Why Fresh Website Content is Important
Your dental website is an extension of your practice and should instill the same confidence a new patient would have from walking into your office. That is why keeping a website fresh with a consistent stream of new content is so important for your practice. Fresh content promotes a great user experience for prospective patients that find you online. Also, adding new content encourages search engines to check back with your website more frequently. Since search engines are constantly looking for high quality content to serve to searchers, they will check back with dental websites that regularly update their pages with new content.
Here are 4 ways to keep your website up-to–date:
1. Add a Blog
Having a blog is one of the easiest ways to add new content about highly relevant topics without impacting the overall structure of your website. However, if you’re going to create a blog, you have to commit to it. Leaving a blog unattended is worse than not having one at all because a blank blog page is visible to users and search engines.
Oftentimes dentists abandon blog posting because they run out of ideas to write about. One way to combat that is by keeping a list of frequently asked questions that you receive from patients both on and offline, or writing about community events that you might participate in.
When creating a blog post, be sure to follow blogging best practices by including keywords that are frequently searched, breaking text up to make it more digestible for readers, and optimizing text with header tags that give copy a hierarchy.
2. Update Your Website Pages with Pictures
Adding relevant pictures about your practice throughout your site is great way to improve user experience. After all, prospective patients like to know who they are going to be interacting with when they go to your practice. Add photos of your staff to give a more personalized element online. A picture of your building on your contact page lets new patients know that they are at the right location.
When adding photos to your website, make sure to include alt tags so search engines can “see” the pictures too. Search engines rely on alt tags to interpret what is on the picture, helping them understand their relevancy to the rest of the page where it is located.
3. Keep Up with Web Design Trends
Did you know a majority of users cite website design in terms of trustworthiness? Meaning, if your dental website design looks outdated, people will be less likely to fill out forms and will likely leave your site. A great website design is essential to keeping visitors on your website long enough to convert into prospective patients.
4. Regularly Update Pages to Reflect Your Practice
Your practice is constantly evolving and your website should evolve with it. Adding bios for each of your staff members is a great way update your website content. Include staff photos of current and newly highered staff members, especially when a new staff member is a doctor that recently joined the practice.
You should also make sure to include new procedures that you offer in your practice. Not only will this inform patients that use your site, it will notify search engines that you have new services – and content with new keywords – that can show up in search results.
Finally, be sure to include updates to your practice’s location if you have recently moved or added more locations to your business in addition to your current practice. A best practice for search engine optimization (SEO) is to create a page for each location with an address and local phone number. Make sure to embed the map from each practice’s Google Map profile for added SEO visibility.
