[Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Nina Litovsky, owner of Nina Interactive, LLC, a boutique firm specializing in website design for dentists and physicians, who did the redesign of this website and particularly the from-scratch design of the forum a year ago and does periodic work for me. I received no payment or discount on other payments for this post and like all guest posts, was judged on value of content alone.]
When it comes to marketing, there is perhaps no asset more valuable than your website. It is the cornerstone of your online marketing efforts, and, in many cases, the first point of contact that potential new patients will have with your practice. Built properly, your website should organically attract qualified visitors, clearly communicate your unique value, visually differentiate your practice from the competition, and compel visitors to become your patients.
For your website to be effective, it should be planned correctly and built professionally. Going forward, you will also need reliable professional help when you decide to implement modifications and improvements to your website.
Choosing a company to build and maintain your website, however, isn’t always easy. Many medical and dental marketing companies offer seemingly attractive options that may turn out costly and problematic for you in the long run. This article aims to help you make an informed decision by discussing these problems and by offering potentially more efficient and cost-effective alternatives.
Large Agencies
There are two types of web design and development agencies: larger, more corporate agencies and smaller, boutique firms consisting of one to several core specialists. While large agency resources can be useful for big corporations and technically complex projects, they are usually an overkill for small and medium businesses such as dental and medical practices. In addition, larger marketing companies entail the following disadvantages:
Price
Larger agencies are rarely able to compete with smaller firms on price. Larger agencies typically have higher overhead costs – office space, human resources, etc. – that are, inevitably, passed along to the client. You either overpay upfront or in the long run, but either way you end up paying more than the value you receive.
Quality
Large agencies need to work with as many clients as possible to cover their overhead and turn a profit. When services are scaled and mass-produced for a large pool of clients, quality tends to suffer, products get too standardized, and all customers get essentially the same one-size-fits-all solutions which may not be suitable for the individual needs of their practices. The company is only interested in providing just enough quality to keep you as a customer, but there is usually no incentive to cater to your personal needs and exceed your expectations.
Customer Service
Larger agencies usually assign an account manager to each project. These individuals act as a liaison between you and the various designers and programmers who will be involved with your website. As employees of the company, account managers work in the company’s interests, not yours. They are not dedicated to you personally and don’t have the incentive to go the extra mile to exceed your expectations. In companies with high employee turnover account managers may change frequently, which further weakens personal connection between you and the company’s team.
Alternative Solution: Boutique Firms
Nina Litovsky, Principal of Nina Interactive
An alternative solution can be a smaller web firm with a reputation for being agile and reliable. Smaller boutique firms run lean, oftentimes foregoing a physical office space and leveraging the skills of a small team of experts. Because of this, small agencies come with smaller price tags. With a boutique agency, you will likely be working directly with the owner. He or she will closely manage other members of the team throughout the course of your web development project. You can expect a higher level of personalized service, as small agencies are more flexible and better equipped to adapt to the varying needs of their clients. Also, small agencies rely on the quality of their work to keep their businesses running, and depend on word of mouth and referrals to drive new business development. The owners are personally interested in your business and have a strong incentive to produce quality work for you.
Bundled Services
Most service providers use one of two service models, each with their advantages and disadvantages: the bundled full-service model and the open architecture “a la carte” service model.
The full-service model may seem to be more convenient. One agency acts as a “one-stop-shop” for design, development, search engine optimization, and website maintenance, plus add-on services such as social media marketing, content marketing and paid search campaigns.
Bundled services generally come with a higher price tag, and in many cases medical and dental practices don’t need all of the services offered in the bundle. Also, in a bundled platform it is impossible to replace and remove the services that are sub-par or are too expensive because everything is integrated into a single platform. Lastly, a bundled platform does not have adequate checks and balances as all of the employees are working for the company that hired them, not for you. When all your services are provided by employees of the same company, it is much harder to get an objective second opinion and fresh advice.
Alternative Solution: a La Carte Model
An open architecture model enables your practice to hire several small specialist firms, a la carte style, to provide only the specific services your practice needs. If a specialist is not generating positive results, he or she can be easily replaced. Such flexibility enables you to hand-pick the best talent and control your costs. Finding and hiring each specialist can be time-consuming, and your web design firm should be able to recommend vendors based on your specific needs.
Proprietary Website Platforms
Understanding the benefits and limitations of various website platforms is a technological nuance that is easy to overlook – but doing so may prove costly in the long run. There are two types of website platforms: proprietary and open-source. A proprietary platform is unique to only one website development agency. An open-source platform is openly available to all website developers.
Full-service agencies offering medical or dental-specific website development often use a proprietary website platform. They will host your website on their own servers, and build your website on their own platform. Hosting fees can run high – $70 or more per month – and moving to a different hosting provider, whether now or in the future, would require rebuilding your site. Making the choice to build your site on a proprietary platform limits your options for the long term, and keeps you bound to your developers for as long as your website is on their platform.
Alternative Solution: Open-Source Platforms
You may be told that a dental or medical-specific proprietary platform is designed to meet the needs of your industry, but the reality is that a well built, open-source website will meet those same needs while also offering more scalability. Opting for an open-source platform affords you the maximum amount of flexibility when it comes to building, hosting and maintaining your website now and in the future. Due to the nonproprietary nature of an open-source platform, you will have a wider choice of companies that can service your website. Currently, WordPress is the best and most popular open-source platform for dental and medical practices. Compared to a proprietary platform, an open-source website is more cost-effective to maintain and host. For example, hosting fees for WordPress run as low as $15-20 per month with a high-quality hosting provider.
Generic Web Content
Some marketing companies offering content generation services simply copy procedure descriptions and other patient education content from other sources, or reuse the same pre-written content on all their client websites. There is no gray area when it comes to the quality of your website’s content: do not use duplicate content. Not only will Google and other search engines penalize your site, but “canned” content also does nothing to communicate the unique value of your practice or compel prospective patients to call your office. As a result, you waste money on filler content that doesn’t convert patients and that can even be harmful to your online presence.
Alternative Solution: Custom Content
If content generation is one of the services offered by your website developer, ask whether that content will be written uniquely for your practice, or if it is generic content that they use for all of their clients. If they intend to use generic content, consider hiring a third-party copywriter, or even writing your own content. After all, you are the ultimate expert about your industry and practice, and know from regular patient interaction what types of questions patients ask and what information they need.
[Editor's Note: Having been in the “content generation” business for a few years, I would highly recommend AGAINST hiring anyone else to make your content. Trust me when I say the quality for the typical provider of content is subpar at best. It is not that much work for you and may be some of the most important and well-paid work you do all year.]
Monthly Website Maintenance Fees
Many businesses take an “if you build it, they will come” approach to their websites, but the reality is that every website requires a certain level of maintenance. Educating yourself about which maintenance and support options are necessary, which are worthwhile, and which are superfluous will help you save money, time, and energy.
Technical Website Maintenance
Technical website maintenance includes website backups, anti-virus scanning, server updates, and other routine maintenance of your website platform and server. This service is necessary and must be performed by your website host. If you have chosen to build your website on a proprietary platform, your monthly hosting fees may be high. Using an open-source platform and a third-party host will save you money without sacrificing the quality of your technical maintenance services.
Technical Support
Your website host should offer technical support services at no additional cost. If your website is hacked or running slowly, you should be able to call your host and resolve the problem quickly. Reputable hosting providers are generally responsive and competent.
Front-End Website Support
Front-end support includes fixing a website malfunction, content updates, or updates to graphics and other user-facing website elements. A well-developed site will be built on an intuitive, easy-to-use content management system (such as WordPress) that enables you to make simple content and image updates on your own, without any programming knowledge. Your practice should not require enough front-end website support to require a monthly support program. At most, hire a website developer for specific fixes and initiatives on an as-needed basis.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is such a hot marketing buzzword that practices are afraid to forego the service. However, many practices don’t know exactly what SEO is, or what they should be getting out of a monthly SEO maintenance program.
A Well-Developed Website is a Priority
If your website is poorly built, any SEO efforts will be a waste of money and energy. Many medical and dental practice websites suffer from issues such as poor planning, inadequate structure and navigation, bloated code, slow speed, duplicate content, and incompatibility with mobile devices. All these issues can block search engines from properly ranking your site. These issues should be addressed before you invest in any further SEO efforts.
Do You Need Monthly SEO?
When considering whether to hire an SEO specialist, first consider your business model and goals. How important is it for your practice to rank at the top of search results? If your leading driver of new patients is word of mouth, referrals, advertising, or internal marketing, the natural SEO traction that you’ll gain just by having a well-developed website might be enough.
Also, take a look at the statistics. Ask your website developer or an SEO specialist to see reports showing the current volume of search relevant to your practice, as well as the amount of competition on those search terms. If there is very little volume and very high competition, your budget and energy may be better spent elsewhere.
If the statistics are promising and your practice stands to gain by capitalizing on SEO, it’s time to choose a specialist. However, avoid any company that uses fear to talk you into a monthly maintenance program; unless you are planning on aggressively going after top rankings, annual or semi-annual SEO “tune-ups” should be the most you need to stay relevant.
How to Work With an SEO Company
If you’ve decided that search rankings are important and are willing to invest in SEO maintenance, look for a company who will custom-tailor an SEO strategy based on the needs of your practice. SEO is a lot more than just adding keywords to your website; depending on your needs, an SEO strategy may require targeted blogging with widespread distribution, social media integration, and strategic website expansion to capitalize on new and emerging search trends.
The best way to gauge whether or not your SEO strategy is paying off is to monitor your website traffic statistics and compare them against pre-SEO data. Increased traffic, a lower bounce rate, and a higher ratio of new to returning visitors are a few of the statistics that may indicate a successful SEO strategy.
Finally, if you opted for a monthly SEO maintenance program, ask your provider to submit a list of the monthly deliverables you can expect. SEO is very much a behind-the-scenes service, making it difficult to gauge how much – or how little – effort is actually being expended on your account. Hold your SEO provider accountable for their work and ask for monthly reports on the performance of your website’s SEO foundation.
SEO Does Not Guarantee New Patients
It is imperative to understand that no company can guarantee search engine rankings, and, even if your rankings do improve, there is no promise that it will lead to increased web traffic and generate more of your target patients. Attracting high-quality patients depends on a combination of factors – such as your other forms of marketing, your competition, and your online reviews – over which your SEO company has no control.
[Editor's Note: There are also reputable online reputation management companies and even companies who will write fake reviews for your practice. Bear in mind this practice is illegal (false advertising) and can carry stiff fines. While educated people know reviews really can't be trusted, we all still use them and your patients do too. The quality of your reviews on other sites may have a larger effect on your practice than your own site and SEO efforts.]
Summary
After you sort out your website maintenance needs, you may discover ways to save money and spend it more efficiently. Technical maintenance costs can be significantly reduced if you host your website with a third-party hosting provider. Other types of maintenance, such as website support and SEO, may not require monthly fees at all. A cost-effective option may be to maintain a professional relationship with a reliable web developer and SEO specialist, and hire them for specific initiatives on an as-needed basis.
What do you think? Have you been dazzled by sales pitches from web marketing companies? Are you being charged high fees and provided with little valuable service? Are you looking for cost-effective way to professionally build and maintain your website? Comment below!
Once again, a very timely relevant article just as I am looking for a web developer. Thanks!!!
Thank you! If you, or anyone, else have any questions or comments, please let me know – I’ll be happy to discuss. After participating in marketing forums on DentalTown for a while, I see that there is a lot of confusing information about dental and medical marketing, and sometimes it’s hard to tell a legitimate thing from a sales pitch. Often, for the sake of making more profit, medical or dental marketing companies offer a more complicated solution where a simple one would do. I also found, after speaking with many dentists, that dentists are not even told about consequences and find out a little too late – such as in the case of website platforms that I discuss above, when dentists sign up with a company that uses a proprietary website platform and then, once they decide they don’t want to pay high monthly fees and want to switch to another company, they discover that they have to spend more time and money to rebuild their website again! My goal with this article is to provide some information to price-conscious doctors and dentists to help them avoid costly traps.
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I have always thought this website was very well done and wondered about the developer. Thank you for writing this article, Nina!
Thank you!
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Few handy tools:
Find a site that you like? Chances are it is running WordPress – http://www.wpthemedetector.com/
Find out what theme they are using and purchase for yourself
themeforest.com – absolutely the best resource for top notch themes and PHP scripts, etc.
wpbeginner.com – Great resource
wpmudev.com
gtmetrix.com – for testing page speed
Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress – without doubt the only SEO plugin to use for your site
I could go on and on but this is a good start.
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Ok Nina, checked out your site today. Any relation to Konstantin who does the 401k planning? It’s not a very common last name I would think.
Yes, there is a relation 🙂
Ok, he did well on our office 401k and we were firing our current website seo group this month anyways so it’s good timing. I’ll give you a call, or email, later.
And Joe, love the enthusiasm, and you were great for my life insurance, but it’s a little much… Just my opinion.
Good comments and ideas and advice, Nina.
Can I also underscore something Nina said?
One really, really, really, doesn’t want to buy canned content. CPAs and CPA firms do that a lot (buying canned sites with canned content from big vendors selling a cookie cutter solution to everybody)…
That approach is just a real waste of money and opportunity.
Stephen, I agree. Many CPA and legal websites share the same problem as medical and dental websites: canned website template with canned content. This is because many specialized marketing companies reuse the same stock designs and same content for all their client websites. But this is terribly ineffective for the practice owner. Stock designs look bland and generic, and they obviously don’t fit the unique marketing needs of each practice. Same with content. Stock, generic content (also called duplicate content) can get your website penalized by the search engines. In addition, it’s boring and disingenuous. This is the reason why we strongly encourage our dentists and doctors, with whom we work, to write their own content (we even provide worksheets). This guarantees that the content is always unique and authentic. It doesn’t have to be a lot – it’s better to have a slim, concise webpage with all-original content, rather than a long page filled with generic content. Any practice owner, as a medical or dental professional, can write content for their own website. For example, when writing for a webpage explaining a specific procedure, you can write the way you naturally explain it to patients: you can describe the benefits, process, and answer commonly asked questions.
Hi Nina! Very timely article. This should be the best time that health practitioners should consider building their business website to leverage competition. Although after website creation, the efforts must not stop in there. The idea of getting the website optimized through SEO is also ideal. Thanks for sharing! Will, https://www.locumtenens.org/
Hi Nina i always read your blogs and your article your article are to good this one is also this article is very useful for me and others who startup our buisness
Thank you Shubham! If you have any questions, let us know here – this is what this discussion is for!
What a timely article!
There is a shortage of IT people who communicate well with Physicians, or listen to what they want or need. This creates many problems in handling any kind of IT needs. Overall general mistrust is fairly common.
If you find an IT person who listens to your needs, and helps you create what you really want and need, that person is priceless – the return on Investment in terms of money and time would be multiple folds over time. Most people would just bloat up whatever you have, and it won’t even be what you wanted in the first place.
If Nina worked on this website, this should be seen as proof positive that she knows her stuff. WCI is experienced himself, and see the functionality and simplicity of this complicated website – nice!
Thank you, Dr. Singh! We work with many practice owners (such as dental practices) and really focus on providing concierge service, listening to the needs of each practice owner, and delivering a fully custom website solution for each practice. I agree with you though, it happens too often in the world of medical/dental marketing/IT that doctors are offered canned, cookie cutter solutions and products, and nobody really listens to the needs or preferences of each individual practice owner. I was stunned to see that many marketing companies do not work in the doctor’s best interest. For example, I’ve seen that quite a few companies charge doctors very high ongoing monthly fees for SEO (search engine optimization) – while providing unnecessary services, or very little SEO service, or none at all! Most SEO or website work involves only occasional one-off projects, so there is no need for ongoing maintenance. This is just one example showing how important it is when your web person doesn’t sell any canned services and works only in your best interest.
I have seen the price for web hosting and domain but no dollar figure for a website design, which I thought was the focus of the article.
I understand that prices can vary depending on the complexity but one should have had some range and maybe a few specifics. For example a 3 doctor practice with 10 tabs linked to different pages usually run as this $. Ballpark figures give you an idea of how low or how high one is looking at to pay for a website design.
That would have made a great addition to the article. I wish I would have thought about that during the editing process. Maybe Nina can throw some ballpark figures out there that would be helpful.
Kamban, thank you for your feedback. I think it’s a great idea. Let me put something together quickly, and I’ll follow up with a more detailed explanation,
Per Kamban’s request above, I’ve put together some information about typical web design price ranges, and I also thought it was best to put these prices in context to help doctors and dentists see the full picture of what’s being offered in the proposals: what the typical ballparks are, what’s typically included, and what pitfalls to watch out for. I hope this blog post will help everyone understand the prices and evaluate proposals from web design companies to make the right decision. If any questions, let me know! Here’s the link to the blog post “How to Evaluate Web Design Proposals”:
http://ninainteractive.com/articles/how-to-evaluate-web-design-proposals/
Thanks Nina for that article that explains it well.
Since the premise of this site is that DIY can be useful for some of our most important decisions (our entire financial planning lives), I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that DIY for websites is very possible. While Nina seems fantastic, like many of the financial advisors affiliated with WCI, I don’t think many of us will end up needing such services.
I built my personal practice site on squarespace, and while it is certainly not perfect and does not have all the things on it I want yet, It costs me about $220/year all in for design and hosting. I spend much more on Google Ads, about $250/month.
You can see my site below (feedback is always appreciated).
http://www.robgraymd.com
May not be for everyone, but if you can do your own taxes, you can certainly do this.
-R-
Dr. Gray, thanks for sharing your experience. I perfectly understand your point of view, and if you like DIY and if you have a good design sense and know how to market yourself, DIY may be an excellent choice.
Generally speaking though, I do think that a professional website should be designed by a professional designer. This is my objective opinion not because I look for work, but because, having years of design experience and comparing DIY websites to professionally designed websites, I think that learning how to use a website builder won’t teach someone how to actually create a site that’s usable, well-organized, tastefully designed, and optimized to increase traffic and conversions. There is just a lot of planning both when it comes to design and code, a lot of thought, research and discovery, and a lot of creative process that goes into designing a site.
Besides, professional web design doesn’t necessarily scream “expensive” – there are certainly options to get a custom professional website at a one-time reasonable price.
There are other inherent, technical problems with proprietary website builders. I you are inclined to building a DIY website, I would at least recommend using WordPress as a more future-proof solution.
I have a blog post describing the pitfalls of using commercial DIY website builders: http://ninainteractive.com/articles/problems-wix-weebly-site-builders/
I agree websites can be very inexpensive and even fun. I was the only tech support at WCI for years. A basic website is not hard. But obviously there are benefits to hiring a pro too.
Excellent article, Nina. Well done! I think you have addressed a very important issue for the medical and dental community here and provided some very sound advice and words of wisdom. As a former owner of several dental practices and medical spas, I can testify firsthand to the number of “traps” that there are for one to fall into when it comes to web design and especially arketing services with disingenuous third party vendors.
I especially liked what you had to say about independent website hosting and couldn’t agree more. It is completely unnecessary to pay a monthy fee beyond that of what a GoDaddy or Bluehost charges whereas web hosting is a commodity service and once a site is launched properly, there is usually very little technical help needed anyways on the back end.
You are also spot on with SEO. It is indeed all the rage these days, but does not guarantee new patients. Simply put, one can drive all the traffic in the world to a website he or she wants through SEO or other marketing channels but the reality is, if a provider doesn’t have a great foundation in place with his or her website then that traffic won’t convert to new patients and any investment made in marketing is therefore wasted. Furthermore, speaking as an expert in the are, SEO, if done properly, is something that should be done once and then only require bi-monthly checkups at the most to do some basic refreshment of content. These refreshes require very little time and therefore there is no need whatsoeer to pay a vendor on a monthly basis in perpetutity for this service.
Thank you for writing this article. Having been on both sides of the equation as a practice owner and now a consultant, I’ve seen all the pitfalls and traps that a provider can fall into if they are not educated when it comes to what to look out for insofar as web design and marketing services are concerned. I think in your post you’ve provided that education quite well and I can tell you that if I had read it early on in my career as a practice owner I likely would’ve saved myself a lot of wasted time and money.
Well done!
Thank you Andrew! I agree, especially when you pointed out that monthly SEO fees are a waste of money – this is very true (SEO is search engine optimization to help a website rank higher in Google). Typically, there’s nothing in SEO that requires monthly tinkering. Any SEO work can be done on a one-off, per-project basis, and repeated occasionally if necessary. I’ve seen companies that charge doctors for monthly SEO and do nothing. Even worse, I’ve seen companies that charge for monthly SEO while the website is bad. A good, solid website is the necessary prerequisite to any further SEO efforts. Doing SEO without a good website is not going to be effective and is a waste of money. Sometimes, having a good website alone can solve most SEO problems.
This is slightly off- topic but could be helpful for other readers. As an employee physician in a group practice, is there an issue with making a profit off of a personal website/ blog that has a medical slant? Even if the website is researched and written on my own time? My concern of course is if the practice could lay claim to profits. I know this could vary by state and how the contract is written with regards to side income. Curious if anyone else has experience with this?
I think that’s a concern with a university job, but it would be a very strange private practice that had a problem with that unless you were affecting the reputation of the practice.
I worried about this when I started my new university job and they had a whole session during orientation about conflict of interest laws in the state. So I asked the rep who spoke to us about my idea for the blog and he said as long as I didn’t use university resources (work on it in my office, etc.) it shouldn’t be a problem. But definitely check with your university’s office!
Hi David,
I get this question all the time and it has even come up in my practice several times over the years. If you are interested in having a profitable website or product outside of your main employer, it is highly advisable to have language in your contract that protects you from your group. Many groups will demand that physicians relinquish honoraria for speaking, locums or any other money made outside of practice as a means to control you and force you to focus your efforts on your practice. The easiest way to avoid any conflict is to do the following:
1. Review your contract
2. Identify if language with respect to activities outside of your group practice exists in your contract
3. Define those activities in terms of within the scope or outside the scope of practice within your current job
4. If such language is not present, negotiate an addendum as a separate schedule in your contract.
5. Use the scope of practice to let your group understand your intentions and reassure them you are not planning on competing with them.
6. Have an attorney review the addendum once you have the general language down to make sure it will hold up in court.
7. You can always start blogging anonymously until the whole process is complete.
Good Luck and start writing!
DOAT
I appreciate the perspective on boutique website services. One caution I did not see expressed here may not be a contemporary problem, but happened to me and caused grief. I used a boutique web provider many moons ago which went out of business unexpectedly. Since I went through them for my website, I didn’t ‘own’ the domain address (however ICANN figures it anyways). So I lost this domain I had been using for years and had to get a new domain, new website, direct everyone to that new domain, it didn’t have all the SEO connections/history of the previous domain, etc. Needless to say, I went with a large corporation for the new domain and ever after. Not that large companies don’t go out of business, but I have more faith they will be around in 5-10 years than a few people working out of their home.
Whether you work with a small or large web design agency, you should always register your domain in your name under your own domain account. Don’t rely on the agency to register and own the domain for you. We work with many doctors who, after using large agencies, want to redesign their websites with us and terminate the relationship with their previous agency but cannot do that easily because the previous agency owns the domain. We always help clients like this register their own domain account and transfer the domain there. But domain transfers are always a hassle which should be avoided. Your domain is your most important online asset, so you should have full control and ownership over your domain.
It’s easy to register your domain with any domain registrar such as Google Domains, Siteground, Bluehost, GoDaddy, Hostgator, to name a few. Purchase the domain and renew it every few years when your domain registrar sends you reminders, but keep it registered in your own account. When you work with a web designer to build your website, you can simply give them access to your domain so they can make the necessary adjustments in order to make the website live. When you own your domain account, you can work with any web design company and your domain will never have to be transferred and will never get lost or expired.
This is excellent advice and also a good idea to find out your registration status now before you find yourself in the position Nina describes.