What is the online experience for your business and how to get prepared for what's to come.

I’ll start by saying that over the 15 years that I spent in this field, I have seen a lot of changes in this web development and all that is related to any online business. I’ll not go into the years of experience my team has if I combine all the years each member has in this field, however, after several discussions, we got to the same conclusion.

I’ll try to start enumerating one by one, what I have learned about this, in hope that will help you get to your conclusions. We’ll go over what makes a business successful and what you can do in order to be successful at what you do.

Before I start I have to let you know, that all this is my opinion, it is based on my own experience in this field, and in no shape and form is what you will experience or the results you will have. So, read and filter everything before you do anything. 

First, we have to agree on several points…

 1. Nothing, in this field, can be achieved “overnight” … is exactly the same as losing weight, it is a process that takes time…

 2. Once the process is started, everything from the “chain” and all its links must function at 100% capacity.

 3. Each individual link can be composed of multiple parts, and each part can be changed or replaced due to different reasons.

 4. You or someone from your team needs to constantly monitor and maintain the link. 

Second, we have to agree that as long as you do not have an “in-house” dedicated team for web development, and if you want to be successful online, then you need to have access to a team of web developers. 

Third, you have to realize that this field has become extremely crowded. Like everything, once the segment start being profitable, everybody wants a seat at the table, so while the potential patients stay relatively constant, the practice pool grows exponentially. Despite the fact that there are more things to talk about, we’ll move on…

Any practice has three modes of acquiring new potential patients (referred to as leads) … 

 1. Referral leads

 2. Online leads

 3. Walk-in leads.

We’ll take them one by one and see what and how can make it better.

 1. As the name suggests, referral leads are from referrals. Friends, family, or even other doctors can refer your practice. If you accept PI cases and you have a professional relationship with an attorney that specializes in car accidents, then this is another type of lead referral. Lastly, if your practice is in a medical insurance network, then the network can refer your clinic to new patients.

 2. Online leads, as the name suggests, are potential patients that schedule their first appointment or call direct after a search is done online. There are countless searches every day, and there are countless practice websites and each search engine has to determine what website to show on the first page for each search. We’ll come back and talk more about this because here we have the website's organic traffic, which is free, and the website paid traffic. It is a huge difference between those options…

 3. Walk-in leads are potential patients that see your advertising on the front of the building. This type of patient has nothing to do with potential patients (leads) that are coming in because they have read on a magazine, flyer, or print advertising in general, or they searched online and did not call or created an appointment online. So, unless the practice has the entrance in front of the building, and the building is in a populated area, like a place where people are walking, you will not have this type of potential patient. Even if they walk in, but the practice is on the seventh floor of a building, and it doesn’t have any advertising at the front entrance, then the walk-in lead is from an online lead or referral lead.

From now on we “dive” deeper into the way the first two types of leads are important and what you can do about them. Get your cup of coffee or your preferred beverage and let’s continue because here comes the best part.

Referral leads are pretty explanatory and you can do nothing about… after all, how can you change someone's mind and make him/her refer your clinic to friends and family… right?

No… you can and I’ll explain how…

Chances are that you will get a referral if your patient has a great result and feel better after the treatment. We are talking about 2% to 10% chances that your patient will refer your clinic to friends and or family by himself/herself. 

And that’s it… pretty much… right? - Well, there are several other ways of getting a referral but that requires work and that is extra time… after all, everybody has a lot of problems to solve, and not enough time in the day.

Do you know that each patient wants that after the visit, to continue to improve and speed up recovery? - Here, a great value is a follow-up email with instructions regarding do’s and don’ts, video exercises, and other educational materials. Create that difference, show the patient that their condition and their recoveries are front and center for your clinic, and each and every patient is the focus. Make sure that what you did in the office, continues after, by instructing the patient what needs to do. Increase the chances of treatment success. The follow-up emails together with the treatment results will increase exponentially the chances to get another lead that will transform into a new patient.  

Interact with the patients via emails, and text messaging. One thing is to have automatic reminders (text and/or emails) and a completely other thing is to have the possibility to chat directly with the patient after the visit. Set your system to send messages and instruct the patient to take specific actions in order to do or get more education articles from your website. 

If your system has this option, each patient can schedule a new appointment, or reschedule an existing one directly in his patient portal. This will increase the interaction and the degree of liberty a patient has when it comes to treatment. A lot of patients are not continuing seeing the doctor after the original treatment is finished, because it has to follow the timetable set by the doctor, or the “hassle” of calling the office if a “maintenance” treatment is started or even “pay as you go” treatment is set…

Normal, your system should send a notification to you, regarding this reschedule, but by letting the patient reschedule directly in his patient portal you will see fewer “dropouts”. Of course, this would not apply to visit cancellations, when they need to call the office and request the cancelation.

Another method to increase lead referrals is direct emails to your patients (if they agreed to receive emails when they first registered - again your system should have this option). You should have several lists with patients in different categories, and send them specific emails. Sure, it takes a bit of time and money if you have a third-party service, (or have your system set to take care of this), but will increase the number of leads you get. 

There are several other ways to increase the number of leads coming from referrals, but your EHR system has to have the capabilities to do so.

Now we move on to online leads and what to do about them. As you already know, if your website appears on the first page when a potential patient search for a specific word (keyword) then chances are that you will get a potential patient. We are going to make a small classification regarding the online searches and what matters the most.

1. Website UI (user interface) 

2. Website UX (user experience)

3. Website loading speed on devices

3. Website hosting

4. Website integration

5. Website on-page SEO

6. Website off-page SEO

7. Website PPC (pay per click)

8. Social Media

The first two, the website user interface and website user experience go hand in hand but they are very different. The user interface is referring to how easy is for a user to navigate your website, and how fast he can find what he is looking for.

Is it easy to get to a specific page from any other page? 

The website has a search box to let visitors type in their queries? 

There are more criteria regarding the website UI, but we are not going to go any deeper…

Then is the website user experience, and this is referring to the information, the amount of it, and the way is structured and presented to the visitor. This is very important and at the same time, different from one website to another… For example, a website like Walmart.com is very different than Wikipedia.org… both websites offer a lot of information about the same things but have different user experiences. If you are searching for “computer displays” on both websites, you will have a different experience.

Number three is about website loading speed. This is a very important point. More than 300% of searches are made using mobile devices, and there are at least two important factors that make or break your website. The loading speed when somebody searches using a smartphone, and how easy is to find and read the information on your website. According to the latest studies, if a website loading time is more than 3 sec. you will lose 80% of visitors. This loading time applies not only to the homepage but also to any internal page.

Another important factor is the website hosting, in lames terms, where is located, who own the server that lend you the space for your website. Here I could talk about it for days without reaching the end… but we are going to focus on several aspects. 

If your website loads fast, this will not guarantee that will load fast every time someone searches online. What you need to know is that a cheaper price always means lower quality standards for the server you are using for the hosting. It means that you have to look at a server as a volume with its resources made from (among others) memory, space, and processors. Each server (machine) has a number of processors, memory, and space (hard drives) we will call them resources, and they cost a fixed amount. The owner (a company like GoDaddy) of the server, needs to divide the server into sections and rent it out. There are only a few choices when it comes to hat company ROI. For example, let’s pretend that the server needs to bring in each month $1000, so the owner has the choice to “divide” the server the way he needs it. Since the division is virtual and not fiscal, can slice the server any way he needs it. 

Now, if you pay for your hosting just a few dollars each month, guarantee you have the hosting on a “buggy” machine that will have unstable and random behavior… Despite the that you see the website when you search directly for it, the search engine will not display it on other people search guaranteed. 

There are billions of searches each day, and there are millions of websites that the search engine has to choose from and display on the first page. The difference between show and no-show on the first page is minuscule and this can be achieved with work and time. 

Let’s talk about website integration next. How integrated is your website makes a big difference? Guess from two similar websites, which one will show up on searches?

One has the Website, EHR, Payment Processing System, Booking, Billing, Marketing, Texting, Video, and Webinars under the same “roof” all using the same “core” or…

One Website that has each system as a third party and is integrated? All function as a block, but each is hosted on its own servers, they have their own procedures and policies? 

It is no point to make… all clear that having all under the same “roof” will save a lot, starting with the money you pay and finishing with the fact that it is only one policy… yours.

Website on-page SEO is important for your business. It needs to be done correctly and maintain periodically in order to have the best results. One example would be the articles you add to your blog. Those are the ones that will serve the keywords to the search engine, and when a visitor uses that keyword in a search, the search engine will display your website because contain that keyword. This is oversimplified but in large this is one criterion. There are a lot more features that does into on-page SEO? Yes, there are, and a lot of work is needed in order to have the Website performant… or you can have a performant system that eliminates 90% of the work you need to do each day.

Website off-page SEO is regarding all the website optimization that is done online outside of your website, This contains a lot, but if you start with social media posts will help your practice grow.

Now we are going to talk about PPC or pay-per-click advertising. This is one of the biggest revenue any search engine like Google has. They make millions from selling advertising but unless you really know what you are doing I will suggest staying away from PPC. The organic searches are 80% and the PPC is only 20% of the clicks. In other words, the PPC does not offer the guarantee of the best service when it comes to PPC, this is why the visitors stay away from PPC unless they are looking for products. 

Once you start paying the PPC, the search engine will “suppress” your website, and it will not show back on organic searches for a long period of time. They make a lot of money on PPC and no money at all on organic searches… so guess what will happen if you stop paying PPC

Then, your competitors, the ones that use PPC, most likely use third-party services for their PPC campaigns… and one of those contractor strategies, is to “consume” your advertising daily PPC budget by clicking on your ad… once the budget is depleted, your add will disappear… Google and other search engines are fighting against those practices, but usually, those service providers are not in the US and they are not affected by the same rules you (a US business) So, there are a lot of options for them to win, and you to lose your money.

Last, but not least is Social Media. We’ll go over this in depth at a later date, but for now, I want to say that a daily posting is the best approach to establish a solid presence that will lead to more new patients.