4 Ways to Improve Your Dental Website

Did you know that 97% of people learn more about a local business online than anywhere else? When deciding which dental practice to visit for a root canal treatment or a dental checkup, the first thing potential patients will do is search online to see their options. Your dental website may be their first impression of your practice. 

Imagine that a new family has moved into the area and is looking for a dentist that offers services for the whole family, including cleanings, fillings, crowns, and dentures. If your website is slow or outdated, or doesn’t offer any insight into your dental services and your team, you can lose a long-term client. 

Conversely, a functional and sleek dental website will boost your dental practice’s reputation by demonstrating your professionalism and credibility as a leader in oral health. Here are some foolproof ways to improve your dental website’s performance to encourage potential patients to choose you over your competitors.

Make Your Dental Website Mobile Friendly: 

With Americans spending around 5.4 hours on their phones each day, it comes as no surprise that mobile searches make up more than half of all Google searches. People are using their phones to find local businesses. Potential patients are more likely to find your dental practice if you have a mobile-friendly dental website.

A mobile-friendly website is a version of your dental website that is formatted to the smaller display screen of a mobile device. It is essentially a shrunken version of your desktop site. Images are displayed smaller to load quickly over mobile connections. Slideshows can work without Adobe Flash or other plugins, and users can click links to place a call to your dental practice or email you directly from their mobile devices. 

If you want to take your dental website to the next level, create a mobile-optimized website that has mobile responsive design elements and greater mobile functionality. It would offer a totally different experience from the desktop version of your dental website. The navigation menu would feature large buttons and show the most important information on the homepage. The design is more simplified with less distractions and download speeds are faster. The dental website might feature multiple screens to reduce scrolling. 

Another reason to make your dental website mobile friendly is because Google’s search algorithm ranks websites based on how optimized they are for mobile. The closer your dental business is to the front page of Google, the more traffic your website will receive.

Test how user-friendly your dental website is on mobile devices using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Create Calls to Action 

What action do you want users to take when they visit your dental website?  Both the desktop and mobile versions of your dental website should have an effective call to action (CTA) to compel users to do something. The purpose of a CTA is to convert the user into a patient. Potential dental patients have also come to expect CTAs. Maybe they have skimmed your services and been impressed by your success stories, and are now ready to move forward with you as their dentist of choice. 

A strong CTA can help them figure out what their next steps should be. By giving potential patients a sense of urgency, calls to action boost your conversion rates significantly. A call to action typically consists of an action verb and appears in an obvious position on your dental website. They can take on many forms, such pop-ups, side panels, slide-ins, and headers. 

Aside from standing out, a CTA should offer and deliver on a benefit. If readers are expecting a free ebook on at-home teeth whitening strategies by providing their email in a form, make sure their click guides them to the appropriate page. CTAs should follow a logical flow for a new site user, gradually guiding them along the sales funnel. 

Here are some examples of dental website calls to action:

• Request an appointment
• Schedule a call 
• Click to learn more
• Sign up for our dental newsletter 

Use As Much Real Photography as Possible 

We all know the importance of selecting relevant and high-quality images to complement the text on a business website. However, to truly convert your site’s visitors into dental patients, don’t fall into the trap of relying on stock images of bright smiles and sunlit dental offices that can be found on thousands of other dental websites on the internet. Instead, have a professional photographer take high-quality photos of your team and dental environment. While stock images can be a quick and affordable way to add color and texture to your website’s marketing campaigns, what really increases brand loyalty and builds trust is original photography.

Hiring a photographer to take unique photos of your dental office and team can go a long way in making your dental practice stand out as authentic, welcoming, and established. Photos of your team’s dentists and hygienists can make potential patients feel like they want to meet you and work with you. In addition to headshots, take photos of your team interacting with patients of all backgrounds around the office. For bonus points, consider filming an introduction video sharing your educational background, industry experience, and a light-filled tour of the office. Videos of patient testimonials can also set your dental website apart and build social proof. 

Make Sure it Loads Quickly 

How many times have you clicked away from a site that took too long to load?  Users care more about site speed than about anything your dental website will show. Google also looks at site speed when ranking websites. A page on your dental website with even a 1 second delay can result in 11% fewer page views, 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and 7% loss in conversions. So what can you do to make sure that your site loads quickly?

The cause of a slow website usually stems from the web host. Make sure that your dental website is hosted using a high quality hosting service for peak performance. Having too many media files on one page may also cause a delay in loading time. Be sure to compress and resize your images so that your pages load faster. Caching your web pages can also help to increase page speed. 40% of people leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Check your dental website’s performance and speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. 

When to Build A New Dental Website 

Now that you know what to do to improve your dental practice’s website, you may be wondering if you should just build a new website from scratch. The answer is yes and no. If you already have a dental website, rebuilding your site can be both expensive and harmful to your SEO ranking. If your needs are purely design-facing, meaning you’d like to give your website a facelift, a marketing agency can come up with a strategy to revamp the look and feel of your site without rebuilding it. In some cases, building a site from scratch might be necessary: 

Here are some of the reasons you might want to build a new site: 

• Your dental practice doesn’t have a website
• Your dental practice doesn’t own its current website 
• The technology of the current website does not allow for upgrades
• Your current website’s KPIs are not performing well and the conversion rate is low

Elevate Your Practice’s Website With Pain-Free Dental Marketing

If you’re looking for a dental marketing agency that can take on the task of building and designing a high-performing and sleek dental website for your practice, get in touch with our team HERE for a free consultation.