There’s no doubt that a dental website is a significant investment in your business and one that can work for you – that is if you understand dental website marketing.
The problem is that too many dental practices simply don’t use their website as the powerful marketing tool that it really is. Instead, they fill it with all the relevant information, put it out there for everyone to see and forget about it.
While that may have worked 10-15 years ago, nowadays, virtually every dental practice has a website, so your chances of being noticed if you do nothing are pretty much zero.
Think about it this way; your dental website is your shop window. It’s working for you 24/7 when you aren’t, and understanding how it can help your dental practice, can put you ahead of the game, and more importantly, ahead of your competition, to land new patients.
With this in mind, we’re going to give you 7 top tips to get your dental website working for you and earning its keep.
#1 – Building backlinks
When it comes to growing a dental website, backlinks are still important – but not just any backlinks. Quality matters. So what do we mean by quality?
When Google sees that a reputable dental-related website links back to your site, it effectively signals, “This trusted site believes this practice’s website is worth mentioning.” As a result, your website is more likely to improve its search rankings.
The idea is that over time, with enough quality backlinks, your dental website will move up the search engine results for the keywords you want to rank for. This, in turn, gives you a greater chance of being spotted when someone in your area is searching for a dental practice to undergo treatment.
Like many aspects of promoting a dental website, proper backlinking is a long-term strategy that can deliver strong results over time. So how long is the long term? According to some sources, a quality backlink can start to impact results in as little as ten weeks, though it may take six months or more for competitive keywords.
#2 – Managing your review sites
Love them or hate them, review platforms such as Google My Business, Yelp and Whitecoat play an essential role in promoting a dental practice. We live in a review-driven culture, and many people read reviews before committing to a purchase, using a service, or booking a treatment. It’s estimated that nine out of every ten people read reviews before making a decision.
As a dental practice, you need to encourage people to review, especially if they have had a positive experience. These reviews can then be linked back to your dental website and used as testimonials.
#3 – Optimising your dental website for the search engines
This, in effect, is dental website marketing 101!
If you do nothing else, your website needs to be optimised to stand a strong chance of ranking well. While keywords within your content are important, optimising a dental website involves much more than that. Some of the key factors search engines look for include:
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Responsiveness on mobile devices – Is your website mobile-friendly?
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Meta tags and descriptions – Are they fully optimised?
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Website load times – Visitors do not want to wait for pages to load.
All of these elements need to be optimised to build a strong foundation for long-term search visibility and growth.
#4 – Creating engaging content
If optimising your dental website is the foundation, then creating engaging content is a close second. It’s about producing interesting, share-worthy content that positions your practice as an authority in its field. This plays a vital role in growing your website’s visibility and should be done consistently.
Some of the ways you can add content to your site include:
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Publishing regular blog posts on topics people are actively searching for
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Adding new pages when you introduce a new service or treatment
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Creating city, suburb and state-level pages to attract patients from nearby areas
Whatever approach you take, consistency is key — make it regular and make it valuable.
#5 – Promotion, promotion, promotion
Whether your content is written in-house or by a professional, there’s little value in uploading it to your dental website and leaving it at that. Today, Google looks for signs that people are engaging with your content — through comments, backlinks, references, or discussion on social media. A strong content promotion strategy focuses less on producing content at scale and more on actively promoting valuable, share-worthy articles, as outlined above.
Ways to promote an article include:
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Sharing it with your email list
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Promoting it on social media
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Guest posting on relevant websites
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Reaching out to industry influencers
By consistently applying these tactics, your dental practice will begin to see stronger visibility and improved results over time.
#6 – Incorporating a good sales funnel
When you consider that getting new patients through your dental practice door is the end goal, your website is the cornerstone of that. So how do you maximise the number of visitors to your site and convert those leads into patients? Build a good sales funnel.
This can be something as simple as creating engaging Facebook or Google ads directing interested parties to dedicated landing pages. The landing page should give more information about the service you are promoting and can be incorporated into your dental website. As far as dental website marketing goes, studies have shown that websites with 10-15 landing pages increase conversions by 55%.
In easy terms, if a person shows interest in a particular ad and clicks through to a treatment-specific landing page, you then have a process in place that hopefully turns that lead into a new dental patient.
Moreover, a good sales funnel makes the process trackable, so you can see what works, enabling you to do more of the same.
That’s intuitive dental website marketing, right there!
#7 – Creating the perfect UX
Good dental website marketing isn’t just about driving visitors to your site; it’s also about what happens when they get there. This is why creating the ideal user experience (UX) is vital.
Let’s face it, if a visitor has found your dental website and it won’t load properly, it becomes difficult to find the information they need, or they can’t find how to contact you (believe me, it happens), then the whole job of getting them there in the first place is pointless. Many practices improve these outcomes by complementing their UX work with marketing guidance for dental clinics, ensuring their online presence is both functional and strategically aligned.
So, ensure:
- Pages load quickly
- Navigation from page to page is easy and simple
- Contact details are easily visible on every page, and
- Website layout is strategic and straightforward.
So there you have it, 7 top tips to get the best out of your dental practice website.
If you want to know more about dental website marketing or partner with a company with a proven track record in new patient growth, come and talk to Mediboost.
Call us on 1300 163 058 or book a consultation today and see just how we can help you.
