These are five quick ways to get more patients with your website. And it won’t cost you a penny.

Now, more than anyother time before, must you use your website to promote your Private Practice. People are working from home and are online, and so now’s the time to make your website work super hard for you, so you’ll get more patients.

You don’t have to be super techy to do the following, and so even if you self-identify with ‘being terrible with tech’, all of these are within your capability. I promise!

Use these five tips to make your website grab more patients for you. Remember, your website needs to be found by patients when they are searching for something, like who’s the best osteopath in their town, or is my cough a sign of lung cancer?

The chances are, the copy you have on your website is good stuff, but it’s also likely that you’re not putting that marvellous copy to its best use.

Tip 1: Make sure that every page on your website has a clear call to action.
Generally speaking, each website page (and that goes for blog and vlog pages too) should have the goal of either getting the patient to book in to see you, or, getting them to read something else that’s relevant to why they went to that website page.

The longer patients spend mooching around your website, the more valuable Google sees your website to be.

Now you might be thinking – yeah – but I’ve got a contact form on my ‘contact’ page. They can just fill that in. The problem is, the human brain is inherently lazy (or in scientific terms, brains like to conserve energy), so if you have make a patient ‘work’ to take the next step (the call to action), you’ll likely lose them.

Put a link to make an appointment (e.g. a clickable phone number or email link, or a link to a booking calendar) as often as you can. If that’s not ‘natural’ for the particular page you are on, make sure that the webpage directs the patient to another page on your site. No website page should have a dead ending.

Tip 2: Put internal website links within your webpages.
We’re all used to clicking on website links, but did you know that if you put a link on a page in your website that links with another page on your website, Google thinks that’s pretty cool.

Why? Because everytime a patient follows that link through to another page, Google sees your site as showing valuable content, which is a key determinant of how Google thinks about your site and ranks your site.

How do you put internal links into your website? This is super easy. It could be directing that patient to page where they book an appointment, or it might be linking two blogs together. For instance, if you’re a surgeon who’s talking about breast cancer reconstruction on one page, you might link to another page that talks about breast implants or nipple reconstruction.

Tip 3: Use patient testimonials on each webpage to show credibility.
How likely would you be to buy an expensive item from an online store, if you hadn’t read any reviews?

The same is true when it comes to patients booking in to see you. Having testimonials which act as social proof is hugely important. Need help with getting these? See Getting great patient testimonials

The trick is to match up what’s being talked about on that particular webpage (e.g. knee arthroscopy rehab), with a testimonial from a patient of yours who has gone through that particular procedure, or had that particular treatment. Don’t rely on a potential patient wondering over to your testimonials page. They likely won’t.

Tip 4: Use video on your service pages.
You’ll surely know by now how hugely evangelical I am about using video to grow your Private Practice:https://www.privatepracticeninja.co.uk/why-you-nee…

Many Clinicians stop at having just one video on their website. Don’t let this be you. If you’ve time on your hands, make videos for every service that you offer. For instance, if you’re a physio practice that offers post-surgery rehab, clinical pilates, shockwave therapy or ultrasound guided injections, make a video for each and every service page. Why? Because video is the number one converting medium by far.

Go for it!

Tip 5: Write compelling webpage titles and compelling meta descriptions.
O.K. So, I left the best geeky bit until the end. Not sure what I’m on about? In a nutshell, you need to produce content that patients are searching for online and give that content a title that reflects what’s been written.

In addition, because all that potential patients have to go on is the title of the vlog or blog when deciding whether to click on that result in a Google search, you need to make sure that the little bit of prose underneath it, describes the content in the best possible way. This bit of prose is called the metadescription and it’s what tickles your brain into deciding whether or not to click.

Here’s an example. If I type into Google “ACL expert physio in London” (at the time of writing this), Google pulls up the following search result: 

The page title (also known in the geek world as the ‘title tag’) in the above example is “Specialist ACL & Knee Physio I London Knee Clinic I Balance”.

The metadescription is the prose underneath it, and here it includes ‘benefit from our vast experience with elite level athletes”.

How should you make sure you’re doing this correctly?

As a very rough guide, you title tag should be about 30-60 characters in length, and the metadescriptionshould be about 130-140 characters in length.

Can’t be ars*d with counting characters? If your website is a WordPress website, then Yoast is an amazing plugin that will guide you through doing this correctly,every time you write a new blog or vlog, or upload a new service page.