The Case for a Responsive Website in Healthcare

Since 2015, if your website isn’t responsive and optimized for mobile viewing, Google will penalize your ranking in organic search results, particularly for searches done on mobile devices. Search ranking is especially relevant for healthcare digital marketing efforts, as nowadays, people want easy access to medical information on all of their devices , and the quicker, the better.Dropping your search rank may sound a little harsh, but Google is just keeping up with the times—a third of the world’s population owns a smartphone and in the United States, and that number is higher in the US, with over 60% of Americans owning a smartphone. Additionally, 1.2 billion smartphone users have health conditions and could benefit from at-home monitoring – your audience is begging for mobile optimization.

Think about how your patients might be interacting with your website. Are they searching for office location information from their smartphone? Research shows that people are accessing websites from several different devices. A new mom with a fussy infant might be searching for advice at all times of the day, and depending on which device is closest at hand, she’s looking at your website on her smartphone, her tablet and her desktop computer. A responsive website will scale to fit all devices, as well as improve your organic search ranking.

Consider how this new search ranking factor might affect you in local search, as well. Let’s say you are a chiropractor and you compete with 13 other chiropractors in the metro area. At best, 10 of you will make it to the first page of organic search results. Given that the first page of search results garner 92% of all traffic from the average search, you’re missing out on a huge portion of your potential patients if you’re not on that first page. Optimizing your website for mobile viewing is one easy way to improve your SEO and increase your visibility in search results.

As more health apps and mobile platforms become available, patients will be heading to their phones first to research medical questions. Denying patients access to medical information sounds terrible, right? Test out your website on different devices and ask yourself if your current site design is excluding mobile and tablet viewers. If so, it’s time for a website redesign.

Contact Pyxl

Interested in learning more about responsive web design? Download our eBook and get in touch with us today.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022