Top 5 ways to optimize your practice’s patient content

The more people interact with your website and social media content, the more highly it is rated by search engines and social platforms

Your online content gives prospective patients the opportunity to get to know, like, and trust you — three factors that, when combined, increase the likelihood that they’ll choose you as their chiropractic provider. The patient content on these pages is also valuable to the patients you currently serve. You might post updated hours during the holidays, for instance, or publish articles about how to treat a particular condition at home.

Optimizing your practice’s patient content can keep current patients coming back and new patients walking in the door. How do you do this? These five strategies can help.

Make your patient content easy to find

Have you ever visited a business’s website looking for something simple, such as their physical address or the services they provide, only to not find this information? This can be incredibly frustrating. And it can cause your site’s visitors to click off your page, never to return.

Make your patient content so easy to find that there’s no way it can be missed. On a website, this includes putting your physical address, phone number, and business hours in your page footers. Also place your phone number on the top of the page, in the header. Make it a different color so it stands out.

If you have a blog, don’t bury it on the website, and configure it so visitors can search for certain keywords. This way, if they are interested in learning more about how to ease neck pain, for instance, they can type this phrase in the search bar and be taken to a list of blogs that talk about this topic. Force them to scroll through every blog ever published to find the information they want and they’re probably not going to scroll very far.

On your social media pages, complete your practice’s profile fully. This enables those who have connected with you on these platforms to get the information they desire without having to go to your website. You can always suggest that they can go to your site to learn more if they want, but this should be more of an option than a required step.

Organize your content in a way that makes sense

Just as you want certain information to almost pop out of your website, organizing the content in a specific way can also optimize your patients’ experience. If your content is unorganized and scattered about, your site’s visitors may decide that it takes too much brainpower to figure out where to look for what they want.

Look at your website as if you were a prospective patient. If you wanted to know what services you provide, is this information listed on a “Services” page, for instance? What if you have questions about the types of conditions chiropractic can help? Does this have a dedicated space as well?

One of the most traditional ways to organize website information is with tabs at the top. This is where a patient may look for certain categories of information. Some businesses place clickable links down the side, sometimes in addition to the tabs at the top.

Another option that can be helpful is to include a frequently asked question page or “FAQs” page. Include all of the most common questions patients and prospective patients ask. If a certain page on your website includes more information on this topic, include a link in the question’s answer so they can click on it if they want to learn more.

Focus on quality versus quantity

It is often recommended that you update your content regularly if you want to rank higher with search engines. When you’re busy treating patients, writing a blog every week or posting on your social media several times a day can feel like a major chore. Plus, committing to this type of schedule can cause you to be more focused on the quantity of your posts versus their quality.

Low-quality posts can negatively impact your reputation and lower the community’s faith in your expertise. If they view your content as subpar, they may assume that your services are subpar as well.

Come up with an editorial calendar that allows you enough time to create posts high in quality. If this means that you only publish a blog once a month, so be it. At least it will be a blog worth reading.

Personalize your patient content

Do you specialize in treating a specific type of patient? Maybe a majority of the people you see in your office are 55 and older, or you specialize in working with athletes who play a certain sport.

Optimize your patient content by speaking directly to this demographic. Consider the topics that are important to them and that they’d likely want to learn more about. Developing patient content that is personal offers a few benefits:

• One, it increases the likelihood that your content will be read.
• Two, it tells your patients that you care enough about them to provide the information that they may be most concerned about or want to learn more about.
• Three, if your content includes the keywords that your target audience is likely to search for online, there’s a greater chance you’ll show up in their search results.

Encourage interaction

The more people interact with your content, the more highly it is rated by search engines and social platforms. So, encourage interaction, increasing that content’s level of importance with the algorithms used by that online site.

End your blogs with a statement that encourages the reader to comment. On your social media pages, ask questions or encourage followers to share or like your posts. Tell them specifically what you want them to do because, if you don’t, they may do nothing at all.

These five strategies can help you optimize your practice’s patient content. They also make your sites and online platforms more user-friendly while improving their search engine rank. This makes it easier for you to reach your patients, and for your patients to reach you.