As a hearing practice, there are certain details you can anticipate visitors to your website will be interested in knowing. Information about your business, like hours of operation and location, are the most obvious, while the details about the services your office provides and the care providers themselves typically make the list next. But after these standard pieces of information are shared, what else should your website focus on?
Despite how simple this choice may seem, it’s actually a well-studied topic online. With hundreds of new websites coming online literally every minute, the question of what the best websites focus on in terms of content has been discussed for years. As a hearing practice, the conclusions translate well for your niche, since your website visitors typically fall into a clear category, making it easier to anticipate their needs.
Before we dive into the core pages your website should have, it’s important to highlight the need for professional and original content in general. Nobody wants a cookie-cutter website, especially in an industry as competitive as hearing healthcare. Taking the time to tailor your content to your individual office, with personalized images to boot, can go a long way in distinguishing your brand from the crowd. In other words, having a winning website is the result of selecting the right types of content to focus on (your web pages) and ensuring that content is top-notch and reflective of your professionalism, personality, and knowledge.
Home Page
This is an easy one, since you can’t have a website without a home page. It’s simply the landing page for your website’s domain (or URL). What’s worth pointing out, however, are the critical pieces of content that your home page should have.
Believe it or not, statistics show that even some of the most popular websites online only keep 45% of visitors on their homepage longer than 15 seconds. People make decisions quickly online and your homepage needs to highlight the most attractive details about your business in a succinct way. You know your business’s strengths better than anyone, but focusing on information such as the following can be helpful:
- Years in business or years of experience (whichever is longer)
- Focus of practice (especially if you specialize in a specific area or serve a specific demographic)
- Area or location that you serve
- Any special designations or awards for you or your business
- Quick links to more information (i.e. a Contact Us link, an About Us button, etc)
It’s helpful to get a fresh look at your homepage—which is not easily accomplished with your own eyes. Try rallying a friend or relative (ideally, anyone who has never seen your website before) to look at your homepage and share their experience with you. Find out if the information about your business was clear and easy to navigate. Ask them if anything seemed vague or hard to find on your website. Ask them to use just three or four words to describe their first impression of your website.
About Us Page
This page isn’t often overlooked by hearing practices, but does often lack some important details that prospective patients are looking for. Your About Us page needs to do more than simply list your professional credentials and background—it needs to convey the type of care you provide and what patients like about your office. If your office is known for its personable approach and family-like atmosphere, this is the page to emphasize that.
Or, perhaps your office has a sleek and modern feel and patients express their appreciation for the cutting-edge tools and products you carry. If so, you’d emphasize that within the first paragraph of this page. No matter what your strengths, be sure to include them early on in your description of your office and staff. It’s best to assume that visitors will gloss over long pages of content and to aim for short and succinct content whenever possible.
Some people opt to list their various care providers and staff members on the About Us page as well. If creating a separate page for staff and provider biographies is not possible, this is the next best option. As mentioned above, it’s advised not to have too much content on any one page, as website visitors are prone to jump away from long-form content in general. It’s also helpful to have designated pages for specific categories of content (such as staff bios) for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, since each page can have its own set of specific keywords and metadata that can help boost your ranking in search results.
Services Page(s)
Sharing the details of the services your office provides is one of the most important areas of your website. You can likely imagine that many of the questions visitors to your website will have are similar to those questions you receive over the phone from inquiring patients. Questions about hearing exams, fittings, repairs, cerumen removal, and tinnitus management are likely common in your office. Likewise, you want your website to proactively answer these as well.
Ideally, each of your main services would be its own web page on your website. This helps avoid the repellant effect of an extra long webpage and also gives your overall website a nice SEO boost. By having each service stand alone on a page, you have more room to go into the details about that service in a way that sets you apart from local competitors. For instance, you can go into the step by step details of what to expect at a hearing evaluation for hesitant patients reading online, instead of just quickly glossing over a basic description of it. This level of detail can easily be the deciding factor for patients looking at several local providers online.
Hearing Health Page(s)
This category includes information related to topics about hearing loss and hearing aids. Instead of a simple FAQs page, this area is meant to dive deeper into the topics and queries that matter most to hearing patients. This page (or area of pages) is helpful for your website for several reasons:
- It shares helpful information about hearing health to website visitors (addressing common questions about hearing loss and hearing aids)
- It prepares any prospective patients for a visit to your office
- It boosts your SEO by adding a generous number of important keywords to your website
- It showcases your knowledge and commitment to patient education and awareness
Depending on how much information you want to share in this category, you can choose to bundle those topics into one page or spread them out into their own individual pages. As mentioned above, there are specific advantages to having each topic stand alone on a page, but you’d also want to have enough content to justify that layout.
Blog Page(s)
While it may not initially be the most visited page on your website, your website’s blog page is arguably one of the most important pages of all. The power that your blog has to increase your entire website’s visibility online should not be underestimated. This is because a blog page has the most content nestled within it, meaning there’s a treasure trove of important keywords aiding your website’s search result ranking, as well as interesting content that online users could potentially share online.
Not only that, blogs are also an excellent way to stay current with your online audience. It gives you a platform to speak to timely events in the hearing world (such as a post about OTC hearing aids) and share announcements about your office (like when a staff member gets married or has a child, for instance). A blog page is where your hearing practice can share more of its personality, discussing information in a more casual and personable way. Similar to our recommendations above, it’s best when each post has its own page to live on.
With so much information on the Internet these days, and a truly endless number of websites vying for user attention, it takes work to get visitors to even click over to your website. Once they’ve landed on it, you must engage them with your best content and layout to encourage them to stay. Luckily, few topics in the digital realm remain a blind science anymore, making the guesswork on your end much easier.
Consider the recommendations we’ve put forth above as you review your website’s design and content for potential improvements. If you’d like professional help upgrading your current site or designing a website from scratch—we can help with that, too.
