You should expect as much from your website as you expect from yourself. That means finding experts with great track records in web design and SEO (search engine optimization). It might be tempting to find and hire the best web designer and the best SEO expert even if they work for different companies, just as you’d refer a patient to the appropriate specialist.
It’s Better to Hire One Company, Not Two
If you hired experts from different companies, you could be doing yourself and your website a great disservice. You’ve worked too hard for too long to get to this point. There are several reasons why it’s far better to hire one company with technical expertise in both web design and medical SEO. When you’re dealing with two companies, even coordinating joint meetings can be a nightmare.
Accountability
If two companies are involved in the development of a new website and SEO for doctors, the opportunities for glitches and delays multiply. The two companies are actually competitors who aren’t really interested in sharing information and helping each other do great work. In fact, they can act like more like quarreling siblings than intelligent adults. In reality, most problems need input from both sides.
Understandably, this can have a negative effect on both your budget, your SEO marketing strategy and the launch of your website. There are always challenges to be worked out and decisions that must be made. If there’s a problem, whether during construction or after your website launch, the last thing you want to hear is that it’s the other guy’s fault and “obviously” caused by faulty design or optimization.
When you deal with one company for everything, you have a single point of contact and accountability. There’s no question whose responsibility it is to meet your launch date and your budget. Your time is much too valuable to play referee.
Communication Problems
Miscommunications breed confusion and disappointment. You’re counting on your website to grow your business, so everyone involved must be on the same page. The one-firm solution is the best way to ensure this happens.
Building the Foundation of a Productive Website
Website design and SEO are interdependent, not separate, disconnected specialties. Both the reliability of your website and your marketing strategy must be built on a solid foundation and work together. Doctors SEO sends your message out to the world. When someone clicks on your link after a Google search, they expect to find a fully functional website, a quick answer to their question and an easy way to contact your office.
Timing is Everything
It’s critical to build your SEO plan into your website. As soon as your website is launched and active, Google will crawl and index your website, ranking it for the first time. It can be tricky to have everything fully tested and approved by launch date, but the value to you of a strong launch is immeasurable.
5 Steps in Web Design
1. Defining Your Needs: Working with a firm specializing on websites for doctors jumpstarts this process, but it’s critical to clearly understand your needs and expectations before work begins.
2. Preliminary Research: What do you like and dislike? What features are common in websites similar to yours? What missing element would make your website superior?
3. Wireframes – the Blueprint of Your Website: Wireframes are used to illustrate the basic layout and to place the elements of the website, just as a blueprint details the locations of rooms and structural elements. It shows the relationship of pages and subpages and how the various elements interact.
4. Style Tiles or Guides: These are the visual elements that reflect the user experience and how the user perceives your brand. A style guide defines the “skin” or visual aspects of your website. Typically, this includes your logo, font selection (sans serif fonts such as Arial in 12-14 point size work well online), color selection and tone of voice. A set of rules is developed to maintain consistency.
5. Build a Prototype: The wireframe and style tiles are combined to create the best user experience and maximum functionality. Testing and finetuning are completed.
Pre-Launch SEO Tasks
While the web design is ongoing, there is also a long list of SEO tasks that must be completed prior to launch.
- Keyword research: Today, this is increasingly complex as it must include determining the best keywords for both typed and voice search
- Competitor research
- Planning your marketing strategy
- Writing and optimizing content
- Creating and optimizing title tags
- Setting up Google Analytics
- Determining URL structure
- 301 redirects: Code that instructs browsers to automatically go to another website destination without user action
- And much more…
Insuring a Successful Launch
The best insurance that the end result will be all you hope for is when the designers, programmers and SEO experts work collaboratively. This becomes exponentially more difficult when they aren’t closely associated.
A Worst Case Launch Scenario
Launching your website with missing or incomplete items could deal your website a blow it might never recover from. If the SEO isn’t finished or done correctly, your site will remain invisible to users because it is ranked so low by the search engines. From the day of the launch, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle for traffic.
If the search engine optimization for doctors has been expertly accomplished, but the site isn’t finished or doesn’t function flawlessly, more harm can be done than good. People abandon websites very quickly and will have a terrible first impression. Mistiming errors caused by a lack of constant and clear communication between two or more firms are more common than anyone would like.
Post-Launch
Websites aren’t “one-and-done” projects. It takes work to ensure that everything keeps running smoothly and to make updates as needed. It’s more convenient to deal with one company that understands the website’s construction and the SEO strategy.
The one-firm solution brings peace of mind because everyone works as a team. At SEO4Doctors, our sole focus is delivering patients to doctors. Our experienced team is passionate about web design, medical SEO and powerful website branding.
Contact us or call 786-930-4333 to discuss taking your medical practice to the next level.
