Today’s post, A Guide To Building Your Practice Website Cost Effectively is a guest post from Nina Litovsky: a sponsor of this blog and owner and founder of web designer firm Nina Interactive, where her team and she work exclusively with medical and dental practices to create modern interactive and visually appealing websites. Every practice needs a website. And knowing how to do it cost effectively is mandatory for a Lean Private Practice. So, read on for all you need to know to build or update your practice website:
A Guide To Building Your Practice Website Cost Effectively
A website can be a very valuable tool for marketing your practice and educating your patients. Built properly, your website should attract qualified visitors, clearly communicate your unique value, visually differentiate your practice from the competition and compel visitors to become your patients.
For your website to be effective, it should be properly planned, well organized and professionally built. Once your website is up and running, you will also need reliable help when you decide to implement modifications and improvements. Choosing a company to build and maintain your website isn’t easy, especially since many medical marketing companies offer seemingly attractive options that may turn out costly and problematic for you in the long run. This article will help you make informed decisions in your website building process by focusing on priorities that you will need to consider and by offering efficient and cost-effective solutions.
Why Every Practice Needs a Website
Most practices have some online presence, be it social media, provider directories, insurance or business listings. With this reliance on external tools do you still need your own website? Yes! There are several reasons why you should have a website:
- Even after using an external tool, patients may turn to your website to learn more about the doctors and treatments offered or to confirm details such as accepted insurance plans, directions, contact information and office hours.
- Having a website will greatly increase your visibility and prominence in search engine results.
- A website is one of your primary marketing assets. A high-quality custom website will help you stand out among competing practices.
- Even if your practice is in a rural area where people use phone books and where there is little competition around, it’s still worth having a website as a forward-thinking solution. People are getting increasingly web-savvy, and more competition may be moving into the area in the near future.
- Your website can have interactive tools to help your patients accomplish tasks such as downloading paperwork or care instructions, scheduling an online appointment, applying for financing, accessing the patient portal, or submitting an online payment. All these internal website tools make life easier for both your patients and your office.
There’s a tension between individual websites and web-dominant titans like Google. On the one hand, you definitely can’t assume that people will remain committed to using your website to get information about your services. On the other hand, external platforms will often offer substandard information about you. Most importantly, if people do turn to an external service after they have already been on your website, there’s a great risk they’ll never return. The higher the quality of your internal website tools and the better the discoverability of these tools, the lower the risk of losing business.
Website Pricing Considerations
You should be cautious of web designers that underbid just to get your business, and then don’t deliver as promised or disappear altogether. You should be equally alarmed about agencies that charge much higher than the market rate and provide a website that is of average quality at best. Consider the following factors when you evaluate web design proposals:
Size of the Agency
Go to the agency’s website and check the size of their team. The rates of larger agencies are typically higher because they need to cover company overhead such as physical office expenses and team salaries. These overhead costs will inevitably be built into the price of your website regardless of the agency’s pricing model, be it high monthly fees, a contract, a proprietary platform that forces you to continue using the agency’s services, or other hidden fees.
On the other hand, solo web design freelancers may be unreliable and more likely to fail to deliver a good product or disappear during or after the project, leaving you without maintenance and support. You may be faced with large unforeseen expenses in the future when you have to find someone else to repair or maintain your website.
An effective solution can be choosing a small firm that has a lean team and can deliver a high-quality website. With a lean team composed of solid professionals, you should pay less than large agency rates while enjoying high quality service and a more personalized, concierge experience.
Full-Service vs. Specialist Agencies
A large marketing agency can provide a full range of services and various bells and whistles, whereas a small firm would provide a few select specialized services. Using a full-service agency may seem convenient but has significant downsides. For example, you don’t get to pick and choose the specialists you work with and cannot control the quality of their work. Even though your service plan may come with many bundled features, the quality of those features may be just average, standardized, and mass-produced. Getting bundled features from a large agency may be inefficient and costly if you don’t use some of those features or if you can get them elsewhere for a lower price. Lastly, those features often work only on the agency’s proprietary website platform, which will force you to depend on that agency for as long as your website is active (read more on vendor lock-in in Own vs. Rent section below).
Using third-party features and hiring small firms for various aspects of your marketing can deliver better and more cost-effective results while allowing you full control over your marketing strategy. Small firms usually offer more flexibility, better accommodation of your needs, and a much more personalized service than a large company. For example, you can shop around separately for a web design firm and advertising specialist that offer the best prices and quality. You can replace a vendor you aren’t happy with, while keeping the other vendors. You can create your own marketing strategy by adding or removing vendors and services as necessary. Such a modular setup allows you to easily adapt to changes in your marketing and budget, control your costs, and pay only for the services you need for as long as you need them. And, it could cost less than paying a full-service agency for everything included.
Own vs. Rent
Just like with real estate, you can either own your website or rent it from the agency. A rental website is typically hosted by the agency on their own platform or hosting server. The monthly subscription fees that you pay to the agency for hosting your website are typically much higher than average market fees from a general hosting provider. The ongoing fees need to be factored into the price of the website when you evaluate your proposal, because over time those high fees will add up and make your website a lot more expensive than it’s worth. In addition, renting a website makes you locked into using the company’s services. Changing hosts may be difficult or impossible, and outside marketing experts you might want to hire will probably have limited or no access to your website.
Building a website that you will own usually involves a one-time upfront cost, but your ongoing monthly fees will be much lower because you can host your website with any general hosting provider you choose. The quality of your hosting service can also be higher if you choose a good vendor (see below for our hosting provider recommendations). You will be able to use any marketing experts you choose and simply give them access to your website. Technical maintenance of the website will be handled by your hosting company, and you can keep your initial web designer on an hourly retainer to help with any website updates, taking that burden off your shoulders. The advantage of owning your website is not only monthly savings, but also the freedom and flexibility to update and build up your website as you please and to choose your own host, third-party website services, and marketing experts. Your website is one of your most important business assets, so we certainly recommend keeping it under your own control.
For more information, read our article about how to save money when building your practice website.
Choosing Website Platform and Hosting
As a website owner, it’s important that you find reliable and cost-effective solutions for your website platform (the software that’s used to build your website) and hosting environment (the vendor that will store your website files and provide ongoing technical maintenance to your platform and server). We build our client websites on the WordPress platform. The versatility, power, and ease of use make WordPress the platform of choice for tens of millions of websites. WordPress is stable and well-maintained, and comes equipped with solid security, regular updates, and virtually unlimited ways to customize and expand your website with various features. The platform offers a built-in visual editor that will enable you or your team to edit the content of your website without having to rely on a developer. The platform is also inherently search-engine friendly, providing your website with a technically sound base for your SEO and marketing efforts.
Proprietary platforms that are offered by some medical web design agencies are unlikely to match WordPress when it comes to versatility, ease of use, and cost-efficiency. As mentioned, a website that is developed on a proprietary platform can be hosted only with the web design agency that owns the platform – usually for a high monthly fee that includes the agency markup. On the other hand, a WordPress website can be hosted with any general hosting company for a much lower monthly fee. You will be paying monthly dues to the hosting vendor directly, and the vendor will host your website and provide all the routine technical maintenance to the server.
We set up our client websites with hosting vendors that are either chosen by our clients or recommended by us. All our recommendations are unaffiliated, objective, and made solely based on our thorough research and extensive experience. We usually recommend the GrowBig hosting plan from Siteground. This plan combines affordable pricing with high-quality service and offers all the features necessary for a good and well-maintained website: regular backups with 30-day backup storage and an easy option to restore from backups, performance optimization to make the website faster, malware scanning, automatic platform updates, and more. Siteground, as well as some other hosting companies, can help migrate your existing website over to their hosting plan.
Read our in-depth article about choosing the right hosting plan for your website.
Website HIPAA Compliance Considerations
The following suggestions are based on our understanding of HIPAA and should not be taken as legal advice. You may want to consult your lawyer for accurate legal advice on your particular situation.
HIPAA compliance involves protection of any private health information (PHI) that is stored or processed online. Any personal detail linked to someone’s health condition automatically becomes PHI. For example, a patient’s name or email alone can be considered PHI only if it is in any way associated with a health condition or treatment.
Your practice website may not need to comply with HIPAA if it’s used solely for informational and marketing purposes. According to the HIPAA guidelines, “a HIPAA compliant website is only required if the website is used to collect, display, store, process, or transmit PHI. If your website simply showcases your company, provides contact information, and lists your services, then there are no HIPAA requirements for your website.” However, it is always beneficial for any practice website to follow industry-standard security requirements, such as using a secure server with SSL/TLS encryption. A website protected with SSL conveys trust to patients and looks good to search engines.
Most practice owners want to have a web-based contact form to enable patients to schedule an appointment online or to request a call from the office to schedule an appointment by phone. Online forms that capture PHI, such as patient intake forms or appointment schedulers, should be protected with the level of security and privacy required by HIPAA. The best thing is to move the form itself to a HIPAA compliant form processing provider such as LocalMed, ZocDoc, Flex Forms, Yapi, FormDr, Jotform, and others. You can keep your web site “as is” and just upgrade your forms to achieve compliance and receive the form submissions as usual.
Alternatively, a website may have a simple appointment request form that collects only the minimum necessary information, such as the patient’s name and phone, with no detail as to what the appointment is for. That information gets automatically emailed to the office for future processing. It is necessary that the office has secure, encrypted HIPAA compliant email. Some of our clients use Google Workspace that comes with a HIPAA compliant option.
Website Copywriting
Your website should have good content in order to educate your readers, attract prospective patients, and rank well with search engines. Your content should be easy to read for an average reader, so it’s best to write the content in a conversational style, use simple language that’s easy to digest, and use common words rather than medical terminology whenever possible. Your content should also be comprehensive to explain the value of your practice and to educate your patients about the treatments that you offer. Website usability studies show that people rarely read webpages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. Therefore, keep your content informative and comprehensive, but also concise and formatted with paragraphs, headings and bulleted lists when appropriate.
Our in-house copywriting services are provided by a professional writer with extensive experience in writing content for medical or dental websites. Some of our clients prefer to write their own content, in which case we guide them through the writing process and assist with formatting and proofreading of the copy.
Read our in-depth article about creating good content for your website.
Website Main Ranking Factors and SEO Priorities
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be defined as making technical and content adjustments to your website to make it friendly for search engines. SEO ensures that your website can be easily indexed by the search engine and shows up in results for relevant searches. Generally, search engines such as Google reward those websites that are fast-performing, well-ordered, informative, and accessible for people with disabilities. Therefore, you or your website designer need to make sure that your website follows all these standards.
If your web designer builds the website in WordPress and hosts it with a reputable WordPress hosting vendor, they will be able to set up and automate most of the technical aspects of SEO, such as performance optimization, schema markup, image compression, sitemaps, and more. An SEO specialist should assist with writing informative website content with relevant keywords placed strategically throughout the webpages, as well as perform all the necessary optimization of your website content, such as formatting of page titles, adding relevant meta titles and descriptions for each page, and optimizing images and videos.
A good web designer can take you a long way in making your site accessible to search engines. Not all web designers understand the principles of SEO, and most SEO specialists don’t understand web design. Our lean team uniquely combines both skill sets because we believe that a well-designed website with strong SEO is the best solution for our clients.
In addition to solid website optimization, search engine marketing includes creating and updating social media pages, business listings, and a listing on Google maps. It’s also necessary to create listings in relevant business, insurance, local and professional online directories (also known as citations). All these listings should feature consistent and updated practice information. Other factors that may have an impact on your website’s search engine rankings include active social media presence with authentic and original content that attracts user engagement (likes, comments, and clicks), numerous good reviews on a variety of online platforms, the longevity of your website, and community involvement such as volunteering, local sponsorships and charity. Getting other websites to link back to yours can also help, but you will need to get quality links that come from locally reputable websites – for example, from a local news website, a local organization that you sponsor, or a local publication that features your article. Such links should be relevant to your specialty and earned organically rather than bought.
For more information, check out the SEO recommendations that we give to our clients. If you would like to learn more about SEO, read our in-depth article that lists SEO priorities for medical practices and deconstructs some of the myths around SEO.
Website Evaluations
We work with both startup practices that want to build their first websites and mature practices that want to redesign their existing websites. Practice owners often reach out to us for a second opinion, asking to evaluate an already built website and suggest improvements in visual appearance, functionality, technical performance, page loading speed, SEO, and other aspects.
We analyze the website with multiple tools to check for potential SEO and technical problems. We also thoroughly examine each page, paying particular attention to the visual appearance and functionality of the website. Problems such as poor and cluttered design, pages that load forever, dysfunctional features, broken links and missing pages, and usability issues can make it necessary to redesign the website and revise the content. Sometimes clients ask to rebuild websites that are not visibly flawed because they want to refresh and modernize the look of the website, make the website mobile-friendly, or move the website to the WordPress platform away from their current marketing company and save on future monthly maintenance fees. We always talk to prospective clients to find out their reasons to redesign their existing websites and to plan the project accordingly.
Read our in-depth article about what makes a good medical website. If you would like to build a new website or to redesign an existing one for your practice, feel free to reach out and discuss your needs with us.
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About the Author
Nina Litovsky
Website: NinaInteractive.com
Email: Nina@NinaInteractive.com
Nina Litovsky is the founder of Nina Interactive, a boutique firm that offers high-quality custom web design, content writing, logo design, and foundational SEO services for solo and group medical and dental practices, doctor-managed blogs, and healthcare-related businesses.