Chiropractic Websites

The best chiropractic websites use clean designs, simple navigation, and tell a compelling story. Unfortunately, most chiropractic websites are cluttered by sign up forms, special offers, and sales pitches -- techniques that equate them with used car salesmen rather than honest healthcare providers. When you're designing your website, keep these simple pointers in mind:

Use Honest Verbiage
Remember that patients will get a sense of who you are by the tone of your verbiage. Always avoid self-promoting language, highlighted phrases, and outdated sales copy. The best chiropractic website copy uses language that clearly describes what the clinic does and how the clinic differentiates itself from other businesses. You should use a conversational tone and try to use image rich language or storytelling -- this will resonate and stick with your audience better than a list of features and buzzwords.

Keep It Simple
The simplest websites are the most successful. Facebook is better than Myspace, Google is better than Yahoo, and Gmail is better than Hotmail. The defining difference between these websites is simplicity! Make your website easy to navigate, clean, and minimalistic and you'll attract more patients and get more calls. If your website is complicated, people will leave.

Ditch the Signup Forms
Every webmarketing "expert" and their grandmother will tell you to place a signup form front-and-center on your website. There was a time, back in the early days of the internet, when most people were dumb enough to casually fill out signup forms. Billions of spam emails later, people got smarter and became leery of signup forms. In fact, now most young people associate signup forms with shady websites, viruses, and email spam. Think long and hard about this: What kind of message do you want to convey about your clinic? Are a few email signups worth potentially turning away younger clients? If your clinic caters primarily to the 50 crowd and you're close to retirement, then it's probably worth keeping a signup form, but if you plan on targeting younger demographics and staying in business for the next 5-10 years, you should ditch the signups and join the web-savvy crowd.

Integrate Social Media
Most website companies offer social media integration, which usually means listing a series of links to your various profiles. The majority of these links are totally worthless and are designed to impress you, the chiropractor, and to get you signed up for a website. When you're integrating social media, stick to the Big 4 websites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube. These websites account for over 95% of social media traffic. Listing 20 obscure social media sites will only demonstrate a lack of web knowledge and an aggressive salesmanship. Links to the Big 4 social media sites should be prominently displayed on every page of your website, preferably in the sidebar.

Start Blogging
Every website should include a simple blog. These handy little tools allow you to quickly post short articles to your website and to syndicate them across the internet and to social media website like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Posting frequent blog articles will also give you a search engine advantage. In fact, you can dominate most keywords by posting frequent articles, especially if they include important keywords like "chiropractic", "chiropractor", and the name of your city. A normal blogging schedule is 1-2 articles per week and a typical article length is 200-300 words. Some of you will be thinking "that's too much work". Too bad, success isn't free.