Creating a health website is no piece of cake. Since you’re getting into the most competitive industry, you should do your homework well before setting the foundations of your business and marketing strategy.
The first thing you have to understand is that health-related problems and needs are very serious, sensible, and often dangerous matters. A health website that misleads patients and random website viewers can create massive harmful effects.
Other than the life-and-death situation, before you start a health site, you have to ensure that you’re not going to waste your resources in vain. The best way to do that is to educate yourself, just like you’re doing now.
In today’s post, I’m sharing several tips and tricks that should serve as lessons for your future attempts. If you follow my advice closely, you’ll significantly improve your health site’s odds of becoming remarkable and successful.
Ready. Set. Go.
Don’t Target a General Audience
Who do you want to help, and how are you going to do that?
These are the first questions you should ask yourself before creating any strategy or plan. Targeting an audience means to communicate messages and offer value to a specific segment of people. The key here is to go specific. Instead of targeting general audiences (people who want to lose weight), try to be very concise and specific (young females who want to lose weight in 1 month).
Don’t Avoid E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing is your best weapon when it comes to developing real relationships with your clients or patients. Every time new people visit your health blog, they’ll eventually end up leaving it. Many won’t come back unless you make that happen yourself.
You should create an email list and collect “leads” with an email form. This email form should be present on your homepage, and should often offer your traffic something of value. For example, you can tempt your random visitors to join your email list by offering exclusive discounts, exclusive information, or various opportunities such as free e-books and so on.
Don’t Write “Average” Content
In the health industry, everything has been already said. Being original is almost impossible, but being unique is totally achievable.
Writing “average” content means repeating what’s already been said in a very monotonous way. You can write something that’s been said 100 times, but if you add a bit of personality, some twists, some great examples, your content will look amazing and unique!
Check out the skyscraper technique to see how to step out of the “average/mediocre” content zone.
Don’t Focus on Transactions, Focus on Branding
As a health website, you want people to remember your name and come again for more. My best advice is to keep the advertising and selling to the minimum while trying your best to focus on branding.
Your site’s content should be focused on informational, educational, inspirational, and motivational content rather than on promotional one.
Ideally, the people who arrive at your health site shouldn’t have too much to think. They should be immediately absorbed by the elements that you’ve set into motion (the opt-in form, an interesting article, a video, etc.)
When your patients feel that you’re trying to do good out of passion and altruism and not for getting personally rich, your brand’s awareness, reputation, and loyalty will increase.
Don’t Neglect SEO
When people have health problems and issues, they don’t go on social media channels to seek for the answers. They rarely call the doctor or ask around a friend.
When it comes to low-threat to medium-threat issues, most people prefer to search for answers on Google. That’s where you come in – all ready to satisfy the needs and problems of your target audience.
For that reason, developing an SEO strategy is extremely recommended, especially if you’re just starting out.
Don’t Make It Hard for Your Traffic
When a prospective client or patient enters your website, they shouldn’t encounter any issues in understanding your content and messages. They shouldn’t have problems reaching any page of your website, especially if they are on a mobile phone.
Everything needs to be optimized properly, in such a way that their web experience will go smoothly. If your site loads extremely slow (for example), people are simply going to search for a faster-loading one. If you have a lot of 404 Errors, people will eventually decide not to waste their time clicking on bad links.
Don’t Forget About CTAs
If you want people to follow the course of your sales funnel, you need to guide in the right direction very frequently.
To help them understand your intentions and the ideal path you have established for them, tell them where to go and what to do. Here are three examples of CTAs:
- “If you’re encountering the same problems, make sure you share those experiences in the comments section below”.
- “Like & Share this video if you want more to come”
- “Go to this website and check out X topic”
Takeaways
As I’ve already mentioned, the health industry is a special niche. The huge competition forces every single entrepreneur to step up his game and climb up the ladder.
By following today’s listed strategies, you’re not only improving the quality of the UX (user experience) and the engagement of your audience, but you’ll be also giving yourself great odds of getting noticed and rewarded by Google and the rest of the search engines.
