The consultation booking path

Six steps, two doors

Search work delivers somebody to step one. Everything after that is the clinic's own process, and a clinic with excellent pages and a poor process is paying for attention it then discards.

Two of the six steps account for most of the loss. The first is the step from reading to enquiring, which is a page and form design problem. The second is the step from enquiring to receiving a reply, which is purely operational and is the one most clinics have never measured.

The page to enquiry step

Four things make this step wider, all of them covered elsewhere in the course and all of them worth repeating here because they are conversion changes rather than search changes.

• A price range, from Module 12, Price, and what you may say about it. A reader who cannot form an expectation does not enquire, they leave to find one.
• A named practitioner, because an enquiry is a message to a person, and an anonymous clinic is harder to write to.
• The unsuitability section, from Module 13, Risks, suitability and aftercare, which paradoxically increases enquiries because it establishes that you will say no.
• A short form, which is the whole of Module 30, Enquiry forms, phone and messaging.

What does not widen it: more prominent buttons, more of them, urgency language, or a chat widget nobody staffs. Each of those has been tried extensively across the sector and each addresses willingness rather than the reasons for hesitation.

Response time

An enquiry about an elective medical procedure is made in a moment of resolve, and resolve decays. A reply within the hour reaches somebody who is still thinking about it. A reply the next afternoon reaches somebody who has since read three other clinics' pages.

Most clinics have never measured their own response time and are surprised by it when they do. The measurement is simple: for the last twenty enquiries, the time between arrival and first substantive reply. Not an automated acknowledgement, which is not a reply.

If you do one thing from Part VII, measure your response time. It is the cheapest improvement available and almost nobody has looked at it.

The consultation itself

The consultation is where the judgement described in Module 01, What an aesthetic clinic actually sells is delivered, and it is the only part of the path where the clinic has the patient's full attention. Two things about it belong in a search and content course.

First, what the patient expects from it should be stated on the page: how long it lasts, what it costs, whether it is with the person who would perform the treatment, and whether treatment can happen on the same day. Every one of those is a question patients ask and few clinic sites answer.

Second, the consultation is where you find out what your pages failed to explain. Every misconception a patient arrives with is a page you can improve, which is why Module 15, Finding the questions patients actually ask asks you to record the questions asked.

Reducing wasted consultations

A consultation with somebody who was never suitable costs an hour and disappoints two people. The pages are the filter, and a good filter increases the proportion of consultations that lead somewhere while reducing the raw number.

Clinics are frequently reluctant to filter, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that a consultation is a chance to persuade. In practice the patients filtered out by an accurate unsuitability section and a published price range were not going to proceed, and the hour spent on them was taken from somebody who would have.

The measurement that matters here is the proportion of consultations that result in a booked treatment, tracked over time. If it falls while enquiry numbers rise, your pages are attracting the wrong people, which is a content problem with a search cause.

Where to spend the effort

Rank the six steps by how many people you lose at each, then work on the largest. This sounds obvious and it is routinely ignored in favour of working on whichever step is most enjoyable to work on, which is usually the pages.

For most clinics the order comes out the same way: response time first, because it is free and immediate; the enquiry form second, because it is a morning's work; then the page changes, which take longer and depend on the writing modules; and only then anything else. Module 31, What to measure, and what to ignore gives you the numbers to do this ranking properly rather than by impression.