Medical blogs are a great way to attract new users to your healthcare practice. Just think how many people google their symptoms looking for answers.
When you consistently blog on topics relevant to your practice, you are likely to increase brand visibility and attract new users your way.
A well-written, informative blog can help you establish a trustworthy relationship with new users. And that can further lead to achieving higher conversion rates, i.e., having more users complete goals you established. For example, if your goal is to have people schedule their appointment online, a conversion rate would refer to the percentage of people that do it.
You could even hire an app development company and ask them to devise a handy app for your users so that they can quickly access and enjoy your content from their phone.
Without further ado, we will share with you 9 steps that will help you increase
conversion rates on your medical blog.
[Source: Unsplash]
Step No 1. Inspect your website.
Before your blog goes live, we suggest you try inspecting it by yourself first.
Think of what you want your readers to do after they finish reading your blog. Do you want them to book an appointment? Or perhaps you want them to buy medical products you offer on your site?
Whatever your goal is, go ahead and read your posts before anyone else does. See if they inspire you to complete the action you want your users to perform.
When you finish exploring your blog, ask yourself -Did you enjoy reading your posts? Did you have any trouble locating call-to-action (CTAs) buttons? Did you do what you hope your clients will do by the time they’re done reading?
Be honest, because that will help you understand which elements need to be improved. If you find inspecting your site hard because you already know it like the back of your hand and you can’t be unbiased, you can always ask your patients for their feedback.
For instance, you can use social media or send them emails and surveys to ask for their opinion. Just make sure you don’t give out the impression that there is a prize at stake for those that respond. You want them to be honest without sugarcoating their opinions.
Furthermore, we suggest you check out your competitors and read their blogs. Pay attention to what you like and, if you haven’t already, consider implementing the same elements and techniques into your website.
Step No 2. Create accurate and informative content.
Most users don’t like it when you use big words. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t master professional communication.
Your medical blog is supposed to educate people and help you build trust with them. If your content is too basic and dull, users will look for answers elsewhere. So, don’t oversimplify it.
Another great tip is to make sure your blog is at least reviewed by a medical professional, if not written by one. The reason for that is simple – would you trust just about anyone to give you good and accurate medical advice? Neither would your users, so it’s best if you hire professionals to blog on healthcare topics.
Now, did you know that Google ‘hires’ quality raters – i.e., people that evaluate how well Google’s search results fulfill users’ needs?
Quality raters check webpage content to see if it has a strong E-A-T – i.e., Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
If your website meets these qualities, that increases your chances of having higher rankings and greater search visibility, which can help bring more users to your blog. While E-A-T may not directly affect your conversion rate, it does affect SEO and SEO affects conversion.
Step No 3. Pick the right topic to blog about.
When it comes to deciding on what to write about, your patients might be able to help you with that.
All you have to do is listen to the questions they ask, make a list of their FAQs, and start writing blogs that answer those questions.
Moreover, you can also use Google trends to discover trending topics and check if the ones you want to write about are popular. Choosing the right topic will help you spark users’ interest and encourage them to click on that subscribe button and become your patients.
Step No 4. Offer empathy.
Medical blog authors often tend to forget who is reading their content. People usually don’t google symptoms or read about a specific disease out of the blue. They most often do it when they worry that they or someone they love may be sick.
Sure, it’s not easy to show empathy when you’re not communicating with patients in person, but you can still make your blog more pleasant for reading.
For instance, instead of featuring doctors’ images, you can ask your patients for their photos along with their testimonials. That will help make you appear more credible, relatable, and caring.
Moreover, empathic content allows you to build strong, trustworthy relationships with users and helps you convert them into patients.
Step No 5. Create appealing call-to-action buttons.
The best way to enhance the appearance of your CTAs is to create beautiful, eye-catching buttons. You can experiment with colors until you create a striking button.
When you’re happy with the design of your button, carefully choose where to place it. CTAs should be easy to spot so that people don’t have to look for them.
A CTA button at the end of a blog will help users understand what they should do and where to go next.
Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter or have them book an appointment? Whatever your goal is, you should make it obvious and avoid confusing users by offering them too many options.
Step No 6. Carefully craft your forms.
If your goal is to have users book an appointment with you or subscribe to your blog, you’ll have to ask them to fill out a form first.
But people are usually not too fond of sharing their personal information. This is especially true when it comes to sharing their medical history since most people tend to perceive that kind of information as private and may not want to share it without meeting the doctor in person.
That’s why it’s important you only ask for what is absolutely necessary, like their name, email or a phone number, their location and maybe a brief description of their medical problem.
Another thing you should be mindful of is how much time users need to fill out your forms. No one wants to spend ages entering their details.
So, if your medical practice specializes in different medical fields, you could add a drop-down list to your form and let users select the type of problem they are facing (e.g., if they have a heart condition, issues with their head or sight, etc.). This will help save users’ time and speed up the process of filling out your form!
Step No 7. Use live chat.
For those who don’t like talking over the phone, you could offer them the possibility to contact you via live chat. In case users have additional questions that you can answer quickly and efficiently, live chat is a terrific time-saving option.
For example, imagine you run a private dermatology practice and blog on dermatology topics.
When people finish reading your post on, say, the most common causes of a specific type of acne, they may want to schedule an appointment with you. They may not feel comfortable doing that over the phone but they could do it via chat.
When you offer the live chat option to your patients, they can quickly contact you and get the answer to their questions in no time.
Another great thing about live chat is that it gives you insight into what people want to learn more about. Their questions may become your new blog topics or help you improve the content you already published.
Step No 8. Analyze and test your medical blog.
The final step that can help you increase conversion rates on your medical blog is to analyze and test your blog’s performance.
You can use analytics software to track various parameters and understand how well your blog performs. For starters, we advise you to start tracking your conversion rates.
You can also calculate your bounce rate, i.e., understand how many people abandon your website before completing the goals you established.
Some analytics tools feature the practical session recording tool, which allows you to see at which point users abandon your website. That can help you understand which sections of your blog are perhaps problematic and in need of improvement.
Aside from analyzing the performance of your blog, you should also test it. Testing is a terrific way of understanding what works on your medical blog and what doesn’t because the analysis alone can’t provide you with such answers.
A great way to test a blog is to use A/B testing. To conduct an A/B test, you should present users with two or more versions of a page and then compare the versions to figure out which one performs better.
If the results of your analysis and testing show that some elements of your blog need improving, make sure not to change too many things at the same time. If you do that, it’s going to be difficult to understand which change contributed the most to the rise of your conversion rates. Instead, change one thing at a time and see how users react to these changes.
Step No 9. Pay attention to other factors that impact conversions.
While the design of your blog and its content have a great impact on conversion rates, other factors can also significantly affect your conversions.
For instance, some patients may want to call you before they schedule an appointment or buy a product you offer. Even if your website is informative and clear, some people will still choose to contact you over the phone to better understand how you can help them.
To improve your chances of those users converting into patients, we advise you to check if your sales team or the person answering phone calls can answer all the questions regarding your services and practice.
Another important factor that can impact your conversions is the price of your services. We advise you to check your competitor’s price list since users are likely to choose the more affordable option.
Also, do your best not to wait too long to contact users once they submit a form. No one likes to wait and not know if they successfully did something. If you’re not prompt enough, you risk gaining a negative reputation.
Now that you know what can help improve conversion rates on your medical blog, feel free to tweak your content and implement these tactics until you find what works best for your target audience and you’re happy with the results.
