Considering a refresh of your dental website?
Here’s what you need to know to get the most from your dental web design
Many dental offices wonder if their website is performing for them, but what does “performing” mean? Does it mean attracting new clients? Providing services and easy access for existing clients? Informing clients and prospects about services? In short, a good website must do each of these things in the right measure, on the right pages, and it must express the core value proposition of the brand in a clean, welcoming, and inclusive way.
Your website should give your customers a clear path to better, more satisfying oral health.
From explanations of benefits and easily accessible payment portals to scheduling and viewing their next appointment, a great dental website helps customers do what they need to do and feel great about it in the end.
Segmenting your dental website
To be effective, customers need to get the right information at the right time. That means that pages and sections built for prospective customers, whether they get to those pages through a search engine, online ads, or are referred to your site through a partner, must provide information about your brand and your offer most pertinent to first-time visitors.
The home page should balance quick access for recurring customers, brand positioning, directive information for those inquiring, and information about services and treatments.
Should all pages be accessible through the navigation on your website? Not necessarily. If you have a page built around a special offer, maybe you don’t run the offer all of the time. The page could be published, but private. Only people with the direct link can get there. That gives you control – run ads or otherwise promote your offer during specific times of the year.
The main information on your website should be easily navigable from the site’s main menu. s
Grouping information into menu categories like about us, our dentists, our services, patient services, locations and special categories such as dentures, kids care, implants, and braces, goes a long way toward helping people find what they really need.
Designing your dental website
Designing your site should follow site segmentation and content creation, including copy, but why? Many web designers want to show you a website built with placeholder copy of some form for you to update. The challenge is that your messaging, and your unique differentiators ends up being stuffed into pre-formed blocks of copy.
Instead, start with the real messaging you want your clients and prospects to experience, then build the design to express it. That may mean your marketing team helps you translate your mission and vision through your products and services to create an experiential outcome that is both authentic and vital. Colors, design elements, and photos should come together to represent your core message.
Maintaining your dental website
Search engines love websites that are continually evolving. Whether you refresh sections on your homepage or add blog content, a social media feed, or updated videos, an active website is one that search engines want to serve to more people.
But how can dentists keep up? It might feel like your topics are all the same – whitening, cleanings, less-invasive techniques, annual x-rays, Invisalign. But there are plenty of ancillary topics to keep things going. What foods provide the best nutrition for teeth? How should patients adapt to a new crown? What should young athletes know about using a mouth guard during sports? Are there ways to reduce or stop tooth grinding without a sleep guard? Does vaping cause tar build-up on teeth like other types of smoking? Are there tooth-cleaning snacks for kids like those you feed your dog or cat?
There are so many topics, and so many angles on topics that no dentist should run out of topics for their social media and website.
Website optimization
Search Engine Optimization is its own topic. We will publish another article just on SEO for dental websites soon, but for now, we can say that dental offices are well advised to create a comprehensive SEO strategy for their websites. The reason? People are far more ready to make a decision when they are investigating a topic like “choosing a new dentist in Akron” or whatever their search topic might be.
The goal of search optimization is to provide the right information in the right formats – copy, audio, video, photography – to reach searchers when they are investigating your topic. That means doing an analysis of topics people are currently searching in your area, clarifying what you want to say, and matching the two through well-written, properly optimized copy.
Interested in finding out more about creating a new website or updating an existing one?
