6 Dental Website Marketing Mistakes to Look Out For

In 3 seconds or less you'll have to make a good first impression on a potential new patient. Here's how to make sure your website is fit to do just that.

Your company website is often the first “face” your patients see, even before they visit you in your physical building. Today, a significant number of potential customers are attracted to a dental practice because a popular search engine directed them to its well-designed website. If they are impressed, they visit the practice in person. Else, they simply move on to a better designed website!

For this reason, your website needs to be visually appealing, responsive to a potential customer’s needs, and in alignment with your company’s mission and vision. In fact, a cleverly designed website can:

• Boost your online reputation.
• Showcase your company in favorable light as a leader.
• Generate new leads for your practice and create opportunities to actualize them.

Conversely, a poorly designed website can even put potential customers off your practice!

To avoid this unfortunate situation, listed below are 6 website marketing mistakes you might inadvertently have made, and straightforward ways to fix them.

1.Your website is slow

Here is a shocking statistic for you. Many of your virtual visitors will give you less than three seconds before they decide to move on. Yes, your website has barely 3 seconds in order to complete loading and make a worthwhile first impression. This means that your website needs to keep up with the internet superhighway by being supersonic in speed! Here are 2 tips to make this happen with minimal fuss.

• Spring clean your website and discard all unnecessary clutter —large graphics and images, sluggish plugins, extra web pages that are no longer relevant, etc. Colorful media images can certainly brighten up an otherwise dull website but take care to keep them under 50K in size.
• Distribute your website pages across a CDN (content delivery network). This way, each page may be handled by a different server. But the end result is a faster, more responsive website.

2. Your website looks dodgy

You know that phrase, “too good to be true”? Let this not be used in relation with your website. This can happen if you use fancy words to describe your practice, without backing them up with facts and figures.

Fortunately, this mistake is easy to reverse as you simply need to spruce up your website with the following key elements:

• Automated counters — for social media shares on blogs, for registration numbers to virtual events, etc.
• An authentic privacy and anti-spam message in all your pages, so your visitors feel safe sharing their contact information with you.
• Positive reviews from patients who genuinely benefited from your practice.
• Relevant media coverage.
• Trust badges for potential payments.

All of these will help re-iterate the integrity of your dental practice, so every visitor feels safe in becoming a potential customer.

3. Your website is careless with leads

In the best case, your website generates high traffic, and allows visitors to provide their contact information. In the worst case, your visitors have no opportunity to sign up with your practice. However, either situation is not going to be fruitful for your business, unless you have a compelling system that influences your visitors to act.

An ideally designed website completes all ends of the marketing funnel, and provides your visitors with:

• High quality content that has undeniable value to your visitors
• Quick and painless opportunities to sign up with their contact information, on multiple web pages. If you send them in a loop across your website, you are bound to lose them quickly and forever.
• A reward on completion of the call to action.

4. Your website seems overly aggressive

Imagine that you have the aforementioned sign-up opportunity displayed in every page of your website, so visitors can provide their email and phone details.

Now the big question is this: What is in it for them?

Yes, your visitors absolutely need a worthwhile reason in order to voluntarily generate a lead for your business.

Fortunately, human beings love freebies. This is one hook you can freely use to entice your visitors to willingly provide their contact information to you.

This can include:

• A free but beneficial booklet that they can immediately download. (Example: “50 tips to balance your blood pressure/ sugar”, or “10-minute test to determine if you are susceptible to stress”.)
• Coupon redeemable in the near future. (Example: “5% off on zero-power, anti-glare eyewear”.)
• Discounts, as everybody loves them. (Example: “5% discount on your next health check-up, valid this month only”.)
• Free/ discounted entry to a coveted online event in your industry, like a dental webinar.
• Free trial versions of upcoming products.

In fact, all of the above can create lucrative opportunities to tie up with your vendors, so you mutually promote each other’s business online. This has the possibility to generate more traffic, and a lot more leads.

5. Your dental practice is not on social media

Today, social media is “the” place to be. It is how you make new contacts for your business and sustain them through virtual engagement. Make sure that your dental website captures this ethic by showcasing your social media feeds. In turn, you should also stay active on social media in a way that it drives more people to your website.

6. Your website lacks human touch

In all this virtual business it is easy to quickly get too “system driven” rather than “human driven”. This may be okay for a large, banking corporation. However, your dental practice is ultimately about enhancing the quality of human lives and extending their mortality. Ensure that this message comes through clearly across your entire website.

An easy way to do this is to share stories — intriguing stories about yourself and your personnel, about lives that took a turn for the better due to your dental practice, and so on.

Conclusion

Finally, it all comes down to the quality of website content. For this reason, take extra care to ensure that whatever you do share on your website—from blogs, to testimonials, to stories, to your business products—are all authentic, and adhere to the highest standards in your industry. As the saying goes, "Authenticity is the best policy".

About the Author:

Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of 180+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dentists who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.