Beyond the Brochure in Dental Practice Websites

Do you want to wow new patients and provide existing patients with a valuable resource that also serves as an important dental marketing tool? Dental practice websites have the potential to be so much more than an online brochure, but few dental health professionals take advantage of that potential. That’s not surprising, really. After all, their business is teeth. If you want a website that really brings in patients and provides resources that your current patients need, you should turn to a company that specializes in dental practice website design.

Brochure Dental Practice Website Design

The most basic – and most common – dental practice websites are little more than glorified online brochures. They contain the typical pages – Home, About, Services and Contact – that are common to nearly any kind of business. In most cases, they don’t provide much more information than a standard trifold brochure. Some dental practice website design companies pad the standard brochure format with a Gallery page to show photos of the dentists’ work, a Meet the Team page that provides capsule bios of the office staff and dental professionals in the practice and a page about Financing options. While those pages provide a basic, well-rounded website for a dental practice, the best dental practice website design companies can offer you much more – especially if you put some thought into what you want to provide for your patients and prospective patients.

Tailoring Your Dental Practice Website Design

No one knows your practice the way that you and your staff do. Before you contact a dental office website design company, sit down with your staff and do some brainstorming. Consider the things that prospective patients ask when they call about appointments and the aspects of your practice that gets comments from your current patients. Those things can help you tailor your website design to attract the patients you want to serve and best serve the patients you want to keep.

For example, if you’re a family dental practice, consider the things that are important to both parents and kids. Your dental practice website might include a page on helping a child deal with fears about the dentist, hints to get children to brush their teeth properly and ways to help a child prepare for a first visit to the dentist. You might provide printable coloring pages and focus your content on the ways that your office is child-friendly – cartoons on the television, child-friendly décor and any other efforts you make to help children feel at home.

Cosmetic dental practice websites, on the other hand, might feature smile makeover pages and descriptions of the various procedures offered at your office.

The planning process will only take an hour or two working with your staff, and the ideas you present to your dental practice website design company will help them design the best and most productive website possible for your website.

Choosing the Best Dental Marketing Services

In today’s world, a dental practice that doesn’t have a website may as well have no advertising at all. Your dental website introduces you to new customers, provides a reminder service for existing patients and makes it easier for people to find you. There are thousands of website design companies you could choose to design your dental practice website but few of them actually specialize in full dental marketing services.

The Importance of Dental Marketing Services

Marketing your dental practice is a vital part of your business. Your website is more than just a business card. It’s a combination attention-getting signpost and informational brochure.

Think of the Internet as a huge mall with thousands of dentists offering their services to prospective customers. It’s not enough for your website to explain your services and introduce you to prospective patients. It also has to attract their attention in the midst of those thousands of others and convince them that you’re the best dentists for their needs. Companies that specialize in designing websites have to understand both what needs to be on your website and how to position where local patients can find you when they need a dentist.

Dental Web Marketing for Local Markets

When people look for a dentist, they tend to turn first to the Internet. Your website is competing with tens of thousands of other dental websites online. You want to make sure that your practice comes up for the people who are most likely to be looking for a dentist offering your particular services in your city or area. It doesn’t do much good for your Austin, Texas dental practice to pop up when someone is looking for a dentist in New York City. Likewise, if you specialize in restorative dentistry for seniors, you don’t want to spend money advertising to parents of young children.

That’s where dental SEO comes into play. A dental website design company is expert at designing your website to rank high in the search engines for your geographic area and your practice specialty.

When choosing a dental website design company, make sure you find one that understands the importance of dental web marketing for your practice and geographic area. A dental website design company that offers full dental marketing services can help you reach new patients and build your practice.

SEO Tips For Dentistry Websites: Traffic Control

Linking your dentistry website to and from the top Internet directories and to other highly rated sites is one of the best ways to ensure a steady stream of visitor traffic. Not only do you get visitors who link in from those other sites, but the popular Internet search engines, such as Google , Yahoo, and Bing, use the number of quality links connected your website in order to rank it in the search results pages. So the more quality links you establish, the more traffic your website will get.

Here’s how to establish quality links:

• Get Listed: The are two major directories that you will want to get your website listed on: the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and the Yahoo Directory. The DMOZ is the largest Internet directory in the world, and both Google and AOL use it in the formulation of their search engine directories. Since Google directs roughly 900,000,000 visitors per month, it’s well worth being listed in the directory Google takes its cues from. Listing your website with the DMOZ Directory is absolutely free, but because the directory is run by volunteers, the processing time to get listed may run anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. Working with a professional company such as Dentistry Websites, which specializes in Internet marketing for dentists, can help you streamline the process.

The Yahoo Directory is not free- it’ll cost you a yearly membership fee of $299- but you will find out if your site is accepted within a week of application. Bing now operates Yahoo, and since Yahoo and Bing combined direct about 325,000,000 visitors per month- the closest runner up to Google—many business owners are more than willing to pay the price of admission.

• Get Published: Web articles can be submitted in a wide array of outside sites and are a great way to advertise your expertise and get interested traffic to your dental practice website by linking to keywords or a resource box.

• Exchange: Exchanging links with compatible sites- those with topics related to yours- is a mutually beneficial move that can increase web traffic for all parties involved. Simply contact the site master and ask for an exchange- but be sure to check out the site before you exchange links, since a site with a questionable product or reputation isn’t going to reflect well on your practice.

The Relevance of Audience Targeting For Your Dentistry Website

One of the key factors in designing an effective website for your dental practice is developing an understanding of your target audience. This may seem like a no-brainer—after all, you run a dental practice, so your target audience members are people who need to see a dentist, right? While this is one definition of a particular audience member, the online presence and marketing of your site includes a variety of other web visitors as well as those in immediate need of dental care.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Clearly identifying and understanding your target audience informs every aspect of your website design and development, from the way it looks to the site content and related web links. Through article and blog linkings, for example, you can connect to and draw in web visitors from wildly different categories, from those looking for information on a specific dental procedure or doctor, to people who are merely investigating related topics, such as oral hygiene, beauty, or even social and financial success. To accurately identify and understand the potential visitors to your dentistry website, you need to first identify the related industries, sites, topics, and searches that might lead them to you. Once you have done that, you will want to take a look at some of the ways your website can be linked to these areas, and the type of content that will draw those visitors in- and keep them coming back for more.

Blogs are one of the most useful and versatile tools for directing and maintaining web traffic because they can easily incorporate a wide range of subject matter, in an engaging and personable manner. One thing you know from your in-house experience with dental patients- or potential patients- is that they don’t want to feel want to see a dentist or practitioner who seems impersonal and distant. A certain amount professionalism and expertise garners confidence, but without a friendly disposition, patients feel uncomfortable and anxious. This translates directly into the feel and content of your dental website, since it is often the first contact point potential patients make, and serves as an initial representative of you and your practice. Keeping an effective blog can be a full-time undertaking; so many practitioners find it worthwhile to hire an expert consultant, such as Dentistry Websites, to handle the specifics.

How Dental Website Designers Bring Clients to Your Site

Having the best dental website design in the world won’t do much good for your practice unless it gets plentiful and regular visitors. Although there are many ways to get visitors to your site, the following could be considered the Big Four.

Get Noticed

There are four basic strategies that web designers use to get their client sites noticed by the general public—and visited by potential clients.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is the basic core tool of web designers everywhere. Ever wonder who chooses the top listing returns for web searches on search engines such as Google and Bing? The way your website is designed and written actually affects your search engines rankings. Those ranking are what dictates how quickly people can pull up your site during an Internet search. Search engine queries have replaced the yellow pages and hard copy advertisements as the number one way customers find and connect with businesses. Ask the web designers at Dentistry Websites how to get more visitors to your dental practice website and the first thing they’ll suggest is SEO.

• Social Media Marketing: In the past, dentists relied heavily upon word of mouth. Today, word of mouth has moved online, and social media networks are inundated with people willing to speak their mind about every subject under the sun. And there are lots of people ready to listen. Businesses have taken advantage of this new marketing forum with great success. So get your practice into the social media network with MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, and start spreading the word.

• Email Marketing: Some people say that paper is dead, and maybe they’re right, but the days of mail out discounts, incentives and advertisements are far from over. Like many things in the business world, they’ve moved online.

• Paid Advertising: Sure, nobody really likes pop-ups, but people do respond to them. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is great because you don’t pay until someone clicks your link- and gets shuttled right to your dentistry website.

Knowing the strategies and successfully implementing them are two different things. Handling a website marketing campaign takes skill and experience. The designers at Dentistry Websites are ready to help you make the most of your website. It’s time to get noticed!

Get Online With Internet Marketing For Your Dental Practice

A mere decade ago, magazine and newspaper ads, word of mouth, and the yellow pages were the chief communicative media any dental practice needed. Today, the web is netting an ever increasing percentage of personal and business communication. Magazine and newspaper ads have been replaced by web pop-ups and commercial business links, and word of mouth has given way to web interactions on social networking sites and related phenomena such as Twitter. The practice of locating businesses by flipping through the phone book has all but died since search engine trolling can gather ten times the results in a mere fraction of a minute. The conclusion? Whether you are a technophile or a technophobe, the internet is a massive contender in today’s marketplace, and an online presence has got to be a mandatory part of your dental marketing strategy.

Creating a Web Presence

Today’s commercial communications are taking place online, so online is where you need to be. Clients are now almost exclusively using search engines and professional websites to find and make decisions about the service providers and businesses that they use, to the extent that if your office does not have a dental practice website, prospective clients will think you aren’t a legitimate or reputable care provider. Fortunately, the internet boom has created a rather unique advertising media situation. With a relatively small investment of time and money, and little or no skill, you can create a commercial website that presents your practice to clients and maintains a consistent, professional web presence.

Besides the usual who, what, where, and how information about your practice, credentials and services, the top dental websites on the net include a more friendly style of information dispersal and advertising—it’s called a blog. The designers at web marketing companies like Dentistry Websites know that the informal tone and twenty-four hour availability of blog postings allow a wide range of readers to access your website, from people actively searching for a new dentist, to those who are just thinking about having a cosmetic dentistry procedure and want to know more about it. Maintaining an informative and friendly blog will bring readers in, and every one of them is a potential client for your dental practice.