The majority of people search for a dentist online before making an appointment. Hence, it is essential to consider search engine optimization for your dental website.
If you compare other sites on the web, the dental website has some specific requirements. Many people don’t have a fear of visiting a dentist, and that’s why it’s essential your dental website is friendly and calm.
Being a dentist, your aim from the dental website should be to educate patients, build trust among them, and mention all the dental services you offer in detail. In simple words, you should consider creating an SEO-friendly website.
Now, the question is, how to create an SEO-friendly dental website?
To make the task easy, we will explain in detail about designing & developing an SEO-friendly website.
Before that, let us understand some basics:
What is an SEO-Friendly Dental Website?
Have you heard about SEO-friendly dental websites? It means a fully optimized website that would increase its chances of a higher ranking in a search engine result. This in turn would lead to more traffic. More traffic to a website will lead to new patients coming to your dental clinic.
An SEO-friendly dental website is something that confuses many dentists. It is especially frustrating for the dental practice owners who just want to provide world-class patient care and are not focused on becoming marketing experts.
Therefore, if you are frustrated with little traffic to your website, then you should take the help of a professional SEO expert to optimize your website to get a higher ranking.
How to Design an SEO-Friendly Dental Website?
For designing an SEO-friendly dentist website, you need to consider various things. Here we have curated some tips for designing an SEO-friendly dentist website. They are as follows.
Latest UI/UX Trends: You need to be aware of the latest UI/UX trends in the market and integrate them into your dental website. Why? People like to use designs that are trending & attractive.
Proper Fonts & Colors: Your entire dental website should be designed considering some specific colors and fonts. It makes your dental website attractive and helps you in branding.
Use High-Quality Images: Never use stock photos on your dental website. People don’t like stock photos on a website and move away from it. Instead, include high-quality images on your website to make it visually appealing.
After looking at the tips for designing an SEO-friendly dental website, we will provide you with essential pages that you should consider for your dental website design.
So let’s start.
Meet the team page
A patient wants to know as much as he/she can about the dentist who is going to treat him/her. Therefore, there should be a “meet the team page,” in which information about the specialties, credentials, and achievements of the dentist (s) is mentioned to ensure credibility and gain the trust of the visitor. It should also include information about the support staff, the facilities, and any other important highlight.
Financial Page
This page should have the details about all the insurance plans, payment details, and methods that are accepted at the clinic.
Office tour
There should be a page on your website in which you can give a virtual tour of your clinic so that the visitor gets a good idea of what facilities to expect when they visit your clinic for the first time.
Forms
Your website should provide access to all types of paperwork needed for making an appointment with the dentist. Make sure that the forms provided in this section should include the essential points that the patient should share with you which are crucial for his/her treatment.
Before and after
You must provide visual proof of the various dental procedures that are done at your clinic. Provide pictures before and after the treatment to gain the trust of your new patient.
Service page
Your website should have a service page that provides information about all the important services that you provide including cosmetic dentistry, laser treatment, root canal treatment et cetera. Make sure that each one of these critical services is further explained by a specific page.
Location and operating hours
You must mention the name, address, and phone number of your dental clinic. Furthermore, you could have a separate page for important details like business hours and maps.
Online appointments
Offering online appointments is a great way to minimize the workload on your staff’s time and energy. It will allow your patients to check the various time slots available and based on it can choose the time of their convenience either through your website or on the phone.
How to Develop an SEO-Friendly Dental Website?
To make your dental website SEO friendly, you have to make some changes. Some of these changes include the following.
The search engine should be able to find your website
Just creating a website is not enough, you have to ensure that the search engine finds your website easily and is also able to read it. There should be no outdated and media-heavy features like Silverlight, Flash, or iFrames on your website. Some other important SEO features that you should focus on include the following:
- URLs
- Image alt text
- Faster page load time
- Meta titles and descriptions
- Small image and video file sizes
- There should be no broken links
Make sure that every single page of your website follows the above-mentioned points.
An attractively designed website
Make sure that you keep the experience of the user as the top priority when designing the website, which in turn would be a huge factor in the ranking of your website. To do this successfully, you should hire a professional website designer. The designer should have good knowledge about the dental industry and has experience in search engine optimization.
Some of the design features that you should include in your website to make it SEO friendly include the following:
- The website should be mobile-friendly
- Your website should use HIPAA and ADA-compliant practices
- The website should load faster
- The design of the website should be simple for easy navigation
Upload keyword-optimized original content
Your attractively designed website should be supported by keyword-optimized content that is unique and interesting. Make sure that the content you are writing for your website should be relevant to your niche, have the latest information, and is well-structured to grab the attention of the viewer and hold it.
Put your practice on Google Maps
Putting your practice on the Google map is a great way to attract the eyes of potential patients. Whenever you search for any local business, then the map directory results come at the top. Therefore, adding your practice on Google Maps is a great way to improve the ranking of your website.
- Put as much information about your dental practice as feasible
- Put photos of your practice
- Put your local phone number
Add your practice on local citation sites and directories
You must put your practice on the local citation, which will mention the services you are offering on the web. These citation sites include the name, address, and phone number of your dental clinic. Some of the top popular local citation sites which you can use to list your dental clinic are:
- Healthgrades
- Yelp
- ZocDoc
Must have a patient review section
It is important to show Google that you are trusted by your patients by including patient reviews on your website. You can also include these reviews on Google, Yelp, or Facebook. Having patient reviews on your website as well as social media linked accounts, will help in getting your website higher weightage from the search engine algorithm, which would result in a higher ranking in any organic search result.
Conclusion
We hope you have understood the tips for designing and developing an SEO-friendly dental website. The primary goal of a dental website is to get new patient appointments and show what your practice represents.
Every dental practice is unique in many ways, and it uses specific approaches to attract the target audience. Hence, you need to create an SEO-friendly dental website based on your niche and target audience.
After creating a dental website considering SEO, your task isn’t over. You will not start getting patients instantly. To attract the audience, you should consider the best dental marketing tips.
By implementing these tips for your dental website, your site could reach a wider audience and help you generate good revenue progressively.
