To kickstart an online presence for your dental practice, there’s nothing better than to launch a website that connects patients digitally with your practice. A website adds on to the credibility and authenticity of dental practice, clinic, or healthcare facility; according to a web credibility research by Stanford, 75 percent of the users are likely to judge an organizations’ credibility based on the website design.
Through dental websites, dental practitioners can make it easier for patients to schedule appointments, gain knowledge about dental health, and opt for remote care. Under this article, we’ll discuss step-by-step guide on developing dental website that makes a good first impression.
1. Find an Experienced Healthcare Web Development Company
Outsourcing dental web development project with an experienced healthcare web development company brings in economical benefits and improves outcome of the project. Outsourcing is an cost-effective method as this saves investment cost of new hires, training, and infrastructure. Further, a healthcare web development company is aware of policies and rules laid under HIPAA, and the safety of ePHI, hence its easier to proceed with the development process.
Partnering with experienced healthcare website developers well versed with HIPAA regulations such as Arkenea ensures that website is created as adhering to the norms of the Act such as privacy and security rules; technical, administrative, and physical safeguards.
With experience comes skillset to design a customized and easy-to-convert dental website for the target audience. Developers are aware of the core development steps, how to market the website, and showcase brand voice of a dental clinic/hospital.
Outsourcing helps to get experts in the field onboard for designing and development, with rapid time to market rate, and scalable solutions.
2. Choose Between Template Vs. Custom Dental Website Development
A custom dental website helps to target niche audience, those who are likely to become your patients; this is an effective way of marketing a dental clinic or practice. Along with this, building a website from scratch increases chances of optimizing SEO for dental website – from permalinks to web pages, thus surging rankings.
On the other hand, using templates for website design provides limited choices for design, and may end up looking as a lot of websites. Further, with templates, organic SEO isn’t built in the system, and accommodates third-party and add-ons that slows down the site. Limited design options restricts the use of components that elevates authenticity of dental websites.
Personalization offers mobile optimized site and helps to define a dental practice brand. Branding creates loyal patients; and personalizing usage of colors, content, elements, and features helps patients to recognize the organization in every town.
By adding personalized features such as newsletters or blogs adds on value to the dental website and keeps patients engaged; including features such appointment bookings simplifies the process of seeking treatment.
Developing website using templates cannot offer such elements that gives a dental website its unique look, hence consider opting for a customized website development – Arkenea, a leading healthcare software development company specializes in custom website development that meets industry standards, get in touch with us to create or redesign your dental website.
3. Decide on Features For a Dental Website Development
Common healthcare app features include appointment booking, patient portals, or EHR integrations, apart from this, some of the the must have features for a dental website include –
a. Dental Service Page
Ensure to encompass a service page in the menu bar, where its visible for patients. Consider including a maximum of seven services in the drop-down list as that’s the number of points a person can grasp without loosing focus and skipping the page altogether.
A dental service page can include all essential treatment offered by doctors such as implants, cosmetic dentistry, preventive care, fillings, and more.
Creating an optimized page for each service gives a SEO advantage, for instance, someone searches root canal, then that page has the highest probability of showing up.
b. Reviews and Testimonials
A testimonial and reviews section is enough to earn trust of visitors, as these prove credibility and authenticity of the site, and not a scam. People trust people over organizations or businesses, hence testimonials work like referrals, convincing people to avail services.
Reviews talk about how beneficial a product or a service is, thus putting a dental service in a positive light. These reviews explain how services or products offered are a solution to the problem faced by many others.
By adding a human touch to a dental website in the form of testimonials adds a emotional aspect as well, thus relating to the brand, and converting new patients.
c. Dental Content
Consider showcasing dental content to build a reputation, rank in terms of SEO, and to display expertise in the field. Dental content can be in the form of blogs, newsletters, treatment videos and photos, social media content, infographics, podcast, and more. Out of these options, select those that suit the target audience and goes with website objectives.
Frequently opted content forms are blogs, social media, and case studies by users, as this gives desired knowledge in a short time, rather than reading white papers or books.
Including a FAQ section gives a brief idea about the treatment, diagnosis, and what to expect to patients; by including an internal link to these FAQs that connect to newsletters or blogs helps to gain more engagement.
4. Incorporate Design Elements For a Dental Website Development
Key role of a website is to attract patients and keep them engaged, hence its crucial to create a world-class design for dental practice that showcases expertise in the field. Consider implementing these unique elements to improve a dental website –
a. Social Media Integrations
As per a report, on an average a person bounces off seven different social networks per month; which puts social media as an effective strategy to boost dental website clicks. Social media integrations enhances reach of dental practice by redirecting viewers to social media platforms.
Social media integration augments the experience of visitors, makes it interesting, and interactive, thus keeping them on the page for a longer time, in turn building a positive brand experience.
Website – social media integrations encourages conversations, builds a personal bond by connecting with a social profile. By adding social media buttons to a dental website, helps to form the connection, and makes it convenient to access social profiles.
b. Conversion Tracking
As per a report, conversions drop and the bounce rate increases by 123 percent due to high loading time of website. Create a website that tracks conversion rates for comparing views on website and new patients visiting each day. Through conversion tracking, dentists or dental facilities can check for keywords, ad groups, ads, and campaigns that are performing better at driving conversions.
This helps to understand the ROI, thus enabling improved decisions about advertising and dental practices. Conversion tracking helps to optimize strategies for getting new patients and build a wider audience group for rendering remote dental services too.
Tracking gives a complete path taken by the patients before they’re converted, example browsers or devices.
5. Test, Launch, and Maintenance of Dental Website
This is the final stage of dental website development, the client is provided with a website that’s error free, has good readability, reliable, and perceived with ease.
Testing phase includes testing of documentation, functionality, usability, UI, compatibility, performance, security, beta, and mobile-friendly. Post which the final website version is launched and maintained over a period of time for updates, bugs, and additional integrations.
As a dentist, if you’re looking to make an online presence to expand your reach, services, and connect with new patients, then get in touch with Arkenea – an award winning software development company, that specializes in custom healthcare website development.