This case considers plastic surgeon's website creation and promotion. It will help young doctors who are thinking about a personal website and want to understand the process of its creation and what should be considered to maximize the involvement of patients.
It is a mistake to think that today it is enough to create a ”fancy” account on a social network and attract patients from there. Let's first understand why a young doctor needs a website.
- In order for the user to understand how to solve his problem, they need to find information - articles written by a doctor, but in plain language, explaining all the nuances of treatment and warnings about side effects, if there are any. Informational queries lead future patients to the sites of specialized medical specialists. Read this article to the end to see the result.
- The website works better than word-of-mouth marketing. Here you can show all the doctor's certificates in special blocks, tell about their experience, which of their colleagues they work with, which special training they passed. Photos are very important: they show the workplace, the doctor themself, the staff who help them, and successfully treated patients (if they give permission to publish such information).
- The site allows you to gather contacts of patients who want to ask any questions from a professional.
- Important method of promotion for a doctor practicing in a certain city is geo-targeting — with this, the website is focused on the target audience of a particular region. You also can advertise certain pages with services.
- We recommend that you collect the best useful articles, publications for narrow medical journals and even scientific papers on your site (with reference to the source). This is your business card: the more expertise you show, the better.
Social networks are good, but you can get banned there, your account could get hacked, and it's hard to pick up old records there. In addition, it is quite difficult to answer questions in detail and fully in social networks. We are not saying that social networks are not important. They are! But the site is your "face", you can easily and quickly find all the information about you. The main thing is to make sure that it is really easy and quick to find :)
Customer's business specifics
Customer: a young plastic surgeon operating in Lviv. The main clients are women, the main procedures are: breast and nose plastic surgery, gynecomastia.
Task:
- Website creation. Newly created website should: bring in patients and prove the competence of the doctor; be convenient and understandable to users; meet the aesthetic ideas of the customer about personal sites; be well optimized;
- Website promotion in Lviv and the western region of Ukraine.
The doctor did not mention any specific figures on traffic, number of applications and appeals.
To make an effective site for a specialist, you need to:
- meet your specialist and understand which services he provides and how many;
- collect the semantic core of inquiries related to the services of a particular doctor/specialist in the given region;
- coordinate the structure of the site, design solutions, important blocks and landing pages;
- create and approve texts for all pages of the site.
In the medical field, every text on the site must be read and approved by a doctor. This is necessary not only because the issue is about trust and health. Each doctor has his own approach, his own school, his own experience - this is what should be reflected in the texts.
Our customer actively cooperated: he was in touch, provided the necessary content, made decisions quickly, consulted with us, approved the concept and texts.
The customer also registered the domain and hosting through the SPRAVA company.
Period of work:
In August 2017, we agreed to create a website and two months later began to promote it.
The total term of work is 2 years and 4 months.
Key elements of the doctor's personal site development
1. The text about yourself should not be like a biography: born, studied, married. This text is in the first person. It must show the experience and professionalism of the doctor to arouse interest and trust.
Our customer has very clearly stated his mission and strengths as a specialist:
It is also necessary to write in detail where he studied, where he improved his skills, what scientific works and articles he wrote, what experience he has. We needed to show screenshots of all certificates and diplomas, which of the famous doctors gave their experience to our customer, areas of practice. In the text about himself, our customer described which people turn to him and with what problems, how the initial consultations take place.
It is important that the potential patient finds answers to all the questions on the doctor's page, so the text should be not formal but trustworthy. The same tone/style is important to describe all services. The factor of trust in the doctor is crucial in medicine.
2. You need to make a separate page for each service that doctors provide. This is necessary in order to make it easier to promote the site, so that the inquiry will redirect the potential clients of the doctor not to the main page of the website but rather to the page which provides the information about the service.
“Services” page of our customer's website contains the following information:
- main point of the procedure;
- medical conditions for the procedure;
- contraindications
- the exact way and time of performing the procedure, also the post-surgery period duration;
- consultation price and surgery price;
- check-up before surgery.
The more details are used to describe the process, the better. Not the medical details, though; we should take into account the fears and doubts of patients, so that they could understand what awaits them, how much time it will take and also assure them of the positive outcome of the procedure. It is important to give opportunities to the patients: let them ask questions in the chat site or by phone, help them to make an appointment for a consultation.
3. You need to make a section with useful articles. They are important for the website promotion:, doctor's potential clients get to his site through informational queries.
Plastic surgeon's site SEO-optimization
When we started working on the site, we faced the following challenges:
- The region is Lviv. It is the most competitive region of Ukrainian-speaking people, but overall competition in this niche is medium (there are two high-competitive clusters - breast augmentation and plastic surgeon). Brand inquiries led us to the Top from the first months of work, and for services’ targeted inquiries we were still outside the TOP-30.
- The website was about one doctor, and the promotion also included inquiries related to clinics. For example, one of the main page inquiries is «клініка пластичної хірургії Львів» - Lviv Plastic Surgery Clinic.
- The website was new and young.
A young site is always an insufficient resource. Initially 30% of the semantic core consisted of uncreated landings. There is no way in which you can get to the TOP with absent pages. About 20 texts for the site were provided by the customer himself. Our team indicated the need to add some more information to these texts, and after that we optimized the corrected texts. Our SEO specialists made a specification for a medical copywriter, and the tests we received were given to our customer for approval. We also helped the customer to write a text about himself; we added the data needed for the promotion and optimized the text after that.
Coordinated fast work allowed us to save time on filling the website with texts, and therefore, we got results from website promotion faster.
The second problem was the photo of the works (the problem is stable in this niche), because the photo of the naked body sparks a conflict of interest:
- Contextual advertising cannot get approved if there are photos of naked people on the website;
- At the same time such photos are needed because users are most interested in seeing the examples of the doctor's work (how else would you trust a doctor's skill?).
We had to balance, so what we did: for some landing pages used in contextual advertising we removed the photos “before/after the procedure”. At the same time we created a separate page with the photos of the plastic surgeon's work results.
Tips on what helped us with working on the site:
- In the plastic surgery niche customers often say: "All I want is TOP result on breast augmentation". This case is different - the customer claimed all the clusters as important and needed. This allowed us to work on the whole website quality, not just focusing on individual pages. Consequently, the host ranking factors were on our side.
- The doctor himself sees patients at several clinics at once, which gives users the opportunity to choose which clinic to go to. This helped us to work with inquiries which are more suitable for the clinic's promotion, rather than a single doctor.
- The doctor's professional experience was a huge bonus. Although the customer himself is young, he inspires trust. For example, he did an internship with the famous Ukrainian surgeon R. Valikhnovsky.
Website works list is following:
- Primary optimization and technical works;
- “Articles” section monthly update;
- Videos uploading;
- Photos uploading;
- Homepage design improvement;
- “Prices” section creation;
- Appointment form implementation: modal window and chat icons;
- Contextual advertising implementation.
Contextual advertising was launched in September 2018. During this period, traffic increased by 26.6%, and conversions also increased by approximately 30%.
Promotion results
First month of promotion results:
| Inquiries | Positions in Google on 11/16/2017 | Positions today |
| plastic surgeon Lviv | 88 | 1 |
| plastic surgeons Lviv | - | 2 |
| nose plastics Lviv | 74 | 1 |
| rhinoplasty Lviv | 80 | 1 |
| ears plastic Lviv | 26 | 1 |
| ears shape correction in Lviv | 37 | 1 |
| mammoplasty in Lviv | - | 1 |
| breast plastic Lviv | 61 | 4 |
| mammary glands correction Lviv | 51 | 1 |
| breast lifting Lviv | - | 1 |
| breast augmentation Lviv | 90 | 3 |
| gynecomastia treatment in Lviv | 59 | 1 |
| abdomen liposuction Lviv | - | 1 |
| belly plastic Lviv | - | 1 |
Results
As the position of the site grew gradually, the increase in appointments from the site was considered by the customer as notable only after a year of work, according to his words. Appointments come not only directly from the forms on the site. Patients write to the doctor a lot on Viber, WhatsApp and other messengers. Patients also call. But the results can always be improved :)
Review by Nadiya Basenko, SPRAVA Project Manager
"When someone is just starting their way on the Internet along with you, and you also start working in a completely new direction , it always feels like a serious matter, it feels very responsible and a little scary. I want to give the results to the customer as soon as possible, so I can also tell myself: everything works out.
The main difficulty was my lack of experience in promoting plastic surgery. Another great difficulty: the surgeon is young, the patients weren't allowed to post their photos on the site, therefore at the start of website development we lacked photos showing the before/after the surgery, and we lacked feedback for the same reason.
The customer understood the main principles of search engine promotion and contextual advertising, also he learned how to attract the patients with the help of a website.
The manager gained valuable experience in promoting the plastic surgeon website. When the team solved the problem of getting the TOP-10 result while lacking visual content essential for the website, it became easier for us to understand how patients who need to get rid of aesthetic problems behave, and how we can improve the website to respond to their requests in the best way.
As a result of our work, Google is increasingly choosing this website for "zero" position, because the information on the site is the most relevant to user queries. And so there increases the number of happy patients who write the most sincere words of gratitude to the doctor in all his messengers.