What should you keep in mind when designing your dental website?

The main thing to keep in mind when designing your dental website is that the website is for your current patients and prospective patients who are evaluating your practice. It is not for you to showcase whatever new technology or change in your process you just finished implementing at your practice, except in the event that this makes sense for the purposes of attracting new patients. That being said, before you embark on developing your website, you should be clear on the purposes of that website.

What is the main purpose of a dental website?

• Have useful content that helps reach as many prospective patients as possible organically.
• Help prospective patients get a sense of the practice, and get comfortable with the office.
• Provide easy mechanisms for these prospective patients to contact the office once they’ve achieved a certain degree of comfort.
• A secondary purpose of the website is to provide tools to streamline the process for current patients. Many dental websites, for example, provide an option for new patients to fill out paperwork online so that they are not delayed when they come in for their first visit.

How big should my dental website be?

The size of the website, defined as how many pages a website has, should be determined by what your goal and what your main marketing strategy will be with the website. For a small practice that only wants to rank in their immediate vicinity that is not too competitive, 4-5 pages could suffice. By the same token, a practice that only wants to focus on one specific procedure and is carrying out PPC campaigns to that effect, can often only have 1 landing page that is hyper targeted and still do a decent job of converting. On the other hand, an office that wants to rank organically for many terms in a competitive metropolitan area, will very likely need at least 20-30 pages of solid content.

Do I need to redesign the website for my dental practice?

This is a touchy subject, as almost every agency will recommend a redesign of your website, regardless of whether you actually need it or not. The truth is, in most cases your website does not need to be redesigned in order to improve your SEO rankings. There is one big caveat; however, which is that if your website is not optimized for conversions, improvements could be slower if you decide not to redesign it to your agency’s tried and true models, as those models have been arrived to as a result of extensive testing to show what converts best. Additionally, if you expect to make significant and ongoing improvements to your website, it is best to work with a website template or model that your agency already feels comfortable with; otherwise you may end up spending more in the long run for worse results as it will take your agency more man hours to adjust things to fit within your current website.

Does the design of my website affect my SEO?

Yes! The design of a website can very much affect its search engine optimization and by consequence its rankings on Google. It is important to note; however, that this must be done with care and knowledge, as what is aesthetically pleasing may not necessarily be the best for SEO. One of the most important factors in having an SEO optimized website is to have a website that loads quickly and to achieve this results effectively, the website has to be designed in a lightweight way from the beginning. It is very difficult to take a bloated and slow website and optimize it to be fast, in the same way a car that has many miles on it will never perform as well as a new car no matter how much work is done on it. Every additional piece of multimedia or additional module on a website has the potential to slow the site down, and so all elements must be carefully considered to balance user experience and SEO. 

Additionally, search engines rely heavily on the organizational structure of your website to determine what your site is about, and what content is important for which topics. For this reason, it is very important to give thought and plan how the navigation bar of the site will be laid out and how the content on the site will be divided.

What Makes Patients4you Websites Amazing?

• A Great Looking Site That Reflects Your Dental Practice’s Unique Character.
• We Monitor and Report on Traffic, Phone Leads and Form Submissions.
• Content Management System for Easy Site Updates.
• A/B Testing to Determine Highest Performing Tactics.
• We Are Easy to Work With and We Respond Fast to Requests.

Additional Information on Designing Dental Websites

Dental Marketing for Big Cities

Dental Marketing for Small Towns

Marketing for Dental Implant Patients

Dental Marketing for High Value Patients

Using SMS to reduce no shows at your practice

Dental Marketing for Fee for Service Practices

Designing a Dental Website for Conversions