10 Steps To An Effective Dental Website That Can Drive Patients
Your website is the face of your business and most patients will visit your site before they ever look into your clinic. The success of any website depends on how its web design is. Thus, your website should relay your patients' experience as well as your brand story. Here are few things to consider for an effective dental website before you work with your digital partner.
The success of any website depends on its web design. Web design is almost a full-time job within everchanging digital landscape. When designing a dental website, the primary goals are to make sure that your site is found in a search engine for your location and convert your visitors into patients. This is because your website is the face of your business and most patients will visit your site before they ever look into your clinic.
Your website should tell your patients' experience as well as your brand story. Choosing a dentist is a very important decision to make; your website design should be unique and clear to help patients to trust you enough to make an appointment. So what makes a good dental web design?
Below we will explore the top ten web design principles that will make your website pleasing, engaging, easy to use, and effective.
Content is King
The content you add on your website needs to be clear, concise, and engaging. Most people tend to scan through text than reading it. Patients search for the most relevant and helpful information. Make sure they can find what they are looking for easily and quickly.
A dental website should include content that has professionalism and industry-expertise to convert more website visitors into patients. It's advantageous to include a blog page on your dental website, as it keeps your website resourceful, relevant, and helpful.
The content should be laid out in the most accessible manner as possible with navigations. It should include Meaningful Information, Internal links, Keywords, and Calls to action buttons.
You can check Dr. Sunyoto’s website, an Orthodontist in Pasadena CA for a clear picture of how content should be laid. So think carefully about the most readable fonts and formats when designing your website.
Optimise Your Website for Search
Writing content to make it reader-friendly sounds good, but you have to write for a search engine too. If your site can't be found in a search engine, it won't matter how great the design or content is if no one sees it.
Make sure to choose your keywords and phrases carefully to place your website prominently in organic search engine results. This can be accomplished by Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When a patient searches in Google for your dental service, make sure they find you.
Call-to-action
A call-to-action (CTA) is a must on a website that tells the visitors' to take some specified action. It's typically written in a command or action phrase, such as ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ and takes the form of a button or hyperlink.
A Call-to-Action acts as a key element on a website. It tells users what needs to be done next. Without CTA, a visitor may not know what step needs to be taken to connect with a dentist.
Make an appointment, Schedule an Appointment, Call Us today are some of the commonly used CTAs on dental websites. But, what if I tell you about an exciting CTA that connects the patient virtually to give them consultation from the comfort of their home?
Take a look at a dental website of Dr. Keerthi Senthil DDS, MS where she is putting the CTA to good use. Now her patients take a free video consultation with her for recommendation before even stepping a foot in her dental practice in Cathedral City CA. This creates a sense of trustworthiness in patients and knows more about you before getting into the practice.
Expert Advice Widget
This strong CTA has increased Dr. Senthil’s productivity and case acceptance. Dr. Senthil has redefined the way of practicing dentistry with Expert Advice, personalised video consultation software for dentists.
Example of traditional call-to-action used in dental website:
- Read more articles
- Sign-up for our newsletter
- Support our sponsor
- Contact Us
- Share on social media
CTAs on each page tells the user what action to take next to continue interacting with the site, and moving further down the conversion funnel.
Colours
A well thought out colour palette can enhance your user experience. Using contrasting colors on text and background will make reading easier on the eye. For buttons and call to actions, vibrant color creates emotion and should be used sparingly.
Keep it Simple
Continuing with fewer themes, it also applies to your design in general. A study from Google shows that "Visitors don't like visual complexity" the less the complex, the more it looks beautiful to visitors. What does that mean for your site? Here are a few ideas:
- Stick to Standard Layouts: Visitors love familiarity and can get weirded out by non-standard site designs. Therefore, it is good to stick with familiar design tropes and layouts.
- Rethink the Sidebar: More and more websites are ditching the sidebar in favor of a single-column design. It creates less distraction and puts the visitor focus clearly on the content.
Easy Loading
No one likes a website that takes too much time to load the pages. Take care of your website loading speed by optimising image sizes. Compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for enhanced loading speed.
Mobile Compatibility
Nowadays it's common to access websites from multiple devices with different screen sizes, that's the reason it’s important to consider if your website is mobile-friendly. If your website is not mobile-friendly it's better to rebuild it in a responsive layout.
User Experience
Getting visitors to your website is only the first step, wanting them to stay long enough to read and take action can be a difficult task. Some of the best ways to create the best user experience are:
- Easy Navigation: Easy navigation makes your website visitor to spend more time trying to find information on your website.
- Contact Information: Make sure your phone number and address can be easily found on your website.
- Easy to Eyes: Avoid too many distractions that make your site too busy.
Video Content
Use of narrative rich content such as video which can provide patients an overview of every dental procedure. Patients may have many question regarding their dental problem and treatment. The answer is 3D dental patient education videos on your website which can be very helpful for patients to take informed decision. Now make your time valuable by placing the dental treatment videos and reduce considerable amount of time in educating your patients about the dental treatment.
Credibility and Trustworthiness
Choosing a dentist is an extremely personal decision; make sure your website helps patients see that you are credible and trustworthy. How to do this?
- Show your happy patients in images, videos, and testimonials
- Showcase your patients’ before and after pictures to let visitors see your quality of work
- List all the services you provide
- Include the FAQ section that addresses a common question
- Include a video of your practice, your team and how things work (culture) in your practice to help a website visitor know about your practice on a personal level. A testimonial on your prospective patients will put more weight on how others describe your services than what you say about yourself
Wrap It Up
Keeping these principles of a good dental website, you can easily develop an aesthetic and functional website to connect with your audience digitally. A clean and user-friendly design can make your dental business stand out in the crowd. Take necessary action to build your digital medium and know-how; a digital marketing agency can help a dental practice to achieve success.