Is your private practice website failing to perform? Can’t remember the last time you had a conversion? Or flat-out don’t like how your website looks?
These are all common reasons to want to make a website (or redesign an existing one).
But before you go to Squarespace or Wix, stop for a second and consider this: Is designing your website solo going to help you achieve your business goals two to three years from now?
We’ve got strong opinions on the matter. Here are six reasons why hiring a web designer may be right for you.
Save Time
There are a million things you could be doing with your time. Tweaking your website, learning how to set up hosting, or learning SEO may not be one of them. Professional web designers take years to learn their craft in the same way that becoming an amazing therapist cannot be achieved overnight.
Talents and abilities can be learned, and with enough time, you could offer your web design services to other therapists. But isn’t that a distraction from why you got into therapy in the first place? When you hire a professional designer, you save yourself hours of your precious time to stay focused on helping people heal and grow.
Stress Less
Working with technology can be a frustrating experience. We want it to do something; it doesn’t want to work with us. So we try harder and harder until we feel overwhelmed with all this “tech” stuff. It’s an issue every web designer encounters in their careers, and you probably can relate to this feeling more than you can imagine.
But an expert is someone who’s solved the same problem a thousand times. Ask an expert to fix whatever bug or issue you’re dealing with – and they could snap their fingers and make it disappear. That’s the value of hiring a professional. They can make the problems disappear so you can focus on your mission.
Bring Your Vision to Life
You likely have a vision of what your website should look like. Maybe you were scrolling Facebook and saw someone else’s website that actually made your jaw drop. You loved the tiny details, the colors, and how that image “popped.” More than likely, they hired a web designer themselves to make that website as good as it was.
Imagine if that were your website—a website that reflected your practice—your philosophy, evolved services, and overall spirit. A professional web designer can help you bring that vision onto the screen more accurately than if you were to build it yourself.
Charge More Per Hour
With an elevated website, your practice should be able to charge more. Part of what makes marketing so effective is the perceived value of something. When a prospect sees your new website, they will assume you’re a professional and that the design of your site justifies your hourly rate.
Think about it in the reverse. How comfortable would you feel charging $250 an hour for a website that wasn’t absolutely amazing? You want your clients to feel they’re getting extreme value instead of being overcharged, and a new design might do the trick to justify those fees we all know you’re worth.
Improve Your SEO
Every web designer worth his/her salt will make a site that is 100% SEO-friendly. That means doing keyword research for your practice, inserting keywords into header tags, body copy, alt-tags, etc. They’ll also make your website fast by optimizing images for loading speeds and using a dedicated server to host it—all of which improve your SEO.
One final factor that improves SEO is user experience. User experience is how accessible and easy your site is to navigate. These factors combine to improve your chances of having an engaging website that ranks in search engines.
Improve Conversions
Conversion design is an emerging trend in web design. It basically means how your site’s design contributes to converting a visitor. A conversion can be anything from a newsletter subscription to a click to book a free consultation. A good designer will know how to design sites that convert.
Finally, it’s extremely rare, but some web designers also offer copywriting services. If they do, you found a unicorn in the jungle and should hire them immediately. Copywriting has a direct impact on conversions, which will really help improve your engagement rate and conversions. Of course, design plays a huge part in this as well.
Grow Your Practice: Hire the Experts at Private Practice Geeks
If you’re unhappy with your web design, you’re not alone. Every day, we review dozens of sites that miss the mark. Part of the reason for this is that anyone with Wix can call themselves a web designer, just like anyone with an iPhone can call themselves a photographer.
If you want a professional to help take your website to the next level, look no further than the experts at Private Practice Geeks. We’ll take your vision and bring it to life. And we’ll help you achieve your business goals with customizable marketing solutions like SEO.
Growing a private practice is tough, but you don’t have to do it alone. We’re here to help. Request a project request from our team.
Author
Hi, I’m Zack, SEO consultant and owner of Private Practice SEO. I’m on a mission to help practice owners launch and scale their practice with everything I’ve learned the past 6 years in the fast-evolving world of online marketing.