Transcript
[INTRODUCTION]
Ronda Nelson: Hey! Hey! Welcome back to this episode of The Clinical Entrepreneur podcast. I’m your host, Ronda Nelson. And as usual, I’m super happy that you are taking time out to join me to talk about yet another strategy, a growth strategy for you with your wellness practice. So, I talk about this all the time that I love working with practitioners who are building in the growing phases of their wellness practice. So, whether you are a chiropractor or an acupuncturist or a health coach, you might be a massage therapist, you could be a Reiki practitioner, you might do sound therapy, you might be a one-off practitioner with a very single unique type of specialty or thing that you do with patients or clients, I am your coach. And so, I love that you’re here. I love that you’re tuning in, because I can tell that if you’re listening, you are one of those people that really, truly do want to grow your practice. When we start out in business, we start to hang a shingle, and we think, oh, I’m just going to help people. There’s a lot more to it than just helping people. We can do that pretty well, but man, this running a business thing is tough duty.
So, today we’re going to talk about a pretty basic thing, and that is what to do with your website. So, I’ve seen a lot of websites. I get lots of practitioners who I coach and work with, and part of what I do is I go in and I do a deep dive on their website, like content, their call to action, their “About” page, services, all kinds of stuff. So, we really dive in pretty deep on the website to just make sure that it’s looking good and it’s going to attract the right person.
So, what I want to talk to you about today is the five key things that, and there are more than five, but these are the five key elements of a great website. And we often think, oh, well, we’re just going to put a website up and have some copy and tell them where we graduated and how awesome we are. And that’ll be good enough, but it’s not good enough. It might have used to be that way, but no more. That is no way. So, first of all, we want to talk about how we’re going to create a compelling headline. And I’m going to talk more about that. We want your website to represent your business well, because in this digital age, everyone is online. Everyone is online.
And the more that we can get online and get in front of people and have a good presence, the better off we are going to be when it comes to converting that visitor into a patient. Think about your website like your house. It’s really the same. Your house is where you live, you personally live, right? This where your stuff and things and all your stuff, that’s where you sleep, your house. Now, would you invite someone over to your house if the front was all in shambles and the yard was full of weeds and you had broken-down cars or it just was in a wreck? You would want to make sure that when you were inviting people in to get to know you, that your house is presentable, that doesn’t have to be perfect, but at least needs to be presentable.
So, the front of your house should at least have a coat of paint and maybe some curtains or shades or shutters on the window. And there probably should be a walkway or some steps. You don’t want them to have to climb up the ladder to get to your house and try and figure out, well, where’s the door? Is it on the front of the house or the side of the house? And well, I don’t know, there’s no doorbell. Do I knock? And it’s dark inside. And sometimes, the image, just like that house I described, our image online can be that confusing. It can be really not put together well. It might be a little confusing, like the patient doesn’t know what to do. They don’t know where to go on your website, just like they don’t know what to do with your house. And then, once they get into your website, just like they get into your house, is it clean? Is it in order? Do people know where to naturally go? Or is it just kind of chaotic and there’s stuff all over the place?
And I call those dancing monkey websites. It’s where there’s stuff moving and things over here and something to catch my attention over here and another thing to catch my attention over here. It would be like being a guest again at your house and a guest walking in and you have five kids, and every kid is screaming or yelling or trying to get the attention of your guest saying, “Come look at my robot, come look at my Lego thing, come look at my Barbie, come look at…” It’s overwhelming. And so many websites are like that. We try and put way too much on the website in the hopes of letting the visitor know, oh, well, we can do this and we can do this and we can do this. We could do this. When really, it’s just overwhelming and way too much information, TMI.
So, I’m going to give you the five key elements of a great website that will help you get to capture the attention of your visitors. It will help you solve their problem. You’re going to tell them how you’re going to solve their problem. And these will help you be able to answer their question, because that’s really why someone comes to your website or finds you in the first place. We first need to make sure your website is findable, right? That it’s ranked well. And on that note, I’m going to take a little side rail off my notes here, but I will tell you, after being in this business for a long time, in business and marketing, I’ve been doing this a long, long time, there are way more shysters than there are good guys when it comes to SEO. Now, all of you know that term. You know it means search engine optimization, but you can go on Upwork or Fiverr, or you can go to Indeed, you can ask your neighbor and you’ll find 10 people that say, “Oh yeah, I’m good at SEO, I can make your site have SEO.” And I’m here to tell you, 90% of them are not worth a pinch of salt. Nada. They don’t know what they’re doing.
You want to know the truth? The truth is, if you have a fully optimized SEO site, you have to have a full-time person that’s working on it all the time. If you really want to compete with the big guys, you’ve got to put some skin in the game. You’ve got to put some cash out there. So, we’re not trying to compete with the big guys. I don’t need to compete with the Josh Axes of the world who are out there everywhere. I don’t need to. I just need to show up well in my own market, in my own local community. That does not require rocket science, but so many people say they can do it and they can’t. So, be very wary of someone that says, “Oh, I can do your SEO.” So, they often can’t.
So, back to my notes. Sorry, just a little detour right there. So, the patients come to your website. Once they can find you, they’ll come and they really have two things going on. They have a problem that needs a solution or they have a question that needs an answer, and that’s it. So, your website, its job is to either (A) solve their problem or let them know you can solve their problem or (B) answer their question, that’s it. That’s it. That’s all your website is supposed to do, and let them know what their next step is, do you want them to call you, etc.
So, let’s go through these five key elements. Number one, your first key element on your website needs to be a headline that grabs their attention. This headline has to let them know that you get them. You’ve either been there or you get it. You know what it’s like to feel so worn out and exhausted and tired that the mere thought of getting out of bed makes you want to cry. You’ve been there. You want to let them know I get you, I see you, I hear you, I feel you, I understand your pain. I know what it’s like. I get it. I work with these people and I know how to help. Did you feel that passion in my voice? Did you hear that? Does it feel different to you? Well, it should, because that’s what the emotion that you want to convey on your website.
Now, there’s two ways to do that. When you have what is called the headline, I should describe that first. A headline is the copy that you find above the fold. I know, another technical term. So, when you go to a website, you type it in your browser and then you go to a website, and the page loads and you’re on the home page. Everything that you see right there at the top of their web page, that’s called above the fold. So, think of the bottom of your computer screen as being the fold, or a laptop, like where it folds. Anything above that is called above the fold. Your headline needs to grab their attention and it needs to be above the fold because really, we only have about 15 seconds where we can capture the attention of our visitor. Well, that’s not very long. In fact, it’s probably around nine seconds.
So, we want that headline to be catchy, but when we have a catchy headline, we also want to have a very compelling image to go with it or behind it. So, one of the things that I talk about in the Business Coaching Collaborative, and when we get to this website section, is I have a website that I love to refer to and it’s a photographer. And her headline says, “We help parents and pros take better pictures.” That’s it. Well, the headline itself isn’t overly compelling until you see the picture. The picture is a silhouette or a profile of a child, and it’s kind of not a black and white, but it’s in a monotone type of a color. And it is absolutely a beautiful picture. So, automatically, I know that this website helps parents and pros take better pictures. Of who? Of children. So, we’re talking to parents who want to take pictures of their children. And guess what the picture is, of a child.
So, often on our websites, we put a picture of our office. Well, that is not going to evoke that emotion. Remember the emotion that I had earlier when I was saying, “I get you. I feel you. I know. I understand.” So, that, if I can’t evoke that kind of emotion with a picture and my headline, the person is going to be like, “Yep, I’m out. This guy is just talking about himself, I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore.” That’s what happens. It’s just what happens. So, we want to let them know on that headline that you get them, you understand them, and that you’re the best person to help. It answers the question that they’ve been asking, like, can I ever feel better? I have a Hashimoto’s. Am I ever going to find someone who knows how to fix or deal with Hashimoto’s? So, if that’s your specialty, that’s your niche, that’s who you love working with, then your headline should say something about Hashimoto’s and that you get it, you understand it. Don’t have to be tired anymore if you have Hashimoto’s, I’ve got you covered. I know that’s not very good, just off the top of my head, but you get what I’m saying. You want to make sure that they feel you. They know that you are going to come up with a solution or a promise. So, work on that headline, get that headline and that upper menu picture, above the fold picture to be very compelling to speak to your audience.
Number two, all websites need to have a phone number above the fold, in other words, in that top part of your home page. I would say about 50% of the ones I look at are missing the phone number, but yet, their call to action or the little button that tells them what to do, like Book Now, Schedule Now, Call Now, Learn More, whatever, so many of them say, Call Now, and there’s no phone number. Like what? Did you forget that part? So, we want the phone number to be in the upper right-hand corner. Okay, the upper right-hand corner, that’s where we want the phone number. And then I love having, even if your call to action isn’t Call Now, sometimes people are on their cell phones, 85% of people who are searching for healthcare practitioners do so on their cell phones. So, you want to make sure that that number is what’s called clickable. And that means, and your web designer, a good web designer, will know how to do this, but you want to make sure that when they touch the phone number on their phone, they’re on your website, and they touch on your phone number, that it’ll open up a little box. You’ve all had this happen, it’ll say call, call now. And they say, yes, and boom, they’re right there. But without a phone number, if they have to go mucking around, trying to find it, they’re going to say, “I’m out. I’m not doing this. This is too much work on this website, I’m done.” And they’ll go find someone else.
So, number one, you want a headline that grabs their attention and really draws them in with emotion. Number two, always make sure you have a phone number above the fold on your website. Always make sure it’s up there. Number three, we want a consistent call to action throughout the whole site. So, I’ve seen so many sites that at the top, it will say Call Now. And then a little bit, maybe even on the same kind of page, it’ll say Schedule an Appointment. And then a little bit later, it’ll say, Download My e-Book. And then a little later, it’ll say, Subscribe to My List. And then a little later, it’ll say Schedule an Appointment. And then a little later, I’ll say Learn More. Oh, my gosh. The poor patient doesn’t even know what to do. They don’t know where to go. What do you mean to do? Where is the doorway to your house? I just want to come in. Could you just make it clear?
So, what we want to do is make sure that you think about what action, what single action do you want them to take? So, if you offer like a complimentary phone call before an appointment, then that’s what you want them to do. Great. Then every single little button on your site needs to say, Schedule a Free Conversation or Schedule a Free Consult or Schedule a 15-Minute Free Appointment, something like that, whatever you wanted to say, or it could just be a Schedule Now. If you put Schedule Now, then you better have your website linked to a calendar because that’s what that implies. If I’m going to click Schedule Now, I expect I’m going to be able to schedule something. I don’t want a Schedule Now button to just go to a form fill where they are going to fill up their information and I have to get back to them. Well, then they might as well have called.
So, see, we make it harder than it needs to be on the patient. And if it’s too hard, they’ll go away. You all have had that happen. I’ve had the same thing happen. If a website button starts not working, and I click something, and it doesn’t go where I want it to go, I don’t have enough patience to hang around on that website and try and figure it out. I have other things to do with my life. So, I’m not going to do it. And patients will leave your site. So, make sure it’s really clear, you know exactly what you want them to do, and they don’t have any other option on your site. Schedule Now, Schedule Now, Schedule Everything or Call Now, Call Now or Call to Speak with Us or whatever you want it to be. So, that’s number three.
Number four, make sure that your website has a few pictures of you, and more faces. People connect with people. We are wired that way, right? That’s part of why the pandemic’s been hard because a lot of people have not been able to connect with each other. So, we want on our website for it to– you want to feel that emotion. You want to have that connection. You want to light something up in them that the person has hope and belief that you can help them. And one of the best ways to do that is with compelling images, but you don’t need your face plastered everywhere. I don’t recommend putting your face as a practitioner on your homepage, because that doesn’t tell me that you can solve my problem, it tells me that you love yourself. I can meet you later. I don’t think I need to meet you on the top of the page when you’re talking about Hashimoto’s. I need a picture of a thyroid or I need a picture of a person that feels amazing because they’ve had their thyroid better and they say, just say no to Hashimoto’s. I don’t know. I’m just making this up.
But my point is, you don’t want a picture of yourself up there. You can put a picture of yourself on the About page or maybe further down on the page, but not up top, but find pictures of people that connect, that have emotion. They’re happy. They’re enjoying their life, or you’ve got a photo of something that represents your ideal patient. So, you can get stock photos and that’s fine. You can take pictures of your images, your office, I mean, for your images and that’s fine, too, but you don’t want those to be above the fold. This is the place where we want to capture their attention, especially above the fold.
And then lastly, we want an About page that’s not about you. Yes, you heard that, right. We want an About page that is not about you, because news flash, no one cares where you graduated from school, no one cares what your GPA was, no one cares that you were in the sorority, no one cares that you did an internship here, there, any other place, nobody cares. What does the patient care about? Themselves. They care about themselves because they’re the ones that have a problem. So, on your About page, you want to write up things that talk about how you’ve been through something similar or how you learned what you learned.
If you want a good example of this, go to my website, RondaNelson.com, and go to the About page. Just go to the About page and read my About page. And see what happens, how I pull you through this journey of my life, kind of my story, and where I am now. Now, as a business coach and consultant right now, I kind of started that way. I’ve actually kind of come full circle, and you’ll read about it on my page. And I was a clinician and still am a clinician for a big section of my life, like 20 years, almost 20 years. And then I’ve kind of come full circle and really softened to the clinical side in order to really help practitioners on the business side. So, I started out as a business kind of person and I kind of came back to that.
So, you’ll see my story, but you can find yourself or pieces of who you are in my story, like, oh, I get that, she almost declared bankruptcy. Oh, yeah, that happened to me too. And we need to happen with your patient or that visitor, we want them to read your About page and find little bits of your story that they resonate with. So, make it about kind of you and them, right? You’re incorporating what their pain points are, what they’re afraid of, what their challenges are, and how you overcame those. So, they want to know that your experience will benefit them. They want to know about your journey, your aha moment, and why you’re so passionate about what you do. That’s what they want to know, not about where you graduated and what color hair you have. Nobody cares. I know. Don’t hate me, but it’s the truth.
So, those are the five things on your website, and there’s more, but these are the key five things. So, number one, make sure your headline is on point for your ideal patient, and you got a great picture. Number two, make sure your phone number is above the fold and it’s clickable. And if you want to know if it’s clickable, just pull your website up on your mobile phone and click on it. And if you get the little box that pops up that says, you want to call this number? You’ll know, that’s it. And if it doesn’t work, then you’ll know. Number three, you want a consistent call to action or what we say a CTA. So, that means every single button on your website that they can click on has to have the same message, so call, schedule, book, whatever you want it to be. Number four, make sure your images are beautiful. You can use resources like Shutterstock, Unsplash. There’s lots of places out there where you can get good free videos or the ones that you can pay for.
And this is another thing, if you find a video that just speaks to your soul and you love this video and you think, oh my gosh, this is the perfect video for my website, but it’s $50, come on, pay the $50, buy the rights to the image, because it will speak to your ideal person. If it’s the perfect image, $50, just think of it as a marketing expense, that’s all. So, it goes on your website. Just find the right images. And then, lastly, make the About page not about you. We want it to be about them. You want to create a story about you that they can insert themselves into. You don’t have to say where you were born and where you grew up and what you ate and that you had allergies, etc. You don’t have to do all that. You want to start at the point of your story, that’s an easy insert point for them to jump into the story with you, that you were really sick and you went to college and you got through it, but it was really hard. Whatever it is, whatever happened in your life that you think your ideal person can relate with, that’s where you want to sort of start your story. And then end it with triumph, or you can end it and say, “I’m still on my own journey, but I’m so much better than I used to be,” however you want to kind of phrase that.
So, you want to make sure, of course, that your site is mobile friendly. You want to resize it, check it on your desktop or your phone to make sure all the pictures are resizing and everything lines up right and make sure all your links work, like someone in your office can check that every week or so, but your website, just remember, it’s more than just a few images and a little bit of text. It really needs to have the right components to make it show up in the local search engine and let them know, let the search engine know who your website is perfect for. If you’ve got all these dancing monkey things going on all over your site, that’s not going to work because the patient gets there, and they’re like, ahhh, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to go, I don’t know what to click on, I don’t know.
So, there you go, five key steps. Now, if you need help with your website, and I’ve talked about this before, but I’m really serious, if you need help with your website or you just want a second set of eyes on it to find out how well it’s working, whether it’s converting visitors, is it even attracting people? Like how many visitors are you getting to your website? And are your buttons working? Like if you want someone to do a very good overview of how your site is performing, go to ClinicalCatalyst.com, Clinical Catalyst, just like it sounds, dotcom, and request a free website evaluation. You can read through the page, scroll to the bottom, and you will find a form. Fill that form out. And one of the Clinical Catalyst team will get back in touch with you and they’ll go over your website ahead of time, schedule a call with them. They’ll go over it ahead of time and then they’ll point out and tell you, okay, here’s what is happening. This is what’s happening on the back side that you can’t see. And they’ll give you some ideas and tips and pointers about what needs to happen on your website, how to optimize it. So, ClinicalCatalyst.com, go there and scroll to the bottom, get yourself signed up for that free evaluation.
So, that’s it for this week. Thanks for joining me. Go out and make it an awesome week as you keep on serving the people that you love, the people in your community that need you and around the world, because when we drop that pebble in the pond and we get one person better, that has a ripple effect on their family, their children, their relatives, and the future generations. So, go out and do your thing, my friend. We will talk again next week. Bye for now.
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