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having a website from which people can learn about your practice or
business. Online visibility, however, describes how easily your
website can be located through online searches and then how obvious
(search engine ranking) your site is from within the search results.
A Coveted Patient
I was approaching cyberspace as something of a coveted patient –
offering a doctor thousands of dollars for a decade of contact lens
orders, annual contact lens exams, and spectacle purchases. Practices
would be bending over backwards to make sure I knew they were around,
right?
The Modern Patient
The modern patient is too busy to make appointments, looks for
convenience at every turn, and uses the internet regularly to
‘time-shift’ - to do things when convenient without being forced to call
during business hours or to hold on the phone. At the same time, the
modern patient doesn’t want to sacrifice quality for convenience and
wants make decisions about quality through information.
My Search
I approached Google as a friend. The search engine, like a trusted
dictionary or encyclopedia would help me find and choose a doctor
online. I wasn’t interested in looking at the yellow pages where I knew
I wound only find a long list of names from which to pick at random.
Ditto for a list my insurance company provided. I wasn’t just looking
for a phone number. I wanted to feel and touch the practice. I wanted to
see what kind of doctors worked there, where they had trained, what
common traits I might share, what the facilities looked like, how close
they were to me, and so forth. I wanted to find a few websites, look at
them, and make an appointment.
What a surprise it was when my initial searches for ‘contact lens
fitting’ and ‘eye doctor’ returned few results. While optometry
practices were prominent, very few ophthalmologists had made any attempt
at making their practices visible online (a separate topic perhaps for
another editorial).
Even in large metropolitan areas where practices actively promote
themselves there are always a few practices that are completely out of
sight. Too often, ophthalmologists are either uncomfortable with the
idea of marketing themselves, or falsely assume that everyone in the
community knows them – knows their brand. In my experience it is a rare
thing for an ophthalmology practice to have strong name recognition
outside of its own established patient base and outside of the local
medical community.
The Opportunity
This is precisely the opportunity for the eye doctor who wishes to see
his or her practice grow. The new patient increasingly does not come to
a practice solely based on a referral, but rather after having
synthesized multiple recommendation inputs together with their own
online research of the doctor and his or her practice.
This is relevant irregardless of the market. In a market with little
online marketing from ophthalmology practices, the opportunity for the
first few practices to start is huge. In a competitive market with many
practices already marketing online, the situation is dire for the
practice that is not visible online. In either case, new patients will
acquired by the practice that can easily be found online.
Perhaps this is evidence that many eye care professionals still neglect
the internet as one of the most important sources of new patients.
Certainly, new patient acquisition is not simply a matter of online
visibility. The website itself needs to be compelling and actionable,
and patients need to have an easy and pleasant experience with
scheduling whether online or by phone.
In the end, I made an appointment out of frustration. Not having found
the information I wanted online, I had to make several phone calls to
patch together what information I could. Now, after the appointment and
without having the sense of having ‘chosen’ the doctor to begin with,
I’ll probably be doing the same next year. Hopefully, I’ll find there
are more options when I begin my online search.
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