Build a Professional Website
There are many companies, or even technology savvy friends and relatives, that can build a website, but are they doing it correctly? Here are some tips to build a professional website in Healthcare:

• Modern and eye catching visuals
• Create a home page with a clear message and branding
• Provide a complete list of all services you provide
• Add content on symptoms/illnesses and cross reference it to your services. Very often patients do not know what services they need, but they know the symptoms they experience
• Post patient testimonials
• Put all your forms, post treatment and print material online
• Enable your patients to interact with you online
• Easy Navigation: Research has shown that users that have to click 3 or more times to get to the required information will leave your site
• Update your information and provide new content
• Put educational information in your website and not just as a PDF. PDF´s do not aid in Search Engine Optimization.

Online Campaigns
Creating Online Campaigns, or Pay-Per-Click ads, is a way to advertise online through search engines and content sites. It is highly underutilized with local businesses especially in healthcare. They way it works is you create an ad on services you offer or conditions you treat. Your ad will show up on search engines or content sites when someone searches for keywords that relate to your ad. Link the ad to the page on your website that is specific to that topic. The best thing about it is you define how much you want to spend per day, how much you are willing to pay per click and what geographic area you want your ad to show up in. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad and studies have shown that on average every $1 spent in local online marketing returns $8. It is important to measure and refine your ads on a weekly bases so you can maximize the amount of traffic to your website.


Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way to increase the traffic to your website by having it placed higher in search engine listings. Google, Yahoo and most of the other search engines developed very sophisticated algorithms and processes to rate and rank your website. It is a complicated business that needs constant attention.


E-Newsletters
E-Newsletters are a great way to stay in touch with your patients long after they are done with treatment. Attracting new patients is crucial to a practice, but retaining existing patients is equally important. A carefully crafted newsletter with valuable information is very powerful and shows that you care about your patients beyond their stay. If you decide to create a newsletter, spend time on creating a newsletter database that is structured in a functional way. Being able to segregate different target groups to have more targeted newsletters is an effective way of increasing the impact of newsletters.


Monitor and Measure
All of the above tools and activities are an important part of your online presence. In order to have a lasting impact, it is crucial to monitor and measure all the key aspects of online presence:

• The website statistics provide extremely valuable information such as; where the website visitors came from, why they came and what they were searching for.
• Campaign statistics allow you to fine tune the effectiveness of your campaigns and increase the conversion rate of clicks to calls/patients.
• Newsletter systems provide statistics about the opening rate of the newsletters. If the opening rate is going down, you know that the content and topics are not relevant to the audience and should adjust the information.

A professional and effective website presence is more than just having a website. A website is important, but even more essential is what you DO with your website and how you use it to grow your healthcare business.