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The Digitalis Blog: Cutting Edge Healthcare Marketing

7 Foolproof Dental Website Management Practices For Your Brand’s Success

dental website management

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The truth is that it takes more than just being an exceptional dentist to build a successful dental practice.

It requires a lot of effort to maintain a world-class practice, whether you’re overseeing your staff, interacting with insurance providers, or giving your patients the best service.

As a dentist, you probably know how to keep up with the latest trends and dental practices. The same should apply to your dental website. By acting as a digital extension of your dental practice, it successfully widens its customer base.

Your website may appear to be a one-time marketing investment, but it needs more care than you think.

Here are a few best practices that you can use to ramp up your marketing strategy and attract new patients.

1. Ensure That Your Dental Practice Website Is Always Optimized

You may have heard of search engine optimization or SEO during the website development phase, but did you know that ensuring your site is always optimized is crucial to its success?

If Search Engines Can’t Find Your Site, Patients Can’t Either

After all, your website is just an empty space if search engines can’t find it. What elements are necessary for a website to be discoverable, you may ask?

Add Important Information To Optimize Your Dental Website, Including the Location of Your Dental Office

A dental practice must specify in its title tag and URL that they are a dental practice. Declare the location of your dental office if you can so that potential patients can find it online.

Create New Content

You should also use keywords that people are actively looking for in your website copy and blog content. Since your ranking changes all the time, you must focus on creating new posts regularly to give your readers the most up-to-date information.

[Read: How to Build a Healthcare Content Marketing System That Really Works]

Optimize Old Content

The blog’s target keywords may change as you write content to reflect your new focus better. Additionally, you can update previous content by adding keywords, hyperlinks, updated content, and more.

Updating and refreshing the content can result in higher SERP ranks. Occasionally update the page copy based on new material. To increase their impact, consider turning old blog content into new media.

Improve the Website Design

Your website is often the first point of contact with your customers, so it will have to make a good first impression. Improving your website design doesn’t just make your site easier to navigate, but it will also improve your ranking.

[Read: Case Study: This Local Practice Doubled Their New Patients in 6 Months!]

2. Make It Mobile-friendly

Mobile-friendly dental website

Great dental websites can be displayed on just about any device, and creating mobile-optimized websites has become a crucial component of digital marketing strategies since more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.

This means that your practice growth depends on your website’s mobile presence.

Mobile Websites Have Been Around Since the 90s

There have been web pages designed for mobile browsing since the mid-1990s, and today, you cannot expect your dental website to be a success without a mobile-friendly version.

Since most patients will be making phone calls using their mobile devices, you’ll need to ensure they can find your dental practices using their smartphones.

What Should You Avoid When Creating a Mobile-friendly Website

Here are a few things to watch out for when optimizing your mobile-friendly site:

  • Unreadable text
  • Slow page loading
  • Cluttered navigation
  • Content that’s too big to see on a phone screen
  • Test It

You can use Google Search Console‘s Mobile-friendly Test to determine whether your site is ready for mobile navigation. You’ll get a pass or fail score once the test has been completed.

3. Focus on Making Your Website Easy to Navigate

When users land on your dental website, they shouldn’t have a tough time finding what they’re looking for. 

Converting Website Visitors Into Customers Is Your Website’s Primary Goal, and Easy Navigation Can Help You Achieve This

Converting visitors into clients should be one of your dental care website’s primary objectives. Your potential patient should be able to find contact information or interesting topics easily to accomplish this.

Service Pages

Each web page’s offerings should be specified in a drop-down menu, and service descriptions should emphasize how you stand apart from your rivals.

Don’t forget to include a call to action. If users decide not to schedule an appointment right away, you must have tools to record their contact details so you can get in touch with them later.

Add Internal Links to Improve Navigation

Mark your internal links (links to other pages on your website) very clearly as you organize your site’s navigation.

When this is incorporated into a site’s navigation and web design, both website visitors and search engines will benefit.

The ability to navigate between pages using in-page links is incredibly convenient and makes your website more user-friendly.

[Read: Case Study: From 0 to 100 Phone Calls per Month in 3 Months!]

4. Include Testimonials and Online Reviews

dentist online reviews

Many users choose to use a particular service provider because they have been recommended by others, and when looking for dental services online, your patients want to see reviews from other people who have been to the practice. Researchers say that 88% of patients look up a provider’s online reviews before ever scheduling an appointment.

Including Reviews Serves as a Form of Marketing

To make it easier for them to make a decision, including references to features on prominent websites, ratings on popular sites like Healthgrades, WebMD, and Vitals.com, and actual online reviews, can improve the user experience and increase the chances that new patients will choose your dental office over other dental practices.

[Read: How Online Reviews Affect SEO for Doctors]

5. Consider Paid Advertising

medical paid advertising

Additionally, to help promote your dental services and reach new patients, paid advertising is a great option to consider.

Target Potential Patients in a Particular Area

This type of advertising can help you target a specific group of people in a particular geographical location, which is helpful because people tend to enter search terms like “dental practice near me” or “dental office nearby” into the search bar.

The most popular places to advertise online are 

  • Google Ads (and their network includes Youtube)
  • Facebook Ads (and their network includes Instagram)
  • TikTok
  • Yelp
  • Microsoft (which includes the Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines)
  • Specific websites or apps that serve your audience, like the WebMD network, which includes a number of medical websites

6. Tell Your Story and Highlight Your Team

Website design isn’t the only thing you’ll need to focus on when enhancing your website. The truth is that people do business with companies they trust. Putting the focus on your staff and your story up front is a crucial step in establishing that trust and ensuring practice growth.

Introduce Your Team

A practice is only as strong as its workforce, and how you treat your staff will reveal more about you as a dentist to prospective clients.

Recognizing and highlighting your team members is crucial. The About Us page of your dentistry website is where you should do this.

Share Your Story or Add Relatable Elements

The About Us page should also include details about why you started the dental care practice to establish trust. Think about your website’s focus. Is it a family practice? Highlight this in your story.

7. Offer Appointment Scheduling on Your Website

schedule healthcare appointment

Due to conflicts with their work schedules, many people would prefer to book appointments after business hours. If your website does not have automated scheduling, it is less likely that they will call you later when you are available.

Scheduling Appointments Can Be Time-consuming

There are generally two ways for a potential or current patient to book an appointment. First, typical dentist websites simply provide a contact email, which frequently requires a follow-up phone call with your patient administrator to obtain the necessary information.

This can be tiresome, so you and the patient will need to set aside time to talk about scheduling an appointment.

Let Your Website Do the Work for You!

The second scheduling approach is more effective. An automated questionnaire allows a patient to provide crucial health information and choose a time from an integrated calendar on your website.

This gives customers flexibility in scheduling and frees up your team members to concentrate on helping patients who are already receiving services from your office.

Should You Optimize Your Website Yourself or Hire a Website Design Specialist?

Don’t waste your precious time trying to convert a stagnant website into a mobilized one unless you’re both a dental professional AND a website development or website design specialist.

Keeping your website relevant, high-ranking, and discoverable isn’t always easy. This is why hiring a professional website manager can make a world of difference.

The best dental websites are well-oiled machines that work all year round to ensure that your dental office is always teeming with patients, so why risk it when you can have a site that ranks highly?

[Read: Medical SEO Guide: How to Top Search Engines (Successfully)]

Let the Experts Take Care of Your Dental Website Management and Design!

If your dental marketing efforts haven’t been paying off and you’re feeling overwhelmed trying to do everything yourself, it’s probably time to enlist the help of a healthcare digital marketing professional.

It’s tough to run a dental office and provide outstanding dental service while maintaining an optimized website that ranks well and produces leads. This is why managing dental websites is best left to medical marketing experts.

Our marketing services aren’t limited to website management, either, so if you need to explore other avenues, such as healthcare SEO and social media marketing, we can help!

Let us take care of the hard work for you, so you can focus on running a successful dental office. Contact us today to learn more about our services!

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Dr. Melissa Austin, MD - Founder, North Valley Women's Care
Dr. Melissa Austin, MD
Founder, North Valley Women's Care

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