If you're a medical practitioner, you understand how important securing patient trust is when building a successful practice. Having a helpful and informative medical practice website is an optimal way to share resources with patients, address their concerns, demonstrate your expertise, and spread the word about your growing practice.

To best serve your existing and future patients, read on to discover what you can accomplish with a medical practice website and why it's important to have one.

1. Help current and future patients find your practice

Your medical practice will be more likely to show up in search engine results if it has a robust online presence, according to Moz. Websites can be used to fortify your overall search engine optimization. With best SEO practices in place, potential future patients who perform searches for medical professionals in their areas might be shown your practice's website. Once they find you, they can click through to your site and learn about your specialization to determine whether you're the right professional to assist with their medical needs.

2. Establish and build patient relationships

A website gives you a platform to provide current and potential patients with helpful information and tips for living healthy lifestyles. You can do this by sharing blog posts and creating a site page dedicated to useful links, research, or downloadable forms. This can help to establish you as a dependable source of information, which might attract new patients, resulting in more appointments booked.

3. Allow patients to book appointments online

Another compelling reason to create a medical practice website is to facilitate online appointments. Patients can schedule a visit using a Contact Form (which you can add to any post or page with Jetpack's Form block) or through a booking plugin. Once they do this, you can send them appointment reminders as a courtesy (and to reduce the number of no-shows). This also gives patients the power to book appointments at their own convenience.

4. Reduce your administration time

Your patients should be able to find any necessary information (office hours, contact details) on your website. Once they have the option to schedule appointments through your site as well, you can significantly reduce the amount of time that you and your staff spend on the phone or on completing administrative tasks. By adding a resources list, a contact form, helpful blog posts, and other pages that answer questions potential patients might have, you'll save time by eliminating those redundant phone conversations, and skipping over searching for the next available appointment slot.

Check your vitals: important resources to include on your site

There are certain elements that every medical practice website should have, as they position your site to be an appealing option for current and prospective patients.

1. Doctor directory

A directory of your practitioners and staff is extremely helpful if you work alongside several doctors. Your directory should contain each person's profile photo, as well as their area of expertise. You can also include biographies, office hours, and relevant contact information.

2. Medical specialties

Your website should clearly convey what areas of medicine you and your team specialize in. This eliminates the need for potential patients to call your office to find out. If someone is looking for a pediatrician, but the doctors at your practice specialize in adult medicine, this will eliminate your practice as a possibility, saving the patient time. This also encourages patients who are looking for specialists in adult medicine to browse your site further and ultimately schedule an appointment.

3. Patient resources

You can take care of your patients' needs before they even come through the door by offering informative resources. Make sure to include things like nutrition guides, the latest studies in the healthcare industry, new patient forms, instructions to prepare for an appointment or procedure, what to bring to the appointment, and even a list of healthy products or vitamin brands that you recommend.

4. Frequently asked questions

As a medical professional, you probably field a lot of the same questions. Consider answering them all on a separate page of your site, and linking back to it from other pages. You'll also want to make it accessible from your navigation menu and "Contact" page to further reduce repeat calls asking about your insurance or cancelation policies.

5. Contact and location information

Finally, your website should include your office's contact and location details. You can include this information along your sidebar or in your site's footer so that it's accessible from every page.

Consider using the Contact Info widget to display your physical location and email address, hours of operation, and holiday office closures. If you prefer to include a map in the body of a page or a post, you could simply add a Map block through the WordPress Editor.

Your patient experience begins with your website

By building a website for your medical practice and including the right resources and information within, you'll be offering great user experiences to patients. A website will position you to humanize your medical practice, while building relationships with patients who put their trust and health in your hands.