The Clinic Marketing Podcast - Local SEO & Healthcare Digital Marketing Tips for Clinic Owners & Wellness Providers

Starting from Scratch: Tips for Setting Up Your Clinic's First Website [Propel Playback]

• Darcy Sullivan

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Launch Your Clinic's First Website the Right Way
Thinking about your clinic’s first-ever website or finally ready to give your current one a major upgrade? In this episode, we walk through the essential steps to build a website that truly works — from what pages to include to how to make it both user-friendly and optimized for search. No tech overwhelm, no guesswork, just practical tips designed specifically for clinics.

You’ll learn:

  • Which mixed set of pages your clinic really needs—and why
  • Smart platform and hosting choices to streamline your build
  • SEO and analytics essentials that raise your Google rankings from the start
  • How to make your site a 24/7 asset that brings in leads effortlessly

Perfect for new clinic owners or anyone building from scratch — we break it down into easy, strategic action steps.

Tune in and build a website that represents your clinic, gets found online, and saves you time and stress.

Send in your questions. ❤ We'd love to hear from you!


🎉 Live webinar: How AI Is Redefining Search for Clinics — and What You Must Do Next

🎥 Watch the free SEO webinar – Rank higher on Google without ad spend

📞Book a discovery call - Book a discovery call with Propel to see how smart SEO and website design can help your clinic get found online.


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Speaker 1:

Hey there, it's Darcy Sullivan from Propel Marketing and Design and the Clinic Marketing Podcast. Thank you so much for listening here. I think you're going to enjoy this clip. It's from a popular episode in our archives, don't forget. You can leave a review on iTunes. It would mean the world. It helps spread the word about this podcast. All right, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome. I do apologize if I still sound a little bit congested.

Speaker 1:

If you're putting together your clinic's website for the first time, this episode is for you. Now, if you already have a website and you're planning a website redesign, I think you will still find value in this episode. We will be filming a specific episode coming up soon that purely dives into what it's like and what you should consider for a website redesign. But in today's episode I'm going to be sharing with you the process for setting up a website for the first time, and I'll be sharing with you some tips so that you can set it up with ease, along with discussing a few items you should spend your money on when you're setting up your website for the first time and where you can pull back the budget in areas that you can save when you're setting up a website for the first time and it all starts with the URL. That's what you type into Google to go to your website. You want to make sure that, if you're picking out a URL for the first time, that it's short and sweet but also matches the name of your business or is close to representing the name of your business, so that when you tell people to go to your website, wwwnameofwebsitecom, it's very easy for them to find it. That you haven't been too creative when it comes to the lettering or gone too off the rails in the length of the URL, that you keep it simple and sweet so it's easy for them just to simply type it in and for your website to come up. Once you've figured out what URL you want to use for your website, the next thing you want to do is decide on a platform and hosting.

Speaker 1:

These days, there are so many website platforms out there that make it easier than ever for people that are just getting started to put together a website. Now, if you're putting together a website for the first time, you might be short on budget and decide that you're going to do your DIY version of a website, or you might want to hire some help. You can go all the way up to hiring an SEO company or a professional website company to put together your first website, or you could look to Fiverr or Upwork for assistance, or you might want to go the DIY route. If you decide to go the DIY route, there are some platforms that are easier for you to set up than those that require a little bit more assistance and a little bit more tech know-how. Out of all of the website platforms, I tend to recommend and love WordPress.

Speaker 1:

Wordpress can be a little bit difficult for those that aren't that tech savvy, so if you are looking to design a WordPress website, you might want to consider getting a little help. If you're a tech novice, now, when it comes to WordPress, that's the foundation. That would be the platform that you're using, but you also need hosting. When it comes to a WordPress website, hosting is where your files actually sit, and for that I suggest WP Engine. In the notes section associated with this podcast, you'll be able to find links to all of the items that we're going to reference here. Now, if you're going the DIY route and you don't fancy yourself a techie person, you might want to consider either Squarespace, wix or Clinic sites. All of these platforms offer easy to use templates and the ability to set things up easily if you're really not that tech savvy. Now, I mentioned before that WordPress is generally the platform that I would suggest that you go with if you do have a little bit of tech assistance. When it comes to WordPress, there are tons of themes, and leveraging pre-built themes will give you the ability to cut some of the overhead off, because you're not starting directly from scratch. You're starting with a theme. Now. Wix and Squarespace also include themes that you can check out, and that's what gives the site that overall structure and design.

Speaker 1:

Once you've decided which platform you want to go with, next you're going to want to start to pull together the content that you need for your website. You can think of these like the ingredients for your recipe it's a lot easier to gather everything together before you start to bake, right. So you want to pull together text visuals. These could be your logo, real photos, stock photos, illustrations, testimonials, videos, your social media links, and you're going to want to also include tracking, such as Google Analytics. I highly recommend, as soon as you kickstart your website, that you go through the process of adding Google Analytics. Google Analytics is going to track the data of how people came to your site, what they're doing on your website. It's going to give you information that's going to help guide you with the content that you're going to want to modify on your website and continue to add to your website to grow your audience larger.

Speaker 1:

We talked for a minute about what content you need, what elements, what ingredients for your recipe that you want to gather, and I want to kind of go back through those and we'll go through them one by one, starting with your logo. Now, your logo is a place where, if you're just getting started, you can save a little money. You can go to Fiverr or you can go to Upwork to have a logo designed, and right now there are tons of resources out there that will help you design a professional looking logo at a very low rate. What you want to make sure of when you're having a logo designed is that it's really easy for someone to understand what the name of the company is when they read the logo, so you don't want to get too creative or too crazy with fonts that it makes it hard to read or understand what the logo is trying to say as you go to gather your ingredients for the recipe that we'll call your website. You want to go out and look at what your competition is doing, but please be sure not to just directly copy exactly what they're doing. So you can go out and take a look, but don't copy word for word what they're doing. Now, when it comes to the content that you need on your website, you're going to want to put together a bit of text. What I suggest for this is that you kind of open up a Google Doc and you start to write and organize your content on there before you actually load it to your website website.

Speaker 1:

If you've listened to this podcast before, maybe one of the blogging episodes, one of my favorite tools that I've mentioned on that episode and a lot of other episodes, is Grammarly, and Grammarly will help you make sure that you are using proper grammar and spelling. Grammar and spelling, which we all know, is very important on your website, since your website is not a digital brochure. Your website is way more than that. There are a couple key pages that you want to make sure that you include when you're putting together your website for the first time. This includes the homepage On your homepage. You want to make sure that it's very crystal clear what you offer, that if you offer more than one service, that it's highlighted on the homepage. You want to make sure that conditions that you treat are highlighted on the homepage, that it's very easy for somebody to book an appointment with you and that you have testimonials. This will give proof to new website visitors that you have treated people for exactly what they're suffering from.

Speaker 1:

You want to include a services page, a conditions page, contact page, privacy policy or terms of use page, an about page, a book and appointment page, and then, as you continue to grow out your website, you might also want to later include a resources page that has information about first visits, paperwork. You might want to include a video library. Later on you might want to start blogging. So if you just open up that Google Doc that we talked about before, you can start to kind of just bullet, point out the pages that you need your homepage services, conditions, privacy policy, contact about and any other resources and then start to add the content that you want to include on your website in the Google Doc so you can see where you're missing elements and what needs to be built out. We have a really great resource, which is the five secrets to owning the first page of Google without spending a dollar on ads. That is a free training that I put together. You can visit propellyourcompanycom, forward slash. Learn to sign up for that.

Speaker 1:

On that training, we go through some amazing SEO tips and we walk through more of the content of what you should include on your website to make sure that you're showing up on the almighty Google as you're putting together this information on your Google. To make sure that you're showing up on the almighty Google as you're putting together this information on your Google Doc. You know you can later build out specific conditions and specific services. So if you treat let's say you're a chiropractor and some of the most common conditions you treat are back pain, neck pain, sports injuries these might be pages that later you want to build out and build off of the conditions pages, but when you're just getting started you don't want to feel overwhelmed, so you can just put together a general services and a general conditions page and then later go in and build out specific services pages and specific conditions pages On our website, propellyourcompanycom. We have tons of resources to help you with this. If you go to the blog, you'll find an article that we wrote about what to include on an about page, what to include on a contact page, what to include in general on your website if you're a clinic owner or chiropractor, to help you really build out the content that you need to have on your website.

Speaker 1:

So once you've put together your Google Doc that has your pages outlined and you know what content you're going to want to, what text you're going to want to put on these pages, then you can start to decide. Okay, what images do I need to include with these pages? For images, if you're going to use stock photography, I suggest a website called depositstockphotoscom. We'll include that link in the show notes as well. If you decide to use stock photography and you go to do a search on the stock photography, don't use the most popular images, because people have already seen those over and over and over again. So make sure that you're using images that do look a little unique and that the images match the pages. For instance, if you're doing a back page, then you should have pictures of back pain on there. If you want to step up your game, try to include as many real photos as possible. We did a really popular podcast on how to plan for your first or next photo shoot. You can find that by going to propellyourcompanycom as well. We'll also include the link to that in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

You're going to want to gather your testimonials from Google and other sources and decide where those should go throughout your website as well. I don't necessarily suggest a page that says reviews or testimonials. I like to see testimonials sprinkled throughout the website like confetti, and I like them to correlate with the content of the page that they're on. So, for instance, going to the chiropractor example, if you were doing a back pain page, then it would be ideal for a back pain testimonial to be on that page While you're still gathering the ingredients for the recipe we call your first website.

Speaker 1:

You also want to consider videos. Now there are a ton of videos out there on YouTube. I'm not suggesting that you use videos for the sake of using videos. We've seen a lot of clinic owners do that, where they grab a generic video and embed it on their website because they hear videos help with SEO, search engine optimization and they help with website performance. What you want to consider here is that the video needs to represent your, your organization. So I don't necessarily recommend that you use some of the standard canned videos that you can find on YouTube. Instead that you add your videos as you put them together, you want to upload those to YouTube and then embed them from YouTube to your website.

Speaker 1:

You'll also want to add social media links. I suggest that you add your social media links down at the bottom in the footer of your website. What happens is, if you put them up at the top, which some people do, as soon as somebody lands on your website, if they're interested in checking out your social media, they're going to click and be gone. So I like to have them lower down on the website so that they're not a little what I would call a distraction, because if somebody comes to your website, it almost means that they're either ready to take action or that they're looking for more information to help them decide to take action, like book an appointment with you, and at that time you don't necessarily want to distract them by sending them to your social media. So once you've gathered all of your ingredients, now you're ready to actually add them to your website, and that's kind of fun, right? Your website gets to be an extension of your company If you are going the DIY route of building out your website or you found another resource to help you build out your website, I still strongly recommend that you check out our free training on the five secrets to owning the first page of Google without spending money on ads.

Speaker 1:

You can find that at page of Google without spending money on ads. You can find that at propellyourcompanycom. Forward slash learn. This is going to teach you about SEO, search engine optimization and how to optimize your website. We also have a paid resource, which is our Ready Set Rank program. You can find out more about that as well by visiting our website, propellyourcompanycom. If you would just like your website put together for you and you are a clinic owner, please feel free to visit our website and click book a discovery call and we would be happy to talk to you about how we could help put together a website for you.

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Darcy Sullivan

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