What’s new in Dental Practice Websites
What is the most important element in dental practice marketing? Your website is the first thing people see when they consider calling your office for an appointment. If your website isn’t attractive, functional and informative, they will move on another site – your competitor. In other words, your website should impress visitors.
So, how can your site impress people? Follow the tips below, and you’ll be well on your way to bringing in new patients through your website.
Design Tip #1
A dental practice website should be found when a good potential patient searches on Google or Bing. Emphasis on “good patient.” If you enjoy doing implants and orthodontics, your website should be visible when people search for the same. Your website should be no-where to be found if a search for “kids dentist” is made. This rule highlights the importance of SEO or search engine optimization. The power of the internet is getting the visitors you want and not getting the ones you do not want.
Tip #2
Dental website design needs to be unique, interesting information about the services “good patients” are searching for. Do not put stale pictures from the ADA that are already pasted all over the internet. Write concisely and personally to the visitors about the service and how your office is going to personally take care of them.
Tip #3
It should be easy to navigate your offices website from any mobile phone. One should be able to quickly call or email your office with the click of one finger from any page of your website.
Tip #4
Your website content should ask the visitor to take action, such as schedule a consultation “now.” That is what is referred to as a “call to action.” The “now” part could be something simple like, the practice offers complimentary consultations to new patients who find us online.
Tip #5
Don’t let your front office chase away 50% of your new patients. Your front office must provide good friendly reception service to anyone who sends an email or places a phone call. Emails should be answered within an hour. Phone inquiries should be met and not placed on long holds. Patient calls should be answered by knowledgeable staff. If you are doing full mouth implants, your front office needs to be capable of answering questions about the service. This will require a lot of training. Consider promoting your assistant to the front desk. You have to first sell the patient over the phone before you will get a chance to sell your case in the chair. Don’t leave a front desk person who does not even know what an “MOD” is to answer your phone if you are selling implants. More about this later.
The Need for Speed
A website should load fast. No one wants to wait for anything to load anymore. That was left back in the dialup Internet days. This means you need to have a website developer who understands how to code the site to make it as fast as possible. This happens through optimizing images, videos, and other types of content on the site. If your page is slow, it will not even show up on mobile devices. 60% of internet traffic is mobile devices according to Moz and Google.
You can test the speed of your site here: PageSpeed Insights
Take the recommendations it provides to speed up your site, so it is acceptable by visitors AND Google for better ranking on search engine results pages.
Responsive Website Design
Responsive website design means that the website will display correctly on a mobile device. Since most people use their smartphone nowadays, having a website that will look good and work well on mobile devices is crucial to successfully convert leads.
If you already have a website and would like to know if it is responsive, you can look at it on your mobile device, or use Google’s tool: Mobile-Friendly Test
In addition to impressing people with your mobile-friendly website, Google prefers sites that render well on mobile devices and marketing experts believe it’s one of their ranking factors.
Website Architecture
Website architecture matters. A dental website should be set up as follows:
Homepage
About Us
Services
- Service #1
- Service #2
- Service #3
- Service #4
- Service #5
- …etc.
Resources
- New Patient Forms
Blog
Contact
Each one of these pages should have high-quality content. This includes text, images, and if possible, videos.
For the Services page, you should have content on that page that identifies the services you offer and briefly describes each one. From that main page, you should link to an individual page for each service. Each service page should have detailed information about the service/procedure.
The above website architecture is simple, it makes sense, and Google prefers it. You can add additional pages, but ensure linking branches in a way that will make sense to visitors.
On-Page Content
Every page of the site should have content on it, and it should be high-quality content. How do you know if it’s high quality? It provides website visitors with valuable information. This is information they can use in their life to do something, such as improve their oral health or get a procedure that will fix an oral health issue or relieve tooth pain.
In addition to text on the page, there should be attractive and detailed images. These images should be related to the content so that people look at it and want to read the text that surrounds it.
Videos are always a great way to explain the information in a visual way for those who prefer it. With so many people watching YouTube videos each day, we know that videos are highly beneficial to a page, and some experts believe it can help increase the ranking of the page.
Internal Linking
A website should have internal links. These links are ones that go from one page on the site to another page. For example, on your teeth whitening service page, you may make mention one way to extend the results of teeth whitening is to brush the teeth twice daily and visit the dentist twice a year for a general checkup and cleaning. You can hyperlink “general checkup and cleaning” to the corresponding page. This tells people that you provide that service and then can get more information by clicking on that link.
Internal linking from your blog to priority pages (the main pages of the site, such as Home, About Us, Services, etc.) is something that should always be done. People who are interested in learning more about a particular service or procedure mentioned in the blog post can easily click through to the page with that information.
Link to Social Media
In addition to linking internally, you should link externally as well to your social media accounts. Dental practice social media marketing is important. Millions of Americans use social media every day, and when you have links to your accounts, it shows them you are available on those platforms. It also provides them even more information about you, your dental practice and everything you can offer them.
As a dentist, the best places to find new patients on social media are:
You may want to use Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social networks, but the above ones are the most popular and effective in using social media to market dental services.
Include Name, Address, and Phone Number
The importance of Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) on every page of the site isn’t just for prospective patients, but it’s also for Google. Google will check your NAP against what you have on your Google My Business listing. It shows Google that your NAP is accurate and that your site is a true link to your Google My Business listing.
It’s also beneficial to have a map on your contact page. This way people and Google can see where your office is located, which increases validity and trustworthiness.
What to Do After You Have an Attractive, Functional and Informative Site
If you build it, they will not come – even if it is the most attractive dental website out there today. You need to promote the website, so people will see it. How can you do that?
- Share links to your site on social media by publishing on your feed and running ads.
- Run Google Ads and have people click through to your site.
- Setup Google My Business and link it to your site.
- Contribute articles to other websites with a link back to your site.
- Add your dental practice to online directories.
- Optimize the website with keyword phrases your prospective patients are using in search engines.
There’s a lot to do after designing a dental website. If you need help with any of the above ways to market your dental practice, reach out to Gary Adams, DDS. An experienced dentist who decided to take on his own dental marketing and succeeded. He’s now providing consulting services to other dentists who want to know how to market their dental practice to bring in new patients online.