Internet marketing: Is your hospital website making these common mistakes?

Many hospitals are getting their feet wet for the first time in the marketing arena. But that’s no excuse for poorly designed and maintained websites given how much depends on internet marketing to drive international patients across the thresholds of their hospitals.

What basic rules do we find hospital websites breaking?

Hospital websites are not the only culprits. We find similar problems in the websites of clinics, doctors and medical travel facilitators.

Here are 8 basic rules that most hospital websites are breaking.

1. Meta tags are missing. Many meta descriptions are too long and too generic. Meta tags serve an important function in searches, providing the descriptive text accompanying search results.

2. Images need to be search engine optimized. Each image should have descriptive labels not numbers or abbreviations. Alt tags provide additional reference for search but are most useful when sites are slow to load.

3. There are not enough inbound and outbound links or internal links. Why are more hospitals not linking to their facilitators, insurers and other partners? In turn, those links will spread to other related links, to second and third degree linkages.

4. Broken links (404 and 301 redirects) need to be fixed, and pages created to inform users of redirection.

5. Websites are not validated for non-www domain name usage.

6. Many have expiring domain names. Search engines note this. Presumably hospitals expect to be around for 10 or 20 more years or longer. Why have they not purchased 99-year domain names?

7. Most hospital sites are poorly planned, with poor navigation, unclear target audiences. We often can’t locate a page we came across in an earlier session on the site. A site map might help.

8. Social networking (blogs, twitter, you tube, etc.) is virtually non existent. Yes, it’s a new field, and I hope hospitals are thinking and planning a smart approach to entering this marketing arena.

Lastly - and this deserves a special mention - perhaps the worst crime hospitals are perpetrating on us via their websites is readability. Given the target audience – presumably the local patient and the medical tourist – why is it that nearly all of these sites have a readability index equivalent to graduate school. Are most patients graduate degree candidates?

Providing intelligent, informed content in a clearly written, accessible way is not difficult but it takes commitment and deliberation of the hospital’s management. The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek and many other popular publications successfully write this way day after day, so that a 10th grader can understand the report or the story.

How many of these rules is your website breaking? An excellent free evaluation tool at websitegrader.com will analyze your site and compare it to competitors’ sites. Use this information to fix your site. No excuses.

If you would like a free evaluation from our web marketing experts of how your hospital website compares with others in marketing to medical travelers and health tourists, please let us know.