The Best Dentist Websites Have These Attributes In Common

Here at My Social Practice, we specialize in creating dental websites that look great and help website visitors convert to scheduled patients. Because we only work with dentists, we have a unique approach to making the best dental website designs. A method that has allowed us to improve the website design and development process and significantly drop costs, which we pass along to our dental website clients.

Building a great dental website is difficult with all the planning and preparation to ensure the site is launched with a feeling of authenticity, professionalism, and trustworthiness. These elements are necessary for a dental website to convert visitors to scheduled patients.

We’ve narrowed the list down to the dentist websites with attributes that make them some of the best dental websites. Our dentist website design team put their heads together, and with years of dental marketing and website design experience, we’ve put together this list. 

If your dental website designer focuses on these attributes in the development and launch of your website, you’ll end up with a modern website that functions properly.

Our suggestions are time-tested and based on what has been successful. The old saying is, ‘Imitation is the best form of flattery.‘ Why not see what is already working?

In this article, we’ll break down some of the essential factors your dental website needs to keep your dental practice competitive in your local community.

No time to wait… let’s get started.

You’ve probably heard about dental SEO; you may have hired a dental marketing company to help optimize your website.
If you want to increase new patient flow and have yet to have a professional SEO expert help you optimize your website, consider it now.
Dental SEO helps dental practices be found by patients online.

If your goal is to have a practice with a consistent influx of new patients, then SEO should be listed first. When you look at all of the online marketing initiatives, SEO is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your practice, which is why I’ve listed it first. 

There are thousands of articles about the search engine algorithm and what you need to do to optimize your dental website. Search engine algorithms often change with updates. A great dental SEO strategy should have long-term benefits.

One approach to SEO is making ongoing changes, so the website experience of your patient is flawless. Google will recognize that your website performs better than others in your area

There are quite a few things that Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines have asked of all websites.

Don’t let dental SEO vernacular confuse you. A discovery search phrase is a single keyword like ‘dentist’ or a phrase like ‘who is the best dentist near me’. Notice that I’m not talking about ‘direct search phrases’. Direct search phrases are like, ‘Dr. Adrian Lefler’ or ‘ABC Dental of SLC Utah’. Direct search phrases are phrases where the patient KNOWS what they want to find. There is very little website optimization that needs to be done in order to be found by direct search phrases. If you have a website and it’s been indexed by Google, you should be good to go.

So, what we’re talking about here is how to be found by patients who DON’T already know who you are. Make sense?

Once you’ve identified the discovery search phrases and keywords that you want to optimize for, you begin creating content related to those keywords.

We’ll talk about how to do this in the sections below.

The Best Dentist Websites Have Great Link Strategies

When you write new copy for your dental website you don’t want to just jam a bunch of discovery search phrase ad hoc onto the page. Years ago that used to work but it doesn’t anymore.

The search algorithm’s are super intuitive and get better with every update. In order to optimize your linking you need to make sure that the anchor text, which is the text that is linked, is relevant to the link.

Dental Website Linking Bad Example: The anchor text is ‘social media caption ideas for dentists’.

 – Check out these social media caption ideas for dentists. –

Go ahead. Click on the link and see where it takes you. Then ask yourself, does the content on that page answer the link anchor text?

Two Great Examples of Dental Website Linking: These are examples of relevant linking for the discovery search phrase, ‘social media caption ideas for dentists.’

Here is a second great example of a relevant link, ‘tips on SEO for dentists‘.

Notice the difference? The first link goes to a website page about dental marketing and the copy on the page is relatively broad. The page does not answer or solve the search phrase ‘social media caption ideas for dentists.’ If you take the time to read down that dental marketing page you’ll find information about social media caption ideas, but it’s way down on the page.

If you were the person searching ‘social media caption ideas for dentists’, you’d probably bounce off the first example because you didn’t find exactly what you want. And guess what? Google and the other search engines record that session and information. High bounce rates are NOT GOOD for dental website SEO.

In the second and third examples you land on a page that was designed to provide the person searching exactly what they want. It’s very unlikely that after landing on the 101 Dental Captions download page, or the 12 Tips article, that the person searching will bounce off the page. Most likely, they’ll stay on the page, read and download the material.

Here is an SEO trick. Once you’ve decided which discovery phrases you’re going to go after, reverse engineer the content on the landing page. If the discovery search phrase is ‘what to do about tooth pain’, then you’ll want to have a page that is answers that question. You might even call the page, ‘What to do about tooth pain.’

Now that search results provide consumers with location based recommendations, like the Google maps section of SERP’s; location related copywriting and other forms of content are a vital factor in digital dental marketing and dental SEO.

If you only have one location, it should be relatively easy for you to optimize your website for location specific pages. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go and social media platforms like Facebook allow your dental practice to be easily discovered by local users.

When preparing to build your website you’ll want to lay out specific pages for each area you’re attempting to draw patients from. What this means is creating content that speaks directly to each local audience. The search engines recognize location based content as extremely valuable and your local website rankings will improve over time.

The pro-tip here is super simple, create location based pages of content on your website. These pages will show the search engines as well as your audience that you’re serving patients in those areas.

In the graphic above I’ve screen shot a location page from Smith Cosmetic & Family Dentistry. They wanted to rank better in Henderson NV. You can click through Dr. Smith’s site to see how we’ve added a few location pages to help her rank in specific areas.

If you’ve had the chance to look around the internet at dental websites, eventually you’re going to realize that there is very little variation in design. You’re going to run into a few websites that haven’t had an update in ten years, and they’re going to look pretty lame, but almost every dental website design built in the last 2-3 years is going to look similar.

You’ll find that recently built dental website designs are going to have almost the exact same functionality. They’ll probably have a long vertical scrolling home page, parallax options, meet the doc page, before and after functionality, book an appointment form, cost calculators, price list pages, booking forms, and many other dental related functionality.

The biggest cost in building a dental website is time. The time that you have to pay a dentist website designer to create what you want. And, usually what you want is an idea stuck your head. A designer then has to create something, show it to you, and hopefully they’ve gotten close to the image in your mind. This type of web design is a disaster.

Templates solve potential disasters. A template helps set the stage and the initial creation. It helps the designer and the dentist get on the same page. You can look at a template and say, ‘I don’t like that but I do like this.” That type of feedback is direct, succinct and actionable.

Steps To Building Your Best Dentist Website

1. Find a couple dental website that you like. One’s that’s already online.
2. Send those examples to your website designer and tell them to find templates close to the examples.
3. Review the templates with a designer and estimate the additional design and photography that will be needed.
4. Do a photo shoot.
5. Review the first draft of your website.
6. Go through a couple iterations and you’ll be done.

The key here is to reduce the amount of time to a first draft of your website. Once you have a first draft the iterations from there to the final product is usually pretty quick. We’ll typically go through one to three iterations after the first draft, and iterations may only take a few days to a week.

Remember, focus on great photography like Dr. Thoms a dentist in Whitby Ontario.

One Last Super Important Tip To Dental Website Design

Focus on photography. I’ve looked at at least twenty thousand dental websites over the years. And frankly the great looking sites all have custom photography. If you have great photography you can make any template look amazing.

Here is an example of a dentist in Lynnwood WA that has fantastic photography. The site was built from a template but it doesn’t look anything like the template because the photography is so good.

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that encourages a person to act in accordance with the behavior or others. The term was coined by Robert Cialdini in his book Influence.

Here is a simple example; you’re looking for a dermatologist in your community and you’ve found one that has a Facebook page with 2300 followers and 78 reviews. The second dermatologist has a Facebook page with 410 followers and 12 reviews. Which one do you call?

Obviously you’re going to call the one with more followers and reviews.

The Best Dentist Websites Have Case Studies

One great way to build social proof is through case studies. Case studies are kind-of-like before and after photos but with a story about the patient’s experience.

Make sure that you use a HIPAA authorization form before you post anything online about the patient. Consent is absolutely required.

A case study is a deep dive into the patient’s experience and the goals of the procedure. You’ll want to document pre, during, and the post experience of the patient. To beef up your case study and make it look great, you’ll want to take photo’s and/or video throughout the entire patient journey. It may sound difficult but with a little preparation you can create a story that will resonate with potential patients.

The format for the case study could be one of several. You could turn the case study into a downloadable PDF. It could be a blog post, email, or you could add these case studies to your website.

Here at My Social practice we create case studies about our dental marketing services and you can check out one of our website design case studies here.

The Best Dentist Website Have Reviews & Testimonials

If you’re a forward thinking practice you’re probably asking your patients for reviews. If you just thought, ‘That’s not me.’, you had better start.

Reviews are one of the most important ways to create social proof. All reviews are great, but Google reviews are by far the most important type of online review.

Google reviews are tied to your Google My Business listing in Google’s business directory. When someone searches online for a local dentist your listing will pop up in the Google maps section of search results and your reviews are tied to your business listing. What do you think happens if you have less reviews or not as high ranking reviews as your competitors?

Download the complimentary Google review campaign materials and get started acquiring more reviews today.

If you’re the type of practice that simply doesn’t have the time to ask your patients for reviews, you’ll want to get a demonstration of our Google review automated software.

My Social Practice’s software has integrations with Google My Business, Facebook, Healthgrades and many other medical related review sites online.

You should also take a look at our local dental SEO annual report.

Consumers are being exposed to so much content marketing and advertising online every day, breaking through the noise is more difficult than ever. Organic reach of business posts on Facebook is below 1%. And, more people than ever are simply blocking ads outright.

This is the reason many companies have started to work with social media influencers to promote their products and services. If you follow any celebrities online, you know what I’m talking about. It’s called influencer marketing, and leading brands are quickly discovering that it’s the most effective way to advertise, hands down.

For digital practice marketing, now more than ever potential patients don’t trust what YOU say about your practice online. They need recommendations from a member of their trusted social network to consider giving you a call and scheduling an appointment.

A dental influencer on a social media platform is a person who has established a brand reputation and have built followers that trust the influencers opinion about products and services. They’re similar to celebrities. In exchange for money, free items, or dental services, a dental influencer will promote your product and services to their social media audience.

Working with dental influencers has several advantages. They produce stunning user-generated content for your marketing. Many professional Instagram influencers collaborate with professional local photographers to develop polished and well-considered content.

The Best Dentist Marketing Leverage Micro-Influencers

Big influencers, the ones with millions of followers will be extremely expensive. We recommend that you focus on micro influencers, who have less followers, are less expensive to work with, but their audiences are usually localized.

You should be looking for influencers with less than 10,000 followers. We’ve seen fantastic success in influencers who have less than 3,000 followers. You probably have several of these influencers in your database already.

If you have questions about Influencer marketing, reach out to us and schedule a social media demo.

Functionally, the best-ranking dental practice websites are responsive, seamlessly compatible with mobile devices, and load quickly. Great dental websites are designed to guide users to helpful information and ultimately, creates a strong call-to-action. Keep in mind that the most important page on your dental website is your homepage. Specifically, the information “above the fold” or before a user scrolls down.

Is the information that you want to give patients on your homepage before any scroll or click takes place? You don’t want potential patients to have to go searching for the information they are looking for. For example, your practice name, doctor’s name, contact information, and purpose needs to be “above the fold” on your dental website’s home page.

You can get a fabulous, functional website without outrageous dental website costs.

About the Author: Adrian Lefler is an expert dental marketer and a key member of the dental marketing team at My Social Practice. My Social Practice is a dental marketing company located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Adrian is passionate about helping dental practices grow. If you’d like to book one of the members of My Social Practice’s speaking team, you can do that HERE. Interested in learning more about the benefits of SEO for dental practices or our dental websites service, you can learn more here. Also please read our Google My Business reviews.