How To Design A Winning Cosmetic Surgery Website – Practice Perfect Podcast Episode #4

Practice Perfect: Actionable business information to take your medical practice to the next level. Now your host Nick Dumitru.

Nick: [00:00:24] Welcome to another episode of Practice Perfect, the podcast for medical professionals and anybody running a professional services practice as opposed to a bricks and mortar store. Today we're going to talk about how to design a cosmetic surgery website. We're talking about this today because there are a lot of myths and misconceptions and misinformation that you'll find on the internet, and from consultants and web designers web developers. Everybody's got an idea about how to design a cosmetic surgery website but very few of them are really in the business of dealing with cosmetic surgery. They're not in the business of making you money. And that's what it really boils down to at the end of the day. Your website has to produce for you. It has to get you the results that you need. It has to convert your prospects to contacts and it has to reassure them that you are the right person for the job. On this episode we're going to tackle some of the common myths and I hope to dispel some of them for you. If you've got additional questions about that I'd love to engage with you. Just send us a note and let me know what other questions you have. I love to hear from the listeners and we will tackle those answers on other programs. Let's get right into it. .

Nick: [00:01:43] The First concept that I want you to understand is that your website has to talk to the patient. It's not about you. We're going to get deeper into that. But that concept is key. The website is not about you. I know that may sound counter-intuitive. It may sound in opposition to what you may have been told by, even consultants from companies like Allergan. They have their business consultants and they're usually advised that the patient is looking for the doctor. And I'm here to tell you that that's simply not true. The patient is looking for her own concerns. She's concerned about herself. She doesn't care about your practice. You're not famous. You're not a movie star. It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that as a plastic surgeon, everybody knows you. I've seen this happen where ego takes over more than one time and I'd like you to have the advantage of not having that ego in place. I'd like you to have the advantage of understanding that the customer journey is about them. Your patient is the hero in her own story. You're not the hero. You're just there to help to get her to where she needs to be. I want you to understand that concept very clearly it's a key point. I'm going to keep stressing it because I want it to sink in. Your patient is the hero in her own story. She is grappling with issues. She is the one that has to get over her hangups, she's the one that has to change, she's the one that has to go through the surgery. You're performing the surgery. You're going to guide her and help her get to where she needs to be. But at the end of the day it's her journey. She has to travel that road and she has to be the hero of her story. So your website has to treat that concept with respect. And what I mean by that is that when your patient lands on your homepage, and yes I understand if she's coming in from search engines she may be landing on the inner pages, but in general as a concept, when I say homepage I'm just referring to any landing page on your site. When she gets to your website it shouldn't be about you. There shouldn't be a huge photo of you. There shouldn't be information about just you and your staff. And I'm going to get into that in a little bit as to why, but you need to understand that when she's there she's there to get information for herself and that information has to be comprehensive. So before we get into the why and how of designing the menu and the structure and the pages, I'd first like to start with the content. The most important thing on your website is going to be the legibility of the content on the website. .

Nick: [00:04:18] Content Is king no matter what industry you're in and being able to read and engage that content is very very important. That means keeping the white text on coloured backgrounds to a minimum. Legible text is still black on white. The same as it's been for hundreds of years. It's black text on white paper, light colored paper, that's always been the most legible form of text and that still is the case today. Most news websites you will not see them with colored backgrounds. It's very hard for the eye to read and to follow the words when it's reversed. So make sure that if someone's giving you a dark colored website with white text on a dark background, you want to try to avoid that as much as possible because it makes engaging with your content that much harder. And if they can't engage with your content, they can't buy and they can't convert. And when you're creating this content it has to be enough that it positions you as the authority on the subject, and what I mean by that is that you don't have thin content. You have enough meat on the bones that when the viewer sees your content, she understands that you understand the topic and what she's going through. It shows empathy and engages her and takes her into the decision making process. Which brings us to our first myth.

Nick: [00:05:33] You may have heard that people don't read. This as a common thing that's told by all sorts of consultants and web designers. And I'm here to tell you that is flat out not true. They can argue it until it's blue in the face but I'm going to take you through some reasoning here and by the end of it I think you'll understand that that's not the case. .

Nick: [00:05:52] The First thing I'm going to tell you is that the number one selling book category is the young adult section. So young people are still reading. These are the people that everybody is vilifying saying they don't read anymore. Nobody reads online. They just scan scan scan scan. Well, they're buying young adult topic books and they're reading those books. Another statistic I want to give you is that 60 percent of e-book readers are younger than 45. 55 percent of print book readers are younger than 45. Now when you take into account that the baby boomers are older than that and they make up the majority of the population, 60 percent of e-book readers are still below 45, which is well outside of the range of the oldest demographic that we have which we presumably would assume that are the readers. And that's just not the case. The majority are younger. So people are still reading. They're reading books, they're reading web pages, they're reading articles and they're reading ebooks. What they don't read is boring content, self aggrandizing content. Remember your patient isn't there for you. She's there for herself. If you're just writing about yourself it's not going to engage her. If you're not telling her things that she's concerned about it's not going to engage her. If you just tell her about your facility and your experience and that you've done more in surgeries than anybody else — all good points but it's boring and unengaging content. It's not going to convert her from the start because she's not there to learn about you primarily at first. You have to understand that everybody that comes into your funnel into your website is at a different point of their buying journey. Some people are at the early research stage. Some people are at the finished-just-before-I'm-going-to-buy stage. Your content has to address all of that because they will go to different sections of your website, take different action and act very differently. And if you're not engaging them throughout that full journey that they're on, right from the initial inquiry down through ready-to-make-a-decision when they're just trying to satisfy their curiosity at first, and then they make up their mind to do it, then they want to find out about the procedure, then they want to find out if it can get them what they want. If you don't have that kind of content, if your content is thin, if your content is just talking about yourself, if your content is not engaging interesting and informative, she's simply going to go to another website because it's not engaging the psychology that you need to engage to have them make a decision. And I want to try to prove this to you. I promised that I would give you some reasoning to prove it to you. Here's how I know people read. .

Nick: [00:08:26] I want you to start thinking about the last large purchase that you made. It has to be an involved purchase: a car, a house, a new bathroom, a long vacation, an expensive hotel, that watch you've wanted forever and you can finally afford to get. I want you to think about your hobbies. It could be a dog that you bought. It could be a boat. Whatever it is that you last made a major decision on I want you to start thinking about your process and think about your spouse. It could be your spouse maybe looking at redoing the house. It could be a new article of clothing. I want you to think about what you did prior to that purchase and I'm willing to wager that you, like me, like everybody else, did your research first. And there are plenty of statistics on this from Google and from other places. I'm not going to get into those. I want you to think about your own life. When you're ready to make a purchase when you're interested in a topic you will do in-depth research. You will watch YouTube videos. You'll read everything there is to read about it. If it's a hobby, especially if it's hunting, fishing, boating, bicycling, whatever it might be. You are into that topic and you will read and you will read tens of thousands of words because it's pertinent to you at that time. Now I want you to think about when you made the purchase. The item or the trip or whatever it was that you wanted and you were so intensely interested in. You bought and then what happened? You didn't care about it anymore. You got it. You're engaging with it. It's yours now. You don't care about researching about it anymore. You're still into the topic, you're still into whatever it is you purchased but you're no longer doing your research and that's the way focus works. And when a patient is interested in changing her body, changing her look, dealing with issues that she may have been struggling with from childhood: ears sticking out, breasts not the right size, belly hanging out — whatever it is that's been bugging her, that's been tormenting her for what could have been decades, is going to be intently interesting to her. And to say that she doesn't read, is not only doing that individual a disservice by not providing them the information they need, but you are essentially screwing yourself out of a sale and letting her go to somebody else because you listen to a consultant that told you the wrong information. When it comes to sales, when it comes to your website, generally speaking, there's a saying that we use in marketing: the more you tell, the more you sell. And that's what you should be thinking about. And that's true for any industry that you're in. The more you tell the more you sell. Because just like you when you are into your hobby, into purchasing your boat, your fishing rod, your hunting knife, your new pair of shoes, that sports watch, that luxury watch, that new sports car, you are intently interested in it and you would do anything to get more information about. I know when I bought my last car I was watching Youtube videos, I was watching comparisons — how does it compare against that BMW, a Mercedes, a Porsche. I was watching all of that stuff and I watched all that stuff before buying the car. After that I didn't watch another video because I had the car. And that's the way it works with breast augmentation. The way it works with rhinoplasty, the way it works with liposuction, tummy tucks, veneers if you're a dentist. It works the exact same way. People are trying to inform themselves and make a decision where they feel safe and confident in their decision. And the more you can educate that patient the better you will do. .

Nick: [00:12:00] So What you need to do is ask yourself and ask your consultant this: if people aren't reading online, if those people are reading, do you really want to market to somebody that's fundamentally disinterested in your topic and your service? Do you want to market to flakes? Or do you want to market to someone that's serious about making a decision, putting down some money and going through with their surgery? And that's how you have to think about content. That's how I want you to think about your web design and your web content moving forward. And if any consultant tells you that people don't read, you can immediately disqualify them from having any sort of expertise because they clearly have done no testing and they have no idea about what's converting online or what to do with a cosmetic practice. And I'm speaking here from our own tests and going up in some of the toughest markets in North America. And I can tell you fundamentally that you should leave that decision up to the patient. Let them decide how far they want to read get to your point. Provide in-depth information because you can not guess at what point in the buying cycle that visitor is at. And you want to have information there that caters to everybody from the decision maker, right up to the I'm-about-a-year-out-from-making-a-decision-but-I-really-need-some-information. And you want to start engaging with them from that point on and have that information there for them be comprehensive and be the authority in your market. Because if she's going to other websites and all they have is thin content, you can bet that you will look like the expert in your field and you'll stand out from the pack. Let's get into a tactical element next which still pertains to content. .

Nick: [00:13:39] When we're talking about content, people follow what's called a dual readership path. Now, while people will read and people that are intensely interested in the topic we'll read everything, there are people that are already have some of the information. So I spoke to you about that buying path. The decision making path to buying journey. It's called by many names but essentially it starts at the point of inception, where somebody is just getting an inkling that I should do something about this, I'm not happy with my breasts, my eyes, my wrinkles. I should do something about it. What are my options? They started Googling. They get informed. They may have been to two, three websites. Those websites were incomplete. So then you have more questions. They start Googling again. Now they start to engage with your content and they come across your site. Your site is comprehensive but they've gotten information previously so they're fairly sure that they know that they want, you know, what the differences between silicone versus saline implants and what they want to do moving forward. Kind of what kind of incision they would like. They've gotten all this information already. So what they'll do at that point is that they'll follow the second readership path and what that means is that they're not reading word for word anymore. Now they start to jump from headline and visual element to headline and visual element. So when you're laying out your page, headlines, sub headlines and graphics are very important because it allows them to take that dual path and engage with the paragraph that they're interested in. So they may gloss over the, you know, silicone versus saline. They may gloss over the incision types and they go to, oh, what's this, this is something new and different. It caught my eye as the headline, read the sub headline, it was intriguing, now I'm getting into the paragraph going to read from here on. So you've got those two types of readership. You've got the one that's going word for word top to bottom. There are intently interested in everything. You've got the second one that's doing some scanning and then reading. They're picking out the content that is of interest to them at that time. And again if you have short content that process cannot happen. If you don't have content that's long enough and informative enough and with enough elements that they can pick through, there's no way that they can engage with anything on that page and they'll just bounce and find another website that's answering their questions. Now as you're building your web page, scanability, visual hierarchy, which is how we refer to this, which is making sure that the headline stands out from the headline and from the body copy and the graphics. Things take priority visually. That's where we have bold and regular. That's a way of displaying visual hierarchy with type. I'm not going to bore you by getting into too much of that detail. But what I want you to pay attention to is also the thought process when somebody is reading, I noticed some of these new design trends. They tend to start to break up the page into big sections and they don't allow enough flow of content when somebody is reading. It's almost like as if you're engaged in a book and then your kid is constantly coming up to you and asking you for something. It keeps interrupting your thought. You're, what they would call in movies, the suspension of disbelief. When you're engaged with a piece of content and the person has a psychological track that they're on, you don't want to break that track up until you're done with your point. So that's another thing you have to be very very careful with chunks of text. So when you're making a point, before your call to action, you want to make sure that that point is complete and unbroken. So that's another visual element that you can now go back and evaluate your own content and your own website and think about your decision making process as you read. Is that being interrupted or is it allowed to come to its natural conclusion? So to sum up that very quickly. Make sure you've got enough content. People still read. Be careful of the dual readership path. Be careful of breaking up trains of thought. If you can do all of that, you'll be head and shoulders ahead of your competitors. .

Nick: [00:17:39] Myth number two: you shouldn't show your price. This is a point of debate between marketers. I can only speak to what I've experienced and I can tell you right now that our philosophy and our design philosophy and our marketing philosophy is one that says that the patient isn't stupid. She knows what things cost. She doesn't need to contact you just to find out the price. And also if she does, that's kind of a low quality lead anyway. There's also the perception that you're dishonest when you don't show your price. Imagine if you went to a store or a restaurant or even an auto dealership and they had no prices on their vehicles, no prices on the menu for the food. And then they wanted your business. What would happen at that point? What would you think of that dealership? If you went to an auto dealership, you were going to buy a car and none of the cars had any prices and nobody talked to you until you went and wanted to ask for the price. You couldn't get any information. Their website had no prices, you couldn't find what this car costs anywhere. A few things will happen there. The first is that you lose trust for that company because they look like they're hiding something. Why are they hiding it? I'll tell you what goes through people's minds because we have surveyed this and we've tested this. And what goes through their minds is that the doctor's making up the price. This person gets one price. The other person gets another price. He's just making it up as he goes. He might charge me $5000 or $8000 or $10000. I don't know because he's not disclosing the price. The moment that you make something public, it's perceived as honest. It's perceived as it's disclosed and set in stone and I'm going to get treated right and everybody's getting this price. That is the perception that the consumer has. It also helps you when they come in because you've displayed your price. They know what the price is and when it comes time to negotiate payment they don't have to try to lowball you. And you can always say, well, those are the prices we have and then we charge everybody the exact same thing. So it's a tool that you can use. So our personal philosophy is to always show the price on a website because not only is it more honest but it binds the consumer to you. It makes them trust you much much more. So where's the data to back this up? Let's get into that. .

Nick: [00:19:47] I'll tell you the three most visited pages on any cosmetic website. It's going to be the before and after page, and I'm talking about pages other than the home page. The home page obviously gets a lot of traffic. Other than the home page, where people go to reset. That that's a reset mechanism so they could come into any page and then go back to the home page, so that's why typically that'll get the bulk of the traffic. But other than the home page here are the three most visited pages: the before and after page, the pricing page and the testimonials page. Those are the three things that people are looking for more than anything else on your website right now. So even if you pause this podcast right now, have a look at your website and see if you've got those things prominent and if they're comprehensive and if they treat the subject matter the way that it should be treated and comprehensively.

Nick: [00:20:35] So if you don't have your pricing on your website, what are you doing to yourself? If somebody has advised you to not put prices on your website because they will, quote, unquote, increase the number of leads, tirekickers, coming to your practice. What are you doing to yourself? You're eliminating one of the top three pages that consumers are looking for. You are forcing them to go to somebody else to find out what the pricing is and what happens when they're there. That person could be more savvy then. They could be more savvy than your marketing company than your consultant. And they could be using that page to capture the lead. They could be using that page to entice them with payment plans to show them that there are other options other than going to someone else's website to find the price. So again you're harming yourself by taking bad advice and not having pricing on your website because in the event that you don't have it there, that person is forced to go and satisfy that need to scratch that itch on somebody else's web property. So you are making them go back to Google by not having the information that they want. All right. So that is a big myth that I like to try to dispel. Don't worry about being too expensive or not having the right price. People will self select. You don't need the people that won't pay anyway. And we'll get into this topic another time in terms of how to position yourself and how to not be a commodity in the market and have to go and lowball to the lowest price. We'll do an episode on that coming up. But for now we're talking about your website and you should be showing prices.

Nick: [00:22:12] The next element that I want to tackle is the navigation for the website. And I have a rule of thumb. If I go to any plastic surgeon's website when they contact us and they asked me to have a look at the site, if I have a look at it and it starts with About Us, I know that that plastic surgeon doesn't get it yet. I know that whoever's built that website doesn't understand the importance of the consumer's journey and why she's there primarily. Now I'll tell you why she's there in a second, and the way that you should order your menu. For now I just want to remind you that the patient isn't there for you. She's there for herself. She's there to get what she needs from your website. She's not there to be informed about you. There is a time when you want to inform her about you and I'll get into that right now.

Nick: [00:23:00] Whenever a patient comes to your site, they'll generally think like this, and this is the order that you want to have your menu: can you do what I need? That's the first question. They come to your website and they don't know anything about you yet. So the first question isn't who are you (the About Us). It's can you do what I need (your Services). Can you do a tummy tuck or are you a rhinoplasty surgeon? Did I come to the wrong website. Can you do what I need? Can You augment my breasts or are you just a liposuction specialist? Can you do what I need? What are your services? What do you have to offer? That's the first item that should be in your menu. Go, look at your own website. If it's About Us, your web team has got that wrong and you've got the opportunity now to change it. .

Nick: [00:23:47] The next thing that she's going to want to know is, do you do good work? Again, not about you, don't care about you. Can you do the good work? Can you perform this procedure in a way that I will get a satisfactory result? That I'll get a superior result? Menu item that correlates to that obviously is the before and after section. And the testimonials section. She's looking for proof that other people have done it. If it's not legal to have testimonials in your state or your province, wherever you're located, you want to make sure that you've got a very strong before and after section. If you don't have that, you want to make sure that you're fostering those reviews online and you're pointing people to those reviews off of your website because there's nothing that any governing body can really do about that. But you want to show her that you can do good work. This is what she's after. So number one, again, can you do what I need? Oh you can. All right. Do you do good work. Prove it to me where's the proof. So the proof elements have to be there. .

Nick: [00:24:43] Once you've satisfied those two primary things then you can start talking about yourself. Then it's the About Us and the Contact Us. And I want you to think about that. It's a logical psychological progression. She has to satisfy her own curiosities first and that has nothing to do with you. This actually gets me worked up a little bit because this is how webdesign firms sell websites. They'll go to a doctor and they'll do an ego play. They'll put your photo on the home page, they'll plaster you and your staff and your big face up top there and they will sell you that product, because your ego wants to buy that. Because your ego is not concerned with your business. Your ego is concerned with self gratification. It's narcissistic. It works against business. It works against you. But that's how they make their money. This is how web design firms are taught to sell. They sell on ego. They'll put your logo and your face on it and then they'll sell you that and tell you that's what people want and that's simply not the case. People are there to satisfy their own needs. We are selfish creatures. Us humans, humanity in general. We want to survive. We want to eat more. We want to get more for ourselves then our family and our children. That is our main concern. Nobody cares about you. You don't care about me. If I were up here telling you about my day and you know what I had for breakfast with my daughter, you wouldn't care about that information. You're here for you. You're here to improve your practice and you're here to get that information. And the faster you understand that and really let that sink in, the faster you can make better decisions, not only for your website but for your business in general. .

Nick: [00:26:29] So let's recap that. Can you do what I need, the Services, whatever way you want to tackle that in the menu. It's not the About section. Do you do good work? Before and afters, testimonials, videos, proof that you can do the procedure. Once we've tackled that, who are you. Do I know you? Do I like you? Should I like you? Let me watch your videos. Let me read about you. What are your hobbies? In previous episodes we discuss that. We discussed about the knowing, the liking, and the trust. I think it was maybe episode 1 or 2. You can go back and listen to those if you haven't already. .

Nick: [00:27:03] So Now I want you to look at your own website. Pull up your website right now. Pause this podcast if you have to or try to remember what you've got on there and look at it. When you go to your home page, are you the primary focus of that site or is it your patient? Are you making the patients the hero or are you making yourself the hero? When you look at your menu does it start with the About section? Is it backwards? Imagine going on a date and all you did was talk about yourself. How interested would they be? Would they care about you? No. They would find you very uninteresting because they want to talk about themselves more than they care about what you have to say about yourself. They have to give you permission to talk about yourself and you get that permission virtually digitally by convincing them that this is the right way to do it and you get that permission digitally by showing them that you understand them first. Showing them the proof of what you can do and then they will give you mental permission to tell them about you. And then they can make their decision. .

Nick: [00:28:05] Now telling them about you brings me very nicely into the next topic which is the photography that you use on the site and I'm talking primarily about the photos of yourself. Your bio pictures, your pictures of you and your staff. I'll go over some of the typical mistakes that I see online. And this I see on a lot of websites. I see this on a lot of doctors' websites. I've spoken about this in Paris trying to educate people about it. Basically this is what you need to know. A photo has a dozen unseen cues, unspoken words. It's a visual language that we use to make decisions. What you wear, your haircut, your body position, your facial composition, all of those things send a message to the patient. You know this is true because you have made snap decisions about people. You've walked somewhere, you've walked into a place and...I just don't like that guy. There's something about him. He looks like an asshole. Whatever it might be, we pick up visual cues from what people are wearing, how they're groomed, how they walk, how they sit, how they speak, the tone in their voice, the intonation, their vocabulary, the vernacular that they use — all of those are cues and clues which have nothing to do with what people say. .

Nick: [00:29:19] So The number one mistake that I see on websites is misclassifying who you are. And doctors do this by wearing suits. As a physician you're given an extreme amount of power with your medical degree. You get people to get naked in front of you just by wearing a white lab coat. And I see this over and over, where doctors, in an attempt to look, quote unquote, professional, will wear a suit instead of a lab coat on their website. Or scrubs. Even those are better than a suit. Because in society we operate on uniforms. If you see a police officer and he steps into the street and puts out his hand, what happens to the traffic? The traffic stops immediately. If you walk into traffic and put up your hand what happens? You get a very good chance of getting run over. So that is the power of uniforms. The military has them. Police have them. Firefighters have them. Doctors have them. Nurses have them. And it embodies them with a certain sense of authority. And when you put on a suit you're wearing a false identity because you are not a businessman. And here's the worst part of that: the patient isn't there to deal with a businessman. She's not there to deal with a greasy car salesman in a nice suit. She's there to have her body examined by a doctor and have a medical procedure done that improves her life. And if you're wearing a suit on your website, you're immediately sending out the wrong information to her.

Nick: [00:30:50] The second mistake that I see is body language. If you're selling to women, men also, but primarily to women, you want to make sure that you've got an open and vulnerable body language. And the number one pose that I see on most plastic surgeons' website, whether they're wearing a suit or scrubs or a white coat, is they have their arms crossed. If you've ever been on a date, what does it mean if the other party crosses their arms and crosses their legs? If you know anything about body language, you know immediately that that is a barrier. That means that they're not interested and they're putting up a physical barrier between you and them. And if you've got your arms crossed on your website, looking smug, you are repelling individuals because you're putting a physical barrier between them and you on a visual level. These are the unspoken cues. So go and take a look at your website. What are you wearing? How's your body position? Is it accepting? Is it accommodating? Is it inviting? If you don't answer yes to all of those things, then your photographer didn't really understand anything about cosmetic surgery sales and that's fine. I mean a lot of photographers do not specialize in this and they just try to get a good photo and I'll tell you from experience, that art directing some of these shoots, a lot of doctors are not comfortable in front of the camera which always boggles my mind, because the first thing I look at them and I say, really? You cut people open for a living and this makes you nervous? But that may be the case with you. However you can change. You can change that picture. You can wear the right outfit. These are simple. I want to give you a few tactical things and this is one thing that you can do right away. When the person's starting to make a decision, they're finally at the About Us section and they want to learn about you as a person, as an individual, that on your website, you're not repelling them with body language and you're not repelling them by wearing the suit of a Wall Street broker or typical salesman that's just out to get their money because that is what the suit tells you. That is the unspoken message of a suit. It's going to deal with money. And if I've got a nice suit on, you know what? I make a lot of money and I take it from people like you. And there's a place for that kind of messaging right. Success attracts people but they are looking for a doctor. They're not looking for a salesman and they're not looking for a business person.

Nick: [00:33:08] We've gone through a few of the technical things. You know what kind of images to put of yourself. You know how to organize your menu. You know what kind of content to put on your website. So now I'm going to talk a little bit about a few things that are a little bit more technical but still very important for you to know when you're making a decision on your web design.

Nick: [00:33:28] The next element that I'm going to discuss is eye flow. What I mean by ice flow is that a person is attracted to certain elements on a web page and that will be anything from a headline, to a color, to a photo, to a graphic. Things on that page will draw the eye around the page and how you deal with the flow will either increase your conversion rate or decrease your conversion rate and you can modify and test this. But if the person is not engaging with the content, they've got no chance of engaging with your business because it's the content that triggers the psychology which gets them to make a decision. So if the images are pulling you around the page and they're not taking you to the content so that they can be engaged with, you're missing out on a big opportunity and you can increase your conversion rate just by doing that. I spoke about this in Paris and I redid the presentation that I did there on our YouTube channel. If you just go to Google and just search for either ThinkBasis YouTube, and go and find the video there or Google ThinkBasis plastic surgery market domination YouTube, that should bring up the video for you. And I've got visuals there. It's very hard to describe this concept on a podcast without visuals, but if you go and check out those videos they'll more than adequately show you what I'm talking about there. And everyone that's watched those has told me that it was very informative. So I encourage you to do that if you want to learn more about that topic.

Nick: [00:34:59] The next thing we're going to discuss is myth number three. And myth number three says that your website should be mobile first. So what does that mean? So mobile first is a design philosophy that was coined a few years back and it states that people most people visit your website from the mobile device these days. Desktop traffic is less than mobile and you should sacrifice some sort of design elements to be mobile first because that is primarily how people will engage with their website. So a couple of things with that is that desktop traffic has actually decreased. It's just that mobile traffic has increased so there's still a ton of people that are at work and they're surfing on a desktop device right a computer or a tablet for a larger screen but primarily a physical laptop or computer. So what's my take on that? What is our take as a team at ThinkBasis? And this is something that again it gets me a little bit worked up because I feel that everybody's got this wrong in stating mobile first because you should not sacrifice any elements. What you'll see in mobile first design is that people will sacrifice an easy to click menu, for one of those little what's called the hamburger menu. You've seen that three little lines and they've gone and done that because they say well it's a mobile first design. Mobile first is garbage. It should be mobile friendly but not mobile first. The phrase that we use is device first because whatever device that person is on, should be served a hundred percent for the user at that time. So we don't sacrifice anything on the desktop because we want to make something great on a mobile device. You've got to think device first. It's got to be the best user experience on mobile and the best user experience on the desktop. No sacrifices no compromises. Period. Each of those devices is being used by that person at that time and you have to treat that device with the respect that it needs and the usability factors that it needs so that it converts into business for your practice. Not mobile first. Not desktop first. It's not either,or — we don't have an option here. It's device first. Be the best you can be on the device that the person is on, at the time that they're viewing your website because nothing else matters. So what does that mean? It means having clear calls to action which are appropriate for that device. Click here for desktop, touch here or press here for mobile and tablet. The user interface has to adjust to the user. The usability of those devices has to be appropriate for the device. It should be easy to scroll and touch on mobile devices. It should be easy to scroll with a mouse and interact with a mouse on a desktop or trackpad if they're on a laptop. With that I want to talk about what's called Tolerance Capital. So usability means removing friction and you want to remove as much friction as you can unless there's a reason for it. There are situations where you actually want to increase the friction. You want to raise the bar if you've got some sort of exclusive high end program that you want to let people in or a VIP application or something like that for your practice. But generally speaking, in usability, you want to eliminate friction and not use up what's called Tolerance Capital. And Tolerance. Capital is the amount of crap people are willing to put up with before they leave your site. If they're filling out a form and the autofill is off and it's hard and small on mobile and they can't see the letters, how many times will they click and touch and type before they get frustrated and leave? That's Tolerance Capital. You want to use up as little of that Tolerance Capital as possible and eliminate as much friction as possible for the device that the person is on. I'm not going to get into search factors and Google ranking and things like that but usability is a factor in that. And part of usability is speed. You want to have a fast loading website. We always shoot for under 2 seconds. If we can, under a second, depending on what the pages is. I'm not going to get into the technicality of at all but part of usability, part of a good experience, is speed and the faster your site works, the more chance that you have that that person will contact you because they will be using very little Tolerance Capital. They have a frictionless experience and they can engage with your site and contact you. .

Nick: [00:39:34] The other thing is not to auto play any videos or sounds. A lot of the web browsers have eliminated auto play video but some web designers will still try to get cute and putting little sounds at play or something on the website. They try to make the website the experience as opposed to the message that it needs to be. Now, we've tested auto play videos in the past and I'll tell you it can drastically reduce the amount of people that are on your site and increase the bounce rate by up to 70 percent of what it was. Why is that happening? You know, we've never really surveyed that but, and we haven't surveyed that because we left it on for just a few days because it just decimated the website conversions and we know the only change we made was the auto play video and the sound. And the reason that we figure that happened was that a lot of people were surfing at work. And if they went to their website and they have speakers and, boom, it started playing some doctor videos, very embarrassing and they quickly hit the back button so that their co-workers couldn't see what they're up to or hear what they're up to. So be very mindful of that. That's something that's a little bit of a gotcha type situation which is hard to know unless someone tells you about that. But again think about the situation that the user is in. During the day they're most likely at their workplace. So they're either at lunch, on their cell phone, viewing your website and doing some research or they're at their desk killing time and doing their own stuff in terms of finding a physician. So you have to think about the situation that they're in and make the website fit that situation. Don't make them have to try to adapt to you and quickly hit the mute button or, you know, throw their speakers under the desk to not have their co-workers hear that they want to have a labiaplasty or something. .

Nick: [00:41:17] The Other thing I want you to take away from this is to have a culture of not assuming. And as I try to teach my child, when you assume you make an ass out of you and me, old joke still good. What I want you to do is test everything. Don't even listen to me on this podcast. Even though this is all tested materials I still want you to start testing. I want you to find out for yourself. Take what I said make those changes and let the data speak. Make sure your analytics are set up correctly. Make sure your split testing software is set up correctly. And run those tests and find out for yourself what works and doesn't work. Don't make any assumptions when it comes to your business. You want to let the data speak you want the facts to speak. That's how we do things. That's how I want you to do things and get a culture of split testing and get a culture of analytics and practice so that you can find out for yourself what you have to do.

Nick: [00:42:09] The last point I want to leave you with, is that the medium is not the message. The message is the message and it's the message that converts your prospects to clients. What I mean by that is if you are building a beautiful website that impresses everyone and gets you all sorts of complements, but doesn't get you sales, that's a useless website. It's great for winning your designer awards. It's great for stroking your ego, but at the end of the day the bank doesn't accept ego points. It only takes cash. So think about your website in that way. It's not about what people tell you. It's not about the compliments that you get. It's about the bums in seats and the people that you get to your practice and the people that choose you over your competitors because you did a better job online. And you can.

Nick: [00:42:56] Take this information. Go back. Make the changes you need and take over your area. Be the leader and show everybody how it's done.

Nick: [00:43:05] I hope this was informative. You'll find us at ThinkBasis.com. Leave us a message. Let me know what you thought of the program. I'd love to hear from you. Until next time, I'm Nick Dumitru. I'll see you then.