Dental Practice Website: 6 Ways to Convert More New Patients

Have you ever left a website right away because it was too slow or hard to navigate? It's something we've all done. Nowadays, people expect every business, including dental practices, to have a fast, user-friendly, and well-designed website. And dental practices are catching on. In 2024, 79% of healthcare providers planned to prioritize website and SEO to acquire new patients.  

Having an outdated website means you’re not giving your team and practice the credibility it deserves. So you’re probably not bringing in as many new patients as you want could be because your website is one of the most effective ways to accomplish that.  

As more dental practices open, a modern website is an expectation as patients weigh their options. If it’s been a few years since you’ve updated your dental practice website, then start with doing an audit to see where you can make some improvements.  

In this post, you’ll learn 6 underrated items that must be considered when auditing your dental practice website. These specific items lay the groundwork for a helpful, high-converting site and establish you as a credible practice.

‍1. Build a Dental Practice for Your Patients.

Your website isn’t about you, but it’s about your patients. Now hear us out. The main goals of your website are to educate patients on your services and encourage them to schedule an appointment. Let’s take it a step further. This means your website should be built first and foremost with your ‘ideal’ patients in mind. To accomplish this, you should know the answers to these questions:

• Who are your ‘ideal’ patients and who is this website for? For example, if your practice is in a neighborhood that’s mostly a mix of Millennials and/or Gen Z, then it’s possible they could be the patients you want in your chairs. Your website content should speak directly to them and be optimized for mobile search, since both groups are most likely to search for practices that way.  ‍
• What problems are you trying to address based on your ‘ideal patients’ and areas of expertise? If you’re targeting Millennials and/or Gen Z, then you might be focused on making your care accessible and affordable without sacrificing the quality of services. Additionally, you might also offer some cosmetic dental services like Invisalign, teeth whitening, and potentially even Botox. If that’s the case, then you should make those services a focus and have dedicated pages about them and highlight them on your homepage and about us pages. You should offer a wide range of payment methods too, including insurance and membership programs, whether they have insurance or not, or are still on their family’s insurance.  ‍
• What questions do your patients want answers to on your website? Some ideas can be answering the cost of care for your services and treatments, what insurance you accept, what membership plans you offer if someone doesn’t have insurance, what treatments and services you offer and what they entail, do you offer emergency services, etc. Answering the most asked questions your ‘ideal’ patients are searching for on social media, specifically TikTok, Instagram, Meta groups, Google, and their online communities like Discord and Geneva shows that you understand what they care about. ‍
• How do you want them to feel when they land on your site? Comfortable, confident, and empowered? Maybe you want to make them smile or laugh because going to the dentist is scary for some people. Infusing your brand personality into your website copy could put prospective patients at ease and show you’re human, but still an expert at what you offer. ‍
• What do you want them to do on your website? Your goal should be for them to make an appointment, whether it’s now or in the future. And ideally, you want them to become future patients.  

Knowing the answers to these questions can help dictate your website structure, design, user experience, content, and even practice branding.  

And it’s okay if you don’t know how to answer these questions. But make time to think through them. If you have an agency managing your website, then be sure to have this conversation to confirm you all talked through this when your site was built or updated. If you’ve already discussed this, but don’t remember much from that conversation, then find out if there are plans to revisit the discussion and see what’s changed. Your practice goals change over time, and your website needs to evolve alongside them.

2. Make it Easy and Straightforward to Find Information.

Believe it or not, aesthetics shouldn’t be the first thing you consider when updating your website. Sure, appearances shape a person’s opinion of your practice, but what's more important is the information on your website and how it's presented. Your website should be the go-to resource for both current and future patients. Even if they aren’t ready to make an appointment at that moment, they’ll remember your site and practice if they find the information they were looking for. Like we mentioned earlier, your website should serve your patients, so build it with them in mind.

Here are some essential items to make your website more intuitive for patients. It’s possible you already have some of these, but they should be regularly updated and reviewed to make sure everything is working correctly.  

• Keep it accessible. Always be sure your website is meeting web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG), data privacy standards, and HIPAA compliant guidelines. Not doing so could land you in trouble and be off putting to patients who have an interest in coming to your practice. ‍
• Have a clear and logical website layout and navigation bar. For example, in your navigation bar, some categories can include about us, services, contact us, new patients, current patients. And you can have subcategories under certain buckets like services. Under services, you can nest cosmetic dentistry, restorative, emergency, etc.   ‍
• Have clear and action-orientated call-to-actions (CTAs) sprinkled throughout your website, particularly on the high-traffic pages. They should motivate patients to take specific actions, like scheduling an appointment or paying a bill. ‍
• Include a sitemap. A sitemap makes it easier for the search engines to crawl and index your website so that it improves your search rankings.  ‍
• Make it obvious where new and current patients should go. There should be a tab or button on your homepage for both patient groups so they’re not wasting time clicking around. ‍
• Create FAQs on your website. You can collaborate with your front office team and clinical team to find out what  the most common questions each team gets asked are. You can post these on your website to educate patients and equip them with more information. ‍
• Follow both on-page and off-page SEO best practices. This improves your search engine rankings and makes it simple for patients to find and consume the information on your site. On-page SEO tactics include optimizing your title tags, meta descriptions, headings, URLs, image alt text, etc. which improve your dental practice website’s rankings in the search engine results. Off-page SEO tactics involve what you do off your website to improve your search rankings. This can include building backlinks, creating social media content, being listed on directories, etc.  

Check out these 5 outstanding dental practice websites that are both functional and patient-centric for inspiration.  
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3. Maintain a Responsive Site.

A mobile-friendly site goes beyond having the text realign so you can see it all on your phone. It needs to be well-organized, easy to search, and still give patients a consistent user experience as if they’re exploring your site on any device. Even though 60% of people use mobile to search for information, many practices still don’t have a user-friendly mobile site. Here are some must-haves for a mobile responsive site to keep your prospective patients from leaving:

• Use a responsive website theme or template that adapts to different devices.
• Text should be large enough so it’s easy to read.
• Graphics and videos need to be compressed so they don’t slow down your site.
• Load time should be between 1-3 seconds. Check your site speed here.
• Adjust your CTA button size and location so people can easily click on them. The middle of the screen works better for mobile instead of a corner.
• Reduce or eliminate your pop-ups because they can be hard to close on a phone. This can be frustrating and cause your patients to leave your site.  
• Test your site regularly to ensure its mobile responsive. You can run it through Google.

4. Highlight Your Patient Reviews.

People look to patient reviews when they’re searching for a dentist. Approximately 98% of people look at online reviews when researching businesses. And 74% of people will look at least two review sites before deciding to connect with the business. Your practice is in the business of dental care so you should have a process in place to regularly collect reviews. This is why your practice should display your patient reviews on your website.  

If you aren’t already, you should be targeting your most satisfied patients to leave reviews because they build trust and influence people’s decisions. 53% of people want to read positive reviews to help them make decisions. Do you have a process for collecting patient reviews? If not, here are a few things to implement:

• Automate your request. Send a thoughtful, but succinct email and text to patients asking for a review. You can automate this using your patient engagement system, so you don’t have to send one manually each time a patient leaves your practice.  ‍
• Provide a review example. Sometimes patients may not know what to include in a review. Include a generic example of a patient review to help them craft one or give them some specific direction like what the front desk experience like and the actual treatment process was. Don’t forget to remove the patient’s name and any personal info.
• Keep the review process simple. When requesting a review via text or email, make sure the review link takes them directly to your website and/or social media page where they can easily leave a review. The fewer the steps, the better. ‍
• Keep HIPAA compliance top of mind. Be sure to reply appropriately to each review that’s public facing with a general response so people can see you’ve taken the time to respond.  Follow up privately with each patient for more pressing and sensitive feedback.  

5. Share Helpful Dental Content.  

Content is effective in converting website visitors into appointments, and ultimately, bringing patients back to your practice regularly. It can be in a variety of formats, including blogs, video, audio, website copy, social media, and more. To know what to create, you have to be clear on who your ideal patients are and what they want to learn more. You have to find a balance of creating content that you’re an expert in and what resonates with your prospective and current patients. There are a lot of ways to source ideas. Here are a few to choose from:  

• Look at your competitors. If there’s a practice in your community who you admire or see as friendly competition, check out their site and see what content they create. This can spark some of your own ideas.  ‍
• Look at social media groups and forums like Reddit. There’s a community for almost everything. And many people turn to these spaces for health-related information, with 85% searching for it on social media. This can give you an idea of what to create if it's relevant to your ideal patients and help position yourself as the expert they turn to for answers.  ‍
• Do keyword research. Incorporating keywords that have a high search volume in the search engines can also give you an idea of what content to create. Keyword research is another piece of SEO to keep in mind. Using specific keywords in your website content can improve your chances of being seen by prospective patients looking for a practice like yours. You can look up keywords in Google, and there are free keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and Semrush you can use too.
  

6. Showcase Your Practice Brand.

Compared to other industries, branding doesn’t get enough attention in the dental space or in healthcare. And when it does, it’s surface level like a logo and/or a color palette refresh. Even though having a cohesive brand image is useful, branding is more than aesthetics. It involves going deeper to understand how you want your practice to be perceived by patients and your community and what emotions you want them to feel, and even what your internal practice culture is like – all these should be conveyed on your website. It helps patients connect with your practice in a more genuine way and increases brand recognition, particularly in an increasingly competitive industry. If what you share resonates with them, they’re more likely to remember you when they are ready to choose a new dentist. Here are two additional branding-related items to spotlight on your site:

• Share your practice story. Every practice has an origin story that involves why your practice owners and team chose dental as their career path. Your website is the perfect place to capture it. Everyone loves a story, and it is how people find connection to businesses, including dental practices. Putting your story on your website humanizes your team, sparks emotions, builds trust, and deepens your patient relationships. Find out what your story is and document it.
•  Identify your practice values. Every practice has its core set of values that your team lives by and is part of what attracted them to your practice in the first place. If you’re unsure about it or your practice hasn’t discussed it, look at some of your favorite brands for inspiration. Many companies have their core values on their website to show customers what drives them. You don’t have to put these on your website, but everyone on your team should know and embrace these values and they should shine through on your website in a subtle way. If you decide to put these values on your website, they could go under the ‘About Us’ page or under your practice story.

A strong dental website is one of the many ways to stand out from the competition and attract and convert new patients. But it’s just one piece of it. If you want your practice to be noticed, you have to take a holistic approach to marketing your practice and evaluating your internal processes. Download this comprehensive toolkit to learn how to acquire new patients and grow your patient base in 2025 and beyond.