Often, dental practice owners focus on driving more traffic to their website; this is all well and good but if your site is not correctly optimised to convert those visitors into new patient enquiries (aka. leads), then your website isn’t working to the best of its abilities.
Luckily there are a few quick and easy things you can do, right now, to make sure your website is performing to its optimised potential.
So, let’s jump in shall we?
Often an afterthought in website creation, your About Us page can be a great place to quickly boost your website’s performance with a simple make over. It is one of the top three most visited pages on your site after all!
Your website should be a pleasure to visit, navigate and read. Don’t overwhelm your reader with technical jargon on your ‘About Us’ page. Make sure your copy is easy to read, communicates your message and is sanity checked for all grammatical and spelling errors.
Add some personality, too! The reason your About Us page is so frequently visited is because your potential patients care about who is going to be treating them, so the more clear and effective you are with this page, the more your patient can get to know about your practice and your services.
Don’t forget to add in real photographs of the team and the practice, as this helps the reader to immediately get a feel for who you are and what your practice looks like. Get some professional pictures taken of the team so you can introduce them, highlight their strengths, qualifications and personalities.
The chances are that if you’re reading this article, you already understand the value of digital marketing, so will have a social media presence for your practice already. (If not – you should definitely get these set up and get posting)
READ OUR ARTICLE ON 21 CREATIVE INSTAGRAM POST IDEAS FOR DENTISTS
So why not make sure the two are linked? Your digital presence should be a coherent, well rounded strategy, and your website and social media should not exist seperately. Make sure that your website features buttons to your social media, in the header or footer of every web page. This immediately gives your web traffic the option to engage and explore your digital presence further, and leads them to more of your content. Plus, it ultimately improves your search engine ranking – boosting you higher up the list on google!
In turn, having an active social media presence will benefit your website by driving traffic from there to your website too!
It may seem obvious, but, what are you actually inviting your website visitors to do when they visit your website? Book in for an appointment? Call the practice? Book a free consultation?
Whatever goal you have for your visitors, make it clear with a call to action. Make what you want your visitors to do obvious with large buttons and quick, enticing descriptions. You only have a limited amount of time to make an impact on a visitor (on average only 15 seconds!) so make it count.
Give website visitors an easy path to convert by making sure your calls to action are featured several times on the page, are easy to navigate and to interact with.
Don’t forget to create a sense of urgency by adding ‘action words’ in your CTA button too, like; “Immediately”, “Today”, “Now” and or “Instantly”.
You know your website looks good, you know it sounds good and you have made sure that you have clear calls to action to point your web visitors to where you want them to be. But have you made sure that it is ‘technically sound’?
You don’t need to be a professional website designer to make sure that your website works efficiently and effectively, there are several quick and easy things you can do to make sure it works the way it should.
Check that your website is mobile-optimised! More than half of all web traffic comes via mobile devices such as smartphones. So if your site doesn’t look great on a mobile, prepare to lose readers fast. Make sure that your design is suitable for mobile, that navigation is easy and all of the information can be viewed and accessed.
Have you thought about your 404 pages? Not every web page can be a winner, and sometimes an error (or 404) page emerges. If that happens, don’t let your potential new customer click away — reroute them to other parts of the site with a helpful, custom 404 page. Link to the site’s most popular pages and also include a search box on the page.
Is your website loading fast enough? Make sure that you check the speed of your website, as a slow site kills your SEO ranking, and in worst cases makes your site completely unsuitable.
You can also submit the site to usability testing communities who will ask who your target visitor is and then submit your site to hundreds of users who fit the profile. They will then feed back a report and videos of them using the website! A quick Google search for “website usability testing” will return some great results to get you started.
We get it though, sometimes the idea of staying on top of your digital presence, generating engaging content on social media, staying ahead of your competitors and *actually* running your practice day to day can feel a bit overwhelming. So call on the marketing experts!
We have some great free resources to get you started, like our 21 Point Checklist, that gives you a step by step list of things you can do to fine tune your existing website, turning it into a lead generation machine. Or find out how your website’s SEO compares to your competitors and get an SEO score and full report, in less than 60 seconds.
Or, why not Get In Touch with us today and we can show you how to make sure that not only your website is the best it can be, and all aspects of your digital marketing are working to deliver great results for your practice.