In the past, the healthcare industry has struggled to keep up with the commodities of a modern society, especially since the transformation into the digital age took hold. In recent years, however, the focus on health and development of new fitness-related technology devices have made it clear that organizations must keep up in order to remain an authority in their field.

This means that many healthcare organizations are turning towards websites to build their authority in the digital age. The idea of these websites is brilliant. They provide a primary source of information, and the ability to contact the organization without having to use a phone, both of which are signs of a modern society.

Unfortunately, however, a lot of these websites are so poorly executed that the benefits are difficult to identify.

When done right, however, it gives healthcare organizations another way to market towards potential customers, and a better way of increasing customer satisfaction.

When you consider that 81 percent of customers are currently unhappy with their healthcare experience, getting your organization on board could be the perfect way to solve any issues you may currently be having. It’s not easy to get right, but these five pieces of advice will ensure your healthcare organizations website is doing everything it can to succeed.

Make Sure Your Website Is ADA Compliant

The Americans With Disabilities Act states that all websites must comply with certain rules, or be at risk of operating illegally online.

Although this is a legal requirement for any website on the internet, it’s especially important for healthcare organizations, who are likely to receive traffic from a number of people with disabilities every day. You’d think this would be common sense, but many healthcare organizations are still breeching these laws online.

One of the most famous cases of this in the healthcare industry involved Tenet Healthcare, who had to make dramatic changes to their website in order to comply with the law. To find out what you need to do in order to be ADA complaint, you should check out the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

They revised 508 standards to reflect website requirements in 2018 that you should also be mindful of when creating, or updating, your healthcare website. Not sure what this all means? Check out this visual, actionable and comprehensive guide to ADA website compliance from Digital Authority Partners.

Provide Information In An Easy To Understand Way

The healthcare industry relies on medical jargon, anagrams and other technical terms for efficiency between physicians. When used with patients, however, research has shown this creates a rift in doctor patient communication.

The result isn’t any different when the information is inaccessible on the internet. People will visit your website to find information about a condition, illness or disease they may be dealing with, in order to find out information that can help them make a decision about what to do next.

If they cannot understand what you’re saying, it’s likely they will leave your healthcare website, and find a website—and organization—who can explain things in a way that can be easily understood. This could result in a loss of revenue, traffic, and may even go on to reflect your in-person client list if people feel they are unable to communicate effectively with practitioners.

Ensure Your Features Are Mobile Friendly

Companies from many industries have started to redesign their online websites to make them mobile friendly in recent years. This is because over 50% of all web browsing in the world occurs on mobile devices.

For this reason, you need to make sure that your website is as easy to understand on a mobile device as it is on a computer, laptop or tablet.

However, healthcare organizations aren’t progressing as quickly in this direction as other industries. You can hire website designers who specialize in your industry to do this for you if you want to be reassured it has been done right. Alternatively, you can find tools to help you do this yourself.

Just make sure you check your website before it launches if you go down this route so you can iron out anything that doesn’t quite look right on a phone. And if you’re interested in more details around all the rules around what you should and should not do online from a healthcare marketing perspective.

Use Photos and Videos To Illustrate Your Points

Websites that include large amounts of text are likely to quickly lose the interest of their customers because people generally have less of an attention span when searching the internet. One way to bring this attention back, however, is to break up the text with visual media like photos and videos.

You could use pictures to complement the text, outline your services, or sparingly decorate your website to give individuals a clearer idea of what to expect.

Another thing you could do is incorporate data visualization techniques to back up the claims you are making, or help people identify health concerns in seconds.

Videos are also a great resource for healthcare organizations. They can help to explain the organization in clearer, easy-to-understand terms that help a client to feel personally connected to the healthcare company. You could also film a video of where your healthcare organization operates if appropriate, to give potential clients an idea of what they can expect in advance.

Why not spend some time brainstorming to come up with your own unique ideas that will make your healthcare organization easily stand out from your competition?

Make Your Website Easy To Navigate

One thing every healthcare organization needs to think about before launching their website is the ease at which it can be navigated. Any website, but especially healthcare websites, need to organize their information in a persistent, intuitive and logical way.

This enables a user to know what page they are on within a website, and how to easily access other available information when they are done with what’s currently catching their interest. The process of understanding how to navigate your website should take any user—even those visiting your website for the first time—seconds to decipher.

Anymore and they’re likely to get bored of your website and move on to something else.Part of making your website easy to navigate also means ensuring that information can be accessed from the right sections.

If you have a category containing all of your rules about patient confidentiality, equality, and so on, you shouldn’t have a random page about a specific medical condition thrown in. This may prevent people from freely accessing the information they need, and could make them leave the website if they are unable to find said information where it’s supposed to be.

This guest post comes from JGBilling, a medical coding outsourcing company.