Having a strong internet presence is absolutely crucial in growing your business. Your company’s website is no longer just a webpage to provide people with information – but a tool to turn searchers into patients.
A business website establishes your credibility, supplies searchers with information, and is a portal of communication between you and current and future patients. Your website is a digital representation of your practice and needs to reflect the professionalism and ease of going to the dentist.
It is crucial that your website provides prospective patients with a positive user experience, as it will directly impact your conversions, patient recommendations, and search rankings.
Here are five best practices to help you optimize your dental website for audience engagement and site conversion
Navigation Must Be Easy for Users & Engine Crawlers
If your navigation is tedious, confusing, or indirect – you will immediately lose website viewers. Your website needs to be seamless to use and easy to read in order for searchers to convert to patients.
Below are some tips on how to make navigation easy:
- Make sure your main navigation menu is clear and concise.
– Navigation must also be consistent across the entire website. - Create page titles that are relevant and accurate.
- Construct a sitemap so that search engine crawlers can navigate and index your website.
– This will help increase search rankings and help visitors find your site. - Make both an HTML and XML sitemap.
– XML is for the backend while HTML is for your website visitors.
– Submit your XML sitemap to Google through Google’s search console.
Optimize Site Speed
Did you know that if your page takes more than three seconds to load, searchers are more likely to abandon your page and look elsewhere?
If your website’s speed is slow, it’s going to affect your search rankings and reduce your conversions. You need to guarantee that your site works quickly – and you can do so by looking at what impacts site speed:
Server Impact.
Different server types have different capabilities and room for website resources – and the server where your website is hosted will have a major impact on your website’s speed.
There are a few server options to look at when creating your website:
- Shared servers are fantastic for saving money but can cost you speed because you are sharing the server with others.
- A virtual private server, which is a server that only hosts your site, can drastically increase speed but for an increased cost.
- A content delivery network, which is a network of servers that your website gets hosted on, can help increase speed but isn’t as reliable as it pulls from the closest server.
No matter which type of server you choose – it’s important to pick a server host that can handle your site traffic and has a 99%+ uptime.
Internet Connection Type
While you probably don’t use dial-up anymore, some connections are still faster than others. Cable connections work seamlessly – but if you want the swiftest speed possible, grab a fiber-optic connection.
Internet Browser
Update your browser and make sure you set it to automatically update. Browsers highly affect your website speed and loading times.
Optimizing Files.
Files can use up a ton of bandwidth and can slow your site. In order to prevent that from happening, you’ll need to optimize them by naming them in plain language, including alt attributes, and choose dimensions and resolutions that don’t have large loads (72dpi is standard). You can also compress files that are too large.
Plugin Use.
If you are using a lot of plugins for your website, it may become bombarded with HTTP requests or laden down with files. This can reduce the overall speed of the site. Choose custom-coded plugins that are load reduced and functional or simply update and replace problematic plugins.
Website Traffic.
If you exceed your website’s bandwidth limit, your website will likely crash or load extremely slow. Monitor how much bandwidth is being taken up and adjust as needed.
Place Links Strategically
Do not use excessive linking across your website pages. Links flood your page – causing it to look spammy and unprofessional.
When inserting in the anchor text, make sure that it links to a relevant page, and try to place these anchor texts near the beginning of your content. Google’s search engine crawlers read from top to bottom, so links that appear earlier will get prioritized earlier for indexing.
Your Website Must Be Responsive.
Just as many searchers will use their phone or tablet as they will their computer to look for your service.
Your website needs to have a responsive design implemented so that your website’s theme or template automatically adjusts to fit the screen size being used.
Horizontal navigation works well on desktops, laptops, and larger-screened devices, but it does not work well on smaller devices and can actually become cumbersome and frustrating to use. For smartphones and tablets, a vertical menu is better and is clear and concise on smaller screens.
Regular Updates & Maintenance is Needed.
Creating a website is just the beginning – completing regular updates and maintenance is important to a successful online presence. If a searcher comes across your website and finds it broken – they’ll likely assume your business is closed, or just simply outdated.
It’s difficult to truly articulate how necessary a working website is for your business. If you follow our best practices, your business will be elevated and your practice will get more patients.
About the Author:
Clayton Patterson is the founder and CEO of Digital Space Marketing. After spending nearly a decade developing websites and launching successful marketing campaigns for medium sized companies and startups, Clayton knows what truly drives conversions and brings growth to an organization. In addition to his extensive marketing experience, Clayton is a lawyer with a deep understanding of website accessibility laws and the technical requirements that all websites should abide by.
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