Your website is a reflection of your dental practice. It’s important to have a clean, easy-to-navigate website with relevant content so that prospective patients will choose your team instead of one of your competitors. Here are four ways you can start promoting your dental practice by improving your website’s design and content.
How to Improve Your Dental Practice Website
1: Optimize It with Relevant Keywords
To help new patients find your website, you need to optimize it for search engines so it will rank higher in search results. The process of search engine optimization (SEO) helps search engines like Google easily understand what services and information your website offers.
A good SEO strategy involves using relevant keywords in your web content. Keywords are short phrases that prospective patients commonly search for, such as “family dentist” or “wisdom teeth removal.”
The more detailed the keywords, the more relevant your website will be for certain results. For instance, someone experiencing a dental emergency is more likely to search for “emergency dentist” than just “dentist.” Optimizing for “emergency dentist in [your location]” shows Google that you offer the services the web user is looking for, in the same place where they are located.
There are many free SEO tools you can use to help you come up with effective keywords, such as Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These tools will not only suggest new keywords, but will also tell you the search volume for those terms, to help you understand which keywords are most relevant.
2: Focus on Local SEO
When optimizing your website, it’s important to implement geographical keywords as well. Listing your location on your website’s contact page simply isn’t enough. You should also be adding your location to other content in an organic way. For instance, a dentist in Phoenix might add “Cosmetic Dentist in Phoenix, Arizona” at the top of a page detailing their cosmetic dentistry services.
Improving local SEO makes Google more likely to display your website when someone in your area searches for “dentist near me.” It also helps web users who find your website quickly determine whether or not your location is convenient for them.
3: Write Useful Content
Good SEO doesn’t mean oversaturating your content with huge groups of keywords. This practice is called “keyword stuffing.” It is actually penalized by Google, and will make your website rank lower in search results.
Google wants to offer web users the most relevant and useful results possible, so you need to create useful content that matches a web user’s search intent. Informative content also establishes your practice as an authority in the industry, helping to build trust with prospective patients.
For example, someone searching for “how to relieve tooth pain” is searching for a how-to guide, not a service page. But someone simply searching for “veneers” is probably looking for a dentist offering that specific service.
Here’s how to make sure your content is useful:
- Write the appropriate kind of content for the type of search (informative blog post, how-to guide, service page, FAQ page, etc.).
- Write easy-to-read, well-organized, and error-free content.
- Target one or two keywords that are relevant to the search query throughout the content.
4: Make It User-Friendly
No matter how well-written your content is, web users won’t stick around if your website is frustrating to use. A user-friendly website contributes to a positive patient experience, improving your reputation.
You can make your website more user-friendly by:
- Creating an intuitive navigation menu and logical website layout
- Optimizing your website for mobile devices (Google has a free tool that lets you test your website’s mobile-friendliness)
- Making your website accessible to all types of web users, including the disabled, elderly, and blind
- Ensuring that your website loads quickly, so people don’t get frustrated and leave
Professional Web Design Services for Dentists
Do you need help improving your dental practice website? The New Wine Digital team is experienced in creating user-friendly websites with strong SEO. We also create informative and engaging content for dentists across the country. Call us at 480-516-1819 to learn more about how we can help boost your dental practice by improving your website.
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (1/9/2023). Image by Mudassar Iqbal from Pixabay