+61401395441 leigh@optomly.com.au

A New Patient clicks on Your Practice Website Address. Their first question is:

Does Your Practice Site quickly help me to find what I need, or is it going to waste my time? (Or will it take too long to figure out?)

Everyone is busy these days. We have less and less time. Equally, we are more attuned to rejecting information which doesn’t seem helpful.

A study shows that it takes as little as 50 milliseconds for a visitor to form an impression of your site.

Think about that….

The average blink duration from a high speed camera was shown to be about 500ms.

What impression can you make in the first 50 milliseconds and later?

Your Practice Website

You and your team have invested a lot of time creating a website. After all, it’s important to have a Practice Website now. Your New Patients will Google You. If you don’t come up, then perhaps Your Practice doesn’t exist.

Maybe you’ve spend hours writing the perfect text to introduce Your Practice. Or you’ve pained over the description of you as an optometrist. And whether your background and interests seem engaging to your potential patients?

However, Quicksprout found that only 28% of written website text is read on average.

Lets freeze time for a moment….

Have you ever thought about how your site would appear in another language?

No? Then lets try it.

Click the link to Google Translate.

You’ll see two white boxes. Type in your Practice Website Address in the left box. On the right, select a foreign language (I picked Croatian, since it looks cool) and click Translate.

All of a sudden, your website seems strange. You can’t read the writing anymore. (You remember the writing that you spent hours trying to perfect?)

Now, the only things that are familiar are the Images, Icons and Buttons on your site. You recognise them because you made them (or had them made).

(Have a look at Provision, Eyecare Plus, OPSM or Specsavers in Croatian.)

So, What?

Now you have a freeze-frame of how your site appears to a New Patient…They likely won’t read your well-written text. (Even though you wrote your site in English.)

Still on the Translated Version of your site, think about your site’s layout.

Does your site guide New Patients in the right direction, just through Images, Icons and Buttons?

What are the largest things on your site? Surely they are the most important things that you want New Patients to look at or click on. Important things to check are your phone number, email address, newsletter signup and map to your practice.

Book time in your regular Team Meeting to evaluate your current site. Pull up some chairs around a computer(s). Look at the things that are clear. And the things that are unclear.

Talk to the person who maintains your site and get them to make the changes you’ve found. Or start a fresh webpage (it’s easier than you think).

But doesn’t Google work out my website score (or ranking) based on written keywords like ‘Optometrist’, ‘Glasses’, ‘Contact Lenses’?

Yes, this is true. That’s why it’s important to write a blog. You need to show that you have answers. And that’s what Google and your Patients want.

However, Google also uses a range of factors to calculate the User Experience. If Google thinks that your website is easy to use and navigate, you will likely be rewarded by ranking higher.

Conversely, if your site doesn’t load well on mobiles or stops users finding the answers to their questions quickly, then Google will place your site lower down the Search Results. (After all, Google makes money by being the go-to place where people find answers online, and where it can sell ads.)

So, whether you use Chinese, Croatian or Czech, have a good look at your current site. Think about what you want to tell your patients in the first 50 milliseconds. If they like it, they’ll spend time to learn more about you. Who knows, they may read your ‘About Us’ page and discover that you like Surfing and follow Geelong in the AFL.

Next, What was the most important thing you found out about Your Practice Website? Add Your Comment below:

Free Download: How to use Google to bring you more potential patients

Free Download: How to use Google to bring you more potential patients

Need new patients? Don't get left behind. Download the guide "How to use Google to bring you more potential patients" as seen in Optometry Australia News 2018

 

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