How to Put Together Beautiful and Functional Dental Websites
by Cydney Hatch • April 12, 2018
Dental offices are known for their friendly staff and smiling faces, but in today’s digital world, beautiful dental websites are just as important as beautiful dental offices.
To help you create a stellar experience for your potential patients, lets get pristine like listerine and learn important elements that will make potential clients want to “chews” you!
Elements of Pristine Dental Websites: The Basics
Let’s take a look at what matters most when it comes to creating beautiful dental websites:
Dental Websites: Audience
Time for a momma marketing makeover! Believe it or not, women make over 90% of dental decisions for their family. I am the first to say I not great at math, but that is a big deal…
90%!
So with that percentage in mind, it is safe to say that your dental website marketing should speak to the minds of women.
Women make purchasing decisions differently than men in that they take a meandering approach. If you have gone shopping with most women, she wants to weigh every option before she makes a decision. Just like brands, groceries, or services, women want information to ensure they are finding the perfect dentist!
With that in mind, dental websites need to be visually appealing and relevant to the “mama.” Your marketing efforts should also be tracked with in-depth demographic targeting so you can better understand your marketing plan for women.
Research has proven that if you get mom, then the rest of the family will follow! This is a significant client retention for your practice so being extremely targeted to your audience will be helpful! You get 3+ new patients for the price of reaching one person! I don’t know about you, but that is definitely worth your time and efforts!
Dental Websites: Content
Marketing is increasingly focused on content! Get ahead of the curve and create an easy to navigate website full of meaningful resources and content to help patients with their dental needs!
Understanding what makes great content, what people want and what will be most effective in making your effort touch the largest audience takes a lot of time and effort. Creating quality content for your dental website isn’t easy, but it can be a reality!
Here are some suggestions on how you can make quality content for your dental website:
Create a Personality
Identify what that feelings your services can give and tell your story to play to those feelings. Why are you here and why would your clients connect to that reason? Most people come to your practice to fix dental problems or to feel beautifully confident with their smiles…
Create content that gives them the feelings they want! The content is all about the client, not you.
Present your dental services in a story format that people can connect with. Using video and visuals has been said to created client trust so try to experiment using those platforms in your storytelling! See more about video work in the visuals section below!
Create a Blog
On top of other meaningful content, you should for sure have a dental website blog that creates thought leadership, opportunities to nurture relationships and offers answers and information to patients.
The trick to a successful content blog is to add new content weekly! Google algorithms reward sites that share relevant, consistent and original content. But before you feel like updating a blog is like pulling teeth, know it can be easy!
Blogging can be as simple as writing a paragraph or two sharing information about your practice, helpful hints, success stories or opinions on dental craze procedures!
If you struggle to think about what to write about start to brainstorm topics relating to your practice area. Make sure your content comes off informative, friendly and targeted towards the clients feelings, concerns and needs. The more friendlier you make your voice, the more success you will have.
For example, if I were a cosmetic dentist, I could start brainstorming a list of relevant topics and questions for my blog like:
- Dental hygiene statistics.
- Why is the Dentist office so scary? How to overcome the dentist jitters!
- Understanding procedures step by step.
- Pros/Cons: Is teeth whitening worth it?
- Are veneers my only option for a ‘smile makeover’?
- What is the difference between porcelain or bonded veneers?
- Is cosmetic dentistry covered by my insurance?
- How many appointments will give me the results I want?
- Tooth enamel and cosmetic procedures, is it safe?
By offering friendly and meaningful resources in your dental marketing it will bring more people to your website.
Visitors to your practice website already know they need a dentist, with content, you are giving them reasons for choosing you!
Dental Websites: Keywords
Once you’ve created a beautifully crafted dental website, one of the most important steps is getting it ranked highly on the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
Using meaningful SEO keywords will take your website from 0 to 100 quickly, but if you think “dentist” is the only keyword you need, we have a lot of work to do!
Start by having a brainstorm session. Make a list of any keyword that seems relevant to your practice.
If you find yourself struggling, there are several tools you can use to find inspiration, but the most important tool is the Keyword Planner. If you feel a bit overwhelmed, consider getting your keywords researched by a qualified internet marketing expert. (Ahem, we are not a bad choice)
Not optimizing your keywords correctly can result in wasting your marketing budget and not getting the results you’re hoping for!
Make sure you set yourself up for success by setting your marketing strategies straight with professional help or your personal marketing planning.
Dental Websites: Landing Pages
Your landing page is different from your other dental website pages. Good landing pages are designed to convert traffic from specific advertising campaigns.
Elements that can help your landing page success are:
- Clear call to actions: Let the patient know what action you want them to take with call to action buttons and fields they can engage with. Landing pages are successful when they are focused on getting potential patients to do something specific! Be clear in your messaging and purpose with landing pages.
- Engaging visuals: Skip the generic stock photos or crowded words and get creative! Use photos of your staff and create a positive customer experience creating consistent, clear and beautiful visuals that help customers feel your practice’s brand from landing page, website to social media!
- Mobile friendliness: This is 2018, if your landing pages or dental website pages are not mobile-friendly, you are seriously missing out! More people are using their mobile devices to find your dental business. Of those that find your landing page on a mobile device, 44% will make an appointment.
- Social Proof: People put just as much trust in online reviews and your reputation on social media as they do word of mouth from their friends. Add testimonials to your landing pages to give people reason to interact! Video can be helpful in this step!
- Clear Contact Fields: People are looking for easy and user friendly experiences online. Make sure you create easy to navigate landing pages where they can find contact fields!
Dental Websites: Visuals and Branding
Visuals matter, especially when your target audience is mostly female!
Developing a strong visual brand strategy for your dental website—particularly in the social media world—is the key to setting yourself apart from your competitors and helping your dental practice grow. The details of your practice matter because they quickly distinguish you to be a top quality dental office.
A brand is an experience you create for a customer. It encompasses the visual, emotional, intellectual and tangible experience a customer has with your business.
So, having consistent visual branding can create the experience clients can trust knowing you are stable in your firm’s business model.
Above, Inspire Dental has set type, color, personality voice and logo they can create their content around. This will be consistent across their website, business cards, emailing content, social media platforms as well as their blog!
Excellent visuals for your dental website and practice are something you should be implementing right away as they are the first touch point a customer will have with your office.
First impressions matter since clients are searching for established firms that look professional, high quality and trust worthy.
Creating visuals that not only set up your brand experience but inform are important as well. Writing is crucial to your dental marketing but mixing up the content is helpful and creating informative visuals can help with interest, brand awareness as well as website traffic!
A wonderful example of quality visual content for your dental practice is Televox’s Dental infographic:
Another example would be to create a FAQ image to explain dental concepts to patients in a new and visual way. Explaining dental implants isn’t sexy, but using a graphic might help turn something medically “blah” into something understandable and fun!
If visuals aren’t your thing, video is another powerful visual that is one of the most effective ways to get your message across, to patients.
In D Dental’s example, they address potential patients’ questions and concerns but they also share their expertise in focusing on cutting edge technology. Not only is this video compelling in the services they give but it sets their general dentistry office apart with their use of technology and creating patient comfort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgPr6jw6aQI
To take it a step further, you could even have fun with your messaging like Whitinsville Family Dental Office:
Visuals add compelling reasons to pick your dental practice over others. Make sure your dental websites use meaningful visual content to drive your expertise home!
Dental Websites: Social Media and Proof
As dental offices directly communicate with the communities they serve, social media becomes a natural way to reach people in need and to acquire new patients.
In a field where your hands are already in peoples mouths, dentistry is intimate and social proof can help patients feel at ease. A website that includes testimonials and social proof will have powerful messaging to mothers who want their families taken care of by quality people. People care about reviews and personal touches, that is why Amazon is so successful!
People trust people, so make sure your dental website has these personal touches!
Dental Websites: Pages and Contact
The most important pages dental websites need to have are a homepage, dentist bios, contact, about us, and services page. Websites need to be clear and direct in both messaging and contact information.
Since scheduling is a heavily important part of your practice’s success make sure you are using websites and applications that are easy to navigate and user friendly. Some of the best scheduling apps to use for your website include:
As each have their pros and cons its up to you to see which will work best for your dental website. Again, make sure your pages and applications are mobile friendly, especially when it comes to scheduling!
A Pristine Website: Now You Know
Smile! You now know a lot of dental website elements that can significantly increase the traffic, engagement and overall success of your dental practice.
Implementing these elements for your dental website should answer the ultimate patient question: “Why are you the right dentist for me?”
If you’d like some extra help adding these elements or getting more leads for your dental practice, let me know here or in the comments! We’d love to help!
