Boost Your Dental Website Conversion Rate in 5 Steps

You spent time testing and tweaking your landing page to get the highest possible conversion rate. You inspect your site, and you think everything is in its right place. But when you checked your conversion tracking records, you realized your site is not converting well enough. As if that's not bad enough, your competition is this close to snagging your leads.

Don't worry. There's still time to improve your dental website's conversion rate. Incorporating conversion rate optimization (CMO) principles and following good dental website marketing practices, you'll achieve your conversion goals for sure.

Good Web Design and Strong SEO Will Boost Website Conversion Rates

Many online businesses assume that they their consumers are a few clicks away, but simply reaching the target audience is no longer enough. While online marketers can take the necessary steps to boost search engine rankings, there are various aspects of a web design that can distract website visitors easily, causing them to disregard your site and move on to the next one. So, what can online retail marketers do to reduce the likelihood of prospective customers leaving their site? Simply work on your website’s conversion optimization. 

Enhance Your Dental Website Marketing with Natural Search Engine Optimization

A few years ago, you may have passed off link buying, link farming, and keyword stuffing as effective search engine optimization methods. However, times have changed, especially when Google released the Panda and Penguin updates. This made the search engine smarter than it was before to the extent that it can differentiate good content from bad. It can even determine if you're doing aggressive SEO instead of natural SEO, which has led to thousands of websites being removed from the search engine results or significantly lowered in their search engine rankings.

4 Tips for Increasing Dental Website Conversion Rate and Search Engine Rankings

When using a website to promote your dental services, you automatically face two types of challenges: how to have high rankings in search engines, and how to increase conversion rate.

But as many businesses have experienced, SEO is not an easy task and neither are the techniques in boosting a site's conversion rate. There are several reasons for this: The competition has a better-looking website with more quality content; the website is designed by a professional without knowledge in SEO; you don't know how to maximize your images, landing pages, and calls to action. Investing in professional dental website marketing will ensure use of the proper techniques.

Successful Dental Offices Have a Solid Online Presence

The internet is among the cheapest and one of the most effective methods of advertising. Having a dental website for your practice not only allows you to showcase your practice, location, services, hours of operation, dentist, and staff in a cost-effective manner, it also gives your prospective patients a way to learn about your practice and interact with it.

If your dental practice does not have an online presence, or you are not developing one, you are doing your practice great harm. It takes more than having a website to find success online. Though your website is certainly the key to any internet marketing strategy, the overall online presence of your practice is the one that will determine your success.

Understanding the Value of Dental Website Marketing

A dental office may proudly proclaim it has been serving the local community for 20 years or more. During this time, the office likely relied on newspapers and phone directory advertisements to make patients aware of available services. There are even dental offices that rely exclusively on drawing the attention of those walking or driving by the office. In the past, strategies such as these were fine. In the modern era, it is critical for a dentist to utilize dental website marketing strategies. Online marketing truly is the best way for a dental office to make potential patients aware of its existence.

Smart Methods for Marketing Your Dental Practice Online

For any professional, the internet can be a powerful tool in attracting new clientele. And this is particularly true in the case of dentists. When someone moves to a new neighborhood, or if they've been without a dentist and need to find one, it's very common for them to turn to the internet. To get an idea what they will see when they begin their search, you can go to a search engine and type in what they will probably do themselves: They'll type the name of the town or neighborhood, or perhaps their zip code, and the word "dentist."

What you see might surprise you. As you can see, the results are usually not initially helpful to your prospective patients. But it's not too difficult for you to make sure that you are the dentist providing helpful information to local patients. And when you improve your dental practice’s online presence, people will find you and come calling.

Want More Patients? Add a Smile Gallery to Your Dental Website

Dental treatment is expensive and not something that someone will pay for on a whim. When you decide it´s time you corrected your smile, whether it is to bring back your self-confidence or just to make yourself look your best, you will only choose the very best dentist around. So, as a dentist, it is essential that your website speaks volumes about the services you provide, a smile gallery being the second most important part of your dental website after your home page.

Dentistry is big business, but nowadays, dental marketing is more important for selling your product than ever before. In the past people may have chosen a dentist from word of mouth or recommendation; today people will surf the Internet in search of their new smile. A dental smile gallery will not only brighten up your website, it will convert traffic into sales, making for longer dwelling times and conversions rates for your content. As a dentist in the 21st century, you don´t just need to be the best in your field; you need to sell your product with the very best dental website marketing.

Turn traffic into sales with the very best smile gallery around.

Why Conversion Rate Optimization is Crucial for Your Dental Website

Getting people to visit your website is only half the battle. What's more important is gaining a person’s attention, keeping it, and then making them book an appointment with your dental practice. Considering the decreasing attention spans of online users, it's getting tough to make them take action.

Conversion rate optimization lowers the barrier with respect to how they perceive your dentistry practice and its website. Are you wondering why you are seeing fewer appointments booked on your website than what you expected? The answer is conversion rate optimization – and it’s time to learn exactly how you can improve it.

Get New Dental Patients Through Social Media and Web 2.0

In today's modern dental market, potential clients are utilizing the internet more than ever. Individuals find service providers, like dentists, through a variety of methods, and one of the most common and easiest forms of research in recent years is the internet. With Web 2.0, dental marketing has skyrocketed.

Improve Your Dental Website in 6 Steps

A fresh, professional-looking website builds trust and credibility and, ultimately, converts site visitors into new patients. But with so much conflicting information available, what are the real keys to a strong website, especially for a dental practice? What follows is a list of six ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of a dental website via redesign.

The Benefits of Blogging for Your Dental Practice

A consistently updated blog is one of the best ways to stay atop search engine results. A good blog builds traffic and back links, which means more leads, which means more business.

Blogging Builds Dental Website Traffic
Google's latest updates seem to evaluate websites based on their content more heavily than before. Prior to the recent update, Google relied predominantly on back links (links to a website from other websites) for its rankings algorithms. Now the official Google position reads: "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share."

Internet Marketing: The Key to Getting Attention for Your Dental Practice Website

Marketing services can be an uphill task for certain businesses like dental practices, given that – unlike a site that sells goods – there are no free samples to entice clients. However, the advent of internet marketing has made it easier for dental professionals to reach a wide clientele base. All you need is a reliable internet marketing services and a website optimization expert to drive your dental marketing through the internet.

How Search Engine Optimization Affects Your Dental Practice

One of the biggest challenges faced by dental professionals is capturing the attention of prospective clients in an increasingly competitive market. Many dentists have discovered that dental marketing is a primary strategy for drawing in more clientele. Dentists are taking advantage of online marketing to showcase their talents and skills in order to reach more people with ease. Some of the strategies employed include updated and optimized websites, social media, and email marketing, among others.

Conversion Rate Optimization: An Integral Element of Dental Marketing

There's no denying that it's getting tougher online to generate leads and new clients with every passing year. Not only do an ever greater number of offline businesses make the transition online, but they also become increasingly savvier and more knowledgeable about how to take advantage of the Internet's incredible marketing potential. This means that for your dental practice's website to stay ahead of the competition you need to gain an extra edge by taking advantage of conversion rate optimization.

Redesign Your Dental Practice Website to Attract New Patients

Dental website marketing basically involves convincing internet users that they'll have a more beautiful smile if they use your services. "Just a more beautiful smile?" you might ask. Well, yes – if a beautiful smile is understood to be representative of healthy, attractive teeth.

Localize External Resources

Summary: Even popular offsite widgets can slow down or hang your web pages. Learn how to localize offsite resources to improve web page performance.

Third-party widgets abound these days on the Web. Widgets, typically implemented with a snippet of JavaScript, are an easy way to add useful functionality to your website. The problem with all these widgets is they can cause indeterminate delays if any third party servers are slow.

What is a Widget?

Webmasters want easy ways to add useful functionality to their sites. One popular way to add functionality is to use a third-part tool, called a widget. A snippet of JavaScript is placed in the target web page, which calls an off-server JavaScript that does some useful task. There are widgets for many popular tasks, including Google Analytics which is used by more than 10 million websites. Other widgets include Jquery, survey widgets, advertising, Facebook likes, Google Plus, RSS headlines, and more.

The Problem with Widgets

The problem with relying on third party widgets is that they can slow down your site. When you load JavaScript or other resources from off-site you can cause indeterminate delays for your own site. Inconsistency in response times can cause a reduction in what Chris Roast calls "attunability" or the ability to attune to the response times of websites. Depending on how the widget is placed within your pages (HEAD, top of BODY, bottom of BODY element), a slow widget can at the least slow down the loading of your pages (bottom of BODY), and at worst hang your pages altogether so users don't see any content (top of BODY). Loading multiple widgets also introduces DNS and network overhead. An anonymous example is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Slow Time to First Byte Example
Anonymized Webpagetest.org Waterfall Graph Snippet

Even popular widgets can have negative effects on website performance. Google Analytics is widely used to track statistics about websites (formerly Urchin). On Thanksgiving weekend of 2012, a popular website for computers and laptops suffered because Google was slow that day (Sunday, November 24, 2012, see Figure 2). When configuring a popular Lenovo laptop (Thinkpad X230) Lenovo.com served up a page that hung for more than a minute, waiting for Google to deliver its payload to Lenovo.com.

Figure 2: Lenovo.com Waiting for Google.com

One solution is to localize the external JavaScript to avoid the uncertain off-site delay. Moving the script from the top of the body to the bottom, and caching it locally improved performance by 13% in our tests. This is with a full-speed Google on board. When Google is slow or unresponsive (as it is rarely, but it happens), your site can suffer. If the external resource changes frequently you can create a CRON script to copy the external resource periodically to keep it up to date.

Another Cyber Monday Example of Slow External Resources

Another example is PC Magazine. Searching for the top 100 websites, the page was delayed while waiting for an external server to deliver a programming API (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: PCMag.com Waiting for api.recaptcha.net

To be fair this behavior tends to happen on busy online shopping days like Cyber-monday, Black Friday, and the week before Christmas, but this third-party slowdown can happen at any time.

How to Combat Widgetitus

Many of these external resource delays are preventable. The solution is to periodically cache the resource locally on your server and serve it locally. You can use a CRON script to periodically copy the external resource over to your server. Here are some techniques you can use to minimize widget overhead.

• Cache the remote resource locally (CRON to copy periodically)
• Defer or delay loading to allow the rest of the page to render before loading JavaScript/external resources
• Load the resource in an iFrame to decouple the script from your page loads

Conclusion

External widgets can cause indeterminate delays of your webpages, which can reduce response time consistency. If your users cannot rely on consistent performance of your site, they are more likely to go elsewhere. To improve attunability, localize external resources to reduce reliance on third-party servers.

Designing for Delay in Interactive Information Retrieval

Chris Roast, Interacting with Computers 10 (1998): 87-104. Introduced the notion of attunability. Consistency in response rates is important for user satisfaction.

Diagnosing Slow Web Servers with Time to First Byte

Slow web servers can be caused by a number of factors. You can test for slow server response times with the time time to first byte metric.

Google Analytics Is Installed On More Than 10 Million Websites

Google's own conservative estimate of the number of sites using Google analytics is over 10 million sites as of April 2012. Marketing Land, Nov. 25, 2012 accessed.

Speed Optimizing Google Analytics

Learn how to speed up web pages that use Google Analytics with a few simple changes, while maintaining its advantages for faster-loading sites.