Healthcare Website Redesign Guide

1. Update or create personas

All great marketing starts with knowing your audience. Websites are no different. To create content that resonates with users and compels them to act, you need to understand the humans behind the screen.

Keep in mind, they might not be the same humans your current web content is written for. Maybe your brand merged with another health system, expanded, or went through other business-level changes. If your existing personas are outdated, take this opportunity to update them. (Don’t wait until you’ve already rewritten your web content; trust us on this.)

What should you include in your healthcare marketing consumer personas?

2. Audit your website content

Apply your knowledge of your audience to your website. Does your current content serve their needs, answer their questions, and make it easier to engage with your brand?

How can you know for sure whether your website is working? Look to the analytics. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console can help you determine if you’re targeting the right search terms and where you’re ranking for them. Your Google Analytics data will indicate how engaging and effective your content is for users.

Don’t stop after the analytics review. Get the full picture of your content’s performance so you can optimize the right pages for your hospital website redesign. Here’s what we recommend:

• Take inventory of your content: The larger your website, the more likely you have outdated or duplicate information hiding under the surface. Don’t haul it over to your new site — clean it up now. Look at all your webpages, URL by URL, and decide which content to keep, merge, update, or remove. (Remember when we said you’re about to climb a mountain? This is the first summit.)
• Look for content and keyword gaps: What information is your website missing, and where are your opportunities to expand your topical authority? After completing the content inventory, these questions will be easier to answer.
• Evaluate your website structure: After many years of adding service lines or products, it’s easy for your site structure to get a little wonky. Sometimes new pages don’t fit neatly into categories, and you don’t have time to create new ones. Now’s the time to assess your website’s organization and source feedback from stakeholders (and preferably, your audience).

Want to team up? Reach out to learn how we perform website content audits.

3. Build a winning content strategy

Use your audit findings to inform your strategy for your health system website update. Define and document your:

• Content goals and objectives
• Messaging architecture
• SEO strategy
• Brand voice and tone
• Writing style guidelines

Note: Your messaging architecture is like a roadmap for your brand messaging across marketing channels. It includes your key messages, positioning statements, and value propositions. Pretend you’re creating a guide to marketing your brand for someone who knows nothing about it. That guide would be your messaging architecture.

Not quite sure where to start? We got you, healthcare marketer. Let’s get your website content strategy all worked out.

4. Streamline your sitemap

Your website structure can make or break the user experience on your site. If users can’t find what they’re looking for — or if they get frustrated in the process of searching — they’ll bounce and look elsewhere. Your content itself may be effectively optimized for your audience, but they need to find it in order to read it.

Larger websites can be more challenging for users to navigate. The more service lines and product pages you host, the more your visitors will have to explore to get where they’re trying to go. Website sitemaps for hospitals must streamline the patient journey as much as possible.

Follow these healthcare website tips:

• Simplify your navigation menu: Don’t overwhelm users with a cluttered navigation bar the moment they land on your website. Aim for no more than 6 main categories. (Remember, you can point users to important subpages with a drop-down menu when they mouse over the category.) Common categories for health systems include “Services,” “Conditions,” “Locations,” and “Patient Resources.”
• Name categories intuitively: Categories in your navigation bar should be as clear to users as signs on a highway. Use your audience’s language when naming them. For example, readers are more likely to understand “Departments” or “Clinics” over “Centers of Excellence.”
• Use internal links wisely: Internal links to relevant webpages keep the user journey moving forward. But pointing users in too many directions (or the wrong ones) can have the opposite effect. Define your primary and secondary goal(s) for each webpage and ensure your calls to action align with your objectives.
• Organize your sitemap for SEO: Search engine crawlers need to understand your site structure, too. Use subfolders (which are also called subdirectories) to organize your web content into categories search engines can “read.” For example, “domain.org/clinics/cancer/breast-cancer” would connect a page about breast cancer to other oncology-focused pages.

5. Optimize your healthcare website content

Your work in steps 1-4 all comes down to this. Use your personas, audit findings, content strategy, and sitemap to create content that’s optimized for SEO and conversion.

This might mean:

• Rewriting existing webpages that don’t fit your brand voice or accurately represent your services
• Optimizing pages for SEO best practices or updating them to target new key phrases from your research
• Creating new webpages to reflect new services, audiences, or business objectives

Like the content inventory, this is another step that can feel like a steep climb. If you’re building a healthcare enterprise website or merging two sites into one, you may need a large volume of new content.

Our advice? Create content briefs and templates to streamline content creation. Include pertinent information about your target audience, SEO, and goals for the page in each brief. And build out templates for similar webpages (such as service line subpages) that will shape the content. These actions set your writers up for a layup.

To boost your production power, reach out for help with website content writing.

6. Build and relaunch your new healthcare website

After laying the groundwork, you’ll be ready to hand your content to your design and development team. Or, to work more efficiently, deliver the first set of pages for them to work with while you optimize and write the others.

This is the last step in this guide, but the process of optimizing your health system website is far from over. (Like the song “Free Bird,” it never really ends.) After your healthcare website relaunch, continue to monitor performance and watch for improvements.

Track key website metrics:

Learn more about preparing for a smooth and successful website launch in our quick reference guide to healthcare website redesigns (below).