Marketing leaders for multi-location health organizations stand at a crossroads when evaluating their priorities. Should you invest the significant time and resources required to create a high-performing website? Or should you focus your efforts on short-term tactics like SEO and PPC to save money?
The latter option is definitely more tempting, and the immediate gains you’ll see from organic and paid strategies prove the ROI your stakeholders need to see much faster.
However, while you’re under pressure to deliver fast results with a tight budget, you can’t afford to rely on an out-of-the-box website with templated designs or basic functionality to meet your business goals. Yes, SEO and PPC will most likely improve your traffic, but if you want to make a real impact on conversion rates and how your organization connects with new patients, a strategically designed website is essential.
Dedicating the time and money to design the right website is challenging, especially when you face pressure to divide your marketing dollars between different practices. But with the aid of a strategic approach that targets your needs, the return on your investment will be much greater.
The True Value of a High-Performing Website
One of the greatest returns on an investment in a high-performing website is its ability to set your organization up for long-term success. While you may be able to launch something cheaper more quickly, your website is more likely to go unseen and unused. Worse yet, it may do further damage by frustrating potential patients and turning them away.
At that point, instead of working from a solid foundation to keep improving, you’re back to square one and facing a costly redesign project. But the question remains. What does a “high-performing website” mean for multi-location health organizations?
We define a high-performing website as one that provides your users an intuitive experience that makes it easy to find information, schedule appointments, and engage with your services. Your website is often the first impression users have of your organization. What does its design and functionality communicate about you in those brief moments? Is it a positive or negative experience?
A seamless design that anticipates your user’s needs builds trust in your brand. But beyond delivering a stronger user experience, a website backed by thorough research and strategy delivers significant returns for your business:
Enhanced Lead Generation and Conversion
A well-optimized site has the power to turn more visitors into patients, which maximizes the return on your investments in SEO and PPC advertising. After all, you’re only wasting your marketing budget when you drive traffic to a website that’s not optimized to produce conversions.
Streamlined Content Management
Marketing your multi-location health organization requires managing a ton of moving parts. A custom CMS that’s tailored to your needs makes it easier for your team to publish updates across multiple sites and ultimately scale your business.
Better Integrations and Functionality
Health organization websites are especially complex, and each of your locations requires integrations with third-party systems such as payments, CRMs, and scheduling tools. A flexible, high-performing site serves as a strong foundation to support all the interconnected systems your practices need.
Mobile Optimization
With more and more users accessing healthcare information on mobile devices, optimizing your website for smartphones and tablets is crucial. This is especially important for location-based searches, as patients often look for nearby locations while on the go. Along with looking for maps and driving directions, they may also need to quickly find a location’s phone number to let them know they are running late.
Data-Driven Decision Making
A website optimized for conversions provides clear visibility into the parts of your marketing that are working — and those that need improvement. With robust analytics in place, your marketing team can make more informed decisions about marketing initiatives and website improvements.
Why User Research Is Crucial to Website Design
Marketing leaders face a pivotal decision when considering the strategic portion of a website project. Whether out of time or budget concerns, some leaders opt to skip the strategy component and go straight to planning their design.
Sure, you can skimp on the details if your organization only needs an online brochure to show you exist. But if your website plays an active role in how you sell your services, you have to invest in the right research to create the high-performing website you need.
That right research is all about your users. Understanding your audience’s needs, pain points, and behaviors allows you to create a truly patient-centered website. When you work with GLIDE Health, some of our key UX research methods include:
User Personas and Empathy Maps
Creating detailed user personas helps you understand who your target audience is and what motivates them. Once established, empathy maps build a more complete picture by exploring what users are thinking, seeing, and experiencing as they interact with your site.
Tree Testing
Tree testing looks at the primary needs of your users as they arrive at your website and how intuitively they can find what they need. This helps optimize your website’s information architecture for maximum usability.
User Interviews
In-depth interviews with actual and potential patients provide invaluable qualitative insights into their needs, preferences, and pain points.
Building a website without this kind of in-depth research means your designers are relying on assumptions — and assumptions are often wrong. Using real-world data, both qualitative and quantitative, allows you to make informed decisions that result in a more impactful and effective website.
How to Overcome Budget and Time Constraints with Continuous Improvement
Even if you recognize the benefits of investing in a high-performing website, the reality may be that your health organization runs on a tight budget. Fortunately, you still have options to balance these concerns with your need for a more successful digital presence.
At GLIDE Health, we refer to this as Continuous Improvement (CI). This service empowers you to make impactful, incremental changes over time. Under this plan, you may work to launch a functional Minimum Viable Product (MVP) quickly with a handful of pages, or you may enter your existing website into a structured redesign process. In either case, we work together to systematically enhance and optimize your site over time based on user data and feedback.
Iteration is key to applying CI to launch a new website. Every change is consistently tested and refined to ensure it’s optimized to increase conversations based on real-world performance. This approach may take longer for your website to be “done” — but then again, no great website ever is.
The “Never Finished” Mindset
Your digital presence needs to evolve along with your organization, adapting to new locations, services, and patient needs. It’s important to recognize that a good website, especially for complex, multi-location health organizations, is continuously optimized to perform at a higher level.
Your website’s many integrations with outside systems require constant updates and security patches. With this level of complexity involved, your health organization can’t view its digital technology as something you can just “set and forget.”
When you work with GLIDE Health, we also conduct an analytics measurement plan (AMP) during a website project. That way, you and your team can identify the right KPIs to evaluate success after launch.
By consistently monitoring these metrics, you can make informed decisions about where to focus your optimization efforts. This approach allows you to continually refine your site’s performance and demonstrate the tangible results of your marketing to leadership.
Scale with Ease Using a High-Performance Website
Your success as a marketing leader depends on delivering measurable growth. A high-performance website makes it easier to add new pages, expand into new territories, or redesign elements as needed.
CI also provides the advantage of working with a consistent development team that understands your organization’s goals and its technical requirements. With GLIDE’s “fractional development team,” you gain access to a wide range of expertise without the overhead of building a full in-house team.
Some key considerations to simplify growth include:
- Ensuring all integrations and functionality remain up-to-date and secure.
- Incorporating new services or locations seamlessly.
- Maintaining brand consistency across a growing digital presence.
The flexibility and scalability of a high-performance website delivers more than a return on investment. It sets your organization up for long-term success as you scale.
Embracing Long-Term Value in Your Digital Strategy
The initial investment in a high-performing website may seem daunting. But you can’t overlook the promise of long-term value as you pursue ambitious marketing goals.
Embracing user research, continuous improvement, and data-driven optimization creates a digital foundation that grows with your organization. This approach not only improves patient experience and acquisition in the short term but also positions your healthcare organization for sustainable success in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Does this sound like an approach that will benefit your next website? Let’s talk about it.
Jeff King
Project Manager
Jeff King is a Project Manager at GLIDE Health, where he manages several high-impact digital projects for multi-location healthcare organizations. With over 20 years of experience in web development, digital marketing, and consulting, Jeff brings a deep understanding of navigating complexity at scale. He’s known for his thoughtful communication, steady leadership, and passion for continuous improvement, and is always looking for ways to optimize processes and elevate outcomes. His hands-on approach and strategic mindset make him a trusted partner in delivering digital solutions that drive growth, efficiency, and patient engagement.
