Marketing Plastic Surgeons: The Splash Page
Whether marketing plastic surgeons or any business, the splash page is always an option. A splash page is like a book cover. It's an introductory screen that first loads when a person visits a website. It often shows a company's name and logo or an eye-catching graphic, but otherwise provides little or no content. Splash pages are usually used to set the mood and entice visitors to continue on the website. They either go away by themselves or require the user to click something to continue. Unfortunately, splash pages are rarely a success for the following reasons:
- Slow load times. Splash pages not only increase load times, they also slow down the whole process. Visitors not only have to wait for the splash page to load, they then usually have to click something to enter the actual site and wait again for the homepage to load. In fact, it's estimated that more than 25% of visitors to sites using splash pages leave immediately. It's important to remember that visitors to your site want the information they're looking for and they want it quickly.
- Decreasing repeat visits. Splash pages can keep people from visiting a second time. While your splash may have been entertaining the first time around, on subsequent visits it simply becomes annoying and frustrating for the visitor.
- Confusing the search engines. Splash pages can make it hard to get high rankings in the search engines. They rarely meet the algorithms that search engines use to rank pages, which are based on things like link popularity, page content, and HTML code elements. As such, they simply turn away search engine spiders and can hurt a page's overall ranking.
Keep in mind that anything making it more difficult for visitors to access your information is always a bad thing. The splash page definitely falls into that category. As such, it's best to avoid using splash pages when marketing plastic surgeons on the Internet.