Better medical SEO, a responsive design, and an easy to use interface may not be enough for a physician or hospital website to meet the expected standards. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance matters. While your practice is providing conveniences such as online appointment scheduling and bill payment for patients to communicate 24/7 with their doctors, it is critical that the patient information you handle is kept secure. Physician website design and hospital website design is different from the average business website design. It is vital to adhere to HIPAA guidelines and industry-specific regulations, while designing and developing a medical website so that medical businesses can operate lawfully and successfully.
Medical Economics has cited an example of unintentional patient data compromise, where a patient’s “before” and “after” photos that highlighted the results of a specific treatment was shared on a medical website with the patient’s signed written consent to post them anonymous. But these uploaded photographs contained the patient’s name, enabling a search engine to locate the patient from the underlying file data. This is a clear example that shows the hospital failed to properly secure electronic Protected Health Information (PHI), resulting in drastic consequences such as costly lawsuits, HIPAA fines and complaints.
It is critical for healthcare providers to ensure that their site is HIPAA-compliant and is able to provide patient education.
Consider these factors to ensure that your website is HIPAA compliant.
Meet critical HIPAA security standards : If your healthcare website is sharing patient information online through a patient portal or collecting information about prospective patients through a healthcare application such as a contact form, or engaging in secure messaging with patients online, make sure the site is equipped with a security protocol. Using SSL to protect patient information is your first step to a HIPAA-compliant website. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology prevents unauthorized access, as it encrypts the data traveling through the internet between the visitor’s browser and the practice’s website server. Upgrading medical website with SSL helps to
secure patients’ trust
enhance website’s legal compliance
build patient trust, and
boost Google rankings
When SSL is used on the website, even cyber criminals won’t be able to use or read the encrypted information. Without this security measure, patient data will be easy for hackers to capture, read and use.
Patient consent before sharing details online : It is important to obtain patients’ consent before disclosing their health information online. Though HIPAA does not require hospitals to get patient consent for sharing details for treatment, payment, and health care operations, the regulations do mandate that doctors should obtain written patient consent before releasing their information for any reason other than healthcare operations. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, patient authorization is important to
disclose PHI about a patient to a third party (for e.g. a life insurance underwriter)
market products or services except if the marketing communication is face-to-face with the patient, or it involves the provision of services of nominal value
raise funds for any entity other than your healthcare business
conduct research, unless your practice has signed a waiver approved by the Institutional Review Board for the use and disclosure of PHI or has de-identified PHI
disclose psychotherapy notes, unless disclosure is required for law enforcement purposes or legal mandates, oversight of the provider who created the notes, use by a coroner or medical examiner, or avoidance of a serious and imminent threat to health or safety
Unless you obtain the patient’s signed written consent to publicly display their name and health information, do not include any form of identifiable information about the patient on the website, such as that which may be included in patient reviews.
Notice of Privacy Practices : The HIPAA requires all health care providers to provide a Notice of Privacy Practices that describes the ways patient information will be used, disclosing this information to others and HIPAA rights regarding health information. This Notice can be either posted on your website or you can choose to deliver the Notice of Privacy Practices to patients by electronic means, which requires that the patient provides an acknowledgement of receipt.
To be HIPAA compliant, it is also important for your website and the server to pass rigorous intrusion detection tests on a regular basis. Hospitals must ensure that their server host is aware of HIPAA and their obligations in hosting a medical website, and is experienced in implementing HIPAA-compliant hosting practices. Healthcare website design for hospitals also requires the passwords to be changed regularly. Besides, only certain personnel should have login access to PHI.
Medical SEO is an extremely competitive arena since healthcare centers, physician clinics and hospitals are all carrying out various kinds of medical marketing to attract targeted traffic by advertising personalized care, unique treatment protocols, and an overall better experience. User experience or UX is vital in medical website design to gain the competitive edge and is the key to keeping users interested in your site and improving call-to-action performance.
Improving user experience is an essential element of healthcare SEO. Search engines such as Google value certain aspects of user experience provided by a website. And the UX factor is also vital to keep people interested in your site and reduce the bounce rate. Here are some areas where you can improve your site’s UX factor:
Having a Mobile-optimized Website
Mobile is everywhere and anything from paying bills to checking up on medical symptoms is done online. More people search for stuff online on their mobile phones rather than on a desktop or laptop. Search Engine Watch reports that research by Smart Insights revealed that the time people spend on mobile devices has exceeded the time they spend on desktops or laptops by 51% to 42%. In spite of that, many mobile users actually end up visiting websites not designed for them. When that happens, they get tired of the site and leave it, increasing its bounce rate. But if your site is mobile-optimized, or has a responsive design which allows it to load well on desktop, mobile and tablet, you capture those visitors. Google’s algorithms rank mobile-friendly sites higher.
Website that Loads Faster
This is another thing Google stresses on. If a website takes a long time to load, visitors will lose interest in your site and go to another site. Google has indicated that page speed signals are included in its search algorithms. Nearly half of web users want a site to load in just 2 seconds or even less. Resources such as Page Speed Insights and Google Analytics can give you an idea of the speed of your web pages in hard figures. It would really help to get that checked and improve the hosting of your website.
Adding Images and Videos
It’s a no-brainer that you’re more likely to click the triangular “play” button than read through paragraphs of text content. Keep the text limited but informative and let videos tell your story in your web pages. Make sure you have images interspersed in between text.
Images can be photos and also illustrations. Creating illustrations can prove to be more cost-effective in some situations, particularly if you need to carry out photo-shoots to take photos that can be coherently placed in your content. Sometimes, illustrations can emotionally connect with your audience better than photos and even convey the point better. You would also need to use graphs, pie charts and other visual tools to display quantitative information.
Headlines
Rather than large chunks of content, users to tend to notice text that is short and larger than, or different to, the rest of the content in the page. So headlines can grab attention. It’s a means of getting the information users need, and fast. It values the time of your readers and improves their experience by grabbing their attention and telling them what it’s all about.
Keeping the Design Simple
It’s great to have an attractive design, but make sure it isn’t too cluttered to make navigation a pain. Simple and straight forward design with a strong user experience works best for medical websites to inform visitors about treatments, the level of personalized care, diseases and their symptoms, etc.
Rich Snippets
A rich snippet is any piece of content – text, image or video – that is embedded in the SERP listing so that the user gets some information about the site in the search page itself. This is intended to prompt people to visit your site and get more information. Rich snippets basically give the user a clear picture of what your site deals with.
These factors could go a long way in making a difference and changing the user experience of your website for the better. A mobile-optimized, fast loading website can improve your search engine performance as well.
Take these positive steps to create a user-friendly experience and succeed with medical SEO!
Medical SEO needs to keep itself abreast of Google’s algorithmic changes. One of the most recent changes deals with mobile websites and Google’s penalty on mobile web pages incorporating interstitials.
Interstitials on mobile web pages will now be penalized by Google. Earlier this year, Google confirmed that it had rolled out the algorithmic update that penalizes mobile web pages featuring interstitials that intrude into the user experience. The announcement of such an update was made 6 months back in 2016.
Improving User Experience on Mobile Web Pages
The idea of the update is to improve the user experience for mobile users. We all know how disruptive interstitials such as pop-ups and banner ads can be when we check out a website. That disruption is magnified when we browse on the mobile phone. Mobile devices have a much smaller screen size, and websites must exploit every aspect of it to provide the best visual and interactive experience for the user. Pop-ups and interstitials significantly hamper that experience, which is why Google decided to penalize websites employing these interstitials. It will be lowering rankings of web pages where users are not able to access the content easily when they move from the search results to the web page.
However, Google mentioned that responsible use of certain kinds of interstitials would not result in the web pages being penalized. These are interstitials that appear as part of any legal obligation such as those for age verification of the user, and those that inform the user of cookie usage. Banners that only occupy reasonable screen space and can be easily dismissed are allowed. Login dialogs for paid or private content that isn’t indexable publicly are also allowed. Google’s new ranking signal would not affect these kinds of interstitials.
Importance of Search Query Intent
This new mobile ranking signal from Google has significant implications for medical website design. As Google’s webmaster blog states, the intent with which the user makes the search query is still an important signal and the content in the website must therefore be easily accessible to the user as he/she moves from the search results page to the link he/she has clicked. Interstitials hamper that experience.
But Google has also said that since search query intent is an important signal, and because the interstitial penalization signal is just one of the hundreds of ranking factors, a website with relevant and information-rich content may rank highly still even if the transition from the search results page to the web page isn’t quite as smooth. That’s not to say the interstitial issue isn’t significant. But not many webmasters have reported quite radical ranking drops since this ranking signal was launched. It shows quality content is still king.
An experienced healthcare digital marketing agency will ensure that your medical website is free from interstitials but still brings the point across and facilitates conversions through quality content.
In the present digital world, healthcare consumers are increasingly relying on websites and social media for gathering information about hospitals, medical practices, healthcare professionals and healthcare products. This makes strategic medical website design a very significant medical SEO service for healthcare businesses. According to Google, 97 percent of consumers use the internet to search for local businesses. Thinking on a global level, to obtain customers worldwide any business should provide them with websites translated in their preferred languages. In order to achieve real success in online marketing, companies should also skilfully leverage the power of locally preferred social media networks and optimize users’ on-site experience.
Using Social Networks to Engage with Global Customers
Having translated websites alone is not enough to establish a global presence. You should never ignore regional social networks while engaging with global customers. Here are the reasons why.
In the coming years, 25% more people are expected to be connected to social networks.
Almost half of the topmost popular social network users are Chinese or Asian consumers.
Around 85% of people who use Facebook are outside the US.
In Japan, around 60% of the country’s entire population engage in social network activities.
Therefore to be smart and competitive, you should have a strong online presence on local social media platforms.
Organizations should ideally translate their social media posts to improve visibility in the worldwide markets. In addition, this will build trust and confidence in overseas customers and persuade them to introduce your brand to their family and acquaintances. Translating social media posts to localized social content helps in increasing traffic and conversions on translated global sites.
Suppose you have a Chinese website; if you integrate this website’s functionality with popular Chinese social networks such as QQ, Weibo and WeChat, you can achieve significant, immediate results. You can increase the site’s referral traffic from these social networks. You can achieve good results by translating content for Facebook company pages also.
On-site Optimization Increases Conversion Rates
Generating referral traffic alone may not increase conversion rates. For this, you have to optimize user experience or design the site keeping in view the expectations of the visitors, such as making it more reader friendly. Localized conversion rate optimization is also an effective strategy for any business and with the help of A/B tests you can analyze your global websites (just as you would do for your primary-market websites). This will bring to light any online performance gaps that may exist in emerging markets. You can then work to make appropriate improvements in your localized site.
To make full use of the potential of social media as a marketing tool, medical businesses can consider using healthcare digital marketing services. This will help monitor social media and identify where your consumers are, how they communicate with each other, and what they are saying about your product/service. You will also get to understand how each community works, and engage with them in the way they most value. You will have a clear understanding regarding the right mix of social media sites to use, and focus on the sites your target demographic uses most, and work to develop strong followings there.
What is a responsive medical website and why do you need it? Medical websites are of great significance in the current scenario with more than 60% of Americans seeking medical information online and also looking to schedule appointments via physician websites. An increasing number of users prefer to use their mobile devices to browse the internet because of the convenience of obtaining the information they need on the go. This is where a responsive web design becomes relevant. A responsive website design allows the layout to automatically adjust to fit the screen dimensions of any computer, smartphone or tablet. As any reliable medical SEO service provider would emphasize, a healthcare business can improve its visibility in search engines, provide optimal medical services, and distribute its brand message effectively to consumers seeking such services.
Revamping in Vogue for Medical Websites
We frequently hear of medical entities revamping their websites to remain at the forefront in this fast-paced digital era. For instance, plastic surgeons now focus on designing responsive websites with a custom layout and aim at ensuring that their website is a one-stop, complete resource for people looking for surgical/non-surgical cosmetic treatments for the face, breasts or other parts of the body. What features will be incorporated in such a surgeon’s website? Here are a few.
Information regarding various cosmetic concerns and their treatment options
Navigational menu that would switch from a vertical to a horizontal positioning on the basis of the viewer’s screen size
Sticky videos that stay in place giving visitors the convenience to continue watching them even while scrolling up and down the page
Links to recent and interesting blogs on the home page with updated information about cosmetic advancements, practice news and treatments
Share functionality on-page that allows visitors to share interesting/helpful information with others through social media or email
Information (multiple page headers) featuring actual patients of the practice
Biography of the plastic surgeons that includes education, training, experience and credentials
Comprehensive procedural pages giving information on everything prospective patients should know
Major Reasons for Having a Responsive Website Design
Here are five major reasons why a medical professional or other healthcare business needs a responsive website.
Increased use of mobile devices: Majority of the internet users access the World Wide Web from their mobile devices and according to a study conducted by Pew, 57% of these people will not recommend a medical business if they do not have a mobile-friendly website.
Project a thoroughly professional image: Every established and successful organization has a responsive website for their business and a well-optimized website enhances their professional image and also attracts more traffic. As a medical business, you need to be thoroughly professional and give consumers the confidence and trust to approach you for services they need.
Making your business more accessible: Making your websites responsive provides more visibility and reach for your medical website across multiple devices. By creating more awareness about your products/services, and giving people access to the medical resources or services they are seeking, you can improve your professional image and reputation.
To keep up with the standards of Google: Keeping up with the standards of Google is very essential for every site and a responsive website helps in better ranking.
Enable viewing on any screen size: In a responsive design, the size of the template is designed on the basis of screen size, not device. Irrespective of the screen size on which someone is viewing your website, it will display well for that screen size. With new devices such as watches, glasses, TVs and so on going to be used for web browsing in the future, a website with a responsive design will still be attractive and relevant.
A responsive medical website design has become a necessity and it will surely have an impact on the growth of your medical business. It is important that any business website persuades visitors to enrol, engage and explore. Naturally, healthcare businesses should focus on redesigning their websites to include better navigation and use of enhanced content that also includes SEO.
