Best Practices for Driving Traffic to Your Dental Website

“How do I drive more traffic to my dental practice website?”

That thought crosses the mind of every dental practitioner at some point.

Maybe you too have sunk time and effort into setting up your office, only to open up shop and wonder where your patients are. Perhaps you have seen steady growth over the past one year but now hit a plateau.

Regardless of whether you are trying to attract your first patient or 20,000th patient, increasing traffic to your dental practice website is a critical part of growing your business. If your website is optimized for conversions, getting a jump in traffic could mean more patients and more sales.

Often, after a website is built and launched, it just sits there. A website can drive patients to your practice, help you improve online reputation, establish communication channels with your target market, and much more if it is properly utilized. However, in order to use this tool to its full potential, you need to understand it and interact with it.

To help you increase traffic to your dental practice website, here is a list of five high impact tactics.

1. Run paid social media ad campaigns

To increase traffic to your dental practice website, you need to be able to get your business in front of your target patients. With paid social media ads, you can create highly targeted ad campaigns that serve specific ads to the patients who are most likely to click through and schedule an appointment.

If you are thinking about running paid social media ads, here are some popular social networks you could consider:

Facebook

With more than 1.65 billion monthly users, Facebook is the most extensive social network in the world. This platform is filled with opportunities for you to reach new patients and drive them to your dental practice. Facebook’s robust advertising platform allows you to target customers based on their needs, behavior, location, and search history.

Using Facebook ads, you can serve automatically-generated ads to potential patients who have previously visited your website, featuring the services that they have already looked at or inquired about. These ads can help you bring visitors back to your website so that you can make the most of the traffic you are already attracting.

Instagram

An incredibly popular platform, especially among Millennials, Instagram can be the perfect choice for your practice if you are also targeting younger audiences.

With its highly efficient tools for business owners, Instagram is becoming one of the key platforms for social media advertising. So, even if you have already built an army of fans and followers on Instagram, you are not using it to its full potential until you have tried its advertising platform.

2. Use SEO to improve your website’s discoverability

Can your patients find your dental practice website?

When patients search for dental practitioners online, you want your practice to be one of the top results for that search, especially since one-third of all clicks go to the first three organic results on Google. The top position is a key component for generating sustained and qualified traffic to your website.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of refining your website to improve its chances of ranking highly in search results for relevant keywords.

SEO is a bunch of techniques and works well when you put in time and effort into learning the rules that manage search engines like Google and Bing so that you can apply those rules to the design and content of your website.

3. Reach new patients with influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the process of nurturing relationships with influencers to get your dental practice in front of new patients.

With influencer marketing, you can exploit the creativity and reach of relevant influencers in your industry while leveraging the trust that they have already formed with their followers.

Bloggers and various social media celebrities are trusted by their followers, so getting them to endorse your practice is an effective and organic way to increase your website traffic. According to Nielsen, 92 percent of customers value word-of-mouth recommendations from people they trust over any other form of paid or free advertising.

4. Drive excitement with online contests

While most of these methods are long-term solutions for increasing website traffic, there are ways to give your practice a short-term boost as well.

With online contests and giveaways, you can drive more traffic to your dental practice website by offering exciting prizes in exchange for your patients’ participation. Gifts and rewards are powerful incentives for getting both existing and potential patients to visit your website.

These contests can use social sharing as a method of entry, which will provide these campaigns a greater chance of going viral and spreading around social networks. Once participants are on your website, you can use different techniques to guide them to your office.

5. Attract more patients with content marketing

Content marketing is more than just having a dental blog.

By creating informative and engaging content, you can attract more patients to your dental practice. From videos and podcasts to guides and free ebooks, there are endless opportunities for your practice to expand out into the world of content and attract new patients.

Fresh and original content help position your practice as an industry thought leader and build a credibility around your brand. Your practice’s content strategy can include anything that your patients might find relevant or interesting. Do not limit yourself to posts or updates that focus just on your services. Instead, consider topics and resources related to your specialty that your patients will find useful.

Content marketing also gives your website the chance to conquer the search results beyond keywords. Using online tools like a Google Keyword Planner, you can identify new opportunities for your dental practice to rank in search results and get in front of the larger patient base.

Generate more traffic, attract more patients

With these dental practice marketing tips, you should be able to generate more traffic to your practice website. More traffic to your dental website means more opportunities to turn visitors into regular patients. Once you have increased your website traffic, you can consider conversion rate optimization as the next step.

Web design mistakes that drive patients away

Your dental website is one of the best ways to advertise your practice by providing accurate information to potential patients. However, not all websites are created excellent. There are a few website design mistakes that dentists make that turn potential patients away. Here are five of the absolute worst offenders:

Mistake #1: Your website looks like a brochure

A lot of websites look like an online brochure. Instead of grabbing the attention of visitors and guiding them into taking a specific action, these websites merely convey business information. The biggest problem with most websites is no engaging content that impacts visitors on an emotional level. Your website should be a virtual salesperson that sells your service 24x7x365.

Mistake #2: Not capturing details of website visitors

Do you know that nearly 90 percent of website visitors leave without giving you their contact details? You can fix this problem by adding opt-in forms in the right places. According to the study, almost 60 percent of website visitors will share their contact details in order to receive valuable information or giveaways, and this is where you can capture their details. You can add these people to your email list and drip feed them with specific information through an automated email marketing solution.

This is a massive missed opportunity for many practices. Just imagine how much revenue your dental practice may be lost because you are not capturing the details of almost 90 percent of website visitors.

Mistake #3: Boring headlines

Think about how you read a newspaper. When you pick up a newspaper, you browse through the headlines until something catches your attention and then you read the article. This is the exactly how people view your website. People come to your website and you have merely a 3-second window to capture their attention, or they will go to one of your competitors. Therefore, it is important to have headlines that hook visitors and make them want to read more. You need to write headlines that are patient-focused and talk about the benefits your services bring to your patients.

Mistake #4: Not using patient testimonials

Patient testimonials and success stories inject credibility into your message by giving it a human voice. This is the chance for your existing patients to sell for you. You are allowing real people to show the benefits they have gained by taking your services.

You will also be allowing potential patients to see that real people have used and approved your services. Ultimately, by using your existing and past patents’ genuine feedback, you can increase your chances of conversion.

Mistake #5: Poor website design and navigation

A visually distracting website with a lot of content can overwhelm readers and dilute your message. Clutter is the number one killer in any website design. When potential patients are confronted with too many options, they tend to walk away from that decision process without choosing an option. Most of your visitors will click close and never return.

Instead, you need to keep your web design simple. Your website should be easy to navigate and clutter-free. Keep the graphics to a minimum and emphasize on using a lot of white space. Remember, you have your visitors’ attention for less than three seconds, so your message needs to be brief and informative.

If you design your website in an engaging way and minimize the clutter, you will keep visitors on your website long enough to understand your marketing message, and you will likely turn those visitors into patients.

Wrapping up

If your website contains any of these blunders, your conversion rate probably is not anywhere near encouraging. Though some of these errors may seem insignificant, correcting these can lessen your bounce rate and improve your rankings.

Correcting these small mistakes can not only attract more traffic to your website but even hold your visitors’ attention for a more extended period and increase the average number of pages viewed per visitor.

Do you need to design a dental website or get valuable insights on dental practice marketing tips? Contact Practice Builders for your free consultation with the experts today! We can take your dental practice’s website to the next level.