How to Generate New Patient Appointments With a Dental Website?

As more patients go online to research local dental services in their area, dentists must use optimized dental websites that accurately reflect the quality of their services to help their potential new patients in their decision-making process of becoming a new patient.

Many websites produced by dental office managers and dentists today do not have the right design, and a recent survey shows that 16% of the dentists don’t have a website. Studies have shown that more than 75% of search traffic goes to the businesses on the first search engine result page (SERP), so merely having a good website design is just the first step; optimizing it is another.

A dental website is a foundation of dental marketing. It must design and optimize based on the target audiences’ interests to build trust with the new patients and generate new patient appointments.

In this article, we will take a detailed look at how to structure a top-notch dental website to compete with other local dental offices, increase your PPC campaign ROI, boost your local SEO strategy and show up on the first page of Google search results.

 

Design Your Dental Website For Your Audience

Before designing a ​dental website,​ you should determine who is your primary audience. If you are a pediatric dentist and your audience are parents, you will need to design your site based on children’s interests and themes. The look, typeface, feature, image, and content of a pediatric dentistry website should be different than an orthodontist or ​general dentist website​.

Hence, the first step to creating a top-notch and fascinating dental website design that will stand out is knowing your audience.

 

Incorporate Your Branding Into Your Website Design

Adding your brand to your website is another way of ensuring that your clients distinguishing your practice from the competition. ​However, ​a new dental patient​ visiting your site for the first time should be able to detect your brand’s theme and message quickly.

As a dental practice, you must incorporate your branding elements such as logo, slogan, and brand colors into your website design and content. Your brand and mission must strategically spread through the entire website by leveraging the right content marketing strategy. A solid content strategy is pivotal to your ​dental marketing ​campaign. The ​dental marketing agency ​of your practice should help you with creating the right content that not only deliver.

As a dentist, your ​website content​ should spread your brand message and your practice mission in the right way by integrating offline activities into your online assets. For instance, if you finance offline local events, fundraising, and charity activities, you could create a press page to inform your current patients and website visitors about your past and upcoming events.

 

Website Looks And UI design Matters For Your Dental Website

The importance of a well-designed website is at least the digital representation of your dental clinic. Due to the competition in the digital space, which is extremely tough, your online presence needs to look good. In a dental website, the user interface (UI) is equally important as user experience (UX). Hence, it is crucial to focus on both aspects to drive more traffic to your website and reduce its bounce rate.

An attractive UI and engaging UX play a vital role in any dental marketing campaign’s success and decrease the marketing budget waste while increasing the ROI.

 

Your Website Must Be User-Friendly and Easy to Navigate.

Your website’s navigation structure can have a huge impact on conversions, sales, and bounce rates. If visitors can’t figure out what to do when they get to your landing page, they’ll exit and find a different dental site to peruse.

The main reasons patients visit a dental website are how to visit the ​dental clinic and direction to the practice, telephone number of the ​dental office, book their dental appointments, and educate themselves about dental procedures and preventive dentistry. 

One of the main reasons why most patients don’t stay too long on a website is that they usually encounter difficulty navigating through the pages. With that in mind, ensure your dental website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. You will lose new patients to your competitors if your dental website’s navigation​ is too complex and confusing.

 

“It is essential to know that the time a user spends on your website is used by Google to determine the quality and value of the page.”

 

Why You Should Design a Responsive Website and Focus On Mobile Friendly Layout?

One of the main factors of a good dental website is how it looks good not only on a desktop screen but also on tablets and smartphones. Today, about 65% of people would rather use their smartphones to look for local businesses around their area.

A responsive website and good mobile layout benefit companies and businesses in the following ways:

 

• It Drives In More Mobile Traffic.

About 70% of website traffic comes from smartphones when compared to just 44% from desktop computers. Again about eight to ten patients will stop engaging with your website content if it doesn’t display well on their mobile device.

 

According to Google, 75% of smartphone users expect to get immediate information while using their smartphone.

 

• Mobile-Friendly Design Decreases Page Load Time.

More than 47% of website visitors expect your website to load very fast in less than 2 seconds. You can evaluate your page speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

 

• Better Conversion Rates

Google states that it is possible to lose more than 60% of your visitors if your website is not easy to navigate. Today, about 71% of individuals make use of their smartphones to search for services online.

 

• Improves Search Engine Optimization:

Google considers your website load time on smartphones and other mobile devices to increase or decrease your SEO ranking on its search result pages.

You need to pay attention to how different media, such as typography, videos, and images on your dental website, look like mobile devices. For instance, pixels define the size of the fonts on different devices.

Also Read: Guide to Design Dental Website that Generates Patient Appointments

 

A correct mobile responsive website includes design elements such as:

• Readable text without requiring zoom
• Adequate space for tap targets
• No horizontal scrolling

Also, websites that are not optimized for all these smaller screens can decline their search engine rankings.

 

How a Mobile-Friendly Dental Website Can Help Your Dental Marketing?

Your website is one of the main channels for generating new patient appointments for your dental practice. On the other hand, dental marketing and advertising is the most effective way of driving traffic to a dental website. Your dental marketing budget waste will increase if any of them are done incorrectly.

By utilizing mobile marketing and promoting different promotions and offers through your website, you can increase your new patient appointments. Your cost of patient acquisition will reduce if your website is user-friendly and responsive on all devices. 

Your audiences are also open to receiving messages or promotions (either through notification or text message) from local practices on their smartphones. For example, if your dental practice offers free dental sessions or dental consultations, a message on your smartphone is the best way to publicize your information. You should also pay attention to your promotion’s landing page’s typography and layout on different mobile screen sizes.

 

Speed Optimization of Your Dental Website

The first impression you give to a ​dental patient​ about your business is your website speed. It is important to know that you won’t get a second opportunity when it comes to user experience. A slow website is one of the main reasons that increases your website bounce rate and makes the user leave your site and choose other dental practices instead. 

 

One essential aspect Google considers when ranking websites is how fast a website loads.

 

Web users expect your site to load at lightning speed, even on mobile devices. About half of them say that a website should load within two seconds, and they will abandon one that doesn’t load after three seconds. Speed indeed matters when it comes to keeping visitors on your site to see if they want to do business with you.

There are some tools out there that will allow you to check your site speed, including Google’s Page Speed Insights. These sites will also give you tips on how to speed up your site. Two simple things you can do to start are checking your server’s speed and optimizing your website’s images.

 

Create a Social Media Friendly Website

Your dental practice needs as much exposure as it can get and be a part of the online community as much as it is involved in its local community. Even though your website is just for dental consultations and booking new patients, it is essential to be social media-friendly. To get the most out of social media today, you must create a website that your visitors can easily share its contents with others via email messages or across multiple relevant social media platforms.

Make sure to include social icons on each page of your website footer and dental blog pages. You may also want to allow users to share specific pieces of content on your site. Your dental practice’s Social media marketing increases your brand awareness as it reaches out and presents your brand in a user-friendly manner. Additionally, it also builds brand loyalty by engaging patients and keeping them updated on your promotions. 

 

Dental Website Must Be SEO Friendly

One of the main dental marketing strategies is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and particularly local SEO. The structure of the website has a good impact on your patients’ experience and your SERP ranking. 

Your SEO implementation starts with on-page optimization, optimizing your website structure and content to be SEO friendly. It starts by conducting keyword research, selecting the right keywords and topics, and using them in the website pages’ right places. Not only that, but you also need to optimize your website’s navigation and make it more accessible and crawlable for search engines to index. Using action-oriented languages and human-friendly sitemaps also makes your site SEO friendly. Other actions to improve the SEO of your site include:

• Use title tags, header tags, image alt tags, and the meta description tag for every page
• Creating user and search engine URL structure
• Creating an internal link structure, navigation, and information architecture helps the search engines crawl through the website easily.
• Creating informative and SEO-friendly content that can be used to earn inbound links during off-page optimization strategies
• Using multiple types of content such as comparison tables, pricing guidelines, images, videos, lists, and text.

 

Website Content

Content marketing involves having well-formatted content that is informative and easy to scan for readers and search engines. Your website content is one of the first things a visitor reads to know about your dental experience and services. About 70% of internet users tend to scan content and move to the next topic or website. If the website’s content meets their needs, there are likely to spend more time on your website and take action.

Content marketing for your dental website is a proven strategy to keep your website relevant, rank well on search engine result pages (SERP), and attract visitors to your website, where they can be converted to patients.

Ensure your contents have the right subheadings, paragraphs, and bullets to dissect the text to make it easy to scan for readers. Each page has to have informative and optimized content related to that page. The homepage content has to be different from the doctor’s bio page, new patient information, or scheduling appointment page. Again, the homepage has to overview of the dental practice’s information, services, and offers. 

 

Create A Dental Blog for Your Website and Optimize it

Any dental practice website should have a blog that the dentist shares daily or weekly health, dental-related tips, and advice about preventive dentistry, dental procedures, and new trends in the dental industry that is useful and valuable to its audience. When writing your blog contents, ensure you do these:

• Use language that is simple and concise, including headers, subheaders, bullets, and other formatting techniques to make it easy for readers to skim your content. 
• Avoid using industry jargon whenever possible. While it’s okay to use technical words that show you’re an expert in your field.
• Understand the knowledge level of your audience. 

​Blog posts that talk about dental treatments/procedures are a great way to educate patients and make them comfortable. Include the treatments’ benefits so patients can picture themselves with the results you can help them achieve.

​Also, posting about your new equipment is another great way to inform patients and acknowledge that you are making investments in your practice. Patients will feel good about going to a dentist that is using up-to-date equipment.

 

Provide In-Depth Information

In-depth information through your blog on some dental services you offer can help answer the questions new patients can have when selecting a dentist and making a dental appointment. Hence the more accessible and informative your content is, the better for your patients. 

Developing your in-depth content and incorporating it the right way is vital in driving lots of organic traffic to your website. The first step towards incorporating your content into your website is planning the content. After planning and clearly understanding your website’s business goals, it is essential to create a content map before you start wireframing your web page’s layout. Furthermore, it is necessary to create useful content for your audience. You can plan an editorial calendar to keep your content afresh at all times. 

 

Online Booking Capability is a Must for a Dental Website.

In this age of cut-throat competition, your dental website must have an online booking capability to make it easier for your customers to self-schedule their appointments through your website. A recent study shows that more than 66% of health services in the world adopt a self-scheduling system, and about 64% of patients prefer online booking using digital tools.

Online booking capability saves time; thus, giving your staff more time to focus on the patients present in the clinic or on other office tasks.

 

Why Should Your Dental Website Have a Chat Capability?

Adding a live chat capability or chat bot to your dental website to answer your website visitors’ questions will potentially boost your patient appointment request up to 40% higher than your competitors who do not utilize a live chat system or chatbot on their site. The combination of chatbot and live chat capability on your website ensures your new patients and website visitors that your dental practice is trustworthy and cares about their patients.

Dental websites with chat capability will obtain more patients than dental practices it takes a lot of time for them to reply to their patients’ emails. A live chat feature on your website will also boost patients’ satisfaction and patient loyalty; this is because this feature allows you to communicate with potential clients directly.

 

Pay Attention to CTAs

A Call to Action is a clickable button, word, or image that directs your website visitors to vital areas of your content where they can take action, such as making an appointment. The copy (text) of your Call to Action needs to be concise and clear on what the offer is and how it might benefit every person that visits your site. 

To make your web design stand out, ensure you pay attention to the size of your CTA button and its placement on your website pages. Another tip is to make sure your CTA stands out from the rest of the other contents of your webpage by using dominant colors or fonts to attract visitors.

By adding a clear call-to-action on every page and in the most clickable areas such as above the fold, you’ll drive visitors to take the actions you want them to take. A few examples of clear call-to-actions include: 

• Schedule My Appointment
• Click Here to Order 
• Download Patient Form
• Contact Us 
• Get a Quote
• Learn More About X
• Get Your Free X

 

Why Patient Testimonial is Very Important?

Testimonials are great ​dental marketing ​tools for you as a ​dental practice. ​Having real patient testimonials — including videos, text, and photos can take your ​local dentistry​ clinic to greater heights. Because testimonials from your previous patients will build trust and confidence for new patients, they are more likely to schedule an appointment with you and your dental practice. You can check how positive dental reviews will help your clinic’s online reputation in this article. 

Furthermore, adding testimonials indirectly boosts the return on investment of your ​dental PPC campaign and click-through rate (CTR) when the number of booked appointments on your site increases.

 

Ensure You Design a Specific Landing Page for Your dental PPC Advertising

Pay Per Click or PPC is one of the most important dental marketing tactics to drive targeted traffic to your website. It is essential to design specific landing pages for your ​dental PPC ​advertising. You need to know that a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign with a unique landing page increases your paid dental advertising conversion while reducing the campaign’s bounce rate along with the other vital PPC campaign benefits.

It is also essential to know that your landing page is a crucial feature that adds to your PPC campaign’s Quality Score. Hence, the better your Quality Score, the lower your cost-per-click (CPC), and the higher Click Through Rate (CTR) will be, which translates to the more new patient appointment at a lower acquisition cost for your dental practice.

 

Conclusion

Whether you are a ​Cosmetic Dentist, orthodontist, general dentist, or Pediatric Dentist, ​this article accessed what a good website design entails for any dental practice and clinic. We also showed how to design a dental website that can affect your ​dental marketing strategy, patient experience, and trust, how a well-optimized website is important for dental and local SEO as well as your site ranking on Google’s first page. Now you finally know how to design a website for a ​dental office ​to attract more new patients.  Let us know which one of the points was helpful, or as a dentist or dental practice manager, please share your experience with us.