The Clinic Marketing Podcast - Local SEO & Healthcare Digital Marketing Tips for Clinic Owners & Wellness Providers

12 Items to Remove from Your Clinic Website Immediately | Chiropractic Website | Clinic SEO [Propel Playback]

• Darcy Sullivan

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As a clinic owner, your website serves as the digital front door to your practice. It's crucial to ensure that your site effectively represents your clinic and you, providing an excellent user experience (UX) for visitors. 

However, you may have elements on your website that are hindering its performance, turning potential patients away. In this episode of the Propel Your Practice Podcast, we'll discuss 12 things you need to remove from your clinic website right now and why they need to go.

Clinic owners can enhance the UX by addressing these twelve key areas, which contribute to their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The ultimate goal is to create a digital space that is not only reflective of your clinic's brand but also inspires, informs, educates, and entertains your current and potential patients. 

📌 Episode Webpage & Shownotes: 12 Features Hurting Your Website’s Performance & How to Fix Them

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Speaker 1:

Hey there, it's Darcy Sullivan from Propel Marketing and Design and the Clinic Marketing Podcast. Thank you so much for listening here. I think you're going to enjoy this clip. It's from a popular episode in our archives, don't forget. You can leave a review on iTunes. It would mean the world. It helps spread the word about this podcast. All right, let's get into the episode.

Speaker 1:

Today we're doing a little bit of website rehab as we dive into 12 things clinic owners must remove from their websites immediately. So this week, today is Thursday. I had intended to record this episode on Monday but got a nasty cold. As you can tell, I still have a little bit of congestion, so I apologize for that. But in the past three days Monday, tuesday, wednesday we still did a number of discovery calls with clinic owners and during these discovery calls I can tell you that 12 of the things that we're sharing today the 12 things clinic owners must remove from their websites immediately I saw repeatedly this week. Now, if you are a clinic owner and you're interested in us looking at your website, letting you know how we can help you from an SEO and user experience direction, you can visit propalyourcompanycom and click book a discovery call.

Speaker 1:

As a clinic owner. You know the importance of your website, of your website. When people go to your website, we want to make sure that they have a great experience a user experience we call this UX and that they take the actions that we want them to take, and today that's what we're diving into. So up on the list of number one for the 12 things that you should remove from your website immediately is the old-fashioned homepage slider. While a homepage slider might seem like a dynamic way to showcase multiple messages or promotions at one time, it can often leave the visitor feeling confused or distracted and, let's be honest, nobody is clicking through to go from slide to slide to slide. Instead, focus on having a clear and concise messaging and including imagery that reflects that messaging.

Speaker 1:

Number two vague headers, and this is extremely, extremely important on your homepage. We've talked about this before, but if your header, if somebody arrives on your website and your header is just like, oh, helping you feel better, well, that doesn't let me know what you do or where you offer your services, versus something like providing chiropractic care to the greater Nashville area. See how, in the clearer heading that I understand what you do, you can have a subheading that goes into more detail, but we want to make sure that your headers are very clear to help ensure accuracy of who you are and what you offer, especially on that homepage. This leads us to number three. We want to make sure, when people come to your website, if they do not feel good, that you do not make them feel worse. This means, if you are a chiropractor or a massage therapist or a physical therapist, if you are anybody who deals with potential patients who could suffer from headaches, we do not want to make their headaches worse when they visit your website. As someone who suffers from migraine, I can tell you there are so many times when I visit clinic websites where my head feels worse because they've used maybe aggressive bright colors, tiny fog, or they've got fast loading videos or things that visually add more discomfort and increase a headache. So make sure when you're putting together your design and again this goes back to that slider that we had already talked about these elements have the opposite effect of what you truly want to happen when somebody comes to your website. Number four when somebody comes to your website, you want them to stay on your website and while social media icons are amazing, we do not want them placed at the very top of the website. Placing them at the top of the website can be a distraction. Somebody can come to your website and, as soon as they're thinking about making an appointment with you, see your Instagram icon at the top, click on it and get distracted and never come back to your website again.

Speaker 1:

All right on to number five. Number five is using stock photos that resemble your competitors. Obviously, we don't love the idea of using stock photos, but I get it. Sometimes you have to, but I get it. Sometimes you have to. And if you do need to use generic stock photos which can happen just make sure, when you're on a website searching for the stock photos, that you don't use the ones that are sorted by most popular, because those are the ones everybody is going to be using. Those are the ones everybody is going to be using. Ideally, it's preferred for you to use unique photos that really truly represent your brand, and if you are planning a photo shoot or considering planning a photo shoot, please be sure to check out the podcast we created on planning the perfect photo shoot to ensure that your images from a photo shoot will be website ready.

Speaker 1:

All right. Number six slow loading video libraries. Oftentimes, clinics like to include video libraries as an asset on their website, which is awesome. Love that idea. Now, I'm not videos to their video library, instead of loading them to YouTube or Vimeo and then embedding them. Oftentimes, too, what can happen is that, if they do, load them to a third-party platform and then embed them, which is the way to handle that, if they do too many on one page, it can slow things down. So keep that in mind if you feel like you want a video library. There are a number of different ways to handle this. One test how quick the load speed is right to make sure that it looks correct and that it modifies itself so that, if somebody's looking at them on a looking at your website on a cell phone, that the videos don't get cut off. That can be an issue as well, so you want to make sure that they display correctly and that they load quickly.

Speaker 1:

If you come to an instance where, again, you're not loading these videos directly to your website, you're loading them, preferably to YouTube or Vimeo. If you load them to YouTube and then you've got a page full of videos and you feel like they're still a little slow, what you can do is organize them in a way where you have them grouped by category so let's just say you have a back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, etc. As your groupings and embed the most popular one and then, under it, include the link to the other videos associated with that library. That's one way that you can keep a nice clean look and feel. The other option, which a lot of people are using, is to instead link the tab that says videos to your YouTube page. And if you decide to go that route, what I would suggest are a few things One, that you have that link open in a new window so that if somebody leaves your website and goes there, that your website tab is still open. And then two is that, within YouTube, that you create a playlist and that you have things nicely organized and nicely labeled so people can find what they're looking for.

Speaker 1:

Okay, number seven. Number seven low quality or duplicate website content. A while back we did an episode on canned content and how to handle canned content. You can jump back and either look in the show notes for this episode or search canned content through the podcast and find that episode. But we want to make sure that you're not creating content just for the sake of content, or that you have duplicate content, or that you have very vague content that really isn't original to your business and doesn't showcase what you actually offer and your personality.

Speaker 1:

Number eight pdf content that should be web content, and I've got a couple examples of this. Um, one would be a flyer. Like you don't want to take a flyer pdf that maybe showcases a new service that you're offering and just take that and put it on a page on your website and think that all of a sudden, google is going to find you for the terms that are on that graphic, even if you convert it to a JPEG, so we could actually even say to a JPEG, so we could actually even say PDF content that should be web content, or images that should actually be web text content. We want to make sure that you convert that content into a web-friendly form and integrate it into your website to help you with the findability factor. That doesn't mean that you can't link to the PDF. It just means that you should actually have that text on your website and laid out in a way that Google can find it and that it's optimized and easy to read. Now, this does not mean that, for example, if you are a chiropractor and you recently purchased a laser, that you take the laser brochure that was provided to you from another company and just word for word, use the exact wording that they supplied on that PDF or brochure and turn it into website content. You want to own that content Again.

Speaker 1:

This goes back to number seven. You want to make sure that it's not low quality, low quality content, that it's content that actually reflects your brand and your offering. Okay, number nine autoplay videos with sound. Autoplay videos with sound. Ooh, this one's the worst. Think about it. Let's pretend that you are at work and you're sitting in a cubicle and you're supposed to be focusing on one thing, but instead you go to a website because you're looking for something else and all of the sudden a video starts playing that you shouldn't be listening to. So we want to make sure that you don't have videos that are autoplay with sounds.

Speaker 1:

Number 10, pop-ups that don't serve a purpose. If I'm coming to your clinic's website for the first time and I don't know much about your organization, there's no reason that I'm going to just want to generically sign up for your email list. So having aggressive pop-ups that just say sign up for our email list are really not effective and, in fact, again provide a bad user experience. Instead, if you are going to include pop-ups, have them be with a purpose. So what does that look like? Well, maybe, if I am on a blog post that talks about something related to running, a pop-up might be get our I don't know video collection, or sign up to receive our three stretches to help you prevent injury before you run Something that actually relates to the content that's on that page, right? So this might mean, if there is something on a back pain page that then the pop-up content relates to sign up to get fill in the blank that relates to the problem, which would be back pain. Again, we want to make sure that we're not using just those vague pop-ups of sign up for email list without giving them any reason why to sign up for your email list.

Speaker 1:

Next step broken links. Broken links are frustrating and they're bad for SEO search engine optimization. So regularly you want to do an audit of your website and make sure that you don't have broken links internally and links that are linking outside of your website that are also broken. One of the easiest ways to do this is there's a handy dandy free tool at wwwbrokenlinkcheckercom where you can simply enter in your website and it'll spit out a list of any broken links. And finally, ooh, and this one I saved it for last for a very good reason. It is one of the worst user experience items that directly correlates with getting people in your front door, and that's conversion confusion.

Speaker 1:

And let me repeat that again, conversion confusion. This is when you go to a website and there's multiple actions that you can take, not just, oh, you can click on different pages of the website and there's a menu structure that has different links, but where it buttons that are book, an appointment book, a free assessment schedule, a call Book, an appointment book, a free assessment schedule, a call. When there's too many options all in one screen at the same time, it gets very confusing and this also, I see this a lot too with, again, the social media icons at the top of the page. So yesterday, for instance, I was on a discovery call with a chiropractor and we were looking at their homepage and in their homepage, above the top menu, they had a call to action for a free assessment. They had a button, but it was the phone number, which was a click to call, and then they had the social media icons and then they had the social media icons and then below that they had the traditional header menu with then a call to action to book an appointment. And then in there luckily they didn't have a slideshow, but they had a huge hero image with with text, vague tests, vague text that didn't state their location or exactly what they did, and then two calls to action there and all of a sudden the person visiting your website's like what do I do? What do I do for this? And on top of that, they were a clinic that offered, while they were a chiropractic clinic, they also offered additional non-chiropractic services. So somebody landing there just expecting to see chiropractic information is like wait, there's a call to action to take this or for this service at the same time as a call to action to book a chiropractic appointment. It can be very confusing. So if you just kind of keep it easy with a book now button or, obviously, if you are on specific pages where you're diving into specific services that you offer really clear actions or defined of what you want people to take. So, in conclusion, by removing these 12 website issues that we commonly see, you can improve the experience for people when they come to your website, increase your brand credibility and drive more conversions. So take the time to evaluate your website and make any necessary adjustments to ensure that it is effectively representing your clinic and the value that you provide your visitors, patients and potential patients.

Speaker 1:

And again, let's go over. Let's wrap it up with reviewing what those 12 items were. That would be your homepage slider, vague headers, social media icons at the top of your website. Again, they're absolutely fine down at the bottom, but let's not keep them at the top.

Speaker 1:

Headache triggering elements, crazy colors, tiny text fonts, fast videos, those types of elements, image issues that include using stop, photos that look just like your competition, video libraries that take too long to load, low quality canned content or duplicate content, pdf content that should actually be written content on your website. And again, the same thing can go for an image that should actually be written content on your website Auto play videos with sound Pop-ups without a purpose, broken links and finishing it off with that conversion confusion. We would love to hear from you as to what topics you would like to hear from us coming up and what issues you are currently having when it comes to your website, seo and content marketing. You can find us on Instagram at Propel your Company, and again, if you're interested in signing up for us to take a look at your website and chat about ways we can help you improve your website and SEO, please visit propellyourcompanycom to book a discovery call.

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Darcy Sullivan

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