When people need to find local services, like dental care, they often turn to online searches and book an appointment with the highest-ranking clinic. The number of searches for “near me” has increased by more than 500% in the last two years, and nearly 88% of users who search for local businesses on their mobile devices visit them within a week.
Taking the time to build a dental website that incorporates SEO in website development can help you rank higher in the search results and reach more people who need a dentist.
Discover the importance of implementing SEO elements into your website design and how website development services from Mediboost can help your website rank higher and attract new patients.
Importance of SEO and Website Design
A search engine optimisation (SEO) process ensures that a website appears high on search engine results pages (SERPs) by making it search engine-friendly. When you integrate SEO with web development and design, you can create an easy user experience and increase visibility to patients who need to schedule a dental appointment.
When you work with a dental marketing company like Mediboost to incorporate SEO into your website design, you can achieve the following:
Increase High-Intent Traffic
Increase High-Intent TrafficSearch engines like Google use keywords and site navigation signals to determine whether a page is relevant to a particular search query. After searching for a local clinic, patients who find your optimised dental website become aware of your services and can contact you for a consultation or to schedule an appointment.
Appearing at the top of the search results helps your clinic stay at the forefront of patients’ minds. This increases the chances they’ll choose your clinic for their dental needs over the competition.
Improve User Experience
Providing a smooth user experience on your dental site includes helping your audience navigate it with user-friendly website development and design. Your site should engage your audience and encourage them to learn more about your services.
For example, your website should contain navigation tools, search bars, and internal links to services and information. Search engines rank your site higher if people spend more time on your site, which improves your SEO.
SEO in Website Development: Factors to Consider
The website development of a dental site involves considering several elements that impact SEO. These elements affect your site’s performance and ranking in search engine results. When designing your website, keep the following SEO factors in mind to see the best outcome:
Mobile Friendliness
Approximately 86% of Australians own a smartphone, making Australia one of the world’s leading smartphone users. Due to the increase in mobile use, Google released an algorithm update in 2015 requiring a responsive site to rank in the search results.
As part of your web development efforts, creating a mobile-friendly dental website is essential. Incorporating mobile-friendly features can help your patients find the information they need, navigate your site, and contact your clinic quickly. Ensure your website design adapts to various mobile devices, from smartphones to tablets.
Other elements of a well-designed, responsive site include:
- Larger buttons for mobile navigation
- Flexible images that resize automatically
- Website layout with fluid grids that adapt to different screen sizes
Website Speed
Your website’s speed is an essential element that Google considers when determining your search ranking. Google favours sites with a fast loading speed since it wants to provide users with the most relevant results. Therefore, a website’s load time should be 5 seconds or less. A delay of one second to your site’s mobile loading time can affect conversion rates by as much as 20%.
Remove unnecessary features that can slow down your website to speed up its load time. Features to remove may include:
- Big image file sizes
- Embedded multimedia, such as videos and images
- Excessive ads and third-party widgets
Adding JavaScript and jQuery plugins to create dynamic content can benefit your site. However, if a web developer does not code JavaScript correctly, it can also slow down the load time for visitors. Having a professional website development team evaluate the code on your dental website can help you decide what you need to make it load faster and help people find it.
Website Navigation
Thoughtful website design for your dental site requires an effective and user-friendly navigation menu. The menu can also link to your primary service pages with content that includes specific keywords. With a robust navigation menu, search engines can crawl through and rank them, enabling users to discover more about your dental services.
As part of your SEO in web development efforts, you can make navigation easier by crosslinking between blog posts and other content on your dental website. Crosslinking can lead more people to your service and contact pages, improving your SEO efforts.
Readability
In your website design, use bold and simple fonts in the headers and content so your visitors can easily read the content. Visitors will leave your site if difficult-to-read fonts, such as script fonts or tiny sizing, prevents them from reading your content.
Your website should have helpful and concise content to engage visitors and motivate them to book a consultation with you. Short paragraphs, simple language, and proper grammar make it easy for visitors to skim the content to find what they need.
Your website should also contain semantically relevant dental SEO keywords and phrases that describe your services, such as root canals, porcelain crowns, and dental implants.
Image File Names
Keywords in the images’ file names can provide Google with information about what’s in them and how they are related to your content. For example, if you write a blog post about the dental implant process, you can rename the images’ file names with keywords related to the products used in the procedure.
URL Structure
The URL structure of your dental website pages and blog posts should contain relevant keywords. Each URL slug should contain only the main keyword of your page. Most keyword phrases are a few words, so people searching for a specific page may enter them into the search bar.
As Google picks up on the keyword phrases in your URLs, it helps boost your SEO.
Grow Your Practice with an Optimised Dental Website
Using a SEO in your website development strategy can help you reach your target audience and explain the benefits of visiting your dental practice. Enhance your search engine results by optimising your content with Mediboost dental marketing services.
Our experienced website developers will help you use target keywords and SEO-friendly web development practices to create better user experiences and attract more patients.
With Mediboost, you’ll receive reliable search engine-optimised dental website design services to help you further develop your website. Contact us on 1300 163 058 today to learn more about our dental website development services.
References
Smartphone Local Search and Store Visits
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/local-search-to-store-visit-statistics/
500%+ growth in “near me” mobile searches containing “can I buy” or “to buy” over the last 2 years.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/near-me-searches-growth-can-i-buy/
Smartphone penetration rate as share of the population in Australia in 2017 with an estimate until 2026
https://www.statista.com/statistics/321477/smartphone-user-penetration-in-australia/
Rolling out the mobile-friendly update
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2015/04/rolling-out-mobile-friendly-update
Speed is now a landing page factor for Google Search and Ads
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/search-ads-speed/
A few tips to speed up your mobile site and tools to test it
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-site-speed-tools/
Mobile page speed data
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-site-speed-tools-improve-conversions/
