In this final post of the Find a Doctor blog series, I will be sharing best practices to ensure your organization’s Find a Doctor tool is easily found by consumers, physicians, and academics. In previous posts we have uncovered the challenges users typically face with these tools, best practice on the type of content to include that converts, and best practices on search and filtering that offers an enhanced user experience. With this final blog post on Find a Doctor tools, the comprehensive information and tips shared will offer your organization concrete ideas on where to start in redesigning and enhancing your organization’s current Find a Doctor tool.
Having a tool that can be easily found by search engines, through paid media marketing activity or even within your organization’s flagship site or mobile app, is often overlooked but vital in ensuring its success. If users are unable to find the tool, it simply won’t be used to its highest potential. Below we share some tips and best practices to adopt.
Search Engine Results Page
Having search engines return results with your Find a Doctor tool included is crucial in driving traffic to your site and in particular targeted traffic to those who wish to use this specific tool. There are a number of search engine optimization (SEO) standards that can be easily implemented to ensure search engines are able to crawl through your site and identify its relevance to the search performed, these include:
- Proper XML sitemap listing all URLs
- Navigable directory for search engines to Crawl
- Consistent URLs and canonical URLs
- Comprehensive title tags and meta descriptions
- Consistent headings
- Name, Address and Phone Number that is immediately available and visible
- Rating and all reviews that make up the aggregate rating present in their full form
- Structured data for reviews
- Structured Data in the JSON-LD format
- Using Image Title and Image Alt tags
- Unique body copy
Marketing Efforts
As users are performing searches in search engines, PPC paid media campaigns will populate towards the top of the page with users clicking ads hoping to find relevant information. Running targeted PPC campaigns will help drive targeted traffic especially if your organization’s Find a Doctor tool doesn’t appear on page 1 of the returned results list or even above the fold. Researching keywords and related terms to leverage as part of your campaigns with ad copy that is informative will help get your ads noticed and drive additional traffic to the Find a Doctor tool.
Flagship Website & Mobile App
Not all traffic to the Find a Doctor tool will come from search engines but users who on your organization’s flagship website or mobile app will also want to easily navigate to it. Including a link with in a prominent place in the global navigation for quick, convenient access to the tool will ensure users are able to locate the tool and reduce any frustrations of having to dig deeper into the site to locate or use internal site search. Whether your audience is on your flagship website or using your organization’s mobile app this still applies. It is also important to consider the cross-linking strategy that you apply for this tool within your organization’s website. The Find a Doctor tool should be fully integrated with prominent cross-links from clinical service areas, health library, locations, etc.
There are many important elements in redesigning the Find a Doctor tool and we have dived deep into this topic over the last few posts. There are many ways to approach a redesign or to make continuous optimization improvements. The best-in-class Find a Doctor digital experiences tend to include most of the elements that I’ve shared to date and should allow your organization to attribute appointments and new patients to this key conversion tool in order to monitor ROI.
I would love to hear what you are doing to redesign or optimize your Find a Doctor tool. Are you hoping to implement some of the best practices shared? Is data holding your organization back or resources? Please share below.
