Dental websites are very important for the success of your dental practice. With more dental practices than ever before, dental websites are important for patients to help them decide who they want to look after their teeth.
A good dental website helps you tell potential patients about the treatments and procedures that you have to offer at your dental practice. It allows you to provide the public with dental health education and encourage them to visit the dentist on a regular basis. For nervous patients, your dental website gives you the opportunity to reach out and encourage them to combat their fears and enjoy better dental health.
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Key features of successful dental websites
There are many important features of a successful dental website and it is important that you find a multiple award-winning digital dental marketing team who specialise in dental websites to create your website for you so that you can be sure that you will stand out from amongst the crowd. Your website needs to be modern, highly attractive, informative and in keeping with current trends. It needs to grab the attention of the visitor, answer the questions that they are looking for with regards to their teeth, and encourage them to take up one of your treatments or procedures and hopefully become a regular patient at your practice.
SEO
To begin with, you need a website that is designed with search engine optimisation or SEO in mind. SEO is a system of techniques and strategies which helps search engines such as Google recognise that you are a credible and trustworthy website, and that you have the answers that potential patients are looking for so that it can rank you highly on search results lists for dental practices in your area.
There are three different types of SEO. SEO needs to be carried out onsite; this means that the actual content of the website needs to be optimised to meet the requirements of Google. SEO needs to be carried out off-site or outside of the website to improve its rankings in the search results lists. Off-site SEO includes techniques such as link building, guest posting and social media marketing. The last type of SEO is technical SEO; this is what makes your website easy to search, crawl, and index by Google. Technical SEO is also concerned with user experience.
Page speed
You need to make sure that your website has excellent page speed. Page speed measures how fast the content of a page loads. Many factors can affect page speed but it is very important that your pages load in between 0 and 2 seconds. Anything above 3 seconds is likely to cause your visitor to leave your website and visit that of another dental practice in the area. Good page speed is necessary for good user experience and is an important ranking factor in search results lists as well.
Accessibility
Another important feature is that your website needs to be accessible. It should be accessible by patients who are not very confident with using the internet. It should also be accessible by patients with disabilities. Not only does this prevent legal complaints but it also widens your audience and allows patients with disabilities to access dental health education and take up your services, in turn helping you to increase patient numbers and look after the community.
No 404
It is important that all the pages of your website are working correctly. Occasionally a web page may show a 404 error. If a website visitor comes across a 404 error then it is more than likely that they will leave your website and visit that of another dental practice in your area. 404 errors can be annoying, a waste of time and also they may give the impression that your website is not trustworthy. This can also affect your rankings in the search results page.
Contents
With regards to the actual content of the website it is important that you have a site map or contents section. A content section helps visitors find what they are looking for quickly without having to browse through your whole website and get bored. It is also important for SEO, organising the pages in an effective manner so that Google and other search engines can index your pages quickly and easily. The content of your website should be correct, informative and educational. It should be interesting to read and text should always be broken up with pictures and videos where possible to retain the attention of the reader.
Speak to an award-winning digital marketing team today to find out more about modern dental websites and how they can help you maintain an individually tailored dental website that is unique to you and stands out from amongst the crowd.