A great Optometry website development strategy has the potential to bring new traffic and a steady stream of clients to your clinic. An effective optometry website that provides an excellent user experience (UX) is every prospective client’s first impression of your practice.  So you want to make your best first impression with the best website. Here are nine tips to help you make the best website for your clinic:

1. Make it easy to get in contact.
2. Itemize your clinic’s services.
3. Share your many achievements.
4. Work within HIPAA guidelines.
5. Follow ADA and WCAG rules.
6. Keep the website minimalist.
7. Include helpful visual elements.
8. Optimize pages for mobile.
9. Follow SEO best practices.

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes. Let’s go!

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1. Make It Easy To Get In Contact

The perfect website focuses on ease of use for its target market, and in the case of a clinic, that means a person can quickly and easily reach you. Follow the best local search engine optimization (SEO) tips and put a call-to-action (CTA) next to your contact information so that it stands out more to users. Even without a CTA next to it, putting your clinic’s address and phone number in visible places is generally good optometry website development practice. Doing so makes it easier for site visitors to find information and helps make them more likely to take action (e.g., call for more information or an appointment). 

2. Itemize Your Clinic’s Services

Optometry clinics are not just for standard eye exams.  Another key service they provide for their patients is prescribing and dispensing eyeglasses and contact lenses to correct vision. So some websites include a shop or a product listing, which significantly adds to their page count. Pay attention to the flow of the user experience to keep your many services visible so that patients can access them any time they want. Paying attention to information architecture (how your pages fit with one another and which ones matter most to your users) is critical to making the perfect optometry clinic website.

3. Share Your Many Achievements

People love convenience.  Attending to details, so your website is exactly that is great for getting more website traffic. However, people also value trust, and if you want to attract more clients to your clinic, you need to show them that you have the skills to do the job right. Earn their trust with your website. Post your awards and name credible sources mentioning you for your achievements or quality service. Just make sure that whatever you post on your website is something people can easily verify with a quick Google search. It also works best to highlight awards that people recognize.

4. Work Within HIPAA Guidelines

Unlike other businesses, the perfect website for any business in the healthcare industry is not limited to UX and SEO best practices. To create a good optometry website, you must also know how to comply with HIPAA standards, which protect all patients’ personally identifiable information (PII). The rules you must follow depend on the nature of the data you collect from patients, how you collect it, and where you store it. Luckily, you can simply get HIPAA-compliant software to address some issues. Obtaining informed consent is also crucial to following HIPAA guidelines.

5. Follow ADA and WCAG Rules

Another critical set of rules you must abide by for perfect website design is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which aims to provide equal access to all users, regardless of disorders.  Unlike HIPAA, which is exclusive to healthcare businesses, the ADA covers every private business’s website. Following ADA’s rules is simpler than HIPAA because the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set clear standards for making your website more accessible.

6. Keep Your Website Minimalist

Besides getting more clients, one of your goals in optometry website development is to get people to stay longer on your website and actively do more interaction with it. That is less likely to happen if your website design encourages users to leave immediately instead of browsing through content. People bounce because your website is unappealing or confusing at first glance. You get about ten seconds to make an impression; first impressions matter for getting traffic and clients. Create a focused website design that engages rather than overwhelms your users.

7. Include Helpful Visual Elements

Although good aesthetics are not the end goal of website design, they affect many aspects of it. As pointed out in the previous section, you want to keep people on your website as long as possible. To do that, you need to give them reasons to stay, such as engaging visual elements. For instance, an optometry website like yours could upload a visual acuity test that people could do at home. Doing so provides two benefits for your business. First, it gives users something to do on your website, and second, it serves as an excellent segue into booking an appointment.

8. Optimize Your Pages for Mobile

The perfect website uses responsive or mobile-friendly design because a large (58.99% as of Q2 2022) section of online traffic comes from mobile devices. That number has steadily risen over the years and is clearly set to keep increasing with each passing year. This is important because it has huge effects on UX. For instance, 47% of users leave after a page fails to load within 2 seconds, and 40% say the same but for 3 seconds. Adapting your website to the screen through responsive design helps it load quicker and keeps users happy.

9. Follow SEO Best Practices

SEO is broad, and the parts covered here are not even close to half of what it does for website traffic and lead generation. For example, technical SEO, including responsive design and load speed, covers website crawling and indexing. Local and off-page SEO includes strategies such as registering for business profiles on Google, Bing, and local platforms. These add value to your website through citations of your business, which helps you rank higher on local searches (provided the information is consistent, that is).

Summing Up

Consider giving your website a new look to draw more clients to your optometry clinic. Optimal website design has a strong, positive influence on UX, which helps bring in more online traffic. Start with critical elements (HIPAA and ADA compliance) before moving on to others. Need help crafting the perfect optometry website? Contact Digital Authority Partners to learn about how we can help.

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