward your visitors with a positive user experience. In addition, search engines love new, updated, and relevant content on your site.
The ABI Flash poll found that 42% of practices surveyed have updated their website in the past week, an excellent best practice for all small businesses. Conversely, almost 20% stated that they have not updated any content in the past year. This leads to one’s website being viewed as a static entity – leading to poor search engine results and causing users to lose interest at seeing the very same content. It is also important that your website have a major redesign or overhaul every few years as browsers and mobile devices continue to evolve. The ABI survey showed that almost a quarter of practices reported redesigning their website in the previous three months, while 46% completed this process within the last 1 to 3 years. Thankfully only 4% of those surveyed overhauled their website over three years ago.
Features and Elements of your Website
Video has become a vital part of your practice’s online presence. Just check out a few of these key stats:
- Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users
- 59% of executives agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video.
- 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.
- Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80% or more.
- Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs).
With this in mind, it is encouraging to report that 73% of practices do take advantage of this and use embedded videos on their websites. In addition, 73% claim that their practice’s website is optimized for use on mobile devices, a now essential practice to insure mobile users can access your site effectively on their phone or tablet. Almost 77% of practices also utilize a lead capture form on their website – a simple and effective way to send sales leads directly to your business.
It was somewhat surprising that only 54% of practices surveyed utilize a blog as part of their website strategy. Regular and consistent blogging on your website helps increase your brand’s visibility, establish you as an expert in the field, and increase the amount of traffic driven to your site through search engines (SEO).
Other Notes
There are a couple of other interesting findings related to this ABI flash poll:
• 71% of practices have used landing pages as part of their marketing/communication strategy
• there was a split as to who manages the regular updates on a practice’s updates – half reported that they use an internal staff person, and half use an outside agency or consultancy.