Your physical therapy clinic’s website can serve a variety of different purposes. It can be used to gain new patients, keep in contact with current ones, and act as a representation of your business to the general public. One vital feature that many clinics’ websites fail to incorporate, however, is a collection of informative, educational articles directed at your patients’ needs.
Why Have a Patient Education Section on Your Clinic’s Website?
Your website should act as the online office for your clinic, and be one of the first places patients go to find helpful information related to physical therapy. Having a patient education section on your website is vital because for most patients, their treatment doesn’t stop when they leave your clinic. No matter how well things were explained to them, or how many handouts they’re provided, it can be tough to remember everything.
By creating a special section of your website to provide highly-informative articles and information to your patients, you can greatly increase their quality of care and their likelihood of returning to your clinic. A few things that you can do to set up an effective patient education section include:
1. Deliver Informative Articles
No matter how attractive and well-designed your website it, the reason that patients are there is to find answers to their questions. The content of your patient education website should be very informative and factual, and provide tips and resources to its readers. If your information isn’t useful or comprehensive, your patients may go looking somewhere else for their physical therapy needs.
2. Ensure Patients Can Find the Information They Need
If you want your patients to make use of your website, you need to ensure that it’s easy for them to find the information that they need. Having an easily-navigated website template will make it easy to guide visitors towards the content that is useful to them and that answers the questions that they have. Most often, patients’ time is limited, and they don’t want to waste it digging around your website trying to find what they’re looking for. Creating your patient education section in a way that is easy for readers to find what practical information for will keep them coming back next time they have a question.
3. Keep New Topics Coming Regularly
Establishing an area for patient education on your website isn’t a one-time-only process. Rather than just creating a knowledge base of useful content, you should be constantly adding new articles and updating the selection of information you provide to your patients. This means creating new content on a regular basis. Over time, your growing list of comprehensive resources will continue to develop into an all-in-one resource for any of your patient’s needs. On the other hand, only offering the same old content will give patients no reason to visit your website regularly, and can lead to wasting staff time fielding more phone calls from confused patients – or even worse, losing them as patients all together. Failing to post fresh content can also harm your site’s SEO rankings.
4. Make Your Content Easy to Share
In order to take your website’s reach to next level, you should create content that is easy to share. Your patient education section can be a great resource not only for your current patients, but also for their friends and colleagues with similar needs. With the importance of social media and our reliance on it in our daily lives, having shareable content means that your patients will likely do your marketing for you. If they find your content helpful they’re going to share it across Facebook, Twitter or a multitude of other platforms. This recommendation gives your clinic credibility among their friends, and is a great tool for increasing business.
Having a patient education section on your website provides numerous benefits ranging from improving the treatment of patients in-between visits, to lead-generation from shared content. No matter how informative your website is, you should always be adding new articles and topics of interest. This can be a time-consuming activity, however, and you may not have an experienced writer in your clinic. To help you develop a powerful patient education section on your website, we offer a steady flow of new content, branded for your clinic and delivered regularly.
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