Do you have an outdated website, or does your dentist business need to get online? We can design and create the perfect website for your company!
Before the internet, people would make first impressions based on the physical appearance of your premises. This was the only exposure they had to your business, so having an attractive storefront became a deciding factor between your dental practice and another competitor’s.
Today, people use the internet first and foremost to find anything – including dentists – yet the same rules instantly apply. There are many factors that can put people off of your business. These include:
Slow loading times – this is especially true for mobile users
Poor website navigation. If people can’t find the information they want, they will go somewhere else.
Unattractive design. If your website isn’t up to date with modern design choices, it will look old and unsuccessful. Just like a storefront, this doesn’t present a good image to potential new customers.
Of course, even if users stay on your website, it still has a purpose to fulfill. Your website should give people all the information they need, answering their question and, ultimately, giving them away to contact you and book your services.
Dentists face a unique challenge, as their users are not experts in the industry but nonetheless know exactly what they need. Because of this, your website needs to answer their questions in a clear and precise manner. Nobody wants to get lost in an essay.
Similarly, the navigation needs to be simple. Each service should have its own page, for example. This way, people can jump straight to the service they need. This also helps with SEO and marketing, as you have dedicated spaces for each service.
Furthermore, your website needs to be responsive, adapting to mobile platforms. This is vital for local traffic, as people will simply search on their phone for local practices.
Every business is unique, so we don’t offer simple templated designs. Instead, we work with you to create a custom website that ideally suits your exact needs. We can do this in 4 steps.
1. First, we talk with you to learn more about your business, such as the services you offer, your typical customer base and any important values that need to be clear on the final design.
2. Next, we create a design that we believe works best for you and we offer a mock-up for review. This is where we can tweak, improve and perfect the design until you are satisfied with it.
3. After this, we start to build the website, ensuring it works to its fullest extent and you can easily access and edit it. For example, if you want to change your prices or other information, we ensure the website can be easily edited by you, whenever you need.
4. Once the website is live, we are always available for ongoing support. This includes our SEO packages and other services, which can ensure your new website appears in search engine results, helping it to get noticed.
Those who are planning to upgrade their website design can follow our web design strategy. And always to remember that SEO is an essential area that we have to address together with our SWOT analysis, as well as, our pricing models. Also, consider the important task to widen strategic areas; the need to discuss technical areas with developers; and for designers to talk about design areas. For after the website is built, there are SEO-affecting areas that are difficult to change.
This is as important as the questions found here that we used as the starting point in our research:
How wide is our market? We need to determine the current position of our potential audience. Are they growing or shrinking? You can use this tool Google Trends.
What key personas are we using? We went over our demographics, motivations, roles, and needs. To save time, we use Craig Bradford’s Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes.
How about our behavior online and offline? What touch points do we have beyond the site? For detail, go to Content and the Marketing Funnel.
We are building an architectural site revolving the stages our customers wave to go through before completing their objective. Go to Rand Fishkin; he offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. We made the preparation of this process to serve as guide particular pages we need to search for target based on specific points and their corresponding keywords.
It is a wise move to know who you are competing against in the digital space to guide you in making decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach.
Our first step was task identifying the three main classes of competitors:
1. Our company’search competitors who are categorized for the type of product or service that we offer. They will be our competitors utilizing the same keywords as clients we are targeting, although it might be for a different purpose.
2. Our business competitors are those who are presently solving the same kind of customer problem we aim to solve.
3. Our cross-competitors of the indirectly are those who have already found the solution for customer problems.
After we completed the list of our competitors, we made an analysis of everyone’s standing, the amount of operational resource to get, and where they are asking these questions:
What are the size and performance of our competitors’?
How are they different from each other?
Do they have strong brands?
What does their link profile look like?
Is there anything interesting/different in their site architecture?
The following tools were used to assist us:
*Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer;
*Ahrefs assistance in the competitor link analysis, and
*SEM rush was used mainly to identify ranking using targeted keywords.
Will we be using HTTPS or HTTP? We decided to use HTTPs that is also one of the ranking factors by Google for we are aware that we need a minimum of HTTPS on those pages.
When Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs, duplication of content issues arise. In the absence of one clear version, pages will compete unnecessarily with one another.
According to a developer’s eyes, a unique page has a unique ID in the website’s database, while in the search engines, the URL is a unique identifier. Every developer must remember that each content piece can only be accessed via one URL.
As developers, we are not under pressure to deliver code on time and neglected to consider areas affecting the speed of pages. From the onset, page speed is important so we put in some time to optimize the performance of the site. For more info, refer to Site Speed for Dummies Guide.
Our website is multi-lingual or multi-regional or both to target international users. For localized keyword research, we refer to hreflang as considerations for all duplicate content are issues better addressed before the site build.
We have the advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely by using separate country-level domains. The success of this approach depends upon our reliance on the resources we built & maintain infrastructure, write unique & interesting content, and promote each domain.
Our best approach was to use is subfolders in order to achieve the way of a diverse combination of language and country found on a single site. (e.g. example.com/uk, or example com/de). Since subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, Development setup/maintenance is significantly lower for subfolders.
With Google who often updates their recommendations and requirements all the time, your platform must be adequately flexible to make speedy changes based on their site’s scale.
To be successful in finding our content and serve it to users effectively, we consider information architecture as critical. It cannot be rank well if crawlers cannot access the content. Users need information architecture to find easily what they are searching for.
Whereever possible, we should always look to create a flat site structure that our pages are not accessed 4 clicks deeper from the homepage. This is the best option for allowing search engines and users to search for content in just a few clicks as possible.
To be guided to our pages, we use keyword and competitor research. However, it is important to group and connect pages for users to make better focused. We use a card sorting technique with users to map out correlationships between our content so we refrain from using imitation website or even similar products in order to do that. (For more details, refer: How to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)
Consider the types of content we will host. Will it be for big guides/whitepapers, or a video library? We need a content strategy to map out at this point and to know what are formats, we will be using it and the kind of functionality it requires. Since, we know the content type, we will be able to help in designing page types and creating a more consistent user interface.
We are using a variety of technologies such as Ajax, Flash, and Javascript that seem difficult for crawlers to understand. In order to improve our site’s machine readability, we mark up our pages with structured data. Get more details by referring to: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.
There are now more variations in devices and in their requirements, so you will see changing behavior patterns of mobile device use. The mobile is an underlying technology to access the web. Therefore, one of our long-term goals is to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. This goal, responsive design, and dynamic serving methods can go a long way in creating device-specific experiences.
For those business owners/someone responsible for launching a site, they have lots of responsibilities on their side. Now is the best time for you to know and to read as much as you can about the importance of implementing structured data and whether you will use JSON LD in favor of Microdata.