21 Dec The Not So Secret Tips To Effective Dental Website Design
How To Turn Visitors Into Bookings
To do this, your website needs to not only look enticing, but it also needs to package the story of your practice and brand into an experience that your visitors will find inviting and makes them want to trust you with their oral health.
Not only do you need to tell your story but the stories of your patients. Choosing a dentist is a very important health decision and people do not make that decision hastily. You need to give them unique messaging and cues that present your practice as welcoming, caring and most of all, talented and skilled in your field.
If your website conveys those messages clearly and effectively, then your visitors will trust you enough to make that initial appointment. Once they are in for that first appointment, it is up to you and your front office staff, marketing team and your dental assistants to make them regular patients.
But how do you design a website that conveys these messages? How do you meld dental marketing with a personal message of caring and inclusiveness? For starters, follow these tips to create an effective dental website design that does just that.
Five Expert Tips For Effective Dental Website Design
Create An Inviting User Experience
Getting found on Google and other search engines and getting visitors to your site is a valuable objective to target—but it’s only the first step and is worth nothing if the visits don’t turn into bookings. You need visitors to be engaged by your story, the patients’ experience and what you have to offer—enough for them to book an appointment with you. Some of the best ways to create a user experience that encourages booking are:
- Simple, Logical Navigation: Your website needs to be simple to navigate and also has to have a logical flow. If a visitor can’t easily move around your site for the information they want and need to make a decision to book, they will be off to the next dental practice in the search results—your competition.
- Highly Visible Contact Info: Your contact info should always appear in a prominent place, ideally at the top of your page, no matter where the visitor navigates to. Constant visibility increases the chance the visitor will contact you—people want their information quick and easy.
- Pleasing Aesthetics: It’s best to keep your design between minimalistic and basic corporate design aesthetics. Have some basic visual accents such as professional photos or abstract page accents but avoid obnoxious and cluttered visuals that busy up your site. Make sure all links work as well as any modules and images. People can think either neutral or negative of your site design or they can be wowed by it—your target reaction should be “Wow!”
Use Unique Images When Possible
A picture speaks a thousand words but a stock photo that has been used in thousands of other dental website designs speaks one word—unprofessional.
You want to avoid stock photos for your marketing collateral and your website if at all possible. A best practice is to hire a professional photographer to take pictures of you and your staff working with either real patients or stand-ins. The important part is that the people who work in your office and yourself are in the photos, not some paid subject portraying a dentist.
Your pictures need to show the personal side of your practice because you are in a personal service business that has an impact on a person’s greatest visual asset—their smile.
When visitors see photos of the dentists in your office interacting with patients, it establishes a level of trust with your site that will increase visitor’s likelihood of calling to book an appointment.
Dental marketing is all about establishing trust and since a website’s initial impression is visual, you must capture that trust through your imagery, then you reinforce it with content.
Content Is The Sticking Point
Your dental website design can have the best images ever created by a professional photographer and sure, it will establish an initial trust with visitors; but if your content doesn’t reinforce that trust or worse, weakens it—you have trouble.
Content is the glue that holds visitors attention and deepens that initial trust the design and imagery sets. The content you provide on your site needs to be crystal clear, concise, engaging, and direct. It must also include a call-to-action (CTA). This means the content must ultimately lead to direct the visitor to submit their contact info, book an appointment, inquire about services or some other CTA that can lead to conversion.
Content, while needing to be long enough for Google search purposes, also needs to have a balance of readability and mobile-friendly layouts. Since many people tend to skip around site content to find what they want to see—you have to make sure you hit the high points visibly and in a way that’s easy to find.
High points are going to include topics such as:
- Dentists Credentials
- Amount Of Experience
- Services Offered
- Facility Features
- Payment & Financing Options
- Hours Of Operation
- Specialties
You also want to exhibit a sense of authority in your field on your website so your content needs to be accurate, somewhat technical in nature but also you need to include a blog.
A blog allows you to showcase your knowledge of the industry in a fashion that not only informs the visitor, but it also conveys your authority and expertise on dental matters as well. This even further deepens that trust a visitor builds the more time they spend on your site.
Speaking of time spend on your site, make sure you write your blogs in a way that is engaging, easy to read and offers relatable and plain language dental knowledge to the visitor. Don’t speak over their head but don’t talk down to them either.
Your content should not only be of high quality, but it also needs to be laid out in a format that is easy on the eyes on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Avoid tiny font sizes, thin fonts or fonts that are low contrast—those are the number one complaint by visitors of all websites, not just the dental industry.
Make Sure You Practice Smart SEO
This is where dental marketing and dental website design gets a bit tricky. Even though you want your content to be visitor-friendly and have a natural flow, you also have to consider that you have another reader—the search engines. These search engines have many different methods and complex algorithms and standards they use to rank your page relevance. It is admittedly quite complex and can be confusing, but at the very least you need to make sure your content is balanced with the keyword search terms you want to be found under. If your site doesn’t exist in the search result pages, your design and great content won’t matter. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be very time consuming and your best solution is to hire a dental marketing agency—potential patients are searching Google for the dental services you provide—you want to make sure they find you before your competition.
Showcase The Things That Differentiate You From The Competition
If you offer some special services, unique treatment methods, or other patient perks that make you stand out from other dental practices in your market—showcase that!
Visitors need to know why they should choose your practice over the one five blocks down. Do you offer something the competition doesn’t? Do you have onsite implant labs, sedation dentistry, All-On-Four Teeth-In-A Day implants?
Whatever it is that you offer, keep in mind that the biggest part of choosing a dentist has to do with psychological factors. You have to consider your messaging, the delivery, the perception you create and how trustworthy your practice comes across.
Your Field Of Expertise Is Dentistry—Why Are You Handling Your Dental Marketing?
We divulge all of this information to you to drive home a very common mistake dentists make early on in their practice—They try to do everything themselves.
They start out and try to handle the digital marketing, the advertising, social media and as many of our clients have admitted—they haven’t a clue what they are doing. They went to school for dentistry, not marketing, and social media marketing.
Learn from your colleague’s mistakes—contact SiteJab DDS today and see why we are the leader in dental marketing and appointment generation.
When you trust SiteJab DDS with your dental marketing strategy you are getting a service inspired by real dentists and executed by digital marketing experts.
We use the proven methods of lead generation and visitor engagement and have tailored it specifically for the dental industry—while being guided by top dentists in the nation.
Contact us today and watch your bookings increase and your practice’s reputation solidify you as a leader in your market.
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