A new year is a perfect time to shed outdated practices and start afresh.
When was the last time you took a critical look at your website?
In the online world, your website is the face of your healthcare business. It showcases who you are and what you do.
Websites are meant to be living entities that grow along with your business.
Just like fashion, technology changes with the times. What once looked fresh and modern may now look old and outdated.
Use these seven questions to help you identify the key areas of your website that can benefit from improvement.
1. How does my website stack up against my peers/competitors?
Make a list of your peers’ and competitors’ sites and evaluate them in terms of look, design, and functionality. Screenshot the design features you think work well and think about how you might incorporate them into your own website.
Look also at what your competitor might be missing. Do you have a key differentiator that sets you apart from the competition? Highlight that difference on your website.
Read How To Conduct A Competitor Audit on Social Media to learn more
2. Can visitors easily find what they are looking for when they visit my site?
Users should be able to use your website intuitively. Put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and ask yourself how easy it is to find key information on your site. How many clicks does a visitor have to make to get to the information they are looking for? Look out for broken links and page redirects, and fix these along with any outdated content.
3. Is my website design mobile responsive?
Mobile first-indexing is now fully underway and there’s no excuse for having a website that is not optimized for use across all platforms in 2022. Most people aren’t looking at your website on a desktop or laptop anymore. They are looking at it on a phone or tablet.
Google now gives ranking priority to those sites that are mobile-friendly. In fact, Google has stated that it will penalize websites that aren’t mobile-responsive, so if your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’ll likely lose out significantly in the organic search rankings. To check if your site’s design is responsive, enter its URL into this Google tool.
Mobile-Friendly Test — Google Search Console
4. Does my site still use Flash?
There was a time when Flash was a key element of every new website, but it’s now seen as an embarrassing relic of the past. It is no longer a matter of IF browsers will stop supporting Flash in the future, it is now a matter of WHEN they will do so, which means you need to take steps now if you want your site to be usable for the widest range of people in the future.
5. How much traffic am I getting?
The most common mistake I encounter when I work with clients, is they have no idea if their website is even attracting any visitors. Unless you regularly track your website performance, you will have no idea whether it’s producing results or not. Use a tool like Google Analytics to monitor your site’s performance.
Has web traffic declined over time? Are there fewer people coming to your site? Do they stick around or “bounce” off your site too quickly? Bounce rate is a contributor to your site’s search rankings, and it refers to the amount of time someone is on your site before “bouncing” off to another site. If you have a lot of people who look and quickly click away, it tells search engines you don’t have useful information on your site.
6. Is my website optimized for search engines?
If you want more people to find you online, you need to optimize your website through good search engine optimization practices. SEO (the ability to optimize your site for search engines), is a detailed and sometimes confusing process, and you may want to hire an SEO expert to do it for you.
If you don’t want to hire someone, there are search engine optimization tools available to help you do your own SEO — and many of them are free. I’ve put together this list of the best free SEO tools out there to help you instantly improve your online marketing.
Further Reading:7 Simple and Effective Ways to Improve Your Website’s Google Ranking in 2022
7. How fast does my website load?
How fast your website loads is critical — a good site will load in 2 seconds. Research shows that a single-second delay in site load time can reduce your conversions by 7 percent.
Pro Tip! Optimize your images for faster loading. A lot of websites have images that are relatively large, which take a lot of time to load. Resizing your images can speed up the loading time.
If your site is taking longer than that, consider that around 40% of people will leave a website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds.
Insider Tip! Use a website speed test tool like GTmetrix a website speed test tool to test how fast your site loads. It not only gives you insight into your site loading time, but it also provides actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. You can also use the tool to analyze the page-load of your site from 28 servers in 7 different regions around the world.
GTmetrix | Website Performance Testing and Monitoring
To Wrap Up
Your website is pivotal to your digital marketing strategy. It takes time and resources to optimize your site to deliver the best experience possible, but if you are serious about how your business performs, you need to get serious about the performance of your website too.
Health Care Social Media 