Healthcare businesses are vying for consumer attention in an increasingly cluttered marketplace. But standing out from the crowd shouldn’t be an exhaustive exercise — refreshing your website is a relatively simple, effective means of giving your brand a new coat of digital paint.
Not convinced? Here are 6 advantages of updating your website:
1. Moving With the Times
A few years is an eternity online, and integrations, themes, and technologies that were once cutting-edge have quickly gone the way of the dinosaurs. And just like technology, user tastes evolve with time. So to align with current aesthetic trends and audience preferences, a business should routinely update their website’s visual treatment.
With regards to the back-end, outdated code and crude functionality can restrict the user experience. To ensure that visitors don’t abandon your site before they’ve had a chance to research your services, it’s vital that you update old plugins and remove any unnecessary steps in your website’s navigation.
2. Mobile Responsiveness
These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find a website development agency that doesn’t include mobile responsiveness in their package. However, that wasn’t always the case, which means there are still websites in the digital world that don’t function optimally on mobile devices. Is yours an offender? If it is, that’s a problem. In 2018, 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones. Guess what! That number is continuing to rise. So don't be left out on the abundance of this traffic and those conversion opportunities.
To ensure you don’t miss out on this abundance of traffic and conversion opportunity, it’s important to update — or even replace — your existing website theme so it’s adaptive across all mobile devices.
3. Bolster Security
Shoring up security should be a key reason for implementing a website refresh. The fallout of a cyberattack or crash can cause significant damage to your business, resulting in privacy hacks, stolen information, and a breach of trust between company and client. A website refresh plugs any holes in your security by ensuring your plugins and integrations are running off of their latest versions.
4. Attract New Customers With a Content Refresh
A website refresh isn’t just about back-end infrastructure or front-end design, it extends to your content too. When auditing your written work and image galleries, pay close attention to consistency and visual fidelity. It’s easy for quality to shift over time, and often our older imagery and copy are of decidedly lower quality. Perhaps your brand voice has evolved too. With a website refresh, you’re able to update or reword your messaging so that it’s consistent with your current tone.
The old adage still holds true — first impressions last. A new or returning client is more likely to browse your website if they’re impressed by what they see, increasing the likelihood of higher conversion rates.
5. Optimize Your Website for Speed
The time it takes for your website to load plays a significant role in whether a visitor opts to explore or leave. According to marketing guru Neil Patel, 40% of people abandon a site if it takes over 3 seconds to load, while just a 1-second delay in page response can reduce conversions by 7%. A website refresh helps you pinpoint and fix areas of your website that are causing delays.
Looking for answers right now? Use Google Page Speed Insights to determine whether it’s time for speed optimization.
6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Even SEO isn’t immune to the passage of time, and as we speed ahead in the wake of digital transformation, your keyword targeting may have already fallen behind. This means your all-important search engine ranking may be affected because of irrelevant keywords and search terms.
The way people look for things on the internet has changed, and today we’re seeing voice-activated search and long-tail keywords emerge as leaders. A refresh allows you to tweak your targeting, as well as add or rewrite metadata and content so that it’s easier for more people to find your website.
Know Where You Stand With a Website Audit
Before you commit to a full website refresh, it’s a good idea to audit your existing website. This ensures you don’t waste unnecessary resources on fixing areas of your website that don’t require tweaking. KBK Communications is a digital marketing agency specializing in medical manufacturing and distribution in the healthcare supply chain. We know healthcare, we know digital marketing, and we have a deep understanding of how a company’s website directly affects consumer perception and conversion.
Recently, we conducted a comprehensive website audits for two of our valued healthcare clients. These audits helped them achieve increased ROI and brand equity in the digital medical space. Download the Case Study here.
Click here to contact us for answers to questions you have about the role of digital marketing in healthcare.
