What to Include and What Not to Include in Your Dental Website
A great dental website is important for any dental practice, it can make the difference between patients who stay to book an appointment and patients who don’t. It’s important to have a website that is conversion-friendly, responsive, and aesthetically pleasing, but how do you achieve that? In this article we list some critical do’s and don’ts of what to include in a dental website in order to help you develop the very best webpage for your practice.
What to include in a dental website:
- User-friendly design: Research shows that if a user isn’t satisfied within 15 seconds of looking at your website, they’ll click exit. To avoid them leaving for your competitors, your patients should have easy access to your services and booking page.
- Consistent Design: Consistency is key for your dental website design. This strengthens your brand and communicates structure amongst your business.
- Mobile Responsiveness:
Your patients are always on the go – most of them will access your website on their mobile phones. Ensure that your dental web design responds and adapts well to all screen sizes, including mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktops.
- Link your Address: Linking your practice address with Google maps makes it easier for your patients to find you.
- Google-Friendly Content: SEO is important for ranking your dental website above your competitors on Google search. This can be achieved with relevant content based on SEO (search engine optimisation) research and keywords – such as dental advice blogs.
- Visible Contact Details: Your patients should be able to easily contact you, so it’s important to add your phone number, email, address, opening hours, and booking link on the header, footer, and contact page of your site. Your phone number, email, and address should be clickable (especially on mobile) so that your patients can call, email, or check directions on Google maps with the click of a button. Remember, you want to make your patients lives easier.
- Multiple Call-To-Actions: Having a call to action (such as Book Appointment button) should not be limited to just the top menu or contact us page. Adding a CTA spread across different sections throughout website such as service pages and blogs reminds your patients, without being too pushy. This also helps them to book appointment with you easily, no matter what part of the website they are in.
- Website Security: You must have a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) for web security and to avoid being flagged by Google with a “not secure warning.” An unsecure website will significantly impact your ability to rank well on Google.
- Payment Plans and Preferred Providers: What is usually your patient’s number one concern? Costs! Give your patients a piece of mind by clearly communicating the payment plans and health funds that you accept. Include this in relevant banners and logos (most people look at visuals first) on the homepage and a separate payments page.
What to avoid in a dental website:
- Patient Testimonials:
Testimonials are great on Google reviews, but are not compliant with AHPRA guidelines on dental websites. Unlike other industries, displaying testimonials in websites are not allowed as it poses a risk in advertising in health services such as:
- Creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment
- Each patient’s experience is different
- Encourages the unnecessary use of regulated health services
- And/or Is false, misleading or deceptive or likely to be misleading or deceptive, including testimonials that are:
- Selectively published or edited, or
- Fake
- Non-AHPRA Compliant Content: Adding to that, it’s best to check AHPRA guidelines to ensure all content is compliant. For example, general dentists should not use the word “specialist” in their content unless the referred dentist has a specialisation degree awarded by the governing body. If you use an external dental marketing agency, it’s important to ensure that they understand these guidelines and thoroughly check the content before being published. For more information about AHPRA guidelines, read here.
- Broken Links: There’s nothing more annoying than clicking a link that says “404 Error.” If a patient clicks on a broken link, they’ll likely give up and visit your competitors.
- Patient Testimonials:
- Outdated Content: Your content should stay relevant and updated, especially for the following:
- as dental technology evolves
- as new techniques, procedures, and materials become available
- as new medical findings and treatment information is published
- if you change opening hours
- addition or removal of services
- changes in payment plans and financing options
- when staff members leave and new staff members start
- Outdated Design and Programming:In the digital world, it’s important to keep up with the trends and ensure that your dental website is modern and updated. This is important not only for appearance, but mostly for SEO-friendliness. Outdated websites are usually not SEO-friendly, and are, therefore, hard to rank well on Google.
- No Internal Linking: Quite often, you’ll have patients who require more than one service. Your service pages should include internal linking to other relevant services pages, so that your patients have access to all information. This helps with SEO and treatment add-ons.
- Difficult to Navigate: Patients should be able to easily navigate the site to find the information they’re looking for. Your sitemap structure should make sense with menus and drop-down navigation.
- No Tracking Codes: Tracking codes are vital for your analytics, which is used to plan an effective marketing strategy to drive more patients to your practice. This is important for measuring website traffic and performance of ongoing marketing activities such as SEO and paid ads. What is measured can be improved, as simple as that!
If your website is not converting or ranking well on Google, contact our trusted team today. We help clients build their dental websites to make them SEO-friendly, easy for patients to navigate and easy for generating appointments.
Give us a call on 1300 777 847 or book a free 30-minute no-obligation consultation here.
