The world has been rocked with shocking events this year – most notably the ongoing pandemic. The instability caused by not knowing what tomorrow, next week or next month might bring has caused anxiety to rise. People are seeking what is comfortable and familiar.
During these unprecedented times, there are 5 essential best pracrtices to keep in mind when working on your dental website design. Some of these updates include features that help create the comfort and familiarity people are seeking. Your dental website SEO makes it so search engines are able to accurately display your website and company information in the search engine results pages.
Top 5 Dental Website Design and Development Best Practices
1. Ensure Your Contact Information is Accurate
Is your contact information up to date? This would include your business address and phone number, any contact emails listed, and social media links. Once every 6 – 12 months, you should thoroughly review all areas of your dental website to ensure your contact information is accurate.
The key areas to focus on are:
• Address: make sure the correct information is shown in the footer, header (if applicable), and contact page
• Phone Number: make sure the correct information is shown in the footer, header (if applicable), contact page, any page that may list phone numbers for specific individuals or departments
• Social Media Links: confirm all links are pointed to the right profile and are not broken
• Email Addresses: make sure all email addresses are active; check the contact page and forms
2. Is Your SEO Complete?
Ensuring the SEO on your dental website is accurate and complete is an ongoing task. Your web design team will have completed this task when your website was first created; however, this is not something that can be done once and left. As your website continues to grow and plug-ins are updated you will need to monitor your site to ensure the main on-page SEO elements are still accurate.
You should run a routine audit on your site every 3-6 months using one of several tools available. SEMrush’s free account will allow you to run an audit on your website; however, you are limited to 100 pages. This audit will tell you how your site is performing, spot duplicate content, broken links, missing tags, and much more.
3. Staffing Changes
Your dental website design should include pages that introduce the dentist and dental team as this helps to make your dental practice feel more accessible and familiar. Introducing the doctor and staff prior to visiting the dental office will help patients know who to expect when they go for a visit. As this is an important piece of your dental web design, you must ensure these pages remain up to date and accurate so that your website does not appear out of date or inaccurate which will cause patients to lose confidence in the practice.
4. Do the Features on Your Website Function Properly?
Ensuring that the features on your WordPress website function as they should help create a positive user experience. When special features cease to function properly, such as live chat windows, image galleries, forms, and plugins, users will lose interest and trust in your brand.
• Forms, Image Galleries: Once built, forms and image galleries should remain to function as intended provided there is no change to the internal structure of the website, and accidentally deleted image, or changing of email addresses. It is good practice to review these features to ensure no unintended changes were made.
• Plug-Ins and Addons: According to WordPress, over 38% of the web utilized their platform to host websites and blogs. If your website utilizes this content management system you will need to regularly monitor your site to keep plugins and themes up to date. Doing this will keep your site running smoothly.
• Third Party Applications: If your site contains dynamic phone numbers (for call tracking), live chat windows, or any other 3rd party applications it is vital that you monitor these features to ensure they are working properly. Even the best applications run into glitches from time-to-time and the last thing you want is for a patient to become frustrated when trying to connect with you. You can also hire a professional dental marketing agency to do these technical things on your behalf.
5. Is Your Sitemap Up to Date?
As your website grows so should your sitemap. If your website is not on WordPress, you may need to manually update your sitemap.xml file periodically throughout the year. To generate a sitemap, you can use the free services at XML-Sitemaps. It is important to keep your sitemap up to date as Google (and other search engines) use it to find the important pages of your website.
To stay ahead of the competition in 2020, your dental marketing team should, at a minimum, focus on these website updates. Keeping the information accurate and fresh will signal to Google to continue indexing your website while also building trust with new and existing patients.
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