The Importance of Optimizing Your Dental Practice’s Website
Why is a website so essential for a dental practice? What should such a website have? This guide answers these important questions that can help you grow your dental practice.
A website for your dental practice helps create an informative and engaging online presence. It will create an online platform where your existing and potential patients can interact with you. Your website can provide information about the services you offer, a story about your practice, team images, technology, amenities and more. It can also provide key information about making appointments, insurance, and payment options. A well-designed dental website can function as a digital bridge connecting patients to the practice.
Importance of a Website for Dental Practices
Your dental practice's website is the foundation of your online presence. Such a website is the first place where potential patients learn about your practice. An ideal website must contain information such as service explanations, patient reviews, testimonial videos, and team bios. An ideal website also must provide visitors with an accessibility menu.
Dental practices with high-quality, well-structured websites generate more traffic than those with ordinary websites. A great website has all the right elements. It is search engine optimized to make it easy for the target audience to find it, structured properly and hosts important or intriguing information to keep them on the web pages for long, and the right inspiration to get them to take the desired action. A well-designed website that is easy to maneuver can help your practice stand out from the crowd.
What Makes a Potentially Successful Dental Practice Website?
There is a plethora of factors that come together to create a website that is effective in driving more patients to your dental practice. I have highlighted seven of the most principal factors below:
1. Information
Your website must provide a respective service page for each treatment you offer. These pages will provide information to your potential patients, alongside helping you rank for the targeted keywords. Highlight your USPs and amenities that encourage people to book an appointment.
The service pages can serve many purposes:
Answering the questions people have about your treatment services
Allowing visitors to make informed decisions about your dental practice
Include photos and videos of each service
Helps search engines crawl more keywords and recommend you faster.
Quality Content
Quality content is vital to the success of your dental website. While providing key information to visitors is one aspect of content, ranking high on search engines is another. Even when most patients are not going to read your web content, search engines crawl your pages and display recommendations in their results.
Your content must connect with your prospective patients.
It must provide valuable information.
Since visitors scan through the text, it is important to provide clear and concise content that is right to the point.
High-quality content on a dental practice's website demonstrates expertise.
Quality content has a greater chance of producing good ROI by drawing more patients to your practice. Think of it as a pre-sale scanner.
2. Testimonials that Build Authority
Make sure to highlight testimonials from satisfied patients on your website. They function as valid and real-life proofs that your dental practice delivers on its promises of quality dental care. When it is your patients in comparison to you talking about the quality service, gentle care, and amazing results that your practice offers, there is a greater chance people will trust the info.
3. Position Strategic Conversion Buttons
Every page on your website must have a compelling call-to-action (CTA) asking your visitors to book an appointment or make a call. These CTA buttons should be strategically located. In other words, they should be readily visible, ideally above the fold and in colors that draw immediate attention.
Request Appointments Online Buttons
Let your visitors book an online appointment. It is a convenient process, and you would be surprised to know that most patients expect such an option. It will be good if you provide them with the option to fill out the paperwork even before arriving at your practice. Online appointments, online paperwork, and text reminders can go a long way in increasing your patient numbers and minimizing no-shows and cancellations. It is also important to optimize your CTAs and online appointments for mobile users.
4. A Well-Structured Website
If you want your dental website to help your practice, make sure it is well-structured. It must have the right pages in the right place. A thorough website for a dental practice must have the following pages or sections:
Home Page
About Us
Services (One page per treatment)
Reviews
Location Pages (If you have multi-location practices)
Insurance Details
Contact Us
Several other elements need to work together to create a well-structured website and do its desired job well. This includes:
A menu easy to navigate (UX Friendly)
Text and graphics that work together
Responsive web images
Authentic about us page
Rich keyword content
The most important part is your home page. This page needs to be a summary of all your website pages.
5. Personalized Branding
People believe what they see. And your website is a wonderful place for personalized branding and showing your practice, team, and premises. Create eye-catching images and videos to bring your website to life. These elements will help create positive first impressions, thus drawing more new patients. Pictures and videos of your doctors and staff provide your potential patients an insight into your dental practice's work culture. Photos of your practice exteriors, interiors, and technology can further help them visualize what to expect when they are here.
When it comes to a dental practice, the story of visual content does not stop there. The right before-and-after photos can have a compelling effect on the visitors, demonstrating the work you do. It is recommended to add authentic pictures of your work that tell a story to your patients.
Before and after pictures are popular, as they make it easier for patients to imagine their results. It is important to have high-quality and well-taken images. Do not expect quality patients wanting a complete set of veneers by having a before and after photo taken with an old phone camera and extremely low resolution.
The use of pictures also helps break up blocks of text. It creates an instant story, as a photo speaks a thousand words.
6. Share the Story Behind Your Brand
The importance of a great About Us page has been emphasized above. People love the 'why' or the story behind a business. A dental practice with an amazing story has the potential to win over its audience while raising its brand value. So, make sure to embellish your story on the About Us page. It can make a substantial difference.
When done right, storytelling can do wonders for your dental practice. It can help:
Develop a robust marketing strategy
Turn a business name into a brand and a legacy
Earn loyalty and audiences' affection
Drive profits
And achieve much more. A brand story also simplifies any confusion about the vision and conveys your practice's purpose to the world.
7. Create a Dedicated Insurance Page
Many dental websites will list the names of the insurance networks to which they are connected. I recommend going a step further and include useful FAQs on the insurance page. Answer questions about what you think patients must know more about.
Importance of Using Patient Psychology
Psychology plays a significant role in web design and content. The use of certain psychological triggers can help influence patient choices. This can further help in creating better ROI. It is recommended to use the following techniques and effects as part of the overall design and content to achieve the desired results:
Plan the navigation menu to put the most important links near the start
Outline all the major benefits
Optimize your page content
Use the Von Restorff Effect to make your visitors remember the things that stand out. Emphasize the CTA buttons and the services you want to promote first.
Use the Zeigarnik Effect to motivate visitors to complete the tasks they didn't finish the last time. This includes completing a sign-up process, returning for more information, or filling up a form. Show a progress bar, offer incentives, or inform about irreversible changes.
A well-designed dental practice website must include the right psychological triggers to drive action from your potential patients.
These small tips will help you understand how your marketing team should structure and develop your website.
About the author:
Cesar Navarro
CEO at Geek Dental Marketing
Cesar Navarro, MS, is presently the Marketing Director & CEO of Geek Dental Marketing®, a marketing, development, and technology company for dental offices. With the vision to grow practices, improve management and visibility online, Cesar launched a full marketing company that focuses solely on dentistry to help dentists stand out from the crowd. Cesar holds over ten years of experience in the dental marketing field. He has also served as a group practice administrator and treatment coordinator, where he began his journey and passion for dentistry. Before dentistry, Cesar served as an NCO in the United States Army for several years, where he gathered many skills that most marketers lack. Combining all his skills like attention to detail and experiences, he has presented several CE courses to help dentists globally, such as “Leadership in a Dental Office,” “Branding Mastery Course,” “The How Much Patient? Converting & Selling”, “A New Era: Social Media Marketing,” and many more, and with it thousands of hours as a practice marketing consultant.
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