Excellent website design is integral to the success of your ophthalmology digital marketing campaign. According to studies, 94% of first impressions about a website are design-related. These impressions have a direct effect on conversion rates and word-of-mouth marketing.
If your ophthalmology website isn’t producing steady leads, there may be something wrong with its design. High-quality websites attract visitors, turn them into leads, and convert a significant percentage of these leads into patients.
When used in tandem with a patient acquisition platform, solid design can generate excellent marketing results. Let’s take a closer look at what it can do for your practice.
Pillar 1: Great Ophthalmology Web Design Establishes Your Brand
Successful brand building can generate trust, secure patient loyalty, and increase awareness. Healthcare providers rarely pay sufficient attention to brand-building tactics, focusing on other elements of marketing instead.
Meanwhile, for your ophthalmology clinic, the brand is something your patients see and feel when they visit the practice or its website, communicate with the staff, and interact with your digital touchpoints (website, social media, emails).
To build your brand through web design, you can:
- Leverage website colors – different colors can trigger different emotions. To convey trust, safety, and transparency, medical practices usually use different shades of blue, green, and white (these color associations may not hold for all cultures). If you want to stand out from the crowd, you could use something else but make sure not to go overboard with gaudiness.
- Stay consistent – brand colors, logos, and other elements of the design have to stay consistent across your website and the rest of the marketing channels.
- Use the right voice – the voice you choose for the website content should be appropriate for the audience. It should be trustworthy, credible, soothing, and educational.
For an ophthalmology practice, the brand is its reputation. If you don’t build a brand on your own, the competition may do it for you in the least appealing way possible.
Pillar 2: Uses a Responsive Design
Responsive design is an integral part of your website’s success. It involves making your website easy to use regardless of the device or screen size your audience prefers. According to research, over 60% of smartphone owners use them to research a health condition.
Keep in mind that responsive design is different from mobile-friendliness. A mobile-friendly design adapts your website’s content and functions to a mobile device. Meanwhile, the responsive design also considers the device’s screen size.
Since 2019, Google has used a mobile-first indexing strategy. This means that mobile-optimized websites rank higher than those that aren’t.
Pillar 3: Improves User Experience
User experience (UX) is the way visitors interact with your website. It involves several factors, including:
- Page loading time
- Easy website navigation (organized information architecture)
- Readable content
If potential patients face bad UX on your website, they are much less likely to convert or come back. For example, 53% of mobile website visitors leave the page if it takes less than three seconds to load.
To ensure great UX, you can:
- Add well-organized and scannable content.
- Check and improve page loading time.
- Adapt the design to your audience’s needs.
- Use bullet points and colors to highlight important information.
- Use images and videos to dilute the text.
- Include clear CTAs.
- Make sure contact information is easy to find.
Excellent user experience is also important for ophthalmology SEO. In recent years, Google implemented a Core Web Vitals update that turned several UX elements into important ranking factors.
Pillar 4: Ensures ADA and HIPAA Compliance
Compliance is essential to the success of your website. That requires regular monitoring of new laws and regulations.
ADA Compliance
ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requires web content to be accessible to people with disabilities if your business is open to the public. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), poor website accessibility includes:
- Poor color contrast
- Lack of alt text on images
- No captions on the videos
- Mouse-only navigation
- Poorly accessible forms
While there is some guidance on how to stay compliant with the ADA, there isn’t an official standard yet. The easiest way to avoid lawsuits or fines is to use a website accessibility widget that gets regular updates whenever new DOJ standards appear.
You can purchase the widget individually or use it as a part of the patient acquisition platform.
HIPAA Compliance
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has clear guidelines that ensure patient data safety. To stay compliant, you need to choose HIPAA-compliant:
- Hosting service
- Forms
- Photo galleries
- Content management system (common solutions like WordPress aren’t compliant)
To ensure continuous compliance, you have two options: purchase HIPAA-compliant modules and software separately, or get them as part of the patient acquisition platform.
Pillar 5: Attracts Website Visitors
A great website is a power behind lead generation tactics. It contributes to:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Ophthalmologists
SEO for ophthalmologists involves a set of tactics aimed at achieving high rankings with search engines. These efforts place your website closer to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and make it more visible to the potential audience.
Excellent website design contributes to SEO by:
- Providing great information architecture.
- Offering linking opportunities.
- Providing space for ophthalmology keywords.
- Improving navigation and keeping visitors on your website longer.
Overall, a high-quality website also helps with content marketing, which is an integral part of a successful SEO strategy.
Pay-Per-Click for Ophthalmologists
The quality of your landing pages has a direct effect on the success of your:
- Paid search advertising – when your website appears on top of the SERPs in response to the patient’s search query
- Display adverting – when your ad appears on other websites that your patients visit.
Search engines evaluate the relevance of your landing pages to the searcher’s intent and queries. An excellent design demonstrates this relevance with keywords in URLs, metadata, readable content, great linking structure, and more.
Pillar 6: Converts Visitors into Leads
To convert visitors into leads, your website should capture their attention. The next step is to get contact information. That’s where forms come in. Once the visitor fills out a form, you gain access to a personal communication channel that helps you push the potential patient down the sales funnel.
High-quality website form design is key to successful conversions. It should gather as much information as possible without overwhelming the visitor with the number of fields. To incentivize the visitor to fill out a form, you can offer something in return such as valuable content.
After filling out the form, the visitor should have access to a “thank you” page that leads to new content.
One of the most advanced ways to convert visitors 24/7 is to use HIPAA-compliant medical managed chat. This way, visitors can get answers to their questions immediately without searching your website or filling out forms.
You can purchase this service separately or as part of the patient acquisition platform.
Pillar 7: Converts Leads into Patients
Once you gain access to contact information, you can work on conversion tactics. This requires HIPAA-compliant lead management software that comes standard with patient acquisition platforms.
This type of software can:
- Nurture leads through personalized email content.
- Increase social proof by soliciting Google Business Profile reviews.
- Collect, manage, and publish reviews on your website.
You can also take advantage of conversion-stimulating website integrations, such as:
- Automated appointment reminders
- Real-time scheduling
- Digital Intake Forms
- Virtual Consultations
- Online Payments
It’s possible to purchase the above integrations separately or as part of a patient acquisition platform like DoctorLogic.
An Example of Excellent Ophthalmology Web Design
Mattioli Vision Professionals (MVP) is an ophthalmology clinic that partnered with DoctorLogic to improve its website. The website now uses excellent visuals and implements some of the best practices mentioned above.
To achieve the desired results, DoctorLogic’s team handled web design and SEO while the patient acquisition platform enabled MVP to easily convert leads into patients. MVP now ranks prominently as a Houston provider of LASIK.