HIPAA or less commonly known as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a set of violations that are some restriction barriers that all medical businesses should avoid at all costs. While these violations are very strict and severe in nature, they are quite normal for medical businesses to come across.

Truth be told, even an international medical business may encounter minor HIPAA violation cases every year or so. However commonly occurring they may be, HIPAA violations are something that should not be treated with light-hearted behavior. Violating them can cause serious financial fines and penalties for the medical businesses.

This is why all doctors who own their online medical businesses must be aware of what HIPAA violations are, why is it important to stay HIPAA compliant, and what to do if you violate one of the sanctions. Doing so will keep your medical business running successfully.

What Are HIPAA Violations?

HIPAA violations are part of the HIPAA act that was introduced in 1996. This act centers around limiting the power medical businesses hold over the PHI (Patient Health Information) they attain when they gain patients.

What Are The Fines Charged For HIPAA violations?

The U.S. Division of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office for Civil Rights can decide fines and punishments according to the nature of the violation committed by a medical business. 

Though, generally, the most common violations can be fined up from  $500 to $50,000 per violation. If the nature of the violation is very serious and sensitive in nature, medical businesses can be fined as well as closed down for business and face jail time.

What Are The Five Most Common HIPAA Violations?

There are a lot of HIPAA sanctions that you need to stay clear from, but among them are the five biggest, most common ones that you should avoid at all costs to keep your medical business up and running.

Prying Into Patient Healthcare Records

Patients give up their personal healthcare information trusting the medical business. This information, however, must be allowed by the Privacy Rule. The Privacy Rule refers to only asking for patient information for the purposes of medical treatment only.

Asking for information that surpasses the Privacy Rule is a violation of patient protection, thus a HIPAA violation. This also refers to prying and sneaking around on medical services records of the patient’s family or acquaintances is one of the most common HIPAA violations committed by medical businesses. Doing so can result in closing the medical business and facing criminal charges.

Keeping Unencrypted Patient Data

Patient data is very sensitive. In order for medical businesses to contain it, the data must always be safe by encrypting it. This adds an extra layer of network protection on the precious data and avoids it failing into the wrong hands.

Not only does this keeps the data safe but also makes it easier to store and transfer if need be. This is a requirement that all medical businesses must follow to remain HIPAA compliant. Keeping patient data unencrypted, is a violation of HIPAA and can cause serious damage to the patient if the data is hacked by cyber-hackers.

Allowing Unauthorized Access To PHI

As mentioned before, when you ask for patients to fill out the forms regarding their personal information, whether online or not, you must treat that information with utmost care and security. HIPAA very deeply looks into the handling of patient information and you can easily violate one of its sanctions if you are not careful enough.

This is why you should not allow access to every employee in your medical business to patient records and information. Your employees getting access to the patient information if  they’re not approved for is a HIPAA violation. Regardless of whether they’re just looking after the patient data or just arranging it if they are not authorized, it’s still considered a violation and bring about a fine of thousands of dollars.

Removing Or Mishandling Of PHIs

Once a patient fills out their form asking for their personal information, you as a medical business must always handle it with care and use it for its intended purpose only, which is the patient’s treatment. Mishandling of patient data refers to sharing it to unauthorized third parties, dealing with it with carelessness, accidentally “leaking” it while transferring it, and so on.

To avoid violating a HIPAA sanction, you must always handle the PHI with care by encrypting it from the get-go and keenly monitoring it when it is getting transferred or arranged in your records.

Leaking PHI To Unauthorized Parties

Connected with the last violation, leaking the PHI is a major HIPAA violation that can cause you a penalty worth $50,000 at least. If you do want to share the PHI, for instance, for gathering patient testimonials for your medical site, you must always get the patient’s consent and get it in the record for legal purposes. If you choose to opt for unauthorized ways to displaying the PHI, it will be considered as leaking the patient data and violating one of the most serious HIPAA violations.

What To Do If You Violate A HIPAA Compliance

It is very common to come across a HIPAA violation, even with the best efforts to avoid them. However, once you become aware of a violation, you must make haste to deal with it immediately. Dealing with a HIPAA violation begins with identifying the nature of the violation and its severity. Get your legal advisor involved and try to amend the situation as moderately as possible.

Stay HIPAA Complaint To Avoid Financial And Business Loss

One of the major things to consider before getting into opening an online medical business is becoming familiar with HIPAA violations. Your, as the owner of your medical business, your medical staff and employees must become aware of the violations, what they are and how to avoid them to abstain from running into any unfortunate circumstances in the future.

As a doctor who may be new to the field of medical marketing, you may have seen “optimize your medical site!”, “ALWAYS OPTIMIZE YOUR MEDICAL CONTENT” and “one of the keys to online exposure is optimization”. While this all is true and you do need to optimize your medical site to make it “live” on the internet, there may be the risk of you Over-optimizing your medical website.

Yes, there is a reason why all marketing experts warn about marketing strategies. All marketing strategies, whether medical or not, must be conducted in a balanced way. Over-do it, you mess up, don’t do it all the way enough, you still mess up. Similarly, the optimization of a website falls in the same line.

Previously, there was no such thing as “over-optimizing your medical website”, but since Google is continually introducing strict algorithms day after day, over-optimization of a website is now considered a bad practice in the eyes of Google and can cost you, the ranking of your online medical business.

What Is Over-Optimization Of A Website?

According to Google, over-optimization of a website occurs when a website grows heavy with unnecessary and irrelevant SEO and content strategies. The penalty of over-optimization can cost you a downgrade of your medical site’s ranking and a chance to lose all your organic search index traffic.

Over-optimization was made prohibited to improve user-experience online. This was announced as a mal-practice by Google in 2012 when it announced its Penguin update.

How Can You Avoid Over-Optimizing Your Medical Website?

Since it has been quite a while now since over-optimization of a website was announced as mal-practice, it is quite easy to avoid some SEO and content practices that can lead up to over-optimization of your medical site. While you are optimizing your medical site, just keep the below practices in mind to avoid over-optimizing.

Stray Clear From Non-Relevant Medical Keywords

Keywords are the pillar of your online medical business, but to be successful, they need to be as relevant as possible. If you incorporate a campaign full of irrelevant medical keywords, you are ensuring the chances of your medical site being over-optimized.

This is a practice that also affects your patient traffic as well because once patients seek out your medical site, they are quickly going to see that your medical content riddled with irrelevant keywords isn’t the thing they are searching for.

This also affects the audit that Google performs on your medical site to rank it, once it comes across all those irrelevant medical keywords, it will downgrade your ranking and the strength of your medical site on search engine result pages.

Manage Your Link Exchange Wisely

This practice is a trade of links between two admin websites and is one of the most famous link-building practices of all time. Link exchange can result in quite massive link networks if it is used excessively. This is why link exchange is considered a practice that can lead to site over-optimization.

If link exchange is done excessively on a medical site, it can lead up to incorporating toxic or irrelevant links in the network which can damage the link chain and your medical site’s standing. Make sure to only add links that are thoroughly checked for any irrelevant or harmful connections.

Say No To The Practice Of Keyword Stuffing

Some people take keywords almost too seriously and consider stuffing their site’s content with them as a way to get their site to rank higher on SERPs. This practice is called keyword stuffing and is something you should at all costs avoid doing on your medical site. A page of content that is full to the brim with nonsensical keywords is useless and irrelevant to Google, so it doesn’t rank it at all.

If your medical site has content that may have a proportion of 60% keywords and 40% information, you must edit it immediately as this can lead to Over-optimizing your medical site. Google only considers content that depends on its relevance, engagement, and information rather than the keywords as the best type of content.

Keep A Track On Your Backlink Volume

Organic backlinks take some time to build. If Google comes across a large volume of backlinks that are multiplying at a suspiciously fast rate, it immediately recognizes this as a cheat and bars the site that is doing it for ranking.

Always make sure to have natural backlinks on your medical site that has a steady rate of growth. The largest volume of generating backlinks for your medical site can be 50-100 per day, and this also depends on your medical services field, patient traffic, and so on.

Focus On Your Medical Content’s Intent

Google immediately pins down content if it is written just for a keyword, specifically. Content that is only created for the purposes of a keyword campaign is a practice that can severely Over-optimizing your medical website.

While the main reason for content creation is satisfying the keywords but it is crucial to always keep the tone and relevancy of your medical content in check. The best way to create medical content for a high ranking is to focus its objective on just informing, engaging, and providing the patients what they seek from it.

A site that has 100 pages of content will rank lower or not at all compared to the one with just 50 pages if its content intent solely depends upon satisfying its keyword campaign. Make sure that your medical content’s intent is always to engage and inform your patients.

Avoid Over-Optimizing Your Medical Site At All Costs

It is quite easy to over-optimize your medical healthcare website if you don’t conduct your SEO and content strategies in a balanced way. Over-optimizing your medical website also occurs when a site tries to follow cheat hacks to gain traffic. Google is quite fast in shooting these kinds of sites down which is why you should always be extremely careful in optimizing your medical site and following the honest ways to earn patient traffic.

You can keep things simple and easy if your ultimate goal for your online medical business is to earn a couple of patients and keep things steady. But, if you have a bigger picture in mind for medical business and want to see it flourish and shine both locally and worldwide, there are a few things you must take into consideration.

To turn your medical business into a global phenomenon, you must tailor it to meet the needs and understanding of almost everyone. One of the major endeavors you must choose is between localizing your medical site or translating it. If your medical website is venturing off into new business sectors, it’s really important to make your medical website accessible in your potential patient’s dialects and languages.

Many people see the terms localization and medical website translation and treat them as synonyms. While they have similar objectives, there are some stark differences between the two. To turn your medical business into a local and international success, you must understand the differences between the two and identify which one will work the best for your circumstances and needs.

What Is The Difference Between Localization and Medical Website Translation?

Contrary to popular belief, localization and translation of a website refer to different things. Localization of a language is a process in which you adapt your medical site and services into the language or dialect of the area or residential zone that you want to promote it in. It also covers both linguistic and cultural adaptation.

However, translation is the process of changing the text into the language of the targeted area. But as there are differences in the languages of the area, this would not be very much effective. While localization focuses on a specific targeted area, translation is a more general and expanded approach.

Medical Website Translation

Medical site translation is a more general and expanded way of reaching patients and is used by a medical business that has the objective of going global.

Expands Your Medical Business Reach

Not everyone speaks English, and if you want your medical business to achieve a global reach, you must tailor it for people of all languages. Focusing on multilingual and worldwide business sectors is an incredible method to encourage development in your medical business, and by translating your medical site, you do just that and open doors for international patient traffic.

Adds To Your Medical SEO

If you enable the multilingual option for your medical site, you open doors for experimenting and conducting with your medical SEO. With site translation, you get the option of new medical content and with new medical content, your medical SEO gets refreshed and updated.

Sites that are translated are jam-packed with great keywords that assist with their SEO. With medical site translation, you get the option to improve your SEO. Doing that lifts search rankings and natural patient traffic.

Boosts Patient Traffic And Revenue

If you want your medical business to earn international recognition, you have got to show the world what you can offer. For that, you must be able to reach people of almost all languages. International patients won’t know your medical business if they cannot understand what you have to offer to them.

Translating a site cancels out the language barrier that comes with international marketing. With the option of your medical content available in all languages, you make it visible to everyone. That opens the gate for international patient traffic which later boosts your revenue.

Medical Site Localization

Medical site localization is a targeted and focused approach to reach the local patient traffic of an area you want to promote your medical business. This focuses more on the local languages and their dialects and ways.

Supports Native Languages

If you want your medical business to flourish, you have got to make it diverse. Localizing your medical site is a guaranteed way of ensuring that your medical business becomes a local success. According to the official U.S government census, almost 350 languages are spoken in America. If you want your medical business to flourish, you must cater to all those languages to reach all local patients.

Improves Patient Experience

When patients click a medical site, they mainly look for five things:

• Quick loading pages
• Simple site design
• Engaging medical content
• Mobile optimization
• The option to see the site’s content in their local language.

If they fail to get that from a  medical site, they leave it. You can avoid the same predicament by localizing your medical site. Not only does it improve the patient experience but shows attentiveness on your part. When patients find your medical site full of content in their native languages, you are less likely to increase your bounce rates.

Multiplies Conversion Rates

While localizing your medical site shows your attentiveness to the diversity of all local languages, it also helps you secure leads and boost your conversion rates since you are now catering to potential patients who were looking for a medical business that offered medical marketing services for doctors in their native language. It gains you popularity among those native patients and ultimately, multiplies your conversion rates.

Localize And Translate Your Medical Site To Turn It Global

While they are often mistaken to be the same thing, translation and localization are night and day. It is up to you to decide which one works for you. The best way to do that is figuring what their objectives are and do they collaborate with your business objectives.

While site translation is a great option if you are looking forward to steeping your medical business into the international medical market. While site translation is a profitable choice, it often loses the touch and effect of the content. But with site localization, you can cover that issue.

Site localization is more focused and doesn’t let the content lose its meaning, but it is more expensive. Now it comes to you to decide which one meets your ultimate objectives and what market (whether local or international) do you wish to cater to.

When all is said and done, all your lead generation efforts turn into driving patients to your medical site, which convinces them to choose your medical services and they become your patient. But your work as an online medical business is not done yet.

While it is quite difficult to attract potential patients and persuading them to choose your medical services, all your medical marketing efforts come to their fruition when you do follow-ups with them keep them your patient for a long time.

In the conventional sense, connecting and engaging with patients on an individual level has consistently been a critical piece of owning a medical business, let alone an online one.

It takes a lot of trust-building to convince potential patients to turn in existing patients but it takes double of that effort to make them stay with your medical business. Building trust with patients is a significant piece of building a relationship, knowing the patient’s set of experiences, and providing them reassurance and individual care whenever they need you again.

Your Patients Need To Know That You Care

In order to maintain a successful online medical business, you need to value your potential patients along with your existing patients. Once a potential patient becomes your patient, they will expect the same undivided attention and care they received once they were a potential patient.

If you neglect your patients after they have become your existing patients, they will likely desert your medical services and look into choosing other medical businesses. That means all your medical marketing efforts going down the drain.

You can show your patients that you care by doing follow-ups, sending them specialized content via social media platforms, or email marketing and offering them special deals and offers every once in a while.

Just with a single email, SMS, or a post on any of the social media they might follow you on, you build a relationship with them that will result in a long-term business opportunity for you and a long time of high-quality medical services for them.

Patients Will Less Likely Leave If You Stay Connected

A survey led 3 years ago found out that 64% of patients leave the medical services they opt for if the medical business does not stay connected with them. It is the practice of successful and smart medical businesses to remain connected with their patients to keep them with their services.

You need to do the same. You need to dedicate just as much effort to your existing patients as you do to your potential patients. Let them know you are still very much interested in them even after they have become your existing patients and you still cater to them. You can achieve that with the use of PCP ads, virtual calls, and specially tailored content via email or social media posts.

Improves Your Online Medical Business Standing

The second biggest priority of your medical business after gaining patients should be looking after the reviews and the recommendations that they leave you with. Staying connected with your existing patients and doing follow-ups with them builds a very positive image in the eyes of your patients.

That can lead to them recommending your medical business to their family, acquaintances, and on online boards. Following-up with your patients through notifications, social media posts, light-hearted emails, and telemedicine is a very marketing-orientated approach to keep your patients committed to your medical business. This improves your medical business’s reputation and helps with your rankings.

Expands Your Patient Crowd

The very next step to gaining that recommendation after you stay connected with your patients is widening your targeted crowd. All those positive reviews and accommodations that you earn after keeping in touch with your patients are one of the most organic and natural ways of broadening your patient crowd.

Not only that but with the help of those reviews, your rankings get upgraded as well and that also opens up a new door of patients to pour in for your online medical business. Staying in touch with a patient after they have used your medical services is a way of securing that patient as yours for a long while.

A few surveys have shown that with the help of telemedicine, doing follow-up calls or virtual video calls with patients can help upgrade your “authority” in your medical business field as well and that alone is also an opportunity for lead generation and increasing patient traffic. 

Builds A Long-Lasting Doctor-Patient Relationship

A medical business that has strong patient-doctor relationships is considered a successful medical business in its field of work. One of the ways to achieve that is by staying connected with your patients. Your patients need to know that you care more than just selling your medical services to them.

With just a single social media post or an email once a week can strengthen that bond of trust and commitment that will secure those patients with your medical business for a long time. Not every patient wants to or can keep visiting your medical facility.

Doing follow-ups with video calls with their permission can improve your patient experience and keep them coming back for your medical services.

Keeping connected with your patients by occasionally reaching out to them about routine tests, influenza shots, or even basic healthcare guidelines can let them know that you still care about them and that develops a strong sense of reliability and commitment.

Staying Connected With Patients Online Is Crucial For You

As a doctor who owns an online medical business, your work doesn’t just end with building up a medical site and promoting your medical services. You need to constantly put in the effort for your potential patients and your existing patients to maintain a stable level of business and an online standing.

Staying connected with your patients with follow-ups, or reaching out to them via social media or email marketing can help upgrade your online reputation, expand your targeted crowd and build long-term patient-doctor relationships.

It’s not easy to find a style of content that is perfect for your brand of medical business, invest in it for its creation and publication process just to see it all stolen and plagiarized by someone else online. It is very easy to steal someone’s hard work with just a couple of clicks but it is very hard to keep it protected from getting stolen. It is hard, but not impossible.

The fundamental standard of SEO is to make your unique medical content and ensure your on-page SEO is thoroughly optimized. Google scrutinizes all online content before ranking it and with new algorithms changes popping up day by day, it is very hard to keep your medical business up to Google’s standards, and having a medical site with its content protected and original is one of the main ones.

Why Should You Try To Protect Your Medical Site’s Content?

Aside from losing Google’s favor, there are a lot of reasons why protecting your medical site’s content is crucial for the success of your medical business.

• Not protecting your site’s content can cause you to lose your online patient traffic. Patients will look you up by your medical content and if it’s stolen, they will see it on other websites as well which will create a sense of mistrust and fraud on your business’s image and patients will no longer pursue you.

• Unprotected content can lead to a significant drop in your SERP rankings. One of the major reasons for upgraded rankings in SERPs is original content. A site that has duplicated content from another site will likely be deemed less worthy in terms of Google’s algorithm of ranking websites. 

• When you have stolen content, your next endeavor would be to add new original content to your site. While this is necessary, it is also very expensive and can cause irregularities in your marketing budget.

Best Methods To Protect Your Medical Content From Theft

As mentioned above, protecting your site’s content is hard but it is not impossible. All you need to do is set some time aside and follow a couple of practices to ensure its safety.

Add A Distinct Touch To Your Medical Content

Keeping track of your site’s content is easy if you know how to identify it among other content online. You can achieve this by only posting content on your site that carries your specific and distinct touch. When you compose with your own touch, it’s significantly harder for people to steal your content and make it look like their own. Doing so will make it stand out and unique so it will be difficult to twist it or reshape it.

Stamp Your Content And Visuals With Your Watermark

It is not just your textual content that needs protecting, but your infographics and visuals as well. Adding your watermark to both your visuals and written content is a great way to make your content your own. No one will look into thinking of stealing your site’s content if it has your name or your medical business’s name stamped all over it. Not only does this practice make your medical content protected but also renders it useless for content thieves.

Have A Copyright Notice Strung Up Everywhere

Similar to adding watermarks on your medical site’s content, stringing up copyright notices on your content is also a great way of warding off content thieves and plagiarizers. Most people just steal content from websites either if they don’t get copyright claimed by the owners or just because they aren’t aware of it.

Adding a copyright notice to your medical site and content is useful for these sorts of individuals. It wards them off and warns them that unapproved utilization of your medical content is an infringement of your privileges as the owner. Suggested by WordPress, place your copyright notices on the top and bottom of your content page on your medical site where it is most likely to be seen.

Use Online Tools To Monitor Your Content’s Protection

Besides all these useful practices, the best one to avoid content theft on your site is by simply monitoring it and running through online tools that will ensure its originality. Some great ones are:

• Creative Commons

If you want a license to establish the ownership of your content, this tool gives licenses to allow the general population to share and utilize your work in your allowed circumstances.

• Copyscape

Running your medical site’s content through plagiarism checkers such as Copyscape is a great way of ensuring that the content remains on your site alone. It appears to pop up on another site; your medical content has been stolen.

• Google Alerts

Simply put a portion of your medical site’s content on this tool and set an alert for whenever it is being acted on. You will get notified if any activity related to it happens.

Always Keep Your Medical Content Protected From Thieves

Protecting your medical site’s content is a way of ensuring that you remain the only owner of your efforts and hard work that you put into its creation and publication. Always monitor your medical content and follow the above-mentioned practices to keep it safe and yours.

If you are a doctor who owns an online medical business, you must know just how much worth patient reviews carry. 77% of patients seek reviews from other existing patients on an online medical business site before choosing it for its medical services.

While you can just simply ask patients to leave reviews, having a full strategy and system designated for asking, receiving, and showcasing patient reviews is the best way to get their full potential. A fantastic way to get patient reviews is by making a profile for your medical business and gaining credibility on it so patients can look you up.

There are numerous online review sites where you can showcase your medical services or your medical business. Online review sites are now a necessary stop for potential patients before seeking out a medical business’s services.

Why Should You Choose A Medical Review Site For Reviews?

To keep a successful online medical business, everything must be sorted and assigned. Similar to how each specific page on a medical site has its categorized purposes, patient review sites do the same. They are a great way to keep your patient reviews sorted, ranked, and on display for other potential patients seeking you out. Not only does it give a good impression of having your medical business name on a review site but it also builds trust and credibility in the eyes of potential patients.

The Most Popular Patient Medical Review Sites

Since it is such a developing aspect of medical marketing and more review sites are coming up everywhere. However, it is essential for your medical business to pick the most credible and popular review sites with the largest patient traffic online to get the most out of your reviews.

HealthGrades

Healthgrades is a very popular site among doctor review sites that gets the almost 20 million guests patient traffic looking for medical services. Not only does it host such large patient traffic, but HealthGrades also has an accessible database of doctors, medical businesses, hospital profiles, etc.

HealthGrades provides 5-star reviewing criteria with 5 stars being a top review like many other patient review sites. This patient review site begins analyzing a patient’s review by picking only the credible ones to have on display. To begin with, you must create a profile for your medical business on this site to achieve patient reviews. It ranks the keywords and gives a score out of 100 to show just how much a medical business matches the search results.

CareDash

The second most popular and credible patient review site, CareDash plans to make online medical business data more straightforward and accessible for patients to leave reviews on them. While using CareDash, Patients can look up the “strengths” of an online medical business and see their credibility while also having the option to leave a review there for it if they have used the medical business’s services.

CareDash is centered around openness and inclusivity to all patients. On the search results, CareDash offers medical businesses and specialists when patients look them up by how much they match the patient’s search index. It also showcases a medical business’s reviews as the highlighted part of a patient’’s search result.

Similar to HealthGrade, you have to create a profile for your online medical business to get reviews on CareDash. By creating a profile of it, you ensure the chance of patients looking you up on this site and leave their reviews so they can be on display with your profile for other potential patients to see.

WebMD

This is essentially one of the most popular review sites that online medical businesses use to gain patient reviews. At WebMD, patients rate online medical businesses on how well they offer treatments and medical services. WebMD doesn’t just have a single 5-star rating framework.

It allows patients to give a general rating about their experience which is why most medical businesses use it, however, it also allows them to give a star rating if that is what they want. WebMD incorporates Google results, which may incorporate other clinical practices, over the profile query items. It shows other online medical businesses in a sidebar directly on another medical business’s full profile page.

Still, you must have a profile to get reviews on it by patients. While most patients often use WebMD as a patient discussion and debate board, it is essentially a patient review site that offers credible medical business to patients allowing them to share their experience with them.

Facebook

Though it is still isn’t a “proper” site for reviews, Facebook is one of the quickest developing patient review platforms online for medical businesses. To enable patient reviews on your profile on Facebook, you can fill out the Facebook Reviews application, which will make a Reviews tab directly on your medical business page where patients can seek out and leave their reviews. While seeking out reviews on other sites can be quite tedious for patients, with Facebook, patients often already have their accounts on it, so leaving and seeking out patient reviews is quite effortless and easy for patients. While you can use Facebook for your SMM campaigns and content strategy, it can also be used for purposes of acquiring patient reviews.

Google My Business

Possibly, the biggest patient review tool that almost all online medical businesses use, Google My Business is a great tool for utilizing the advantage of Google Search and Google Maps data and acquiring patient reviews. A recent study found out that 98% of patients pick a medical business if it is ranked on the top five on Google My Business index lists.

You need to certify your patient reviews for online medical business on Google My Business to enable patient reviews on it. While it is a great tool for acquiring and showcasing patient reviews, making a profile on Google My Business is a great way to earn credibility and improve your online standing for your medical business.

Patient Medical Review Sites Are Profitable For Your Medical Business

To earn the trust of your potential patients, you must have the reviews of your existing patients on display. While having them on your site is great, using patient review sites is a much more profitable and credible option for your medical business.

If you have spent quite some time doing medical marketing, you may have come to find that often having great medical content, social media promotions and even a fully optimized site may lack in gaining patients for you. That is because like every other consumer on the planet, they look for something to base their trust on before buying a product.

Patient Testimonials

Similarly, your potential patients look for something to trust in your medical business before they can pick you. That “something” can be patient reviews or even better, patient testimonials. Patient are narratives or advanced reviews that convey a patient’s experience about your medical services , your treatments, their recovery journey, and often if you are lucky, a recommendation.

Patient testimonials are much more whole and personal than simple reviews and act as a base where your potential patients can relate to and deem you reliable. Putting up patient testimonials on your medical site can act as embellishing your site with certificates. This practice can encourage patient commitment, increase the patient visiting time by engaging them, and can help you out with improving your search engine rankings as well.

Serve As Proof And Certification

Simply put, patient testimonials are proof and certification. It serves as a convenience and advantage to both you and your potential patients by giving them something to base their trust in all the while elevating your online standing. Patient testimonials are perhaps the most remarkable approaches to acquire trust and draw in new patients to your medical business.

While they also help you out with your content marketing strategy, a survey led some time ago states that 89% of patients are more likely to choose a healthcare business after taking a look at their patient testimonials on their official site.

 Patient testimonials are viable because your current patients were once in the predicament where your potential patients are, which is considering whether to pick your medical business over another and figuring out what makes you different and more worthy of their choice rather than your competitors.

When potential patients see what different patients are stating about you without any paid encouragement from your behalf, fortifies their trust in you.

Contribute To Lifting Awareness For A Medical Business

While putting up patient testimonials is helping you gain new patients, it is also elevating your online reputation. Patient testimonials are an informal exchange between your existing patients and your potential patients and can accumulate awareness and reputation for your medical services among your intended patient crowd. They are a sort of archives and a record book that potential patients can look through.

Make sure that the testimonials that you put on your medical site are as natural as possible and unbiased. If they come across as forced or as though you have paid someone to write them, can damage the prospects of their success. The thought is to keep the tone unobtrusive and light with a sense of realness and a relatability to them.

Your patient testimonials contain the experience of a patient which is what the potential patient will most likely be interested in, but it also contains information about your treatments and healthcare services, which works in the favor of increasing positive aspects of your reputation and image.

Offer A Link To Existing Patients To Potential Patients 

Patient testimonials are genuine stories that mention to others what you are and how you have had an effect on your patient’s life. The way that testimonials come from a patient straightforwardly makes them relatable and viable.

While you may think that these testimonials are on your site and are about you, which they are, but, they really offer a space for your existing patients and your potential patients to link and relate to one another.

At the point when you put up patient testimonials, you are telling your potential patients what you did and people’s opinions about your medical business. Patient testimonials must seem like you haven’t put any purposeful endeavors to gain them. It indirectly works in a way like this:

“My GERD problems are cured because of _____ healthcare business.”

“Really? I have been looking for a place to sort out mine too! Tell me more about your experience.”

Add To Content Marketing Strategy And Lowers Bounce Rates

While they are connecting with your potential patients, patient testimonials also improve your content marketing strategy, mainly because they are a part of the medical content you put up on your medical website design company. You can optimize them, have some ranking keywords in them and even share them on your social media platforms for more exposure. Make sure to have some infographics or visuals to make them more engaging and appealing as possible.

When a potential patient comes across the page for your patient testimonials, they will likely be intrigued and read them. This cancels out their chance of existing your medical site and lowering your bounce rates. The average time for a patient visiting a medical site is 3.4 to 3.9 seconds according to Google and when you put up patient, you are increasing that time for your patients.

Patient Testimonials On A Medical Site Gain Potential Patients

Everyone wants some level of proof and trust to see what they are buying, generally. Patients are the same. Your promotions and content endeavors won’t work to their full potential if you did not give the potential patients something to trust. Putting up patient testimonials does just that.

No one was prepared for the massive impact the Covid-19 pandemic brought with itself on the world. Since it has affected everything on the globe, businesses aren’t safe either and if we talk about medical businesses, people have been having mixed approaches as to how to keep them up.

As a doctor who owns an online medical business, you can turn the circumstances around in your own favor and make them work out for you. As an owner of a business, you must know about one of the most major rules of marketing, which is adapting to unforeseen events and coming up with approaches that will protect your business for them.

You need to follow the same in order for your online healthcare business to keep running. With a few adjustments and a couple of measures of adaptations, you can tailor your online medical business to still run successfully. With the help of the helpful tips below, you can turn the unfortunate circumstances around for you.

Investing Smart In Your Marketing Campaigns

To protect your online medical business from falling down the slope of useless financial investments, you must thoroughly collect your financial plan. Since Covid-19 has had a more physical impact on businesses, cut back on campaigns and strategies that center around promoting your online medical business in a physical way.

Draw up a calculation and figure out what you’re spending now and what you were spending before to identify what can be put on hold until the situation normalizes. Investing smart in your marketing campaigns has a very powerful impact on your business’ capacity to endure the harsh outcomes of the pandemic.

Think of it as cutting the excess fat off of your financial plan. If you can separate your uses into what is essential versus what can be dispensed with, you’ll have the option to remove a great deal of the fat and give yourself an income advantage to support your marketing aspects that are active during the pandemic.

Brushing Up your Social Media Patient Network

Now that everybody is home, they are on their social media now more than ever, which for you, equates to a high flux of patient traffic. Use this opportunity to put more and more effort into your SMM (Social Media Marketing) strategies and reach out to your existing and potential crowds of patients to let them know that your medical business is up and running.

Since a lot of patients are now on their social media accounts looking for online medical businesses, reach out to them to let them know about the updated practice in your medical facility or any Telehealth services that you may be offering. To show your activity on social media platforms, you can:

• Start virtual meetings with potential or existing patients.
• Publish supported posts or paid ads.
• Post any deals or notifications you may have.
• Notify your patients about your Telehealth services.

Adjusting And Adapting Your Medical Business

The Covid-19 pandemic is transforming every business on a scale no one could have foreseen. The businesses that had a contingency plan on the ready is disturbed less and adapted to the circumstances more quickly rather than the businesses that are still adamant about following their old ways. That right there is the key. For your online medical business to flourish even in the pandemic, you need to adapt and adjust.

For instance, if it’s the issue of your struggling finances, you should overcome that issue by reducing your budget on the relevant aspects of your business and putting them on hold. Investing in creating a space that works mainly virtually and handles all your online marketing work virtually, can help you keep up your website and medical services.

Similarly, if your area of work is on a strict lockdown and your medical facility cannot accommodate patients, introduce online medical services like “Telehealth”, “Virtual Consultations” or “Virtual Care” that doesn’t require any physical interaction between you and your patients.

Introducing Resourcefulness To Your Circumstances

Since this pandemic is something that no one anticipated, right now online businesses have very little to work with. This is where you can work with your creative team to come up with new ideas to keep your patients engaged and avoid the risk of losing them. For instance, if you have decided to offer Telehealth services to your medical services, update your medical site’s landing page accordingly.

Add a signup form for patients to fill up if they are interested in your Telehealth services and promote them in every way possible. Use your social media platforms for doctors, PPC, email marketing, or even SMS alerts to reach out to patients to let them know about your update services and how you are still working.

Planning Ahead For The Future

It is the practice of successful businesses to learn from unexpected circumstances and learning from them. You need to do the same for your medical business to flourish. Assemble all that you have learned from the pandemic and what are the most successful strategies and practices that kept your business running and sort them out if any more circumstances like this pandemic occur in the future.

Invest your efforts and time in planning out the progressions you must make to permit yourself to remain in business. This is also necessary for you to remain at the top of your game and staying two steps ahead of your rivals and competitors. 

Adapting Your Medical Business To The Pandemic Is Important

All around the globe, businesses are shutting down fast because they are failing to keep up with the pandemic. You can avoid this by adapting your online medical business accordingly and keeping up your medical services in a safe and distanced way.

If you want to maintain the traffic you have currently and not lose any leads, you must market towards your patients. However, if you want to not only maintain the flux of your patient traffic but increase it, you must move in a strategic way and operate your medical business in a calculated way against the pandemic.

The time patients spend on your medical site is an obvious sign of how they feel about it and your medical services. On the off chance to increase patient is rebounding or leaving your medical site without investing enough energy to surf on it, something isn’t going right with it and should be fixed.

The time a patient spends on your medical site is directly proportional to how Google views your medical site and business. You can discover the normal time a patient spends on your medical site by using the Google Analytics tool. It appears in your reports under Audience » Overview.

The time a patient spends on your medical site is connected with the sort of medical content you publish, the layout of your medical site, and the amount of interaction available for patients on your medical site. As a doctor who runs a medical business with a website, your topmost goal is to make patients stay on your medical site long enough to discover your medical services.

What Is A Bounce Rate?

Generally speaking, a bounce rate refers to the rate of traffic that leaves or deserts a website pretty soon after clicking on it or not spending the general amount of time on it. In terms of medical marketing, a bounce rate is the rate of patients that leave a medical site without spending the time to discover the medical services.

A bounce rate identifies an online business’s success or failure. It is certainly important for following up with Google’s website algorithm that values websites with low bounce rates.

Some Great Hacks To Increase Patient Visiting Time On A Site

Putting up a medical site is an easy step compared to attracting patient traffic. But keeping that patient traffic engaged long enough in your medical site is even harder. However, below are few helpful hacks that will undoubtedly help your medical site lower its patient bounce rates and increase the patient visiting time.

Internal Linking Is The New Way

A medical content that is thoroughly rich with internal links is a jeweled piece of content according to Google. Linking to your medical content is presumably the best method to expand online patient visits on your medical website. Incorporate at least 2-3 links in a paragraph of a medical content page or other medical blogs.

Not only does this exercise increase patient visiting time on your medical site, but also creates a web of internalized links between one single page of content to many others, which is a great way of optimizing it as well. With internal linking, you kill two birds with a single stone.

Develop Your Medical Site With An Attractive Layout

Even though every aspect of an online business is, well, online, patients still regard it as though physically window shopping. They won’t enter a shop or your clinic if the exterior design isn’t appealing or attractive enough. You hope to achieve the same with your medical site.

Patients will only stay long enough to consider your medical services if the overall website layout is pleasing to them. Try to make your healthcare website design look as simple yet attractive as possible. Choose light and pleasing color scheming with a minimalistic approach. Avoid bad linking and keep things de-cluttered and simple to reach.

Work On The Readability of Your Pages

Connected with the above hack, sites that are hard to read or understand have very high bounce rates. To increase patient visiting time on your medical site, make all pages on your site simple to peruse on all devices.

Make your text dimension is big and optimized enough for simple reading, yet small to evade looking ridiculous. Break lengthy paragraphs of your blog entries into simple and small ones. Break your articles into different short blogs, headings, sections, bulleted points, and incorporate some free space on your medical site.

Increase Patient : Add Appealing Optimized Visuals

Medical visuals are the most captivating type of medical content on the web. Patients love to look up visuals rather than plain and long medical content. This is the reason you see most well-known sites utilize full-screen pictures on their landing pages.

You shouldn’t just stop at pictures, use videos and infographics as well. The best tool for high-quality pictures is Shutterstock. Not only does this improve the patient visiting time but also increases the layout of your medical site and makes it look professional.

Make Your Medical Content Interactive

Even though visuals are a great way to improve your medical site’s readability, you must not forget your written medical content. It is still, the aspect that draws in patients majorly on your medical site.

If you look through a patient’s perspective, you search for medical services, you land on a result that looks to what you searched for, you click on it and are disappointed when it is just a never-ending paragraph of words.

This is why you must make the written medical content on your site, interactive and adding internal links in one way of doing it. You must incorporate visuals and medical infographics and incorporate call-to-action incentives in it. That way, patients will be well engaged while reading the medical content and increase the visiting time on your medical site.

Make A Habit Of Offering Content Upgrades

Content updates are a great way of engaging patients with your site. This is a marketing practice that is often used by online marketers and bloggers. Offering content upgrade works by playing out a task. This task could be anything.

You can ask patients to sign up in exchange for a full, uninterrupted view of your medical blogs, registering for a free record, or round out a study. Offering marketing services upgrades can adequately help patients to commit to your medical business and increase their visiting time as well.

High Patient Visiting Time = High Business Success Rates

Google regards sites with low bounce rates as successful and ranks them higher. That must also be your ultimate goal. Following the above hacks can help you achieve it and lower your patient bounce rates, ultimately.