10-Point Checklist. for Building an Exceptional Website

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1 10-Point Checklist for Building an Exceptional Website

2 It s important to periodically review your hospital's website and assess what s working and what s not. This helpful 10-point checklist gives you a quick and effective way to review 10 key areas of your site and see how it stacks up. If you identify areas for improvement, let s talk about how you can enhance the user experience on your site. 1 Responsive Design Mobile usage is skyrocketing and it s important to present the best experience for site visitors regardless of how they access your site. The fact is, if your site isn t usable for a large number of visitors, not much else matters. Google agrees. In an attempt to improve the user experience for mobile searchers, Google started adding mobile-friendly labels to search results. Tip: Don t put your site rankings at risk test your site using Google s Mobile-Friendly Test. 2 Provider Promotion According to the Pew Internet Project, 77 percent of online health seekers say they search for conditions or doctors online. Supporting and promoting your providers online isn t just good practice, it s mandatory. Make sure you include profiles of your doctors that showcase your providers specialties and personalities. Tip: Potential patients are searching for online ratings and reviews attract those searchers to your site instead of third-party sites like Healthgrades by adding ratings and reviews to your provider profiles. 3 Site Search Your website contains medical terms and provider names that can be difficult for consumers to spell. Think ophthalmology. Does your site have a search that returns relevant results even if the visitor misspells a name? Does it present results in a clean, tabbed view with brief summaries of the pages in question? Both are helpful to visitors searching for information. Tip: Check common terms and names and common misspelling in your site search and see what the results are.

3 4 Cross-Promotion Enhance your visitor experience by connecting visitors with relevant information as they navigate through your site. Be sure you are connecting visitors with providers, services, classes, events and locations. For example, if they are researching a medical condition, showcase your experts in that condition on that page. That way if the site visitor is ready to take the next step and look for a provider, the information is right at their fingertips. Tip: Managing content on hundreds of pages and interconnecting it all can be a full time job! Check to see if your content management system (CMS) offers dynamic panels that automatically connect and present related information. 5 On-page SEO Factors Do your URLs look like this:. Or like this: Notice a difference? URLs describe the page to both site visitors and search engines. They are a key part of search engine results, and help users decide if the page contains the information they re looking for. Well-crafted URLs should be easily read and relevant. Tip: When it comes to having URLs that support SEO, the right CMS can make all the difference. Be sure your CMS is creating SEO-friendly and human readable URLs. 6 Bill Payment Online bill payment allows patients to pay faster and more often, but patients aren t the only ones who benefit from its convenience. Online bill pay also has a positive effect on your revenue cycle management. It automates part of the process which reduces overall processing fees and saves your accounting department time. Tip: When it comes to ecommerce capabilities, it s critical that you have a secure bill payment option and stay in compliance by storing payment records properly. 7 Hosting Don t underestimate how important hosting is to your overall website health. Organizations that host in-house often find out the hard way that their site s uptime isn t their I.T. team s top priority. Downtime equals lost patients, so regardless of if you host internally or externally, be sure to have a service level guarantee in place to keep your site s uptime a priority. In addition, if you choose to host externally, be sure you are working with an organization that understands HIPAA and PCI standards and has the proven ability to support critical data infrastructures. Tip: Don t jeopardize your patient data! According to Forbes, data breaches in healthcare totaled over 112 million records in Hosting with an organization that specializes in the healthcare industry minimizes your risk of breach.

4 8 Calls to Action Your website s main purpose is to help site visitors connect with your organization. It s important to strategically place calls to action on high traffic pages. Review your top visited pages and make sure you re offering calls to action on those pages, especially ones that are tied to specific goals. For example, if your goal is to increase volume for orthopedics, make sure you have a strong call to action on every page in the orthopedic section. Tip: Remember, if you re having a hard time identifying a call to action on a page, imagine how difficult it is for a potential patient to figure out what to do next! 9 Calendar and Events Offering classes and events helps your community live healthier lives. Your online calendar should make it easy for site visitors to find, register, and pay for classes and events. The calendar should also offer an intuitive back-end system that enables your organization to easily manage registration and payment information. Tip: Consider offering a shopping cart, a popular feature in online calendars that allows users to register for multiple classes and pay once. 10 Forms Healthcare websites offer lots of forms everything from contact us to pre-registration. Some forms are complicated and ask insurance or health-related questions. Other forms require just a name and . It s important to adhere to HIPAA regulations and protect the privacy of health information through secure data storage, controlled workflow and restricted access to the data. Make sure you re encrypting protected health information (PHI) in transit and in storage. Tip: Keep forms as short as possible and get the minimum information needed to move forward. The longer the form, the more likely the site visitor will not fill it out or abandon it partway.

5 About Geonetric Geonetric helps healthcare brands thrive through effective marketing and distinctive websites. As a marketing agency and software developer with both creative and technical expertise, Geonetric provides hospitals, health systems and medical groups with a healthcare-specific content management system, hosting, marketing strategies and creative services optimized for the unique needs of the healthcare industry hello@geonetric.com th Ave SE Cedar Rapids, IA 52401