When speaking with patients suffering from tooth decay, dentists rightfully point out how easily preventable the damage is with proactive care. Proper hygiene, better dietary habits, and regular check-ups maintain the integrity of teeth and prevent additional damage even if patients previously failed to commit to good dental health practices. However, preventing tooth decay requires a commitment by the patients, similar to avoiding website design mistakes.
Bad web design is a dangerous practice that undermines a business’s growth potential despite easy prevention. Thankfully, website design mistakes can be corrected once identified. Businesses that fix them can regain previous losses in existing and potential clientele through their commitment to a professional digital presence. Your dental practice can overcome previous website mistakes to dominate SEO search results.
Common Web Design Mistakes and Why They Pose Issues
Website design is an alien concept that doesn’t always connect with the traditional skill sets necessary for professionally improving dental health. This issue often results in perfect example cases of website design mistakes that we can study and rectify. Some of the most common mistakes and the problems behind their use include the following elements:
- Slow load speeds – Users seek fast, responsive services while researching dental services. By using designs that require long load times, a business increases the rate of potential clients clicking off immediately. This ultimately hurts their SEO metrics as Google directs users away from their pages due to poor performance.
- Non-responsive designs – The current digital age demands designs that work for constantly evolving devices and interfaces. This means that every website needs to be prepared to service all devices. Sites that fail to provide responsive designs through testing and research create unpleasant user experiences that drive away potential clients using devices that the designs do not function well on.
- Poor navigation – Even if a digital space provides a fast and responsive user experience, that’s not enough to succeed. Your site still needs to convert users to patients through proper navigation to your services and contact information. Businesses cannot reap the full benefits of their digital presence if their sites do not correctly direct users to become clients. Users will instead seek competitors with more obvious contact methods.
Of course, dental offices can prevent any of these issues when creating a website through consultation and review. Even if you only discover the problems after a launch, there is still hope for the site’s traffic. If a business takes active steps to fix the issues quickly, then the site’s search metrics will improve substantially.
Why You Should Avoid Cookie-Cutter Website Designs
Given the nature of Google’s ranking system, websites and their content must be designed with SEO in mind. However, some web designers may overwhelm the first page of a search by using cookie-cutter websites that oversaturate pages with keywords without providing meaningful content to users. When this occurs, users cannot receive relevant information, undermining Google’s business model as users become less likely to trust the service.
Fortunately for the health of internet searches and competing businesses, Google does not treat rate manipulation lightly. When discovered, Google punishes rank manipulation by issuing manual spam alerts for the content. This means that Google will pull the site’s penalized pages from the top search results. If the misconduct is severe, Google may issue a blanket blackout which prevents the entire site from appearing in searches.
In a competitive digital age, any downtime is lost time for a business’s growth as a reputable, high-quality organization. It is crucial for the health of your business’s digital brand to avoid these practices altogether. They create an unfulfilling user experience that puts your site at risk of becoming blacklisted from search results.
Start Protecting Your Digital Health
It’s never too late to begin improving your dental practice’s digital reputation and correcting past website design mistakes. However, the sooner you start, the better the ultimate payoff from work put in. Here at New Wine Digital, we’re able to work with you every step of the way in building, maintaining, and redesigning your website for the ultimate user experience. Contact us today at 480-516-1819 to start setting the foundations for your business’s growth.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash