7 Reasons Why A User-Friendly Website Is Important For Your Dental Practice

There are many reasons why a user-friendly website is important for your dental practice. In fact, about 66.7% of American adults reported visiting a dentist or dental clinic in the past year. While that’s a healthy statistic, is there anything dentists can do to reach the remaining 33.3%?

Yes, there is: and it’s not what you think.

Simply improving the quality of your dental practice won’t attract new patients. You’ll also have to invest in a well-made website to see an uptick in footfall. After all, America loves the internet, with 307.2 million users trusting it for their most minor needs.

Need convincing? We’re here to give you a quick rundown on why your dental practice requires an intuitive website.

7 Reasons Why Does Your Dental Practice Need a User-Friendly Website

Yellow Page marketing is a thing of the past. In today’s digital age, you need a website to grow your practice. More importantly, that website needs to be optimized- not just for Google, but for your patients too. Here’s how user-friendly professional dental websites can be a game-changer for dental practice marketing.

1. Faster Page Loading Times

You probably don’t realize how critical website speed is to the success of your website. A user-friendly web page loads quickly- it’s textbook!

Besides improving your search engine ranking, a fast response time keeps online visitors happy. Nobody likes a slow-loading website, and users might leave pages that take more than a couple of seconds to show up. Hence, if your website is too slow, you’re probably missing out on patients who were otherwise interested in what you had to offer.

2. Easier Navigation

In 2022, there were a total of 188,074 active dentists across the United States- and this number is sure to increase. Dental practitioners in almost every niche are slated to face steep competition in the years to come. The only way to beat industry Goliaths is to pull patients in with a user-friendly website.

Let’s put it this way: dental practice websites with poor navigation will drive away patients. That’s why it’s vital to have a clean website with design elements best suited to their needs and habits. Organize your content by relevance and interest, so your patients can find everything they’re looking for conveniently.

In case your dental website design has too many pages, consider adding a search bar so that your patients can find what they want hassle-free. Also, pay close attention to the header and footer of your website. The goal is to make navigation as effortless as possible.

3. Ease of Use Across Devices

Websites that haven’t been updated in the past several years might only be optimized for desktops and laptops. This would’ve been fine in the early-to-mid-2000s. But in 2023, it’s a deal breaker.

Mobiles generated 58.99% of global website traffic in the second quarter of 2022, meaning more than half of the world’s population searches for services/commodities via cellular devices. And you probably know that a website requires a different layout and navigational process to work well on a smartphone. Fail that, and you’ll miss out on online traffic.

4. Highly Persuasive

Like most others, your dental practice website is probably geared to serve a few primary functions: provide vital information about your practice, obtain new leads, and secure new/returning patients. Navigation aside, you can use two central tools to better meet these goals- internal links and calls-to-action (CTAs).

Use internal links to guide users to relevant pages on your website, such as your services or contact page. You can also add a CTA to encourage viewers to take the next step and schedule an appointment.

A dental practice website is part of your overall marketing strategy. Hence, it’s best to make it as persuasive as possible- either by gentle or overt means. You can apply these two tools to build a truly user-friendly website.

5. Increased Dwell Time

The more satisfied patients are when browsing your website, the longer they’ll spend examining the information it provides.

On the other hand, when visitors access your website and leave right away, search engines take it as a sign that it doesn’t effectively meet their needs. Typically, this causes Google to push your site further down the results page, which significantly reduces the number of potential patients who see your site.

That’s where a user-friendly website can make all the difference to your dental marketing efforts. Your aim should be to keep patients engaged for as long as possible, decrease bounce rates, and boosts dwell time.

6. Improved Trust

There’s no way we would see a medical professional we don’t trust entirely. The same applies to your dental practice website.

When you’re working on a dental website, you’re trying to make a first impression that will impact whether or not a potential party finds you credible. An updated, optimized, and intuitive web design builds trust because it shows you take your work seriously.

A user-friendly website will also include ‘social proof’, or evidence that your services are well-regarded by actual patients. Things like online reviews, video testimonials, and before-after pictures in easy-to-locate places can help build trust with online visitors.

Putting together a website is no easy feat. It’s best to work with a professional dental marketing company to do things the right way. A reputable agency will know exactly what to do to get you on Google’s SEO frontlines.

7. Better SEO Rankings

Enhanced user satisfaction, longer dwell times, and improved page load speed factor into your SEO rankings as well. In other words, these elements tell Google that you offer informative, valuable content to users. This improves your rankings on the results page, exposing more potential patients to your site.

Given how a large number of people seldom look past the first results page, your SEO ranking can play a crucial role in your digital marketing campaign. And it all starts with a user-friendly dental practice website.

The Bottom Line

A difficult-to-navigate dental website can kill your web traffic quicker than you think. It’s time to turn your outdated website and create one that can bring you the patients. Remember, if people don’t have a good experience with your website, they’ll have preconceived notions of poor service at your office- and that’s not something you’d want!

Building an effective and optimized dental practice website takes time and skill. Fortunately, you don’t have to shelve your existing priorities and create one yourself. DentaMarketing can analyze your goals and develop a well-designed, visually pleasing, and easy-to-navigate site that keeps visitors hooked! Trust us to do all the heavy lifting on your behalf. For more information, give us a call today!