10 things hurting your dental website

Managing a great dental website is one challenge. Managing one that gets great results is another.

A high-performing website isn’t just a nice-to-have in 2022, it’s imperative if you want to maximize practice success, profits, and valuation. Scan through this blog to get the statistics that really matter when it comes to a dental website; stats that could help decision-making.

The problem is, an outdated, low-performing website could be hurting your practice in ways you don’t even realize, quite likely even working against practice success.

Technology waits for no one, and digital best practices are constantly, I mean constantly, advancing. This requires constant maintenance of all aspects of a modern website to stay ahead. If your website is over 3 years old, and/or is not being efficiently managed and updated from a technical, SEO, and user experience standpoint, it’s probably ancient in the eyes of Google, and what you don’t want to hear, in the eyes of patients too.

Results aren’t cut and dry as to how, when, or why it comes to getting ranked, how new patients find you, and when and why they convert – or don’t. But an outdated website is not doing you any favors. Some of the most common problems include:

• Disorganization and bad flow; information is there but with no hierarchy, user experience is difficult.
• An older site often just isn’t built for mobile and lacks a fluid user experience. This is a major problem as you’ll read further down – 70% of people are more likely to choose a provider that offers a mobile experience.
• An older site looks haphazard with an attempt of update, with a new logo plopped in instead of rebranding and updating the entire site.
• Content and design look like they’re from the ’90s – yes, haha my team said “the ’90s.” If you’re my age, that might feel like 10 years ago but it’s actually 30! If content just does not look and feel modern, then that reflects on the dental practice and what patients perceive office technology may be like.
• And then there is the templated site with no personalization or personal images. Patients want to see and get to know who they’re choosing as their dental provider.

Here’s a common scenario that leads to an outdated, sometimes broken, and definitely weakening website. Dentist paid thousands to have website built – loved it at the time, still loves some aspects of it. But now, it’s barely been touched, the user experience is clunky, technology is outdated, pages break anytime they try to add or do something new, content is old, and off-page activity has been non-existent (to help Google and search engines see the site). BUT there is a feeling of ownership, of investment, and a hesitance to move to a new site.

That’s no good. If this describes you in any way, it’s time to let that old site go, and here’s why:

1. Not responsive or mobile first. At least 50% of traffic is mobile, and for urban/suburban areas, the rate can be over 85%.
2. Almost 70% say they’re more likely to purchase if the website is easy to use on mobile. When it’s not, it’s the second highest reason people leave a site.
3. Poor visitor experience. Patients go to your site for very specific reasons. If they can’t find what they want quickly and easily, they will leave. Do you find yourself having your web developers “fixing” broken pages and links? This is a sign you need to change your strategy.
4. It takes less than ½ a second for a user to form an impression – speed matters, slow loading is the #1 reason people leave a site.
5. Not SSL certified. If you care about your data or have any forms fills, you need that little lock icon to show that your site is trustworthy – and protects you and your patients.
6. High bounce rate. Lack of click throughs could be caused by a myriad of issues like page not found and crawl errors – and these all hurt Google’s ranking of your site.
7. Lack of updates. Nothing more embarrassing than your last blog dated 2019. Right now you probably don’t need that 2020 message stating you’ve “re-opened” to serve patients!
8. Missing or hidden call to action. Does the new-patient phone number stand out? Can patients quickly find your contact or book appointment buttons?
9. No social. Social is an opportunity to show patients inside your practice and how great it is, it’s the place to show that your practice is modern and trusted by others. This is another place to monitor – your last post can’t be from a year ago!
10. Slow page load times – this is the most damaging. Google likes fast sites and ranks them better, and patients, your web visitors, have no patience. How long are you willing to wait for a website when you’re searching for a new provider of any kind?

Don’t underestimate the importance of good web design and professional, experienced, management to get better results, to lift up your practice online, to improve your patient experience, and to help attract and keep good employees. Your practice philosophy, reputation, and service is something your employees are proud of (which improves morale and engagement, and creates an awesome patient experience), and having a great online presence truly boosts morale and it helps you attract the type of team members you want – but it does the opposite if it’s not great.

With the major issue of recruiting team members across the industry, doesn’t that make you take a moment and look at your overall online presence? If it does, fill out that free consult form on this page and we’ll talk with you about where you can make improvements. We make it super easy and affordable to have a FANTASTIC dental website and online presence.

Now for the patient experience. When you search “dentists near me” do you show up? Do you have 100 4.9-star reviews?

Then navigate to your website and BE a patient. Does it give a great impression of your practice as it stands today? Can you quickly see how to contact your office? What happens when you search on mobile? Does it reflect your brand? Is content current? Do pages load quickly?

Again, free consultation, we can help!

Google uses hundreds of factors which impact the algorithms that rank your site and make it visible to search. They’re looking for a combination of topic authority, expertise, site functionality, and overall online presence. That’s because Google wants to provide great service to their users and present what they deem as “the authority” of the topic searched.

For website success, marketing to Google while providing a great user experience is paramount. Google owns almost 92% of search engine market share. Your site should include subject matter expert (SME) content, relevant high-quality, keyword-rich on-page content that is focused on your audience, as well as off-page content that Google is looking for behind the scenes that allows them to recognize your site as authoritative. Successful sites have an ongoing link-building strategy targeting quality links that Google can deem relevant, therefore gaining your site more ground – and authority.

The other challenge in the effective management of a dental website is that results tracking hasn’t been clear.

Are you one of the offices that has been using a manual process of tracking, including asking patients how they found the office? This never works no matter how diligent a front office team may be. Things get busy, scripts get lost, new staff come in, and the patient answer will never reveal their total journey.

After listening to literally thousands and thousands of dental telephone calls, I can tell you that new-patient welcome scripting is often overlooked, isn’t used, and goes by the wayside. Adhering to process is very difficult, which means that only a small portion of patients will get a random question from a hygienist that might uncover highly suspect data.

This means anecdotal results and guessing when it comes to decision-making. Maybe you’ll get clicks and impressions analytics reports from your web provider, or you have basic call tracking, but not the clear picture that call scoring and telephone and email attribution can provide.

Dedicated call tracking and call scoring and the use of AI technologies attribute new patients by phone and email data so that you know precisely how much new business is coming from your website. There is absolutely no need to not know exactly what your website is delivering in 2022.

With dedicated optimization efforts, we are able to see an 83% increase in keywords on the first page in just 6 months. It takes time for website to earn its way to the top, this is one of the reasons we call our solution a WebLift!

Rankings can suffer due to many issues; an older, outdated site could also be slow, there could be a lack of recent patient reviews, and you could have duplicate content that you might not even realize is duplicated from other sites, and perhaps without being penalized because the content is simply no longer considered unique in the eyes of Google.

Here are some stats for 2022 and your website that you can’t ignore:

• Organic search drives over 53% of all website traffic
• 60% off people prefer beautiful and well-designed sites over basic ones
• First impressions are design related 94% of the time
• Decreasing speed load time by 1/10 of a second results in 8-10% increase in conversion.

So, as tough as it may seem, if any of this resonates with your current dental website situation, it’s time to face facts and get a new site. When you choose Patient NEWS, you’ll have an amazing, modern, professional design, content written by dental experts (we have been writing content exclusively for dentists since “the ’90s,” 2023 will be our 30th anniversary – meaning you probably know we’re a great company), an incredible system for constant technology updates, a super-fast site (we beat 6 top dental web companies for desktop AND mobile speed), really cool features like our proprietary FlashSmile™ application where patients can whiten their teeth to preview how you can help, on-page and off-page optimized content, link-building, video, press releases, etc., call tracking, scoring, and call coaching, and a “real” account manager (joking, not joking), who will actually be available to help you get great results!

Call in now to get a free report on the state of your current website.

Joanne Bishop