Building your online presence as a business takes time, but it starts with one crucial step: your business website. 

A website acts like your online business address and location. Almost everything you do online will drive potential patients back to your site, where they can learn more about you and the services and products you offer. It also helps you manage your online reputation, lending credibility as you build a loyal following on other channels. 

But a website alone doesn’t guarantee new business. You have to attract attention and draw interested visitors to increase growth.

Here are three quick and actionable ways to drive traffic to your pharmacy website:

Set up a Google My Business (GMB) profile. 

This free tool allows you to create a profile with your location, hours, offerings, and other business information. Google then stores your information and adds it to search results pages and Google Maps so people can find you when they look for a pharmacy in their area. 

Ask patients to rate you on sites like Google, Facebook, or Yellowpages. 

Referrals are the second-highest source of quality leads in marketing. Collecting positive reviews, and responding well to negative ones, establishes your reputation online and encourages people already looking for a new pharmacy to come to you.

Interested in getting more reviews, but don’t have time to manage the process? Contact us today to learn more about our reputation management offering. 

Post regularly on your Facebook business page. 

According to the Hootsuite and We Are Social digital report Facebook makes up one of the top 3 most-visited sites worldwide. Having an active presence on Facebook makes it easier to connect with loyal patients, share promotions, and advertise to new audiences.

All three of these methods have an added bonus: they build your website’s credibility with search engines, part of a strategy called search engine optimization (SEO). SEO helps you position your website to increase visitor quality and quantity.

A Short Introduction to SEO

Search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, use ranking systems to determine where website content ends up on a search results page. They continually collect new and updated content like webpages and social media posts and sort it into information databases so it can be organized to appear in search results. 

SEO employs a number of strategies to boost your business’s visibility in search engine results, such as:

• Meta tags
• Website and page speed
• Text and image formatting
• Internal and external links
• Keywords
• Search intent

You can also optimize your website for mobile and local traffic. Mobile SEO helps ensure your website is mobile-friendly, a must at a time when search engines have begun prioritizing the mobile website versions when collecting data for search results. 

Local SEO focuses on positioning you to attract website traffic in your geographic area, so you can draw people to your brick-and-mortar store as well. 

Learn more about leveraging this strategy in our SEO basics for pharmacies pillar post.

Tools and Resources for Your Pharmacy Website

• Google Analytics. Free tool for in-depth website analytics and traffic insights
• Google Search Console. Free platform that supports website optimization and measures search traffic and performance
• SEMRush. Analytics and research solutions for SEO, PPC, content, and social media
• Ahrefs. Platform for SEO resources and tools
• Moz. Another all-in-one platform for SEO tools

Digital Pharmacist is dedicated to helping pharmacies transform their businesses. Get in touch today to learn more.