In today’s article, we’re going to be digging into one of our subscribers’ websites. This is John Evans’ website over at Brain Wellness Institute. And what John wrote to me is that they are a mental health practice that is offering psychology and psychiatry services in Orange County, California. And so they have essentially been building their website, trying to figure out exactly what they should be doing, whether they’re on the right track to get more services from their website.
So by the end of this article, you should be getting a better understanding of what I’m looking for when I dig into small businesses websites that you can apply for your own business. Let’s go ahead and dig right in through John’s website.
Digging into the website homepage
Digging right into John’s website, I see that they provide integrative mental and physical health care. They believe it’s critical to treat all aspects of our patients and provide holistic care. That’s a great start. What I would say overall is I’m not really sure why physical is not bolded, but everything else is bolded. I love the, how can we help you. It really focuses the copy on the end recipient reader, as opposed to themselves.
That said, though, you could also go from it from the positioning of actually switching things around where you would talk more about them right off the bat, and then have the question or the call to action be to learn more. So for example, it could be integrative mental and physical health care for you, or integrative mental and physical health care for your needs, et cetera. Whatever it is, what you could do is you could change it around from being focused around you guys, the overall Brain Wellness Institute, to being focused on your potential end-user. That way, when they read it, they can think to themselves, oh, this is clearly written for me as a potential customer.
Key sections in the website
As I scroll down though, the other things that I’m looking at is I can see right off the bat that they are covering some key sections. And this is great. Whenever you’re starting your small business website, you’re going to want to make sure that these sorts of key questions are immediately answered.
So looking at this section, I can tell what their mission is going to be, what their vision is, who’s on their team, insurance, our services, as well as how I can get in touch with them. So when I’m scrolling down on one of these websites, what I’m thinking about is who, what, where, when, why, and how. So in this situation, a lot of these questions are being answered.
The who is clear in terms of meet the team, the what is clear in terms of their mission and vision. The why is clear as well in terms of probably mission and vision, how is probably answered in the services section, and aware is probably answered in the footer in terms of some of their locations since we know that this is a local business. So overall they do a good job of answering these key questions.
The only thing that I would potentially draw attention to though, is that I’m not really sure exactly which of these sections John wants me to actually click into most. Based off the way the titling is laid out, I think it’s going to be either vision or services since they are the largest blocks in this overall section.
But that’s something to keep in mind when you’re designing a webpage is, is this too visually stimulating? So that it’s very difficult for the end-user to know exactly which one of these you want them to click. So that’s one of the things that I would emphasize. The other thing I’d say is related to authenticity.
When you have something like a meet the team page, and you’re clearly using images from people on your team, try to avoid using just generic stock images all over the place in other sections on your website. It just gives it a different feel versus having a website where everybody that’s used in images are actually people on your team.
Digging into the services page
Digging right in though, as we scroll further down the line, what we can see is that they also have other sections around different types of services that they cover. So they cover things like therapy neuropsychological testing, as well as autism, ADHD and learning disability testing. It looks like these are all the different services that they cover. This is actually a little confusing to me because when you look at this, I would have expected that our services would have been the page that would then lead to these titles.
But what I realized now is that what our services is signaling is all the services below the fold that they actually cover. So right off the bat, what I would recommend for John is if he’s looking to simplify as overall homepage, try to emphasize what exactly do you want your end-user to be clicking into first.
Right now, this is not super clear because for example, the sizing of our vision and our services is the same size. And then secondly, when you’re looking at something like in our services section where you have a pointing arrow down, potentially change this out where you actually want the person to click through to then open up these titles, because without that sort of functionality, this is a very unintuitive experience because it kind of blends into what you were doing up here with the overall core navigation of your site.
Digging into the contact us section
As we scroll down, though, you can see that there is a general contact us form. The only thought that I have right off the bat of looking at this is that if you want to really prioritize selling more services or getting more inquiries for your business, you can make it easier for people by actually having a dropdown for what people’s inquiries should be related to.
If you can think about the key questions that people often ask you, whether they’re calling you on the phone or submitting an interest form on your website, you can probably group them into three to five different categories of things just to make it easier for them. And the reason why this is super powerful is because if you can reduce the number of decision points for somebody to make the decision to want to get in touch with you, then they’re going to be more likely to get in touch with you.
So this can be a great way for you to increase the conversion rate of this contact us page. Whenever you’re looking at designing a contact us page, I want you to think about how can I make this as few questions as possible to get to the key action of submitting that form.
So in this situation, what you should be thinking about is right now, we’ve got five pieces of information that we’re asking people to submit. But then when you also have to be thinking about is how much information are we really asking of people to type in here. And in this situation, they’re pretty much asking people to come up with everything in terms of the questions, whereas a simple dropdown in terms of what their inquiry might be related to or how they heard about them and so on would be really great ways to just reduce the cognitive load for the end-user to get to the conversion.
As we scroll on further down, you can see that there’s a phone number. That’s great. And you can see the key pages in terms of what they actually cared about.
Digging into the footer section
So if I wanted to look at this earlier section of the different pages and compare it to this bottom section, you can actually tell exactly what they probably care about most based off what they put in their footer, which is meet the team services, insurance, blog and contact.
And that kind of does not align with every single thing up here in which we have some general vision and mission statements up here, but we don’t actually even put those into the breakdown of the footer page. So try to be consistent when you’re looking at your footer pages of prioritizing the key pages that are interesting to your potential end-user.
Digging into the Meet the Team section
The next thing I’m going to dig into is there meet the team page. So whenever I’m looking at a meet the team page, I want to make sure that there’s some sort of affirmation to the mission and vision of the organization, as well as details specific to people that might be servicing me if I am part of a service related company.
So in this situation, what I am expecting as I scroll through here is a breakdown of some of the doctors and things like that and their backgrounds, just so I can understand potentially their approach towards care and things like that. So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to scroll through this page and go ahead and click into some of these to see exactly what their bios are all all about.
And what you can see here is that there are some nice videos about each of the different teams as well as read more pages where they detail a little bit more about them. I think these are overall pretty good. It’s pretty par for course. However, if I were to improve this a little bit further, what I would potentially include is a way to make this more skimmable.
So right now these are good bios and that they’re really rich. They’ve got some great content on here, but you could actually make these a lot more efficient if you were, for example, to include bolded or bulleted points that would be like their specialty in terms of these different doctors and providers, as well as some of the key things that they might be able to address in terms of your services.
So just right off the bat, that’s an immediate thought is that it’s difficult for me to quickly parse through that without having to actually read each of the bios. Whenever you’re creating a business website, you want to make sure it’s really easy for somebody to get the big picture really quickly, just based off of a few seconds or a few minutes on your website. So that’s the first piece of feedback I give in terms of the meet the team page.
The next thing I would add is some sort of coming soon image in terms of these people on the page that don’t have images yet. But overall, what I’d say is that there could be some improved navigation as well in terms of the side panels. So I think that either on the left or the right hand side, they can have a table of contents or some sort of search bar function. It would make it a lot easier if I were actually seeking Brain Wellness Institute services could just search for my provider as opposed to having to scroll through this entire thing in order to find somebody that might be actually taking care of me.
So when it comes to the meet the team page, main things I change is making bios more skimmable and making it clear in terms of who each person can serve best. And secondly, improving the navigation on the page to make it easier for somebody to get to the point of value of the actual page, which is in most situations is going to be learning about a particular provider that they might be interfacing with through some sort of appointment later on.
Digging into the services page
Next thing we’re going to dig into is services. So we’ll get this dropdown. First thing I’d say is this is a little overwhelming. There’s a lot of content in here, and I would try to find ways to prioritize particular things that you know are clicked on way more than other things. Right now, it looks like everything is just listed.
And so I think they could remove some of the cognitive load on the user by just having some of the top related services and then having an all services button for people that are looking for more. But if I scroll into one of these pages, what you can see is they detailed some of the things that they do in terms of therapy.
Again, main feedback I’d give them is the same thing as what their meet the team page, which is this needs to be way more skimmable. I need to have an understanding of things like what your pricing might be like or what the different session packages may be as well it needs to just be easy for me to skim through this.
So that’s the first thing. When I went through the third key page, if I keep on going to the next page, I’m going to choose another services and just see what happens. Another thing that I just flagged though, is that it’s taking a lot of time to load between pages. In fact, I’m still loading that page.
I’m just going to try to choose another page, but overall, if you’re seeing situations like that, where it’s not the end-user’s internet, which I know it’s not in my case, it means that your server is either using some sort of shared hosting package and things like that, which may actually impact things because it isn’t used to being able to get a lot of pool in terms of traffic.
So just something to look out for is run your pages through your page speed analyzers, as well as other free Google tools so that you can see exactly how Google is reading your pages, because in the case where your pages are loading way too slowly, it’s going to actually impact your organic rankings as well.
As we scroll down here, though, what you can see is they have this page on the UCLA Brain Camp. This is a lot better. This is so much more readable than that therapy page. So I would recommend they take this sort of approach for all their other services pages. I’m not going to go through every single one of these, but at a high level, what I want you to take away from this, if you’re watching this, John, is that when you’re digging into your services, you want to make it get crystal clear exactly what services you’re providing and make it into something like a Cliff Note sheet similar to what you have here with the UCLA Brain Camp.
It’s much easier for me to get a sense of what you’re doing with the brain camp versus the therapy page, where I have to read through the entire thing to learn exactly what you guys do relate to therapy.
Digging into the insurance page
As we move on to the next page in the insurance page, the first thing that I noticed at least is that it did take me a few seconds to actually load that page. Again, you’re going to want to look into that in terms of page speed, but I love how clear it is in terms of who they currently accept insurance. So this is a really nice here. What I recommend though, just based on my past experiences on other health providers websites is that I would provide a breakdown of what specific types of plans under these major providers that you accept, because sometimes people don’t actually accept every single one of the health care plans for these different insurance companies.
But overall, what this page is doing really well is they’re answering the question of exactly what insurances at a high level are covered. In order to improve this page, I would include a further breakdown in terms of what the key plans are under each one. So whether you make that into something where you click into it, and then from there, it shows all the related Anthem plans that are covered, or you have something where there’s a phone number for each of these major providers so that people can check for themselves whether or not their insurance is going to cover your services.
Digging into their blogs
So for this last section, we’re going to take a look at their blog. Overall. I can see that Dr. Julia Evans is the main contributor for all of this content.
And if I go back another page, I can see that they started this effort in July. Pretty good in terms of consistency, it looks like they are releasing content more or less once every few weeks or so. So good job there. It’s great to have a consistent content calendar, and that’s all as one of my biggest pieces of advice for small businesses.
The next thing that I would look into is what exactly are you going after? So it looks like they’re going after some versus content here, as well as some overall content around TMS. But I want to know exactly what the bigger picture is around this topic area. So if you’re going to be creating content on a particular area, what I want you to think about is how it all connects together.
Right off the bat, this looks a little disjointed right now in which they’re talking about some things around TMS, but it’s not actually super well embedded in terms of what I’ve seen so far of all these different pages. So for example, I would expect that if you have a page on TMS versus antidepressants, which is right for you versus stimulating a healthy brain, the origins and benefits of TMS therapy, I would expect some sort of interlinking to be happening between your different posts on TMS.
However, because they’re not doing that, what it means is that it’s making it much more difficult for Google to understand the relationship between all of these different blog posts that they’re writing. So that’s my first piece of advice just looking at a high level. The next thing that I give you in terms of feedback is the way that you’re categorizing your post mainly in that you’re not categorizing your posts.
So just taking a look at this, these are all full falling into a general folder of posts in terms of their blog. And this could be one thing that they could really improve really easily is just providing some sort of key categories for their reader to make it easier, again, to understand contextually what their blog is all about. The next thing that I’d say in terms of digging into these posts a little bit further is that they may not be actually positioning themselves as the truly authoritative source around these particular posts.
What I mean by that is they are using some overall headers, but the overall post themselves, if I were to guess around a thousand words or so, and that’s really not going to get you in most situations, the top spot on Google. So that’s just one thought in terms of feedback there, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to actually put in one of these search phrases into Google to see exactly what comes up here.
Digging into the top posts related to this website
I’m going to be looking for their website. Again, it’s Brain Wellness Institute. And right now I’m not seeing anything for them. I’m not seeing anything for them. So right off the bat, it looks like this content is not good enough to actually rank organically without any backlinks and guessing they don’t have backlinks, and I can check that in a second, but then what I’m also look into is I can look into what the top posts are and why they might be successful.
So when I scroll through the top posts here, what I see is that there’s a couple more headers in this particular post. It looks like on the right hand side, you can see how they’ve sectioned off their blog versus the example of what we’re doing today with Brain Wellness Institute. They have not done that. And so it’s just probably a little bit better organized in terms of a blog on this side. Lengthwise, it looks about the same to be honest. And as we dig into this other website, where you can see here is that there’s definitely a great breakdown in terms of all the different key sections here.
What I also like about this site versus the site of our subscriber is that they have different visuals and things like that to break up the text. Overall, it’s just very easy and skimmable to read, which is a great benefit. And what I see over here is that if I were to look on the right-hand side, they again have major categories to find on their blog.
So again, just taking a look through that particular post, what we can see is that one of the key improvements that our subscriber John could do immediately is introduce categories on the right-hand side, make it a lot easier for your readers to actually figure out what the key sections are in your blog, dig deeper into each of the content areas, make sure your content is actually better than what else is out there.
Otherwise you’re just creating content for the sake of creating content. And then what you can also do is we can also just do some better interlinking between all of our different pages.
Overall, this website is doing pretty well, but it could be doing even better. Just by having some optimizations in terms of time to value of what exactly you’re doing in your services, as well as more interlinking and better categorization and emphasis on the end reader, we could increase the overall inquiries that are coming into this business.
Furthermore, what I would say is we didn’t have enough call to actions on the website. It could be a really simple action to just put together a freebie on the website. That way you could try to capture some more information on people that are already landing on your website to then reach out or learn more about your particular services.
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