Improve Your Dental Website Design to Attract More Patients

Improve your dental website design to attract more patients. Using quality content, dental SEO, and website marketing for a mobile-responsive user experience. When it comes to your dental website—the virtual front door of your practice and the backbone of your marketing strategy—it has to be absolutely compelling so visitors won’t leave your site. It’s your first interaction with new patients and your first opportunity to establish trust, so it’s crucial to make the engagement count.

Some of the top dental web design fails, such as—slacking on your service pages or missing a call-to-action (CTA)—are the fastest way to close the door on new patients. A few important must-haves any dental website design should include:

• Resource page for patient safety
• Frequently asked questions section
• Online scheduler and secure online forms
• Communicates how you do business
• Easy navigation

Priorities among dental consumers have changed drastically over the past few months in the aftermath of COVID-19, so your web content needs to be updated regularly to mirror the new normal. An important addition to incorporate is web pages dedicated to information about your patient safety measures including team member PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) requirements. This could possibly mean that the website you depend on to generate new patient leads is no longer effective and that it’s time for a rigorous review of the content on your dental practice website. Here are some pointers to ensure your dental website design is set up to attract new patients and reflect our new normal.

1. Ensure Your Dental Website is Mobile-Ready and Responsive

Mobile-responsive design ensures your website looks great on a desktop or any mobile device by automatically adjusting the layout and scaling text and images to fit a user’s screen. The site opens quickly and features such as tabs, forms, and drop-down menus are easy to interact with. In the first quarter of 2021, mobile phones generated 54.8% of web traffic across the globe. Clearly, having a mobile-friendly website is no longer just a nice-to-have feature, it’s an absolute must-have. Google is now, through its mobile-first strategy, predominantly using the mobile version of your site’s content for indexing and ranking. A user-friendly mobile-ready dental website design should encourage visitors to linger longer and help to elevate your search engine rankings. Conversely, if your site is tricky to navigate, or doesn’t load properly, or is slow to load—you may lose a prospective patient altogether and frustrate your current ones. A mobile-responsive design eliminates the need to invest and maintain multiple versions of your dental practice website.

2. Optimize Your Dental Website’s On-Page SEO

Typing a search engine query is the first step toward finding just about anything on the Internet, from a weather forecast to a top-notch dental practice. In fact, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Google currently dominates the global search engine market, so it’s no surprise that Google guidelines are the baseline standard for determining your dental practice’s online visibility.

Keywords

Well-targeted keyword phrases are essential for dental SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The more similar (or semantically related) the keywords, the higher chance you have of Google ranking your site. You’ll need separate pages if you want to rank for several different keyword phrases. While it helps to repeat the keyword in the page title, headings, sub-headings, and URL, there’s a caveat: don’t overdo it. This is known as keyword stuffing. Google will notice and penalize you accordingly.

Site Speed

Site speed, the amount of time it takes your website to load and respond, is a deal-breaker when it comes to SEO performance, and Google has deemed it a top factor in determining your position in search. While trustworthy external links are valuable, internal links improve your website’s usability as well as its search engine desirability.

Metadata

Ensure metadata descriptions include primary keywords and are unique and specific. Alt text and tags in images and videos, as well as some text descriptions, make your page easier for search engines to discover.

3. Create Unique and Compelling Online Content

Great content on a dental website is the key that unlocks the door to links, social shares, traffic, and attracting new patients. Focusing on quality content that generates high-quality backlinks to your site is ideal. Four traits tend to characterize content that achieves this desired goal:

• Your content needs to speak to patients directly and demonstrate why your practice is the right fit.
• Content that was once considered "good" or even "great" is not enough anymore. Content must now provide value. It should be educational, inspiring, and informative.
• It must have strong visual components–images, infographics, or videos.
• It’s on dynamic and clean sites that have a professional look and feel.

Delivering the best user experience (a key metric Google relies on to rank your site) depends primarily on the quality of content on your website. The online visibility of your dental practice is directly proportional to the level of consistent and engaging content you post. Avoid unoriginal or cliché content, and tired, run-of-the-mill stock images. Keep your dental blogs, podcasts, webinars, hints and tips, FAQs, newsletters, and e-books fresh with frequent updates. Timely, relevant, and original blog posts are especially effective in communicating your unique message. Compelling content educates, converts, and attracts. Your dental website design plays a critical role in your dental SEO strategy, educates patients, and communicates your dental practice values. PBHS-designed websites come complete with 100% specialty-specific, peer-reviewed clinical content, providing real answers to real patient questions.

4. Don’t Forget CTAs and a Contact Us Page

Calls To Action

Incorporating a well-placed CTA, or two, on your website is a great conversation starter between patient and practice. It can mean the difference between somebody merely browsing to taking action by clicking on a link to either book an appointment, download content, or explore additional treatment options. Think of CTAs as helpful signposts to steer an interested patient in the right direction to find the information they’re seeking. Effective CTAs are considered among the best SEO best practices and while there’s no multipurpose approach, some work better than others. An attention-grabbing design coupled with a clear, compelling CTA can make your site stand out from the competition.

Contact Us Page

Building a contact us page is another way to convert visitors into new patients. Encourage visitors to fill out a form on your website and collect their email addresses. Ultimately, you’ll attract more responses than a simple contact us button and begin creating a very effective email marketing list.

Your Grand Dental Website Design Just Got Better

Partnering with a dental marketing agency that fully understands SEO, mobile-responsive design, and the value of captivating content is an effective way to add value to your dental practice. Offering dynamic modern designs, simple drag-and-drop features, and complimentary support, PBHS is an industry leader in creating dental website designs that meet the very specific needs of the dental care communities. PBHS provides the set of tools to increase your productivity and profitability so you can focus on your patients and your practice. Is your website living up to its full potential? Start with a complimentary PBHS review of your current dental website design today and get immediate tips for improvement.