She Did Everything Except Call the Surgeon

I wanted this trade to be bad at websites.

Bad makes my job easy. I open the site, I find the wreck, and the owner already knows what I’m going to say before I’ve said it. Nobody argues with a wreck.

Plastic surgeons took that away from me, and I’ve been a little sour about it ever since.

Dentists finish below you. So do chiropractors, so does every general medical practice I put through the same ten checks, and the only trade above you is the orthodontists, who are level enough with you that the alphabet has to break the tie.

78 out of 100, second of the 47 trades I audit.

So why am I writing anything at all? Because a score is ten things flattened into one, and a patient is one woman on one particular evening.

Ten checks, one woman

My score is a weighted average, some checks counting for more than others, and the methodology page lists every one of them along with what I lean on hardest. Between them they cover how a page behaves on a phone, how quickly it turns up, whether the padlock is on the address, and whether anyone in your building is counting what happens after a stranger lands.

Not a single item on that list has ever booked an appointment by itself. I count them because they’re the things I can count, which isn’t the same as them being the things that matter most.

So let me count the other way. Not in percentages. In people.

She’s thirty-eight. She’s been thinking about this for two years, and tonight she’s on the couch with the television on and her phone about six inches from her face.

Her mind was mostly made up before she ever heard of you. A forum, a stranger’s recovery diary, one friend sworn to secrecy in a car park.

Your reviews aren’t the problem either. This trade averages 134 reviews at 4.7 stars, which is the sound of a lot of frightened people being looked after properly.

When did you last read yours? I’d bet the last twenty describe your practice better than anything written on your homepage.

She taps your listing. Count that as one.

The wait she’d never call a wait

Your page takes a beat to arrive. This trade comes out at 59 out of 100 on my phone speed test, and Google files anything from 50 to 89 as needs improvement.

She’d never describe that as slow. She’d tell you nothing happened, and her thumb would already be moving.

A page sheds people for dozens of small reasons in those first seconds, and almost none of them are about how it looks.

Say she waits. Say she’s more patient than most, and she stays. Count two.

Now she reads. Your face, your training, the photographs, the paragraph where you say what you won’t do and why.

She reads all of it, which is more than she gave the last three tabs.

What she wanted at twenty to eleven

She’s ready. Not to book, exactly. Ready to ask one question she’d be mortified to say out loud to a receptionist.

Your homepage offers her a phone number. The office shut at five.

Nobody calls a surgeon at that hour, and she isn’t going to be the first, especially not about this.

Tomorrow morning is no better, whatever you’re thinking. A receptionist at half past nine is a different proposition altogether to a woman who has spent two years not saying this out loud to anyone she knows, including the people she lives with.

33.2% of the homepages I opened in this trade carry a contact form, which is ahead of the 28% I find across small business sites and still leaves most of your competition with nothing at all to catch her.

Montreal does this better than any city I audit, and not one owner there has ever brought it up with me on a call.

A form isn’t a marketing tactic. At twenty to eleven at night it’s the only door in your building that’s still unlocked.

She promises herself she’ll ring in the morning. Have you ever rung in the morning?

Count that one as gone.

And she wasn’t window shopping. She was the most expensive visitor you will ever be sent, a woman who arrived having already decided, needing nothing from you except a way to begin the conversation without anyone watching her begin it.

You will never know she existed

She doesn’t complain. She doesn’t leave a review. She says nothing to your front desk, because she never got as far as your front desk.

She shows up as a quiet fortnight in October that you put down to the season, or a year where the consults were fine but thinner, and nobody in the building can tell you why.

So how would you ever find out about her? You wouldn’t, and neither would I, and the ones who leave politely are the ones nobody ever gets around to fixing.

I can’t count them for you and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. They leave no trace anywhere in your practice, which is exactly why nothing ever gets done about them.

There is no report in your practice software with a line on it for the women who read everything you wrote, believed all of it, and then closed the tab because the only way in was a telephone number and a set of opening hours.

What I can tell you is which side of the line you’re standing on, and yours is the good side. That’s what makes the missing ones so infuriating.

Whenever a trade comes out looking this strong I go back over it the slow way, because I’ve had a good number turn out wrong before: pick the trade in the explorer at the foot of my report, leave the city selector alone on all cities, and the whole industry rolls up into one card with the sample size printed beside every rate. The same card counts out 2,235 practices sampled and 1,812 sites audited, which is a big enough pile that one bad afternoon in one town can’t shift it.

Why the good sites lose her anyway

Because everything she did before the last step went perfectly.

She found you. She trusted the stars. She read the words, looked at the faces, and picked you out of a list of four.

You paid for all of that, in time or in money or in fifteen years of careful work on nervous people who went away and told their friends about you.

Then the last three inches of the journey had no door in them.

Which part of that would you rather buy again? The visitors, or the door?

What the door has to be

Nothing clever. A name, an email address, the procedure she keeps reading about, and a box big enough to type an embarrassing sentence into, sitting on the first screen where a thumb can find it without any hunting around.

What it can’t do is interrogate her. A form demanding a date of birth, a mobile number and permission to ring her during working hours is asking a woman who hasn’t told her husband anything yet to hand over far more than she came prepared to give.

How many boxes does yours ask her for? Count them tonight, and delete every one you could just as easily ask her in the room.

I keep mine to four, and I have never once finished a project wishing I’d asked a stranger for more.

Every extra question is another moment for her to remember that it’s late, that she’s tired, and that the whole idea can wait until she’s had a proper think about it.

She won’t have a proper think about it. She’ll have a busy Thursday, and then a birthday, and then it’ll be March again.

The form goes onto every plastic surgery site I build before the photographs do, which irritates photographers and has never once irritated a patient.

Back in 2021 I hid a surgeon’s gallery on phones instead of repairing it, and years later her page was still telling patients to come back on a computer.

Tonight, after the last one leaves

Take your own phone. Search for what you do and the name of your town, and tap your own listing the way a stranger would, without the shortcut you’ve got saved.

Then try to book yourself in without calling anyone.

Give up at the exact moment a woman with a job, two kids and a secret would give up. Don’t be generous with yourself. She won’t be.

Whatever stopped you is the thing I’d fix first. It stopped her in March, and it’ll stop the next one on Thursday.

Write it down while you’re annoyed and hand it to whoever looks after your website, because a specific complaint from the owner gets fixed inside a week and a vague one comes back as a quote for a rebuild.

If you’d sooner I walked it for you, send me the address and I’ll do it in the morning. Do it yourself first, though. Reading it in an email from me is nothing like your own thumb stopping dead on your own page.