Is Your Website's Content Working as Hard as You Are?

Melissa Waine
Jun 5
6 min read

Consistency is a trust signal for health and medical information. A content audit, a clear information architecture, and the right strategy tools can transform a website from an expensive brochure into a high-performing asset. Here’s what that actually involves — and why so many health organisations are getting it wrong.

You’ve invested in a website. You’ve worked with a designer, found a developer and written (or commissioned) copy. The site is live. And yet something isn’t quite right. Visitors land and leave. A colleague mentions that the clinical content page information is out of date. An enquiry came through asking for a healthcare provider's details because the hyperlink is broken — again. Sound familiar?

The problem is rarely the design. It’s usually the content.

In health organisations, whether large companies or small not-for-profits, this problem is especially common.

Websites tend to grow organically over the years, often with pages added over time by different people, in different styles, for different audiences, with no overarching strategy to hold it all together. What you end up with is a patchwork: some excellent, authoritative content sitting alongside outdated pages, broken pathways, missing information and messaging that no longer aligns with the organisation's branding or objectives.

This is a particular problem in the health and medical fields, where the evidence is constantly evolving, informing new clinical guidelines and changes to diagnoses and treatments.

What you actually need is content design and development. Here’s what it involves.

Start with a content audit

Before anything can be improved, you need to understand what you have. A content audit is a systematic review of every page on your website: what it says, who it’s for, whether it’s accurate, whether it’s working and whether it needs to exist at all.

A thorough content audit typically assesses:

• Accuracy and currency: Is the information still correct? Are the contact details for services and healthcare professionals up to date? Are the links correct and accurate?

• Audience alignment: Is this page written for the right reader? Content aimed at referring clinicians needs a very different tone and structure from content for patients or family members.

• Completeness: Are there gaps? Topics your audience needs information about that simply aren’t covered?

• Duplication and overlap: Are the same topics covered in multiple places, creating confusion about where to find authoritative information?

• Plain language and accessibility: Can your audience actually understand what you’re saying? Is it accessible for all users?

• SEO performance: Which pages are driving traffic? Which aren’t being found at all?

The audit produces a clear, prioritised inventory: pages to update, pages to consolidate, pages to retire, and — critically — content that is missing entirely.

Rethinking information architecture

Once you understand what you have, the next question is how it should be organised. This is where information architecture (IA) comes in: the structural design of your website — how content is categorised, labelled, and navigated. Good IA means your users can find what they’re looking for quickly and intuitively. Poor IA means they can’t, and they leave.

For the healthcare provider I worked with recently, the content audit revealed several structural problems that were significantly affecting the user experience. Pages were buried four clicks deep. Service descriptions were split across multiple sections for no clear reason. The tone lacked empathy and a recognition of the stigma around the conditions it purports to serve. There was no logical pathway for a potential patient to engage with the clinic and understand what support was available to them.

Based on the audit findings, I drafted a new information architecture and content development plan for the site that:

• Placed the most important content where users could actually find it

• Created clear pathways for the site’s two distinct audience groups

• Eliminated duplication by designating a single authoritative location for each topic

• Used an empathetic and gentle tone to engage users

• Made the navigation labels accurate, plain-language, and meaningful to users (not internal jargon)

• Added 24/7 crisis support services and accessible online services for additional support beyond the healthcare professional appointments.

The tools that hold it all together

Content audits and IA work address the structural problems. But there’s another layer that’s just as important and far more often overlooked: the tools that ensure consistent, high-quality content going forward.

I’m talking about style guides and tone of voice documents — and in healthcare and scientific communication, they matter more than most organisations realise.

What is a Style Guide?

A style guide sets out the rules for how your organisation writes. It covers decisions that might seem minor in isolation but create real problems at scale: whether you capitalise job titles, how you format dates, whether you use Oxford commas, how you handle abbreviations, which terminology you use for specific conditions or treatments and dozens of similar choices.

Without a style guide, every person who writes for your organisation makes these decisions independently. Over time, your website, reports, patient information, and email communications all look like they were written by different organisations; because effectively, they were.

What is a Tone of Voice document?

Tone of Voice (TOV) goes deeper than formatting rules. It defines how your organisation communicates — not just what it says, but how it says it. It captures the personality, values, and character that should come through in every piece of content you produce.

In healthcare and medical communication, tone of voice is especially critical. Your patient audience is often anxious, time-poor or non-specialist. And they may not want to be called patients at all.

The way you write shapes whether they trust you, whether they understand you, and whether they take the action you need them to take.

A well-developed TOV document gives your team clear guidance: how to be a trusted authority without being condescending; how to be warm without being unprofessional; how to explain complex clinical or scientific information in plain language without dumbing it down.

Why these documents are so often incomplete or gathering dust

In my experience, one of two things tends to happen. Either organisations have never created a Style Guide or TOV document at all: content decisions have always been made on the fly, person by person. Or they were created at some point, typically when the website was last redesigned, and they’ve sat in a shared drive ever since, ignored and increasingly out of date.

This problem can affect both health not-for-profits and corporations alike.

I’ve recently had an organisation assure me that their style guide would be sufficient for a new brochure and website project I delivered, which articulated the value of a new product on the market in a fresh tone. Yet it had multiple different logos and inconsistent references to the organisation itself, and its Style Guide was limited to colour schemes for visual branding, with zero editorial direction.

The consequences show up in predictable ways:

• New staff write in their own style, creating inconsistency across pages and documents.

• The language on patient-facing materials doesn’t match the language on the website, creating confusion

• Clinical terminology is used inconsistently, sometimes the technical term, sometimes a lay term, sometimes both in the same paragraph.

• The organisation sounds confident in one document and hesitant in another, or warm in one channel and cold in another.

• Briefing a copywriter or agency becomes time-consuming and frustrating because there’s no agreed foundation to brief from.

These aren’t cosmetic problems. Inconsistency in health communication can undermine clinical messages, reduce patient engagement, and damage the credibility of an organisation that has invested years in building its reputation.

In health and medical organisations, trust is hard won. Patients and their families are making significant decisions — often in stressful circumstances — and they are making judgements about whether to trust you and the health and medical information you provide every time they interact with your content.

Consistent, clear, well-written content signals competence. It tells your audience that your organisation has its house in order and can be trusted.

A style guide and tone of voice document are the infrastructure that prevents this. They don’t constrain good writing; they enable it by giving everyone who writes for your organisation a shared foundation to build from.

If your website content has grown beyond what you can manage, or you suspect it’s no longer serving your audience as well as it should, I’d be glad to talk through what content review and development might look like for your organisation.