How a dental website can help make, or break, your dental practice.
You are aware of how crucial it is becoming to have a website these days. Fewer and fewer people are using the yellow pages (which are becoming obsolete). As of 2010, over 80% of people search online for a local business. If you have no dental website, or the dental website you have is not bringing new patients in the door, you should be alarmed.
Let’s put you, the dentist, in the shoes of your patients. You have a toothache and know it’s not just from drinking a slurpee too fast. You keep putting off going to the dentist though because you’re afraid of what you’ll find out and more afraid of how much it will cost to fix. You (the dentist) probably feel similar to this person. You know you need to get a dental website for your dental practice but you’re not sure how to identify a good service provider, you don’t want to waste your money, you don’t want to spend your money, etc.
Searching “website dental” on Google will give you thousands of options. How do you narrow it down? what do you look for? What do you need to be competitive in your market? These are some questions we will address now.
What do you (the dentist) need in your dental practice website?
Your dental website should have one purpose—generate new patients. This is accomplished through attracting potential patients to you (through being placed high in search results—Search Engine Optimization). You can have the prettiest website in the world and it won’t do you much good if no one can find it. Once your potential patient has found your dental practice website, you must not waste their time. They want to know some things about you before they make a call:
- Can they trust you?
- What make your dental practice different from the others?
- Where are you located?
- What do other patients have to say about you?
If you can answer these questions quickly and satisfactorily, you’ve got a great chance of having them call your practice. -Now it’s up to your front desk to close the deal.
How can your dental practice website be more competitive in your market?
Organic search results are crucial in your dental website strategy. How do you get ranked higher so people will find you? A combination of great, keyword-rich content is essential to being ranked well. Not only should every page of your site be well written, maintaing a focused blog will help you continually climb the rankings. Your dental website should have this blog functionality built in, building up your site’s relevance with every new and targeted blog post.
Build up your backlinks. Google’s recent release of their new major change in their algorithm cracks down on bad links. So don’t hire someone to build a massive amount of backlinks for you without knowing where they plan on building the links. Shoot out an email to family members and friends and ask them to link to your dental practice website on their own blogs or websites.
Local Search
This writer feels that local search has become as important (if not more important!) than “traditional” searches. These local searches are what you see when you search for something like “New York Cosmetic Dentist.” Nowadays the first page is dominated by Google Places results (the map with dots and locations). Even if your dental website ranks #1 in the organic search listings, if you don’t have a strong local ranking (meaning that your are not seen in the first cluster of seven local search results) your dentistry website might not even be noticed. Your dental practice website’s ranking is a factor in your local search results, so it is necessary to get both your traditional organic search and local search rankings pushing you to the top.
Website Dental / Dentistry Website / Dental Website Look
What would you think if you saw a beautiful (and nice) person who smiles, only to reveal a mouthful of discolored, crooked teeth (with a few missing)? No matter how many great deeds this person has done or how many charities this person chairs, you’re going to be a bit turned off. Now, how do you think your potential dental patients feel when they hear good things about you, know that you’re nearby and then try to find your dental practice website to discover you don’t have one or that the one you do have looks like it was a discounted website built in 1998? Don’t mistake the matter, appearance counts! Can you see the disconnect if you present yourself as a dentist that can help someone’s smile look gorgeous and improve self-confidence, while you present your self (through your dental website) as an out-dated and out of touch dentist that doesn’t really have an eye for design or know what looks good?
Website Dental Summary:
- Build a dental website for your practice that is Search Engine Optimized
- Include a blog that can build your site’s relevance (ranking) with fresh, keyword-rich content
- Build up quality backlinks
- Make sure you give attention to local search
- Make sure your dental practice website looks great
These tips should give you a good starting point as you begin your dental website transformation. When LUMN builds your websites, we make sure to give attention to each of these details to deliver a beautiful, functional dental website to help you attract new patients to your practice.