Greetings!
Would you like to book more new patients from your website?
Last week, we reviewed our dental marketing strategy we used to grow Highmoor Dental from a small dental practice with one dentist, into an award-winning dental practice that eventually sold to a large dental organization for a generous multiple of earnings.
This week, we’ll review the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy: your dental website.
If you think of your website as simply an online brochure and invest little time or resources into it, you’ll get little out of it in terms of new patients.
However, if you see your website as the online headquarters of your dental practice, you’ll invest more time and resources into it and get a lot more patients out of it in return.
But, where do you start? Should you keep your existing website and improve it, use a DIY website builder, or hire a freelancer or agency to help you?
Here, I’ll provide a comprehensive overview of all of your options to develop the best dental website design for dentists to attract new patients to your practice.
DIY Website Builders
As you can see from the chart above, there are many options with various pros and cons for each. Although DIY website builders provide lower financial costs, they also require a greater amount of time investment, which takes away from your ability to focus on delivering and billing dental services. Also, the business results may not meet your expectations, depending on how much time you also invest in learning digital marketing, on-page SEO, etc. Although it’s relatively easy to build your own website using DIY tools, it’s more challenging building a website that ranks high in search results and produces positive business results.
Hire Freelancer
Hiring a local freelancer or a freelancer online has its advantages, depending on the quality and skillset of the individual freelancer. An individual usually has lower operating costs than a business, so they often charge a lower rate than an agency. However, one person may likely not have all of the skillsets required (e.g. design, development, copywriting, marketing, on-page SEO, etc.) to develop a business website that produces great results. Many freelancer designers may be skilled in creating aesthetic designs, but may struggle with building a website that’s easily found at the top of Google or increases web conversions to book more appointments.
Hire Agency
Generally, this option requires a larger financial investment, but the least time investment on your part. The results vary on the agency, but if you hire a top dental website design agency you can be assured of getting a premium quality website, friendly support from a team of experts, higher online keyword rankings, and better business results. Although this may require a greater initial investment, it may also produce the greatest financial return on investment by consistently attracting new patients to your practice.
Now that we’ve reviewed your options for creating a new dental website, what’s the best platform to use? Many web design agencies use Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly, in addition to WordPress or custom-coded development using HTML/CSS. What’s the best option for you?
Building a website using a website builder (e.g. Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly) is similar to buying a pre-fabricated, modular house. It requires a lower financial investment and is user-friendly, but at the expense of customization, features and functionality.
Building a website using WordPress CMS is similar to buying a new house from a residential home developer. There are many floor plans to choose from and you can customize the features you need, creating a balance between functionality and affordability.
Building a website using custom coded development is similar to custom designing a new house with an architect, then hiring an engineering firm and general contractor to construct the house. It requires significantly more time, planning and cost, but the quality will vary depending on the experience and skillset of the team.
Website Builders: Wix, SquareSpace & Weebly
Generally, Wix, SquareSpace and Weebly are considered the top three most popular website builders, based on market share (i.e. 1.2-4.4%). They’re very similar to use, have similar features and affordable pricing (e.g. $10-$50/mo.). Many people find them easy to use, however the features are limited.
For example, SquareSpace and Weebly are both ‘closed-systems’, meaning that they want you to use their internal software tools instead of integrating third-party tools. As a result, you may not be able to integrate your online booking calendar or connect your EMR. Since SquareSpace owns Acuity Scheduling, they’d rather you use their scheduling software, instead of your own. Wix does have an app marketplace for third-party tools, but the market size is limited.
Also, if you decide to leave, you likely won’t be able to move your website with you. Because these tools use proprietary technology, they are best kept hosted directly with their provider. That means that you cannot transfer or export your dental website out to another provider – at least not easily.
Although Wix is built using standard HTML5, it’s also developed using Wix’s proprietary Velo code, so it cannot be hosted with a third-party outside of Wix. With SquareSpace, you can export your site as an .html file, but only certain content types will be transferable. Similarly, with Weebly, you can migrate the content of your website, but not the designs, as they are developed using different technologies.
Finally, website builders have built-in SEO tools, making it user-friendly, but providing limited features for optimization. They also have built-in tools for speed and security, providing user-friendliness at the expense of comprehensive functionality.
WordPress CMS
Wordpress.com is a website builder, much like Wix. However, wordpress.org is an open-source content-management system (CMS) that powers over 44% of all websites on the Internet, and over 62% of all CMS platforms, doubling in market share in just the last 10 years alone.
WordPress CMS also powers many large websites globally, including The Harvard Gazette, Time Magazine, BBC America, CNN Newsroom, The Walt Disney Company, Microsoft News, The New York Times, Sony Music, TedBlog, and more.
The reason for the explosion in global market share for WordPress websites is because of their extensive network of third-party tools and plugins offering comprehensive functionality, making it the best fit for most business use cases.
WordPress CMS is considered open-source software, unlike the closed proprietary systems developed by the website builders. This allows third-party developers to create tools and plugins that provide additional features and functionality, including connecting your online booking calendar, integrating with your EMR directly, providing comprehensive on-page SEO analysis and guidance using artificial intelligence (AI) software, improving speed, performance, and more.
Many third-party developers have created software to give WordPress websites a robust, user-friendly editor that’s similar to website builders. That means that you can manage your website yourself, or internally with your team, without relying on expensive developers for every small update or change in your website info.
Also, WordPress CMS is developed primarily in PHP, avaScript, HTML and CSS, which are standard programming languages for the web allowing easy transfer of your website from one host to another hosting provider – giving you complete control over your hosting options.
Custom Coded
Websites can also be custom developed on code editing software, such as CKEditor, Microsoft Visual Studio, Xcode and others. This allows for an almost limitless amount of customization, as you’re building the entire website from scratch. Custom coded websites require developing the back-end infrastructure and databases, as well as front-end designs and content.
The main benefit of custom coding websites is that you’re only coding what you need, and not carrying additional code that slows down your website speed and performance. As a result, custom coded websites are often the fastest loading.
However, since custom coded websites require coding the entire website from scratch, it takes longer, requires more labour hours and costs more to develop. On average, custom coded websites can cost about $10,000-$50,000 to fully design and develop, depending on size.
Also, custom coded websites require a professional developer to manage and update on your behalf. You’ll either have to hire an in-house developer or hire an external developer to continue to make updates for your website, however big or small.
Higher development costs and complex website management have motivated many businesses to shift their websites from custom coded to content management systems. In 2011, about 76% of all websites online were custom coded. By 2024, this has dropped to about 32% due to the rise in popularity of content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, which now make up over 62% of all CMS market share online.
Website Infrastructure
Now that you’ve decided on the best platform for your dental website, we can move forward to planning your website structure, including the pages, sections and content. For starters, how many web pages do you need to begin with?
One page? Or five? Ten? 20? How many pages do you even need?
Well, what’s the purpose of a web page?
A web page serves several functions, including: attracting new website visitors, providing information on your practice, team, services, and ultimately, motivating visitors to contact your front desk to book an appointment.
Since the first goal in online digital marketing is to attract a website visitor, this person found your web page online because they were searching for keywords that are relevant to the content on that page. Therefore, its best to assign one target keyword for each web page.
Think of each web page as a fishing line that attracts fish searching for the content on that fishing line. You can catch more fish by having more fishing lines (or web pages) out in the sea. But, if your fishing lines are too close together, they interfere with each other’s ability to attract fish. You need to strategically place your fishing lines away from each other, in areas that fish are most likely to swim, to increase your chances of success.
In other words, although more web pages are better, as each web page can attract new traffic searching for content on that page, you have to strategically choose which keywords you want to target on each page to ensure you capture the right traffic that’s searching for your dental services. Sometimes a small change in the order of your words will have a significant impact on your website traffic.
For example, many dental websites advertise their ‘endodontics’ services. Although this is medically correct terminology, many patients are not as familiar with this language, so they use different keywords when they search online. Many patients are more familiar with a common treatment, root canals, and search for that keyword instead.
Google monthly search volume, Canada, Nov 2024:
· Endodontics: 6,500
· Root Canal: 24,200
Ideally, you have one web page for each of your primary dental services where you target one primary keyword (e.g. root canal) with several secondary words (e.g. endodontics, root canal operation, RCT treatment). So, if you have five services, you’ll need five web pages.
Then, the rest of the web pages depends on your budget. If you have a smaller budget, you can try to squeeze the rest of your practice info on one page, but it may be long or crowded. If you have a bigger budget, you can consider developing the following web pages as well:
· Home: executive summary of your entire website
· About practice: summary of practice, your story, vision, mission, values, clinic photos
· About team: summary of team of dentists, associates, hygienists, admins with photos
· About patients: new patient information, patient intake forms, before & after photos
· Blog archive and single post: publish SEO optimized blog articles to attract web visitors
· Location: summary of all dental clinic locations, including web page for each location
· Contact/booking: summary of practice contact info, phone, email, booking calendar
Having a complete list of all of your website’s pages allows you to create a site map, which is a list of your website’s pages and the relationship between them.
Website Content & Design
Once you’ve decided on your website infrastructure, including your website building platform and created your sitemap, you can start to create the content for your website. The quality of your website is ultimately dependant on the quality of your content. People come to your website to consume content, not to be impressed with fancy designs. So, do designs matter?
Depends on what you mean by designs. A dental website that’s overly aesthetic may be distracting from serving the business goal of making it easy for a website visitor to book an appointment. But, a website that’s poorly designed may not keep the website visitor engaged long enough to book an appointment.
In 2004, Northumbria University conducted a study where they observed participants as they interacted with health websites online. Based on their feedback, 94% of the participants lost trust with online health websites based on factors related to design:
“The look and feel of the website was clearly important to the participants. Visual appeal, plus design issues relevant to site navigation appeared to exert a strong influence on people’s first impressions of the site. Poor interface design was particularly associated with rapid rejection and mistrust of a website.”
In other words, it’s not important that your website looks aesthetic, but it’s extremely important that your website looks trustworthy and reliable. Online website visitors need to feel a sense of trust when interacting with your website, especially since you’re in the dental and healthcare industries.
So, how do you create content for each web page that attracts website visitors searching for keywords, while also earning their trust, and evoking an emotional response to encourage them to book an appointment?
1. Attracts Visitors
Website visitors are attracted to your website because they’re searching for keywords online that are relevant to the content on your web page. So, what keywords are your website visitors using to search for your dental services?
You can conduct keyword research using many tools, including Google’s Keyword Planner. This provides a database of information about keyword search volume in your local market.
Once you know what keywords you want to target for each web page, you can create content for that page using that keyword and other related secondary words. Google’s algorithms will scan not just the body text, but also the headlines, image file names, page title, and URL, so it’s helpful to add those keywords there as well.
2. Earn Trust
Your website can earn your visitors trust by displaying trust signals throughout, which includes academic credentials, business licenses, association memberships, client testimonials, before and after photos, essentially anything that will encourage an online web visitor to start developing a sense of trust with you and your practice.
People connect better with your website if they can see warm, friendly faces of you and your team, as well as happy faces of your patients’ before and after photos with brilliant results. Investing in professional photography and videography can make a huge impact in earning trust with your website visitors, allowing them to connect with your happy patients and team.
3. Book Appointment
Many website visitors don’t read long paragraphs of text, they skim them. Therefore, it’s helpful to create your content in a format that’s website friendly. Short sentences, bullet points, and benefit-driven headlines.
Many people read the headline first before deciding if they want to stop and read the rest of the body text. A descriptive headline may be informational, but is not as persuasive as a headline that communicates the benefits of your services. For example, consider replacing ‘Our Dental Services’ with ‘Family Dental Services to Brighten Your Smile’.
Connect Technology for Advanced Features
Finally, to get the most out of your dental website, you can connect it to your existing technology for additional functionality. For example, you can integrate your practice management software or EMR’s online booking calendar directly on your website, allowing your patients to book appointments or send appointment requests directly online.
Also, you can connect your website with a live chat tool that allows your website visitors to communicate with your front desk. Many people feel more comfortable asking a quick question using live chat than having to call or email, increasing the number of online inquiries. If your team is too busy to respond, you can connect our AI chatbot that answers questions and books appointments – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
An effective dental digital marketing strategy will result in an increase in website traffic and online inquires, including phone calls, emails, text messages, live chat messages, web forms, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and more. It’s easy to forget to check these platforms for a busy dental practice. Once your team returns the message, the person may have booked elsewhere.
To avoid this from happening, you can connect your dental website to our dental CRM that captures all of your online leads and organizes them for you in a user-friendly database, without any data entry from your team. This allows your team to stay on top of each new patient inquiry, making the most efficient use of your marketing budget.
Conclusion
Although creating your own dental website is easy using DIY tools, building a website that consistently produces positive business results is far more challenging. Hiring a freelancer can be an affordable solution, but potentially at the expense of business results. Often, hiring an expert dental website design agency can be a valuable investment that produces a positive return on your investment.
There are many platforms to consider, including Wix, SquareSpace, Weebly, WordPress CMS and custom coded websites. Website builders are the most affordable, but at the expense of closed-systems with limited features and functionality. Custom coded websites have almost unlimited features and functionality, but with a much higher price tag. WordPress CMS offers the best balance of features and affordability, making it an ideal choice for dental practices.
If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to contact me directly. I read and respond to every email. All the best in growing your dental practice!
Sarkis Hakopdjanian
President | Optiimus
(587) 409 5990 | (833) 409 0979
sarkis@optiimius.ca
