Websites - It's not just about you.

Is your practice's LASIK website just about you?  "Well of course it's about me.  It's my website, isn't it?"  is a common response.  True, your website is about you and it is about your practice, but your knowledge and skills exist for the benefit of your patients.   If you want your website to really perform, go the extra mile to ensure your website makes your potential patients feel like the website is all about THEM.

1. Make sure they can easily find what they are looking for.  Don't try to be too clever or creative with your navigation or descriptions.  A well-planned organizational flowchart for your website is a blueprint for success.  Navigation that is not consumer-friendly is a recipe for failure.  This is magnified if you provide a large menu of specialized services and expertise.  Focus on helping visitors reach target "destination" pages.
   
2. Speak in their language, not in a manner that tries to make you sound so professional your site becomes "institutional".  Ideally, your site should be filled with more "you, yours, your needs, your health, your well-being, your life, your future, etc." than "us, we, our practice, our surgeons, etc." Let them know it's about them and "what's in it for them."
   
3. Be a resource of important information, and provide materials that have some value to the visitor.  Don't just try to "sell" them superficial cookie-cutter or generic copy.  Make the information value enough so that they might even print it!
   
4. Do things that accelerate the "relationship" between your practice and the visitor.  For instance, identify "who" they will be contacting when they send your practice an email.  I can't recall ever meeting a person in an office named, "info!"
   
5. Don't assume visitors know enough about LASIK services and general eye care that you overlook including important information.  For example, if you offer services with a certain guarantee behind it, be sure they know that immediately and throughout the site.  
   
6. Provide ample opportunities for visitors to send you an email.  Yes, it is important to place phone numbers "above the fold" on every page and to try and generate phone calls.  It's understandable that you prefer telephone calls, rather than emails.  However, Internet users and most of your website visitors typically prefer corresponding through email.  If email is the communication means of choice, then do things throughout your website to facilitate it. 
   
7. Don't forget, most visitors that come to your website are seeking help and want to educate themselves on an important decision that will affect them physically.  They likely don't have a great LASIK surgeon relationship and are feeling intimidated, confused, scared, and possible frustrated.  Be sure you let them know you understand what they are going through, that you will listen, and that you care.   Developing trust and credibility is what sets high-performing surgeon websites apart from those that only serve as an online brochure.
   

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutionshttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=4413159191335415469

The Importance of Paying Attention:

In the movie True Stories, David Byrne from the Talking Heads plays himself exploring the eccentricities of a fictions small town in middle Texas. At the beginning of the movie Byrne says that it is exciting to get or go someplace new. But after a while, he says, the newness fades and the intricate details die away. People stop noticing all the things that made it exciting in the first place. Individuals get used to it and it just becomes part of the big picture.

What does this have to do with websites? It has everything to do with websites. It can be a very exciting to participate in web marketing and Search Engine Optimization. But after a while of receiving results, a lot of businesses forget about the details. SEO or web marketing just becomes “something they do.” Many individuals just glance at their results while some ignore them all together.

This month, I received a call from a client who was comparing his results from last month and the month before. By doing this, he noticed that his LASIK website’s first page listings were down slightly. It was really refreshing to have a person be concerned for the welfare of his web marketing. “I want to know how this drop is going to affect us,” he said. I was glad he asked.

I made several recommendations based not only on the number of Page 1 listings he had, but also on his web traffic reports. His average user time on his site was down. We took a thorough look at the site and decided to update some of the older pages. By adding new, fresh content, I can bet that his Page 1 listings are going to rise along with his average user time.

This success story was brought to you today by: “The Importance of Paying Attention.” If this client hadn’t reviewed his reports every month, he may not have noticed the drop and there may have been a continuous downward spiral.

It is just as key to pay attention to the results of marketing efforts as it is to market in the first place. If no one is paying attention, how does anyone know it is working? And if it is working, why not try to make it work better?

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

The e-PR Campaign- Success Through Visibility

Electronic Press Releases (e-PR) - e-PR is an excellent way to promote your website on the internet. It spreads the word about what your site has to offer, locally and nationally, while expanding your link popularity at an almost viral rate. It's also the most cost effective means of growing your link popularity. Here's how it works:

Page1 Solutions e-PR program initially sets up your campaign by finding websites that will likely be interested in publishing your articles and press releases. We use this comprehensive list of online publishers to reference when it comes time to make a submission for you.

Select an article. Each submission will require an article that is pertinent to your practice’s website. The article can be something that you have had for some time, something that you've just written, or you can have us write the article.

Submit the article. Our e-PR specialist will optimize the article prior to submission. She will also plant links within the article's text. Once this prep work is done she will submit the article to your strategic online publishing list.

Track results together. By monitoring web traffic reports and incoming leads, you can see a growth in both the aforementioned areas. We can help interpret your results accordingly and monitor your success.

Continue the Process. It's important that you understand that e-PR isn't a one-shot deal. It's an ongoing campaign to grow your link popularity, which in turn helps your website visibility. Each article will have a peak performance, but after it reaches its peak, the links from the online publishers begin to fall off as the article is supplemented by new articles from other sources. For this reason, it's necessary to publish an article at least once a quarter and optimal results can be generated from campaigns that submit an article every month.

This comprehensive strategy, which will increase your exposure on the World Wide Web and boost your ranking on the search engines will aid in the process of growing your website's link popularity. Link popularity is how Google and other search engines measure your website's reputation and credibility. They assume that if another website is linking to your site, then your site must have something good to offer.

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions