Brand your Practice - SEO

Posted by Kaylie on 6 July 2011

In my previous posts on psychiatric practice websites, I have covered the importance of having a website so your practice can be found online. If you have a website, or are now considering one, congratulations! At this point, you could rest secure in the knowledge that you have a website to send patients to, or you can do a bit of work and try to make your website appear near the top of a search engine list of results. That’s right; we are moving on to the ever expanding subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website!

SEO requires a bit of work, but really pays off when you see that a search for “insert city name here psychiatrist” lists your website on the first or second page. After all, you want your website to bring in new patients, right? Well, one of the best ways to do that is to get as high in the search engine results as possible.

We are now going to dive into some of the work I mentioned earlier. I highly suggest keeping a folder on your computer dedicated to SEO and keeping all notes/decisions you make regarding SEO within the folder. You’ll want to be able to look back and know why you made a certain decision or where your website ranked when you started, so start by being organized! I recommend you download an example of psychiatric practice website visitors to help you with this exercise.

The first question you need to ask yourself is: Who do I want to visit my website? You probably answered that you would like new patients to visit your website. However, don’t forget about current patients. And do you want fellow behavioral healthcare practitioners to visit your website?

Now, for each group of visitors, ask yourself: What page on my website would answer the questions they are asking? This is what we call a Landing Page.

A landing page is, in short, a page that contains information focused towards a particular visitor type. By putting all the information and answers to potential questions the visitor type might have, you are optimizing the user experience. How so? Well, if the first page they land on when coming to your site contains the content they are searching for, they don’t need to click around your site looking for it or, worse yet, leave your site to look for one that does have the information they want.

The last thing I want you to do today is this: For each landing page, ask yourself if it has adequate content to satisfy your targeted group’s potential questions, or would a lack of content cause them to move into a separate search? What is missing? When you are done, go through each item you felt was “missing” and consider adding that information to the landing page. Only add items that make sense (eg: potential patients don’t need to know who to contact for billing questions) and, if applicable, talk with your website designer about how to add it without making the page overwhelming.