By Luc Wade, Marketing Director at Hive Business.

There are 4 main reasons why your dental website might not be performing to its full potential.

1. SEO

Poor performance due to poor traffic

The best content in the world means nothing if it can’t be found on Google or the other search engines. A well built and properly optimised website will make it easy for Google and the like to crawl and index your webpages.

Some of the most common SEO issues are easy to fix.  Including:

• Improper redirects for any webpage errors that are occurring
• Messy or awkward URLs
• Slow page load speeds
• Images that are not search friendly
• Poorly written page titles and descriptions

2. Promotional 

Are you attracting the wrong type of patient?

Before you make any major changes to your site and content, consider first, the people coming to your site. Are they the right audience for your dental practice or are they quickly leaving your site when they realise your location, type of practice or treatments available are not for them?

Are you promoting your dental practice and website in the correct areas that attract the correct demographic? If you aren’t, you could be wasting precious time and budget bringing in meaningless traffic. Your should consider whether your brand needs updating to fit your ideal patient.

Go to your Google Analytics account and look at the bounce rate and see if particular sources of visitors are generating more or less conversions compared to others.

If you see high bounce rates and low conversion with any particular source, you need to re-evaluate the channel.

Pay per click (PPC): if you are paying for traffic (e.g. Google PPC, Facebook PPC, retargeting, etc.) and not seeing results from these campaigns, re-evaluate and either stop any that aren’t showing ROI or change the campaign and test again to see if you can get better results.

For organic: if you are finding it hard to engage with your audience via site content, blog articles and social network posting you may want to reassess your tactics. Ask yourself, your new and returning patients, your target patient groups where they go for information and what type of information is important to them. Understand this and you can create and share that type of information on the correct channels in the correct way.  Do this well and the right people will find it, interact with it, land on your site and in your practice.

3. Design 

Your website isn’t responsive

Google’s “Mobilegeddon” has changed the digital landscape for practices without a responsive website.  Back in April, Google released a new algorithm update focused on boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly websites and pages in mobile searches while pushing sites deemed unresponsive down the search engine results.

If your website offers a poor user experience on smartphones and tablets and is slow to load on mobile devices it’s unlikely to be responsive.  To check if your site is “mobile friendly” try Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool.

With up to 50% of your website traffic from a mobile device nowadays, it’s important to check and make amends. Especially as mobile-friendly sites receive lower bounce rates and higher conversion numbers compared to those that aren’t.

Your dental website has unclear or cluttered navigation

A well-structured navigation is critical to success.  If visitors come to your site, and they can’t get around easily because navigation is set up poorly, they won’t engage with your site.

Poor engagement statistics coupled with SEO issues and other technical issues highlighted previously are all indications of “low authority” according to Google.  And if Google consider your site irrelevant and not useful to visitors, it’s not going to rank in the search engines.

The navigation of your dental website must fulfill the following criteria:

• Ease – the navigation should be intuitive and easy to use, providing direct access to your “preferred” treatments areas.
• Visibility – The menu must be constantly visible enabling the user to easily navigate throughout the site
• Internal Links –Static content must include internal links for faster access to other sections of the website.

Check Google Analytics to view just how your site’s visitors are engaging with the different sections of your site. If there are areas on the navigation that are receiving significantly lower clicks compared to others, you may want to consider consolidating.

4. Content 

Blog topics aren’t connecting with readers

If your blog content is not connecting well enough with your audience then your brand, site traffic, conversion rates and new patient numbers could suffer.

Look at your blog dashboard and review the average blog views as well as the clicks attached to each one. Consider social shares and comments if this data is available.  If your engagement rates are low and you continually receive negative or no feedback from readers, you should take a step back and review your content strategy.

Lack of calls to action (CTAs)

A CTA is an image or line of text that prompts your site visitors to take action.

The success of your digital marketing strategy hinges on your dental websites ability to convert visitors into patients. In order to do that, content or promotion relevant CTAs need to be placed on most if not all site pages to provide visitors with a point for conversion.

Review your dental practice website and identify pages with no CTA’s or even pages where CTAs appear but are mismatched to the content or promotion.  Add or reword CTAs as necessary.

If you have any overlaps in topics between pages and offers (e.g “Free Consultations” or Free Hygiene appointment to new patients”) place the offer CTA on each relevant page.

If you would like to dive deeper into why your Dental website might not be performing to its potential, call us on 01872 300232 or email us at hello@hivebusiness.co.uk.