What's involved in building a medical website?

If you are a doctor opening a new practice, a doctor with an existing website you build yourself, or a marketing manager newly assigned a task of getting pricing for the development of a website for a medical practice, this article is for you!

Please allow me to explain what is involved in scoping out a website build AND developing a marketing strategy for our customers here at DoctorLogic.

What is involved in building a website for healthcare practices?

When it comes to pricing out an initial build, these are the items that we need to scope out in order to give set up fee pricing.

What kind of design are you looking for?

• Are you looking for a templated design? Benefits include lower setup fee cost and potentially faster build times, but you do have limitations in design. You can change fonts, colors to match the brand, messaging and imagery, but you cannot chage the code structure or flow the homepage layout.
• Are you looking for a custom website? Cost will certainly be higher due to the back and forth between the design team and the doctor. The number of revisions for design and content impacts cost to the agency and therefore will be higher than a templated site.

Total number of doctors to be listed on the site:

• Are we building out 1 page with a list of doctors all in one page?
• Are we building out individual pages for each doctor, each with their own bio?
• Will they have any new doctors join the practice anytime soon?
• Will they be utilizing our review software to solicit, monitor and market reviews just for the brand, or reviews for each doctor too, or not at all??

Total number of location pages needed on the website:

• Are we building out individual pages for each facility?
• Will they be utilizing our review software to solicit, monitor and market reviews for each facility??
• Will they want Local SEO for each facility (GBP optimization and online citation management)??
• Will they have any new locations for the practice anytime soon?

Total number of service / condition pages needed for the website build

• How many of these pages are needed for implementation (10, 20, 30, 40, etc.)???
• One service or condition page takes a few hours to create including an initial round of content written, then QA, then formatting the pages with photography, and then adding all of the proper the SEO elements (Custom URLs, Custom Header Tags, Unique Strucutred Data, etc.)

Other Considerations?

• Do they need custom markup pages?? Examples include custom page for a custom page for telehealth visits, pages about specific devices or technology within the practice, travel pages, pages about insurance, financing, etc.??
• Are there any integrations needed?? Simple link to another external webpage (like an EHR portal for online scheduling) or an iFrame, or it could be something more complex that must be scoped.
• Are we carrying over any blog articles from the previous site?? If so, how many blogs are needed for carryover 10, 50, 100?

When it comes to SEO, there are multiple strategies:

• Website Fundamentals (URL Slugs, H1 Headers / Title Tags, Structured Data, Page Speed, Menu Navigation, etc.)
• Local SEO (Optimizing Google Business Profile and about 30 other director citations like Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, etc.) for EACH location.
• Content Marketing (You can do this with our software on your own by adding page updates, blogs, reviews, etc. OR you can pay us to write 1, 2, 3, 4 pieces of content per month to drive SEO performance)
• External Link Building (The practice picks 4 of their top services for the year.? Each quarter we focus on link building for one treatment.? We gather 8 links over 90 days and link back to one service page.)

[Related]: Get your FREE copies of by 3 eBook series on SEO for Healthcare

Other digital marketing strategies besides SEO, include Reputation Management, Google Paid Ad Management, and Social Media Content Creation and Ad Management, Managed Chat, etc.

This is why we meet with our clients to discuss all of this before we provide pricing.? We also like to do proper discovery to understand what the practice is trying to accomplish after the website is built, so we can make an appropriate recommendation for the marketing strategy to ensure the success of the website.

ABOUT ME: I have been helping doctors market their practices for 12 years, written hundreds of articles on LinkedIn and multiple eBooks, spoken at 50+ medical conferences about digital marketing in healthcare in the last 7 years and I've consulted well over 1,500 practices in my career.?

NEXT STEPS: If you haven't found the right agency yet, I hope this explanation above gives you the confidence needed to schedule a meeting with me so I can learn more about your practice and the goals. I can show you the type of results that we deliver for ouor healthcare clients, and we can scope out your project together.

If you would like to meet sometime soon to discuss your website, please feel free to simply email me directly or call me. I would be honored to help!

To your success!

John Vakidis

Partner, VP of Business Development

Do you have questions about marketing your practice more effectively online? If so, shoot me an email to [email protected] or call me at 469-458-7126.