When you start out a private practice, building an online presence is one of the easiest and fastest ways to grow your customer base. You may have some loyal patients who are going to continue to use your services, but it is likely you will need to attract new patients.
Having a website makes it easy for patients to find you, see the services you offer, learn more about you and trust you as their private GP of choice.
It can seem very daunting to need to create a website, however they are becoming increasingly easy to develop with even limited coding or software development experience.
“No code” platforms such as Wix and Square Space, are designed to make website building as simple as PowerPoint or Microsoft Word, or for the more tech-enabled, tools such as Webflow are infinitely flexible.
By visiting their websites, you can learn more about how these platforms work, how to create your own website and many guides you can follow.
However, building an optimised website requires much more than 1-hour of your time on a website editor. Critical to the look and feel of a website are the branding and images used.
We’d recommend having professional photographs taken of your team and office, as otherwise populating a website can be tricky. Professional imagery also works as a trust signal to potential patients.
Having a high-quality website can reflect your high-quality services.
You will also need a bulk of content on your website to not only explain to patients what you can offer them but also to ensure that Google (and other search engines) correctly find and rank your website when they index your pages.
Google’s search engine optimisation (SEO) is nuanced but important point to understand.
Google and other website such as SEMrush, HubSpot and Moz provide a wealth of guides, hints and tips to help you rank highly in search results, meaning patients find your website.
There will be specific keywords and phrases you should be using in your content, you should be correctly naming your pages and images and you need to make sure your site is performing well technically.
However you decide to build a site, whether you do this yourself or outsource it, you’ll also need to pay for hosting and for ongoing maintenance to ensure that your ‘digital front door’ remains effective.
You will need to continually update content on the site, a news or blog section is good for this, and make sure your services are up to date.
Having a professional and well populated website also allows you to implement other systems and processes which can improve the running of your practice and patient experience.
Once you have a website you have the option to offer online booking, can take payments online and gives you another channel to speak to your patients.
Find out more about systems that can help you optimise your private GP practice
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