Resource Centers:(News, information, and tools to support your practice)
August 2008
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Land more patients with 'landing pages'
Newsflash: Your home page may not be the most viewed page on your Web site.
Content on your practice’s home page is important, but it is only the first step. If you want to land patients, “landing pages” are the answer.
A landing page is the first destination a visitor “lands” after clicking on a link or advertisement. The main goal of a landing page is to produce a “conversion,” whether it is a sign-up, sale, or lead. By optimizing your chiropractic landing pages, and sending prospective patients to the right landing pages, you can significantly impact your site’s revenue.
Depending on their search criteria, potential patients may bypass your home page entirely. Therefore, you should tailor each page toward one of your practice’s products and services. By tracking the traffic of these pages, you get feedback on how to hone in on the messages and offers that are most effective without having to constantly tinker with the rest of your Web site.
When your practice is ready to begin building landing pages — or optimizing existing ones — here a few tips to keep in mind.
• Define your conversion. Before you design your landing page, define that page’s conversion activity. Ensure each step in the conversion process either states or supports your practice’s service proposition. For example: With a newsletter landing page, the conversion activity is entering an e-mail address into a form and clicking accept.
• Give the visitor what they want. Most people don’t come to your landing page and look at every single design element. They come looking for quick answers to their health questions, or to learn about a specific aspect of your practice. This is not your home page.
The information should be compelling and relevant to the search terms that brought the visitor there. If a visitor searches for information on a “herniated disc,” the landing page should talk about spinal disc herniation — and how your practice addresses it.
• Keep the forms simple. The fewer fields, the more likely someone will fill them out. Landing pages should provide solutions, not inundate visitors with more to think about. Make the input cursor jump to the next field, and allow users to tab around fields. Auto-populate any fields you can. Don’t ask for city, state, or province if you ask for a ZIP or postal code.
• Remove navigation. If you can, remove the navigation bar. Of course, don’t remove it if it is essential to the conversion process. Too much scrolling can become a distraction. Remember your message, and if
• Stay focused. Avoid promoting or linking to other areas of your site. The point of the landing page is to prevent your visitor from wandering. Imagine if your practice encouraged prospective patients entering your clinic to “choose their own treatment,” instead of following a doctor’s recommendation.
Once they walk out the door and stop thinking about your offer, you’ve lost them.
• Keep focus above the ‘fold.’ Pay attention to the virtual fold (the bottom of the screen before scrolling). Place enough content above the fold to allow your visitor to make a decision about continuing on the site. If a visitor has to click or scroll to figure out what your practice offers, the only thing they’ll click is the back button.
• Improve readability. Make it simple to figure out how to convert. Place the important information (whether it’s your copy or image) close to the middle, and never distract your user from that focal point.
Customers tend to interpret “dead” space or too many graphics as the end of the information.
Some other aspects to improve readability include reducing the number of columns, making links blue and underlined, using black type on white background in 12-point font or larger, making buttons stand out through size and color, and using action text on buttons, such as “Click to get your free spinal screening.”
• Provide multiple response methods. Determine your practice’s single goal upfront before designing your landing page and develop it to that purpose. If you’d like visitors to be able to respond in ways beyond the form — say, by calling or e-mailing you — make the contact information and calls-to-action prominent.
Practices that design their landing pages to capture client information should use a softer approach than those who use it for selling.
• Test, test, test. Testing is the only reliable way to improve landing page performance. Test the entire user experience and ask:
1. Is there a focus on the whole page?
2. Does the message match the advertisement?
3. Did you eliminate all distractions?
4. Are there enough conversion exits?
5. Does the page enhance your practice’s image?
Design your page carefully, while keeping it simple and to the point. With an appropriately targeted landing page, your chiropractic Web site will convert visitors into patients.
Michael Teitelbaum is the president of TruePresence, a national Internet marketing firm. He can be reached at 800-506-9116 or through www.truepresence.com.
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