You need a website for your dentistry practice. Maybe it is a new website or maybe you want to redesign it to create a better image or get more new patients. You are trying to figure out what is important for dental websites.
You have several options for your new website. You can purchase a website from a company that specializes in pre-configured dental websites. Many of these come with stock content about dental procedures that you can use to educate existing and prospective patients. The advantage of this kind of content is that it is a quick and low cost way to quickly deploy a good website. The disadvantage is that this content is often deployed on 100+ other dental websites. This is viewed as duplicate content by Google and will hurt your chances of getting good search rankings reducing your opportunity to get more new patients. Often you get much better results from a custom dental website built custom for your practice by a firm that builds custom websites.
Dental Websites Musts
- Objectives: Start with your business objectives for this new dental website. This will give you clarity to what to focus on. You will want to rank order these so you can address these in order as you plan your dental website. Examples might be: Acquire new patients, provide a trustworthy image for the practice, educate patients on available procedures, provide social proof through online reviews, provide important office information such as office hours, location, phone number, and driving directions.
- Competition: Spend time looking at your competitor websites. Prospective patients will be shopping for a new dentist and be comparing dentists based on what they see. Remember no website is perfect and no website does everything wrong. Look at the things they do right that you want to include in your practice website. This could be colors, layout, calls to action, types of information they present, use of video, etc. As you look at these websites, look at the websites as if you were shopping for a new dentist. Which websites (or which features) are most compelling.
- Home Page: Your home page introduces a prospective patient to your practice and is the single most important page on your website. Your layout and visual appearance is very important. The visual images should appeal to your targeted demographic. This means age, ethnic, sex, perceived income level, etc. Your home page should have clear messaging so they understand your key service offering and where you offer it. Typical dental practices will draw patents from 3-5 miles from where they work or live. Have clear call to actions such as request an appointment, call should be highly visible and seen without the need to scroll down.
- Mobile: Your new website must look good on all devices. This means a desktop display, mobile phone, tablet and mini-tablet. Today most developers offer responsive websites which means that website will detect what kind of device the visitor is using and properly display on that device. Your developer can adjust how it will display on each type of advice. Many templates and packaged dental websites lack this kind of mobile presentation. Verify that your developer has the skills and tools to do this correctly.
- Content: Provide the content your patients are looking for when they come to your website. Patients typically want to see the office phone number, address and hours on every page. Include reviews / testimonials to provide social proof that you provide good quality service. Include a driving directions map on your contact page and perhaps your home page. Include short bios on the dentists and staff so they can see who will be treating them. Provide printable new patient forms so patients can come in with paperwork complete.
- Educate: Your services pages are very important to not only show the services that you provide, but also information about the procedures. Patients trust sources that educate, so providing good informative content on your website helps improve your trust and credibility.
- Traffic: Decide where the traffic for your new website will come from before you build it. If you want traffic to come from Google searches, then you need build the SEO into your website. People will search for your services such as cosmetic dentistry or implant dentist combined with the city /state. Building up the services area of your website using original content with your address on every page will really help. Also use the keywords in your page URLs, visible content and Title tags.
Dental websites that are built with a clear purpose and provide content prospective new patients are looking for is really important.