The main goal of any dental website should be to serve as a tool to enhance your business. It can do this by simplifying some processes such as patient forms, but the real impact comes when dentists use the website as a tool for new patient acquisition and business development. Having built dental websites over the past 13 years, Patients4you has found the following items to be the most important when it comes to designing a dental website for conversions.
Trust
Trust is a key component of any consumer decision, and it is driven largely by intangible factors on what makes a consumer feel more comfortable. The internet being such an anonymous place, it provides consumers much comfort when they can see the humans behind the other side of the website they are visiting. The best dentist websites have pictures not only of the doctor and management team, but of the whole team including hygienists, front desk and other administrative staff. Remember that patients are embarking on a long term relationship when they elect your practice, and as such will likely interact with multiple members of your team.
Speed
The average consumer will not wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load before navigating away from the page. In addition to this, page speed is becoming an ever more important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm for determining organic search results and positioning.
Specials and Promotions
As in all retail, customers are enticed and moved by special offers. Clinics that adopt a data-driven approach to marketing and have a good handle on the lifetime value of a patient for the practice, understand that they can afford to offer enticing initial offer and still have the patient be profitable for the practice.
Cater to Dental Emergency Patients
Throughout the years that Patients4you has been managing and designing websites for dentists across the country, there has always been one kind of patient and marketing initiative that delivers consistent and predictable ROI, and that is marketing for dental emergencies. It is easy to see why this is the case: the typical patient will evaluate three dental practices before deciding on which one to visit, whereas the typical emergency patient has a much stronger sense of urgency and will generally go with the first office they can find that can work with their situation. For this reason, catering to emergency patients and having options for them to call can be one of the quickest ways to get new patients in the door.
Most of your Users will Browse your Website on their Phones
Since dentists are on their own websites all day, and usually access the site through their desktop computer, they forget that actually most users will only see the mobile version of their site. For this reason, it is imperative that the website is designed and tested with a mobile first mindset. There are many conversion tactics that work on desktop, but that simply are not effective on mobile.
Conversion on the Phone is Imperative
Getting potential patients to pick up the phone and call your office is only the first step in establishing contact. If your office line is busy, and you never follow up with the patient, then your whole marketing efforts were rendered useless. Ensure your staff is always nice and courteous with all incoming calls.
Armed with this knowledge, you should evaluate your current website and determine how well you are executing on these principles. Should you need any assistance, Patients4you has over 13 years of experience on building great dental websites.
