Anaks Labs
Article 06

Twelve checks, one phone

Everything below can be done on the device in your pocket, in half an hour, without buying anything and without asking whoever built your site. Each check is a question with a yes or a no, and each one is followed by what a no indicates. Not by what to do about it — that line is held on purpose, and there is a note at the end about why.

Published · Anaks Labs

Before you start

Do this on your own website with the practice's own name in front of you, and write the twelve answers down somewhere you will still have them in six months. Half the value of this exercise is that it is a record: if anyone works on the site afterwards, this list is the only account you will have of what it was like beforehand.

A no is not a failure and it is not urgent. Several of these are things that a perfectly successful practice can live with for years. What the list produces is a shape — where the noes cluster tells you a good deal more than any individual one of them.

What the page says about you

  • 1. Is there one sentence stating what kind of practice this is and where it is?

    Not a logo, not a photograph of the building, not a phone number in the corner. A sentence a stranger could quote. On more than half of the registry sites in our audit, nothing on the page declared the type of business and its location in a form anything could carry away — the address was frequently printed for a person to read, which is not the same thing.

    Measured by us across the 122 registry sites in the audit, where it came to 57.4%. How that was counted →

  • 2. Can you select the words of your main headline with your finger?

    Press and hold on the biggest sentence on your homepage and try to select it, the way you would to copy a phone number. If nothing highlights, that sentence is a picture of writing rather than writing. A no here means the most prominent line on your site is not available to anything that is not a pair of eyes.

  • 3. Do the words inside the rotating panel appear anywhere else?

    If your services, testimonials or offers live in something that slides, look for those same words on any other page. A no means the only copy of them is inside a moving element, and moving elements are the most common place for text to go missing from a page before anything reads it.

  • 4. Are your opening hours written out somewhere as ordinary text?

    Not on a graphic, not in a photograph of the door. If you cannot select and copy your Thursday hours, then nothing can restate them for a patient who asks at nine in the evening whether you are open tomorrow.

  • 5. Is anything a patient needs only available as a download?

    Fee schedules, insurance lists, pre-operative instructions, new-patient forms. A no on this check is fine; a yes means a portion of your most useful material is in a container that is far less likely to be quoted back to anybody.

  • 6. Does any page answer a question somebody asks at your front desk?

    Cost, whether a plan is accepted, how long recovery runs, whether anybody can be seen today, where to park. Across every group of clinic sites we could separate in our audit, at worst two in three answered none of them anywhere on the site. This is the single most common finding we have.

    Anaks Labs field work, 182 clinic sites. We give a floor here instead of one headline percentage, and the scope row explains why. Base, definition and scope → · where the 182 came from →

What the site is shaped like

  • 7. Does each thing you offer have a page of its own?

    Or is there a single services page with nine headings on it? Neither is wrong for a visitor. But a practice with one page covering everything has one address for nine different questions, and a no here explains a lot of otherwise puzzling results elsewhere.

  • 8. Search your own practice name. Does your site come first?

    Type the name and the town into a search engine as a stranger would. If a directory, a review aggregator or a social profile outranks your own website for your own name, that is the clearest possible statement of which source is currently speaking for you.

  • 9. Do your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear?

    Compare your own site against your map listing and two directories. Suite numbers, abbreviations, an old area code, a name that gained a partner. Disagreement between sources is one of the most common reasons a practice gets described inaccurately, and it is entirely visible from a phone.

  • 10. Has anything at all been published on the site in the last year?

    A page, a post, an announcement, a new member of staff. A no does not mean the site is bad. It means there is no evidence on it that the practice is currently operating, and that absence is legible to anything reading it.

What you can find out from it

  • 11. Can you say how many people got in touch through the site last month?

    A number, not an impression. If nobody can produce one, then every decision about the website — including whether to spend anything on it — is being made without the only figure that matters.

  • 12. Could you change your own hours this afternoon?

    Not whether you would want to. Whether you could, without emailing anyone and without waiting. A no here is the check that tends to predict the others: a site you cannot touch is a site that will be inaccurate the first time anything about the practice changes.

Where this list stops

At the diagnosis. There is no thirteenth item explaining how to correct any of the twelve, and that is not an oversight — repairing these is the work we are paid for, and an article that gestured at it would leave you with half a method and a false sense of having handled it.

What the twelve answers give you is worth having on its own: an honest description of where your practice currently stands, written down and dated, produced by you rather than by somebody who wants to sell you a rebuild. If you do eventually hire anybody — us or anyone else — that page of notes is the most useful thing you can put in front of them, and the only account of the before that anybody will ever be able to produce.

Check eleven has an article of its own, because the usual way of answering it collects more than a clinic should →

Read next

What the same checks produced across 182 clinic sites, with both sample groups →