11 ways to drive traffic on your dental website and convert!

“How to increase traffic to my website?”

This question is bound to have crossed every dental practitioner’s mind, especially in an era where almost every potential patient uses the internet to look up a dental practice before booking an appointment there. As dental digital marketing experts, we’ve come across hundreds of new and established dental practices trying to give their business the fillip it needs to create a steady patient base and thrive in the competitive dental industry.

We have also observed that both new and established dental clinics are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of dental marketing for dentistry and how a solid dental marketing strategy could turn a practice around. Dentists realize that they need to increase the digital footfall on their website and have a dental website that could convert the traffic into patients.

But how exactly can we drive more traffic to a dental website? Which digital marketing tactics bring the most targeted traffic to a site? What do we need to do to ensure that a website converts high traffic into patient appointments?

This article will answer these questions in practical yet straightforward and actionable dental digital marketing tips and tactics. It’s time to outdo your competitors and achieve top-of-the-mind awareness by leveraging the full scope of your website.  

 

Why do you need to drive traffic to your website?

Modern patients are tech-savvy and not patient enough to call your dental office to seek answers to their questions (or book an appointment) while staying on hold for a few minutes until your staff can respond. So what do they do?

They seek answers online from dental websites that provide professional and relevant information. When potential patients find the information they are looking for on your website, you gain their trust as a reliable dentist. As a result, there is a better chance that they will book an appointment with you. But for patients to find the required information on your website, you first need to get them to your website. In other words, you need to drive traffic to your website. 

 

How to drive traffic to your website?

Several paid and organic dental marketing methods drive traffic and draw visitors. A dentist marketing agency knows all these methods inside out. They will analyze your practice goals, strengths, weaknesses, market, and competition and implement relevant solutions to increase website traffic. Let’s look at some tried and tested methods of driving traffic used in digital marketing for dentistry.

 

Organic marketing methods

Organic methods don’t require massive investment or expenditure but instead bank on diligent dental digital marketing strategies to capture traffic. Here are a few organic ways that you can implement to boost site traffic quickly:

1. Dental SEO generates a stream of qualified leads.

SEO marketing for dentists is the key to driving organic website traffic. Using proper optimization techniques, a dental marketing company can bring massive volumes of targeted traffic to your website. In addition, since the local community contributes to the larger share of dentists’ revenue, local SEO for dentists is crucial for dental businesses as other local businesses such as restaurants and bars and medical and legal professionals.

Benefits of Dental SEO

1. SEO drives quality traffic to your website
2. Dental SEO attracts local patients, who are the key revenue drivers for your practice.
3. SEO improves your conversion rates
4. Unlike Paid ads, you don’t have to pay to earn clicks with SEO
5. The top organically ranked pages get more clicks than paid ads
6. SEO generates a continuous stream of low-cost leads and new patient appointments

 

2. Craft quality content for your site

Nothing spreads faster than quality content. Visitors will keep coming back in pursuit of exciting content. Show off your expertise by creating and sharing articles on various industry-specific topics. You should regularly publish content that educates the audience, from simple oral hygiene tips to elaborate dental procedure descriptions. Your visitors will glue to your content, and you win their confidence.

 

3. Drive in-market patients to your site from Quora

Quora is a platform that engages users with the typical question and answer format, where you can answer queries from potential patients and build credibility and practice awareness. Link your practice website once in the answer so users who enjoy your answers will route back to your website.

 

4. YouTube videos drive target audiences to your site.

YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google and is a great medium to grab prospective patients’ attention. About 75% of Americans use YouTube, and an average adult spends nearly 5 hours on Youtube every week.

YouTube is known to drive tremendous traffic with the right content. However, if you are unsure about the kind of content to put out on YouTube, here are a few YouTube video ideas for dentists to help you get started:

• Create dental office tour videos to give an inside view to patients who wish to glimpse the facilities before scheduling an appointment. 
• Share video testimonials4 of your current and previous patients to build trust and credibility. 
• Make videos providing valuable dental and oral care tips to patients.

 

5. Harness the power of Email marketing

Email marketing offers a staggering ROI of 4200%. 89% of marketers use email marketing for lead generation. In other words, few tactics are more potent at driving quickly convertible traffic to your website than email marketing. Here are a few email marketing tips to help you drive maximum website traffic:

• Promote offers and discounts via emails
• Write a clear and concise email. Get straight to the point.
• Include the website link as a call to action in the email campaign
• Optimize your emails for all devices 
• Send emails only to relevant audiences and avoid spamming.

 

6. Use Social media to expand your reach.

Have you ever experienced ending up on a brand’s website while checking their social media posts? The same thing could happen to your target audience! 

Social media posts can drive traffic and repeat visits to dental websites. Like YouTube videos, social media content is highly shareable, generates engagement, and can go viral quickly. With high-quality, trend-driven social media content, you can generate interest in your practice and motivate users to check out your website.

 

How to drive traffic through social media?

1. Include the website homepage link in all your social media profiles
2. Regularly promote blogs on social media by posting the URL of the article to redirect traffic to the website.
3. Post when your audience is most active to trigger clicks and shares
4. Try to create innovative content that your audiences share. Your dental practice could gain popularity overnight, and website traffic can surge massively.
5. Join community groups on social media such as Instagram and promote your website.

 

Paid methods to drive traffic to your website

Organic methods to drive traffic work well, but you can get even more traffic when you deploy them in conjunction with paid methods. Here are several paid tactics to escalate the volume of traffic to your website. 

7. Facebook ads

Facebook marketing for dentists is a great way to create local awareness, increase user engagement, and generate traffic for dental websites. If you promote a particular service, the Facebook ads platform provides an audience segmentation feature perfect for targeting the right audience. A well-executed Facebook marketing campaign drives highly qualified and easily convertible leads to your site.

The following Facebook advertising options would work best for directing traffic toward dental websites:

• Video ads: In-stream, feed, and stories are the three types of video ads available on Facebook:
  • • In-stream ads embed in between videos. 
    • Feed ads appear while prospective patients are scrolling through 
    • Stories ads engage with patients for a short duration of 24 hours.
• Image ads: Upload a visually attractive image with an apt description and an appropriate call to action button. Choose your ad objective from options like brand awareness, traffic, engagement, reach, etc.
• Collection ads: A collection ad includes a cover image or video and four images.
• Carousel ads: This format allows adding multiple slides within a single ad unit. Display any ten images or videos of your choice, each with a CTA of its own. 
• Slideshow ads: Slideshow ads are similar to video ads but consume less data. These are comparatively easy to create and quick to load even on devices with slow internet speed.
• Lead generation ads: Lead ads prompt prospective patients, to fill a form that helps you understand them better by learning more about their needs and preferences
• Offer ads: Offer ads are apt to announce any offers or discounts for new patients or select dental services. Patients can save the offer, and Facebook will remind them to use it before it expires.

 

8. Instagram ads

Instagram is the most popular social media platform among the young demographic – 75% of Americans aged 18 to 24 have an Instagram account. This is why Instagram ads should be a part of your dental marketing strategy. Like Facebook ads, you can use Instagram ads to enhance audience engagement and motivate them to visit your website. Popular Ad formats for Instagram marketing for dentists include:

1. Image ads: You can capitalize on the highly visual nature of Instagram and run image ads to send visitors to your website
2. Carousel ads: Carousel ads allow prospective patients to swipe through a maximum of ten images or videos with a separate CTA button for each. 
3. Stories ads: Stories ads are known to entice viewers with their immersive experience and drive traffic with swipe-up features directly linked to your website. 

 

9. PPC ads

Pay-per-click ads or Google ads are dental marketing solutions that incur costs but guarantee visibility and drive in-market patients. PPC ads are among the top three most influential generators of website conversions. While organic methods take time to show results in traffic and revenue, PPC ads provide instant results.

The landing page of PPC dental ads could be any of your dental website pages. For instance, if you specialize in Endodontistry and target potential root canal patients, you could designate your Root Canal Treatment page as your landing page. Likewise, cosmetic dentistry specialists could direct leads to their services page.

Benefits of PPC ads

1. Hyper targeting features to segment patients based on demographic and psychographic factors.
2. A cost-effective solution as you pay only when prospective patients click the ad
3. Seize attention right when prospective patients are actively searching for your dental services.
4. PPC ads are an effective tactic to promote emergency services. 
5. It drives immediate results and remains unaffected by Google algorithm changes.

 

10. Google retargeting ads

As the name suggests, retargeting ads are dental ads shown to those potential patients who visit your website but leave without taking action for various reasons. Google retargeting permits you to target patients based on their past behavior. Since these users have expressed interest in the past, targeting them might bring them to your website, nudge them to inquire, and consequently book an appointment. 

 

11. Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing has perks, and spending a few bucks to collaborate with influencers and get your dental practice in front of patients can bestow immense benefits. By reaching out to relevant influencers in your industry, people who follow and admire these influencers will be motivated to know more about you simply because their favorite influencer is endorsing your practice. 

 

How to design your website for maximum conversions?

Driving traffic to your website alone wouldn’t get you anywhere. If users bounce off your site without booking an appointment, the whole exercise of driving traffic is futile. You must create and maintain a website that converts the incoming traffic into your patients. You can seek the assistance of your dentist marketing agency or a dental website company to build such a website or rectify any prevalent issues in your existing website. Make sure that the following dental website design factors apply: 

 

• Site’s Visual appeal

For most patients, your website is your dental practice’s first point of contact. And we cannot emphasize the importance of first impressions enough. Use an eye-catchy color palette that matches your dental practice’s branding. Ensure that your dental website design is aesthetically pleasing and that you will have patients returning to your site. 

 

• Mobile responsive web design

According to Statista, mobile devices generated 50.81 percent of global website traffic. If you don’t optimize your mobile website, you miss out on many potential patients. Adopting a responsive, professional dental website design is a must not lose traffic. Even after optimizing the website for the perfect set of keywords, visitors will turn away if they find it distorted after clicking, leading to a substantial loss of new patients for your dental practice. 

 

• Web Page loading speed

The loading speed of websites is another factor affecting the amount of traffic. Bounce rates will exponentially increase if the website takes too long to load. For example, 53% of mobile users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. With the attention span of visitors dropping lower, the ideal load time should be 1-2 seconds.

 

• User-friendly navigation

The disorganized website navigation makes visitors feel like they have landed at a destination without maps or directions. The menu bar should be easy to locate, clean, and visually prominent. Pages should internally link to encourage visitors to browse more pages and spend time on the website.

 

• Online appointment booking capability

The main intention behind driving traffic to a website for dentists is to attract a new influx of patients to the clinic. On top of that, the trend of online appointment booking is gaining momentum, and a hassle-free online appointment scheduling feature that permits a 24/7 booking facility must be placed to cut patients’ wait time and reduce paperwork.

 

Conclusion

This article has discussed several paid and unpaid techniques to drive traffic to a dental website. While these techniques may be easy to understand, implementing them is a different ball game altogether. This is where dentist marketing expertise could help you out. 

An experienced dental marketing company would create a user-friendly website and deploy research-driven dental marketing techniques to divert traffic to the dental website, ultimately creating a continuous supply of qualified leads and an ever-growing patient base.

Key takeaways from the article:

1. Website traffic is critical to survive and thrive in the competitive dental industry.
2. You can use a combination of paid and organic methods to increase website traffic.
3. SEO, social media, email marketing, content marketing, and paid ad campaigns are some of the most effective techniques to gain traffic. 
4. Your website structure and design must be on point to convert visitors into patients. Your website should load in less than five seconds, be visually appealing, and integrate the latest dental technology.
5. Hiring professional dental marketing services will help you drive more traffic and leads to your website.