How to tailor your website to the 65+ market

You've decided to target your website toward the senior market. Smart choice. About 48 million Americans currently rely on the Medicare program and 11,000 baby boomers become eligible for Medicare each day, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Seniors now make up the fastest growing segment in the health insurance market.

See also: Infographic: Seniors on Finance

You can get maximum turnaround in the Medicare market by optimizing your website to the 65 and older age bracket. Here are five proven tips for targeting seniors and Medicare-shoppers through your website.

1. Know your audience.

Now that you have established who you're targeting, you are halfway there. Ideally, you should have a separate website dedicated purely to the senior market. If that's not feasible, make sure your website contains a separate section for senior products.

There are some easy ways you can target and gain the trust of visitors to your website. We all know the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Feature pictures of seniors. Stock photos are inexpensive and offer many visual options specifically related to your content.

Are you affiliated with any big-name, recognizable brands? With their permission, display their logos on your website in addition to your own, to help you come across as a legitimate business. As consumers, we lend higher trust to the brands we recognize.

Highlight the right plans for the senior market. In this case, you may be selling Medicare products. Focus your content on topics that will be useful to online shoppers age 65 and up. Answer questions like "What is Medicare insurance?" "What's the difference between Medicare Supplement and Medicare Advantage?" and "How do I enroll in Medicare insurance?" Anticipate and answer your reader's questions as you lead them through the sales funnel.

2. Remove obstacles from the visitor's path

Once a prospect has decided to take action, don't make them sift through countless pages or spend sixty seconds scrolling down to the bottom of your website looking for a buy button. Too many business websites today make it difficult for people who want to buy now. Remember that some of your prospects may not be very Internet-savvy. Seniors do well with multiple contact options and clear navigation buttons.

Make the ultimate goal you've established for your prospects very clear — whether it's to fill out a capture form, apply for a quote online or call a number. Place a bright quote button that stands out at the top of your home page. The rule is this: The bigger the button, the more clicks it gets. Include a capture form on the side of each page so visitors can easily find and enter their information. List your phone number in bold at the top of each page. Leave no question in their mind what you want them to do.

3. Guide your prospects.

Take your prospects through the interest, research and purchase stages. Understand that many seniors shopping for health insurance may not be totally clear on what certain industry terms mean, for example a deductible or copay. They also may come to your website knowing they need senior health insurance but are not sure what specific type. This is your opportunity to make sure you have pages that cater to these possible questions.

This is also a great opportunity to generate leads. I've found that placing a call to action (a quote button or form) in the middle of an insurance terms glossary page for example, increases the chances of capturing that lead. Make it easy for your visitor to find the information so that once they've done their research, they can quickly move forward with shopping for a quote or enrolling in a plan.

4. Prioritize your products.

If you sell different products and feel that one of them — say, Medicare Supplement insurance — is most important for your target audience, make that product stand out. Once you've determined your priority products, give them priority positions on your website.

Highlight your key product(s) in the upper right of your home page, 'above the fold.' Above the fold refers to the upper half of your web page, where information is visible to a user without them having to scroll down or take any further action. The Nielsen Norman Group determined that web users spend 80 percent of their time looking at information above the page fold. By the time a user has to scroll down, their attention span is already limited.

5. Track and test.

Track information about the visitors that come to your website. There are several free tools for this purpose, one of the most popular being Google Analytics. Once installed, Google Analytics will track information about the traffic to your website such as: what zip code a person is in, what time they visited the site, the duration of time spent on a site, what pages they visited, what keywords they typed in to find your website and much more. This data will help you define your target audience and optimize your website accordingly.

Testing certain aspects of your website, including the navigation, buttons, and readability, can provide valuable feedback. Start by asking seniors that you already know to visit and explore your live site and report back on anything they found helpful or confusing.

As trivial as it may seem, even the color of your call to action button can make a difference. Luckily for us, there has been countless research already done on how different website elements, such as color and size, convert with different groups. For example, orange is a color that has tested very well in creating an aggressive call to action, while blue creates a sense of trust and security. You can do your own version of A/B testing by selecting an initial text or button color for one element of your site, then changing it the next month and comparing results.

To ensure a higher rate of success it's important to understand how the online market works and how your specific audience of seniors age 65 and older will interact with that. Take the time to understand their needs. By implementing these guidelines, you can maximize the results from your website.

For more from Lauren Jaeckel, see:

4 ways to make the growing mobile market work for you

3 ways to drive leads on LinkedIn

4 ways to get more leads from your website