Things to consider when creating a website design for your dental clinic

In the digital era, presence on the Internet is a vital part of every dental clinic’s success formula. A professional-looking website will help you connect with potential clients, improve your brand image and grow your business faster. On the other hand, poor dental website designs usually do more harm than good by creating negative impressions about businesses. In today’s article, our web design agency in Chicago will give you a list of things to consider when building a dental clinic website design.

Table of Contents

• The importance of building a solid online presence for your dental clinic
• More than just another dental clinic website
• Premium dental website design done right
  • Easy navigation
  • The right choice of images
  • New Patient Forms & Online Scheduling
  • HIPAA Compliance
  • ADA Compliance
  • Quality assurance
• Integrating your marketing strategies
• Optimizing your website to drive online search traffic
• Final thoughts

The importance of building a solid online presence for your dental clinic

Today, a strong online presence is the backbone of every successful business. The situation is not any different for healthcare providers, as a recent survey showed that 86% of patients choose a dentist by online reviews. Human habits changed with the advancements in technology, and using traditional marketing channels is not enough when running a dental clinic. Before scheduling an appointment, people usually search for more information about your clinic online. They want to know what others think of you, how experienced your staff is, how to get to your physical location, your business hours, and more. Showing potential patients that you are an active, professional business on the cutting edge of digital marketing will help them decide where to go for their dental needs.

You can position your business as a thought leader in your field and reach new audiences through online marketing and presence on social media networks. A professional dental clinic website design will support all your online efforts and give clients 24/7 access to all the essential information about your business. It will help you build a strong brand presence, which is crucial in every competitive industry.

More than just another dental clinic website

As many business owners have already noticed the importance of having a solid online presence, the only way to truly stand in front of the competition is to build a unique dental clinic website design. With many DIY platforms and countless tutorials for creating dentist websites, you might wonder whether custom-coded websites are still a worthy investment. In our experience, the answer heavily depends on the channels your clients are currently coming from, your budget, and the level of competition you are facing.

If your clients mostly choose your dental clinic based on friends’ recommendations, a basic website might suit your needs. However, the main problem with page builders is redundancy in code, which causes slow website speed. If you are comfortable with your web development skills, we highly recommend using the Sage WordPress theme as a framework for dental website design. It will allow you to achieve much better performance.

On the other hand, every clinic could benefit from a custom-tailored dental practice web design that stands out from the crowd and drives business growth—in most cases, investing time and money in developing such a website usually pays off in the end.

Premium dental website design done right

A premium website will put you in front of the competition and benefit your business in many ways. When it comes to building a dental clinic website design, paying close attention to the following factors will ensure the high quality of the final product:

Easy navigation

Making website navigation easy for users is an integral part of creating a good user experience. It is also a powerful way to increase the time visitors spend on your website. Here is a list of tips that can help you make navigation on your website better:

• Plan the navigation in front
• Prioritize certain pages
• Ensure everything is available within three clicks
• Don’t overcrowd your menus
• Stick to best practices

The right choice of images

As the human brain processes images much faster than text, they are vital to every dental clinic website design. You must choose the right images to communicate your messages to your target audience. For the sake of uniqueness, we advise against downloading too many stock photos for dental websites. Having professional-looking images that reflect your clinic, staff, and services can help you build trust with potential clients and enhance brand recognition.

Dentist websites often use before and after galleries as a powerful way to showcase their expertise and increase conversion rates.

New Patient Forms & Online Scheduling

To ensure the growth of your dental practice, your dental clinic website design needs to contain features that allow clients to schedule an appointment fast and easily. It will reduce the number of phone calls you receive and help you attract new clients and keep the existing ones by making the whole experience smoother.

You should also enable potential clients to fill out new patient forms online. The best practice is to tie these forms to dental practice management software programs to automate the process. This way, you will save time and appear more professional. Just make sure everything works perfectly and all leads finish in your inbox.

HIPAA Compliance

Health care providers, including dentists, need a website that complies with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – especially if they are dealing with protected health information (PHI). This act sets standards for protecting health information that circulates in electronic form. Failing to secure such information could lead to drastic financial penalties.

If you plan on implementing patient forms and payment options on your dental practice website, you must ensure that any information patients leave on your website is encrypted and secure. Our web development company in Chicago accomplishes this by implementing an SSL certificate on dentist websites. Enhanced security will provide necessary protection for your clients and help you achieve better rankings in search engines.

ADA Compliance

Americans with Disabilities is a civil law right that protects people with disabilities from discrimination. To comply with this act, dentist websites need to be accessible to people with various forms of disabilities. Even though this is an ethical duty in the first place, creating an ADA-compliant website is also good for your business – as it will make your services available to everyone. But what level of compliance should your website meet? 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have three levels:

• Level A – Basic Accessibility: This level outlines the minimum requirements a website needs to pass in order to be considered accessible. For example, one of the criteria is that color mustn’t be the only visual mean of conveying information.
• Level AA – Strong Accessibility: This level makes content accessible in a wider variety of ways, as it contains 20 additional elements compared to Level A. One of them is related to the contrast between text and background, which needs to be at least 4.5 to 1. Level AA is the recommended level of compliance.
• Level AAA – Excellent Accessibility: This is the highest level of compliance, which not many websites meet. It outlines 28 additional criteria, including a minimum contrast level of 7 to 1. That allows visitors with 20/80 vision loss to understand the content of a dental practice website.

Quality Assurance for dental websites

Ensuring your dental website functions properly is the step you should not skip before the launch date. You need to review images, color palettes, micro-interactions, and copywriting in search of any inconsistencies that could potentially harm your business’s online presence. The best approach is to create a design QA checklist with your team before you begin inspecting a new software platform. Skipping the Quality Assurance process is not advisable, as even professionals with advanced design skills make mistakes. It is better to find out what needs to be fixed before users can interact with your new dental clinic website design. This way, you can make necessary adjustments and ensure the premium quality of your new website.

Integrating your marketing strategies

Every web design project should be approached with a complete marketing strategy in mind. Your website must support your marketing efforts across all social media networks and clearly communicate your brand messages to the target audience.

• Add Social Media Icons: The rising popularity of social media networks is an excellent opportunity for dental clinics to promote their services to a target audience. Implementing icons that, when clicked, lead to your profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. will increase brand engagement .
• Give Social Proof: Great dental practice web design utilizes the power of testimonials and online reviews to increase conversion rates. Consider integrating reviews from Google, Yelp, Facebook, and other platforms on your website. To maximize the number of reviews, your dental clinic gets, you can develop software that automatically sends review requests after an appointment.
• Call tracking – adding a javascript snippet can help you track exactly where your new clients are coming from, allowing you to adjust your marketing campaigns for the best possible return on investment (ROI).
• Add Google Analytics to your dental clinic website design – Integrating Google Analytics with your website will allow you to track the number of visitors, keywords that are bringing results, conversions, and more.

Optimizing your website to drive online search traffic

More and more people use search engines to find healthcare providers, which is great news. However, performing dental search engine optimization is necessary for improving the chances that people interested in dental services will find your website before other dental websites. You need to:

• Write high-quality content
• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
• Optimize images
• Create separate service pages
• Create location pages if you work in multiple locations

Write high-quality content

When it comes to long-term ranking on Google, writing engaging content that informs visitors about dental practices is the best approach. Your content needs to be written with people in mind, so avoid placing low-quality articles on your dental clinic website. Creating engaging procedure explanation videos is a good idea for dental clinics, as it will help you build trust with potential clients by demonstrating your expertise. If you manage to create content that keeps visitors exploring your website, Google will award you with better rankings. In addition, people might want to share your content across social media networks, improving your brand visibility and adding up to your social media presence.

Also, keep in mind that designing a content management system specifically for dental practices will pay off in the long run, as daily updates will become much more manageable.

Ensure your dental clinic website design is mobile-friendly

Mobile traffic is on the rise, and ever since Google announced the mobile-first indexing policy, it has become clear that mobile-friendly websites perform much better in the most popular search engines. If your dental website doesn’t function well on smartphones and tablets, most visitors will leave without exploring it any further and search for a solution to their problems elsewhere. That leads to an increase in bounce rate, negatively impacting search engine rankings. To avoid high bounce rates, you need to ensure that your dental clinic website design looks perfect and provides a great user experience on every device. Implementing a responsive web design is the perfect way to achieve this. By utilizing the power of a fluid grid layout, you can make your dental website adapt for each screen size.

Another reason responsive websites perform much better in search engines is page speed. They tend to load much faster than non-responsive websites, thanks to image optimization and removing unnecessary HTML codes. That results in an enhanced user experience Google wants to provide to its users.

Optimize images on your dental website

Images are one of the most resource-consuming elements on dentist websites; you need to optimize them to maintain the website speed. Slow websites have higher bounce rates, as people usually don’t wait longer than 4 seconds for a page to load. Our designers follow dental website best practices when choosing image file sizes and formats. The key is to select the smallest possible image file sizes without sacrificing the quality. This approach will help you maximize the page speed and enhance the user experience.

Another powerful way to increase the visibility of your images on Google Images is to add image alt tags. It will allow crawlers to understand the context of your images better, as well as help the users in case the website doesn’t load fully.

Create Service Pages

Service pages are great for explaining all the different services your clinic provides and building trust with potential clients, but they also play a vital role in search engine optimization. Creating them can help you expand the number of keywords your website ranks for. You will increase the chances that one of your pages will appear on the SERP when someone searches for a specific dental service. That will allow you to reach more potential clients, especially the ones who have never heard of your clinic before.

Create Location Pages for Multi-Location Practice

If you provide services in more than one physical location, your dental clinic website design should include a separate page for each of them. By targeting keywords that contain location-specific phrases, you can achieve better results in local SEO and obtain more quality traffic. If optimized correctly, each location page could rank in SERP – allowing you to target a wider audience. Considering the fact that 76% of people who search for local businesses visit one of them the same day, we can conclude that it is worth investing efforts in local SEO. Here is a list of tips for creating location pages on dentist websites:

• Create a clear website structure: Group your location pages together in a logical way and ensure URLs are optimized for each page. Creating a clear structure right away will allow you to expand your business later without worrying about restructuring a whole website.
• Avoid duplicate content: Creating unique content on each location page is vital, as it will improve the quality of your website and help you rank better. You can target specific landmarks and present unique services, local reviews, etc. It is also essential to ensure that phone numbers, addresses, and social media links are up to date for each location.
• Geo-tag images: add location-specific images on your location pages, and ensure image alt tags are optimized to rank for local searches.
• Use internal links: a solid internal linking structure helps crawlers and users with navigation on your website. Linking to your location pages will make them rank in the SERP much faster. However, do not forget that internal links need to be relevant.

Final thoughts

Creating a successful dental practice website requires time and knowledge and involves more steps than designing visually appealing elements and choosing the color palette. Everything needs to function perfectly in a way that will provide a great user experience for your potential and existing clients.

If you are searching for a professional agency that can handle your new dental clinic website design, feel free to schedule a call with Alpha Efficiency, and our team of dedicated designers will help you build a successful online presence.