Mistakes That Drive Visitors Away from Your Cosmetic Surgery Website
Achieving success with your plastic surgery website is a two-part process. First, optimized pages must be created in order to bring targeted traffic to your site. Second, your site’s appealing, professional design and solid content must then convince those visitors to become actual patients. It sounds like a simple process, but some of the best ranking websites in the search engines still suffer from low conversion rates. There are several common mistakes that many of these sites make that not only keep visitors from staying on a site, but can even drive them away. These include the following:
- Where’s the content? Skimping on the valuable content can be a costly mistake. People use the search engines to find the information that they’re looking for online. If they end up on your website as a result, they expect you to have the information they want. If you don’t, they’ll go right back to that search engine’s results list and click on the next link. Though you may be able to scam the search engines by creating pages stuffed with keywords, you lose out in the end because you simply can’t scam your visitors. The rule then is to give your visitors what they’re looking for by providing useful, valuable content that they can easily find on your site.
- What’s taking so long? People want valuable content, but they also want it fast. No matter how great your content, your visitors are not going to wait around if you’re site’s taking ages to load. They’ll simply leave and go elsewhere. Ideally, your site should take no more than 15 seconds to load. Avoid using overly large or too many graphics that slow down your site. The ideal text/graphic ratio is 80%/20%. If you must have a image-heavy page, such as a page of before-and-after patient photos, make this a separate page with an appropriate title that allows visitors to know that they may take some time to download. You can also use thumbnails of smaller images with links to larger ones.
- What’s with the layout? Take extra care with the layout of your site. It should take no more than three clicks for a visitor to find what they’re looking for. Proper layout includes easy, user-friendly navigation, working links, a sitemap, simple menu systems, and legible text. When in doubt, simplicity is always best.
- Look at the psychedelic colors, man! Awful color schemes are a surefire way to send visitors packing. Make sure that the colors you choose for your site are appropriate for your site’s content and your targeted audience. Really bad color schemes can make the text on your site impossible to read and can wreak havoc on the eyes. It’s best to use dark text on a light background, such as black text on a white background. Don’t use a similar color for both and don’t set text against a patterned or busy background. Though light text can be used on a dark background, it should be kept to a minimum as it proves harder on the eyes. Bright colors can be used to set apart essential elements, such as headings and important text. Just be sure that you remain consistent with your chosen colors throughout your site. Also remember that colors can create an emotional impact and directly effect how your visitors react to you and your site.
- It’s alive! It’s true that flash and other animation-type gimmicks can bring life to a website. Unfortunately, it’s also been proven that they don’t convey professionalism to visitors. It’s best to use these sparingly or not at all.
- Haven’t they ever heard of a dictionary? Poor spelling and grammar can ruin a professional appearance. Be sure to always double check your content for spelling and grammar.
- I think I need a dictionary. Just as it’s important to use proper spelling and grammar, it’s also important that you don’t go too overboard. This is particularly true when it comes to a plastic surgery website. Avoid using unknown medical terms without explanations for them, and keep it in layman’s terms.