Your website needs to bring new patients to your practice, not turn them away.
But if your website isn’t properly designed and optimized, it’s going to do more of the latter and less of the former.
So, if you want your website to bring more people to your practice, here are the two things you need to keep an eye on...
Way #1 — Check the Organization and Structure
All the different pieces of your website should be working together to achieve a common goal, and when you’re busy running a dental practice or hurriedly trying to create new content, it can be difficult to zoom out and look at the bigger picture.
Structuring and organizing website content may seem simple on the surface, but it takes time and planning to do well. Many dentists start publishing and arranging content on their website without asking themselves questions like…
- Where should it live?
- Does it speak to the wants and needs of my ideal patient?
- Will it deliver the greatest possible value to potential patients?
And when that happens, your website can’t move the needle and bring new patients in from the cold.
If you were a prospective patient, what would you want to see on a dentist’s website?
What information would be important to you? What would give you the confidence to pick up the phone and make an appointment for the first time?
Your website needs to be organized in a way that puts the most important information front and center.
What you should do
Take a step back from your website. Create an outline or sitemap of the pages you have and how they should flow to best suit the needs of prospective patients. Use internal linking between relevant pages of your website to guide visitors down a clear path, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading them to the answers they need as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Think about how each page should work (individually and collectively) with other pages to accomplish two critical goals:
- Educate your ideal prospects.
- Encourage prospects to call or fill out a form to schedule an appointment.
Way #2 — Monitor the outdated material
Going to the dentist is a big deal, with high out-of-pocket costs for many Americans. Therefore, they expect the content they see on your website to be well-written, well-designed, and on the cutting edge.
Put simply, your content needs to feel up-to-date—it needs to be topical, timely, optimized for mobile devices, and punctuated with attention-grabbing visuals.
If your website is not these things, then you’re going to lose digital visibility and you won’t capture the interest of prospective patients.
What you should do
To stay appealing to future patients and at the top of Google search, you should refresh or redesign your website every 18 months. If you’re a busy dentist, the only way to do that is by working with a qualified digital marketing team that owns a track record of website design success. Working with a professional organization is the only way to ensure your website is up-to-date.
If you think that your website could use some help —talk to the dental marketing experts at Scorpion. They will be able to redesign your website, create new content to improve your search presence on Google, and organize your website so you can convert more traffic into more calls to your office.
