Unless you work in the medical field, it’s a complex topic to understand. And for patients who are considering a specific procedure or type of surgery, not understanding the terminology can be daunting.

When people search for medical or surgical-related information, it’s because they have a concern or need they want to fulfil. Ensuring that patients find your website is just the first step. Once a patient lands on the website for your medical practice, they should be met with information they can understand.

Here’s another way to think about it. A patient who wants to achieve their weight loss goals with the help of surgery isn’t necessarily going to type laparoscopic gastric banding into a search engine. There are those who might but most others will use a range of other terms that are more user-friendly. Your copy needs to cater to patient needs.

It’s important to keep in mind that you’re not just writing for potential patients either, you’re also writing for search engines. If you want search engines such as Google to pair your website with relevant search queries, you need to keep wording and keywords in mind.

There is also the link between user experience and Google. Google wants to ensure that users are having the best possible experience. This not only means sending them to the right websites for their queries but ensuring those sites are worth spending time on.

How does Google know whether your website is worth spending time on? It looks at how much time people are currently spending time on it. To increase time on site, you need to have a user-friendly site and most importantly, engaging, informative and easy-to-understand content.

Tips for Improving your Medical Website Copy

Let’s look at some of the best ways to create better copy for your website recommended by Azuri Group, the best medical marketing agency in Australia.

Outline What’s Important to Patients
Before you start creating content for your site, outline what’s important to your patients. What would they want to know if they were searching for information on a specific treatment or surgery? You could write paragraph after paragraph on the procedures you offer but would it be relevant to a patient?

Establish Your Authority
While you want potential patients to feel like your content is easy to understand and read, you also want to establish yourself as an expert. Your patients are trusting you with their health and safety, so give them reasons to trust you. There is a way to create content that’s engaging, user-friendly but authoritative. Since this is the web, you also want to make it easy for readers to skim your content. This can be done with bolding and bullet points.

Keep SEO in Mind
While writing for potential patients should always be your top priority, it’s important to keep search engines in mind too – it starts with keyword research. Using long-tail keywords in your copy will make it easier for Google to match search queries to specific pages on your site. Keywords should only be used if they fit naturally into your content. Keyword stuffing will be flagged by Google and it will detract from your user experience too.

Quality Over Length
There has always been a bit of a debate about how long your content should be. The reality is, your content can be thousands of words but if the quality is lacking, it won’t have the positive effect you’re hoping for. If a page on your website deserves more copy because there is a lot of detail to share, add it, but only if it’s relevant to your visitors. If you can say something in fewer words, that’s always preferable. On average, a web page should have at least 600 words but it’s usually not necessary to have more than 1,000-1,400 words. Naturally, your page layout also plays a role here. Patients don’t want to have to scroll through paragraph after paragraph with no visual break.

Understand Your Audience
Who are your patients? Look at their demographics, education level, job roles and decide what kind of copy would most appeal to them. You want to find that happy medium between giving your audience enough authoritative information, while still making sure your copy is understandable and engaging. Hiring a professional copywriter is always best here since they know exactly how to achieve this. It will also save you time and effort, allowing you to focus on growing your practice.

Tell Them What to Do
Once you draw a visitor in and get them to spend time on your site, you want to tell them what to do next. They have all the information they need on the procedure they’re interested in but what do they do now? Calls to action are essential for your site – specific calls to action even more so. Ask a visitor to call or book a consultation using your online booking system. Don’t leave any room for guessing.

Copy is a powerful marketing tool and when you get it right, you can grow your medical practice faster than you thought possible. When last did you analyse your website copy?