5 ways to improve your dental practice’s online footprint

April 26, 2016

Every dental practice needs to have a website, but these sites also need to be well organized, effective, and easily accessible. Here are five simple ways to make your practice’s online footprint more attractive to potential patients:

• Clean up a busy homepage – Look at best practices from other websites. Pick out the most appealing features of well-done websites, and use them to start rebuilding your own homepage. Keep it simple and visually appealing, and don’t put your visitors to sleep with a plain block of text.
  
  
• Display information simply – The dentist’s name, contact information, office address, and hours of operation are critical and should be easy to find. If it takes more than one click to find your office’s contact information from the website homepage, it needs to be simplified. The best way to do this is to put your navigation bar at the top of your website, and make the page destination of each button clear.
  
• Optimize search engine results – Without keywords and categorizing, your website is sure to get lost in the Internet ether, so add keywords to your website that will cause it to show up when potential patients search. Make sure to keep up with this, by consistently modifying and adding keywords and website content.
  
  
• Make it mobile friendly – Mobile web surfing has officially surpassed desktop, with the latest statistics putting mobile usage at 51%. If your practice’s website isn’t mobile friendly, you could be penalized in Google’s mobile online rankings, particularly after Google’s “mobile friendly” update last year.
  
  
• Add social media – Your practice doesn’t have to be on every social media platform imaginable. Pick the ones that you believe will be the most effective, stay active on them, and link them to your website and vice versa. The links to your social platforms can be simple, subtle icons.

Having a website for your practice is only the start. If it doesn’t interest or inform visitors, they won’t get past the homepage. Making some of the simple changes above can improve website traffic and business for your practice.

Marissa is a student at Loyola University Chicago, and a Marketing Intern at Supply Clinic.