Let's be honest, sometimes it’s not easy being a dentist. No matter how skilled a professional you are, you’re going to have to compete with other local dentists for the same pool of potential customers. That means you’ll have to put a good chunk of your hard-won earnings toward an advertising budget to get as many patients to your practice as possible.
Traditional advertising methods such as television and prints ads can be effective, but you need to accept that, thanks to the internet, we are living in an age of information. More and more customers are ignoring inherently-biased ads and doing the research themselves by browsing through dentist websites and selecting the most attractive option. That’s why it’s absolutely necessary for dentists to invest in a web design company to make your website as unique, polished, and easy to navigate as possible.
Enhance Your User Experience
You can blame the 100+ channel cable television packages or smartphones or Twitter if you want. For whatever reason, people just don’t have the attention span that they used to. The average internet user will only spend 7 seconds on a website to find what they’re looking for before they get frustrated and look elsewhere. A cluttered design just won’t do. You must make your website easy to navigate so visitors can quickly find what they’re looking for, or you risk losing potential clients.
Set Yourself Apart
Let’s try a thought experiment: put yourself in the head of an internet user with a tooth problem who’s looking for a dentist online. Your search comes up with a dozen dentists, all of which look more or less the same. How do you decide which one to visit?
Enough of that exercise: get back into your head, please. Let’s apply what we learned about your potential customers, knowing now that they have a plethora of options. You need to set yourself apart. Your website gives you an opportunity to showcase what makes you different, whether it is lower than average rates, state-of-the-art technology, whatever. Find what makes you unique and feature it prominently on your website.
Convert Views into Visits
It’s hard enough to get views to your website: it will take an entirely separate effort of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to boost your page rankings enough so that these customers see your dentistry practice in their search results.
So don’t let you SEO efforts go to waste. You need to convert those views on the internet into visits to your practice. A polished, well-made website will reflect your professionalism is much more likely to draw new clients in than the bland or cluttered websites that may belong to your competitors.
Do you want to find out how to increase conversions on your website? Here's 5 tips I give you on how you can convert visitors to patients.