6 Things to Fix on Your Dental Website When You Go Out of Network

In network, your website only had to confirm a decision patients had already made. Out of network, it has to make the case for paying more before anyone calls. The six changes that matter most: (1) specific homepage copy instead of generic, (2) an About page with real photos of the team, (3) proof of your actual dentistry, (4) real reviews, (5) an insurance page that explains and offers a membership plan, and (6) fixing the homepage first rather than rebuilding the whole site.

The best place to start is by identifying what your website was actually for while you were in network. A patient filtered a list of in-network providers by zip code, arrived at your site with the money question already settled, and needed to confirm three things: that you were near them, that you were open when they needed you, and that the practice did not look neglected. That is a confirmation job, and almost any competent dental website does it.

The day you leave the network, the same page inherits a different job. The visitor now arrives with the money question wide open, and the site has to answer why would I pay more to come here before anyone picks up a phone. Nothing about that is solved by better design.

1. The specificity test

This is the first thing we do on a site and it takes about ninety seconds. Read your homepage copy and ask whether any other dental practice could publish the same sentence unchanged.

The design can look incredible, with great images that aren’t stock photography and real videos of the team. But saying “we provide our patients with the highest quality modern comprehensive dentistry.” could be said by any dental practice.

In network, generic copy costs you almost nothing, because the patient was not choosing on that basis. Out of network, it is the whole game. The fix is not more adjectives. It is replacing the category description with the specific thing you actually do differently, in the words you would use if somebody asked you at a party.

2. The about page that isn’t an afterthought

Something that is always true is that the homepage of your website gets the most traffic. But the second most visited page on a dental site is almost always some version of meet the doctor or meet the team, and when a visitor lands there and finds nothing, they leave.

Referred patients arrive already persuaded and the About page is a formality. Everyone else is trying to work out who you are from whatever you have put in front of them, and a stock photograph of a family who have never been to your practice tells them nothing.

The cheapest meaningful improvement most practices can make is replacing images with a real photograph of the actual dentist and team. It costs a photographer’s afternoon and it changes the page from a template into a person.

3. Demonstration of excellence

There are three kinds of content that matter on a fee-for-service site, and practices reliably over-invest in the first two.

Culture: The team, the office, the birthday, the twenty-seventh anniversary of a hygienist. This humanizes the practice and it is easy to produce.

Education: Answering the questions patients actually ask. Why press-on whitening strips are a bad idea. What to do if a tooth comes out. These do not go viral and they do not need to; one practice’s library of them accumulated tens of thousands of views over four years, from people in their own town.

Demonstration of excellence: The actual dentistry, and the patients who received it, visible. This is the one that carries the weight, and it is the one most practices have least of.

The mechanism is an inference the visitor makes on their own. If you are publishing your work, answering questions in your own voice, and showing real patients who are pleased, a reasonable person concludes you must be good at this. Nobody has to claim it. 

What does not do this work is a list of your technology. A scanner and a comfort menu are table stakes that every practice in your market also has, and no patient has ever paid a premium because of an equipment list.

4. Real social proof

Reviews are not only an acquisition channel. They are the verification step in a process that started somewhere else entirely.

Somebody tells a friend about you. The friend does not call. They search your name, read your reviews (often sorting by the worst ones first) glance at your recent posts, and only then decide whether to pick up the phone. Every referral you receive is being audited on the internet before it reaches you, which means your online presence is not competing with other practices so much as validating the recommendation you already earned.

5. The job of the financial page

Most practice sites have a page listing accepted plans. It exists to answer a filtering question, and the day you go out of network it is answering a question you no longer want asked.

So, that page now has three jobs instead of one: explain plainly that you are out of network and what that means in practice, explain how out-of-network benefits work and present the membership plan as the straightforward alternative for people without coverage. 

Done well, it does on the page what your front desk does on the phone, which means fewer people leave before they have called.

6. Don’t rebuild the whole website from the get go

This is the point at which a marketing agency usually proposes a website build, so it is worth saying that we frequently advise against starting there.

It is often better to fix the homepage, replace the imagery with real photographs, get the copy specific, and get the site to a stable enough place to market, then rebuild in six months or a year with content you have actually gathered by then. A rebuild done before you know what you are saying produces an expensive version of the same generic page.

What good looks like

A visitor who has never heard of you should be able to spend four minutes on the site and come away able to say something specific about the practice that is not true of the one down the road. Not “they seem nice”, something concrete about how the practice works or what it is for.

That is the whole test, and it is achievable in a couple of months on a site you already own. The practices that get there stop competing on the terms the directory set, which is what leaving the network was supposed to buy in the first place.

What to do today

Read your homepage and delete every sentence that would be true of any practice. Put a real photograph of a real person at the top. Show the work. Rewrite the insurance page so it explains rather than lists. 

And, if you don’t have time to do this because, understandably as a dentist, you’re busy, that’s where our team does best.

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