After the website goes live, there are 3 things you must ensure are working as expected. They are as follows:

1. Is the Website Responsive
   Traditional websites have a difficult time displaying themselves correctly on smaller screens of a tablet or a mobile. A “responsive” website on the other hand implies a website that renders itself automatically to fit into the given form factor (screen size) of the device in question. You 1need to specifically tell your website designer that you want a responsive website made.If you have had a website made more than 2 years ago, there is a high probability, that it is not ready for Showtime, and is not responsive.You can check this out yourself.
   • Goto https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
   • Enter your website name and click Analyze
   • Wait for a few minutes as it is a bit slow
   • If your website is responsive, you should see the result in green

   If your website is NOT responsive, you should see the result in red. You need to get hold of a website designer.

   

   Your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) will also climb in ranking if you have a Responsive website. Google realizes that responsive websites yield a better experience for the end-user who is searching online, and tends to rank such sites higher than the traditional ones, other things being constant.

2. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
   Search Engine Optimization refers to a set of techniques that seeks to increase the amount of traffic coming onto your website. There are a few low-hanging fruits such as ensuring that every web page is titled with the right mix of keywords that represents the content it holds and using meta description header tags in your Html, but I will not go into the technical aspects of this. This is more of a domain for the website designer. Let us focus on the bits you need to know about.
   • Webmaster
     Ask your designer if they have opened a webmaster account with Google and Bing. These are a collection of tools that will help you manage your website with these big two guys. Make sure the username and password are known to you once the accounts are ready.
   • Submitting
     Once your website is complete, ask the designer to make sure the website is “submitted” to Google and Bing. Submitting a website means, letting Google and Bing know that you exist. Only if they know about you, will they start showing you in their search results. As obvious as it sounds, I have seen professionals miss out on this one too many times. Note down the date on which the designer submitted your site. After a week of such a submission, go to google.com and search for your website as follows: site: yourwebsite.comEx: If your website is called myskinclinic.com, go to google and type in as follows:
     site: myskinclinic.comLook at the search result. If it is empty, it means google still does not know about your website. Ask your website designer to submit your website again. Repeat the process for Microsoft Bing.

   There are a plethora of other SEO techniques available, but they can broadly be classified into 2 categories, White Hat (the slow and right way), and Black Hat (quick and wrong way). Avoid the latter, by specifically telling your designer, that you do not want any Black Hat SEO to be applied to promoting your website. White Hat Techniques for a Clinic are limited and centred around providing quality content. This I will cover in the next chapter, on Blogging.

3. Analyze It
   Now that the website is almost live, check if it is linked up to Google Analytics. It is free and shows how many visitors and from which countries, using which keywords, came to your website. How long they stayed, which pages they looked at and so forth. It will help you understand what is working for your website and what is not. Post the website going live, and review its rank quarterly by comparing it to your competitors (other local clinics in your field). A useful tool that lets you do that is Open Search Explorer at moz.com/researchtools/ose/ It gives you a well-rounded score for your website. Ranking Score takes time to increase (3-6 months) and a score of 25+ out of 100 is good enough, once you achieve it.

That’s it. Hopefully, you have covered all parts of the website building topics on our site and are on your way to making your clinic’s website a super success :).

Rachana Suraiya

I love writing, especially about health tech :). Feel free to reach out to me with your comments and feedback at rachanas@emrmagazine.com