There’s no doubt that a dental website is a significant investment in your business and one that can work for you – that is if you understand dental website marketing.
The problem is that too many dental practices simply don’t use their website as the powerful marketing tool that it really is. Instead, they fill it with all the relevant information, put it out there for everyone to see and forget about it.
While that may have worked 10-15 years ago, nowadays, virtually every dental practice has a website, so your chances of being noticed if you do nothing are pretty much zero.
Think about it this way; your dental website is your shop window. It’s working for you 24/7 when you aren’t, and understanding how it can help your dental practice, can put you ahead of the game, and more importantly, ahead of your competition, to land new patients.
With this in mind, we’re going to give you 7 top tips to get your dental website working for you and earning its keep.
#1 – Building backlinks
When it comes to dental marketing, backlinks are still important – not just any old backlinks mind. Instead, we’re talking quality. So what do we mean by quality?
When Google sees that a reputable dental website links back to your website, it basically says, ‘hey, this trustworthy site thinks that this dental site is worth a mention. Let’s move it up a few ranks’.
The idea is that over time, with enough quality backlinks, your dental website will move up the search engine results for the keywords you want to rank for. This, in turn, gives you a greater chance of being spotted when someone in your area is searching for a dental practice to undergo treatment.
Like many aspects of dental marketing, proper backlinking is a long-term strategy that can and does work. So how long is the long-term? According to some sources, a quality backlink can impact results in as little as ten weeks, but this can take six months or more for competitive keywords.
#2 – Managing your review sites
Love them or hate them, review sites like Google My Business, Yelp and WhiteCoat are an essential part of dental marketing. We live in a review-based culture, and many people will look at reviews before they commit to buying, using a service, or booking a treatment. It’s thought that nine out of every ten people read reviews before making a purchase.
As a dental practice, you need to encourage people to review, especially if they have had a positive experience. These reviews can then be linked back to your dental website and used as testimonials.
#3 – Optimising your dental website for the search engines
This, in effect, is dental website marketing 101!
If you do nothing else, your website needs to be optimised to stand a chance of getting ranked well. While keywords in the content are essential for dental marketing, optimising a dental website is about so much more. Some of the key factors that search engines look for are
- Responsiveness to mobile viewing – Is your website mobile friendly?
- Meta tags and descriptions – Are they fully optimised?
- Website load times – Visitors don’t want to wait for ages for a page to load.
All of these need to be optimised to build a good foundation for dental marketing success.
#4 – Creating engaging content
If optimising your dental website is dental marketing 101, then creating engaging content is a close second. It’s all about creating interesting share-worthy content that positions your dental practice as experts in their fields. This is an essential part of dental website marketing and needs to be done regularly and often.
Some of the ways that you can add content to your site include:
- Regular blog posts on key topics people are asking
- Adding more pages if you have a new service or treatment you want to promote
- Adding city, suburb and state-level pages to attract patients from nearby suburbs.
Whatever you do, do it regularly and make it count.
#5 – Promotion, promotion, promotion
Whether you have had content written for you or it’s been done in house, there’s no point in uploading it to your dental website and doing nothing else. Nowadays, Google wants to see evidence of people talking about your article (comments), linking to it, referencing it or discussing it (social media). A good dental marketing strategy focuses less on creating mass content and instead allocates resources to promoting engaging and share-worthy articles, as detailed above.
Ways to promote an article include:
- To your email list
- On social media
- Guest posting
- Reaching out to influencers
Do these things, and after a while, your dental practice will start to garner results.
#6 – Incorporating a good sales funnel
When you consider that getting new patients through your dental practice door is the end goal, your website is the cornerstone of that. So how do you maximise the number of visitors to your site and convert those leads into patients? Build a good sales funnel.
This can be something as simple as creating engaging Facebook or Google ads directing interested parties to dedicated landing pages. The landing page should give more information about the service you are promoting and can be incorporated into your dental website. As far as dental website marketing goes, studies have shown that websites with 10-15 landing pages increase conversions by 55%.
In easy terms, if a person shows interest in a particular ad and clicks through to a treatment-specific landing page, you then have a process in place that hopefully turns that lead into a new dental patient.
Moreover, a good sales funnel makes the process trackable, so you can see what works, enabling you to do more of the same.
That’s intuitive dental website marketing, right there!
#7 – Creating the perfect UX
Good dental website marketing isn’t just about driving visitors to your site; it’s also about what happens when they get there. This why creating the ideal user experience (UX) is vital.
Let’s face it, if a visitor has found your dental website and it won’t load properly, it becomes difficult to find the information they need, or they can’t find how to contact you (believe me, it happens), then the whole job of getting them there in the first place is pointless. So, ensure
- pages load quickly
- navigation from page to page is easy and simple
- contact details are easily visible on every page and
- website layout is strategic and straightforward.
So there you have it, 7 top tips to get the best out of your dental practice website.
If you want to know more about dental website marketing or partner with a company with a proven track record in new patient growth, come and talk to Mediboost.
Call us on 1300 163 058 or book a consultation today and see just how we can help you.
