Dental Practice – How to grow, step by step guide

dental practice

Dental practice latest trends

People are using the internet now more than ever and it has become almost mandatory for at least the essential service providers to have an online presence. Medical services are amongst the top services including dental practice, physicians, medicine, etc. If any person is in need of any such service, the first thing he/she does is to ask (search) Google, especially in these COVID times, it has become even more necessary to have a valid reason to even step out of the home.

So, people prefer to have full info and even have an appointment scheduled before going anywhere. So, in such a scenario it is a must to have an online presence and that is the first step if you want to grow your practice. Once that is done, there are so many things that you can do to your dental practice. Let's have a look at it step by step.

Step 1 - Setting up dental website and social media channels

The first step is to have a good website and social media profiles like Facebook. Instagram, LinkedIn, and possible Youtube if you can. Since there are different types of websites that solve different purposes so, similarly for your dental practice there are some features that a website should definitely have to provide a great user experience to your patients. Let's discuss it one by one -

1. Proper design and layout - It should have a proper design and layout, that is designed and developed by a professional. There are so many website builder platforms out there nowadays that you can use to make a website yourself, but it is highly recommended to get it done by a professional who is aware of the insights of the industry, knows what are the required elements in a website, especially for the dental practice.

 

2. Contact form - There should be a proper and functional contact form on the website so that your patients can contact you directly via that form. A contact form is a feature that automatically sends you an email once your patient or the user fills in the details which could be name, contact number, email address, message, etc. The fields of the contact form can be customized as per the requirement.

 

3. (Responsive website) Mobile friendly - The website should be fully optimized to work properly on a mobile device because many people are browsing on their mobile devices in the form of smartphones or tablets. So, you need to make sure, no matter which device a user is accessing your website for the dental practice, it should work properly and provide a seamless experience.

 

4. Ability to book an appointment online - It is great to have a feature to book an appointment on your dental website directly. It helps your patients a lot to just go to your website, check the available schedule, and book an appointment.

 

5. Ability to charge appointment fee online (Optional, but good to have) - You can also have a payment processing feature to charge your patients for an appointment in advance from your dental websites. But it would be better to get it done by a professional because there are some complexities that come with it. For example, to charge and process payments on your dental website, you also need to have an SSL certificate on your website. It makes the website more secure and the payment processing info is fully encrypted. We at DigiTooth Designs have different packages which include this service already. So, it becomes more convenient for you to get all that you need for your dental websites in a single place.

 

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6. Appointment reminders - If you have an appointment, you should be reminded about it. Your secretary may forget but there should be a more reliable automated system in place that should remind you and the patient about the appointment automatically before a certain period of time directly from your dental website. So, dental appointment reminder is mandatory.

 

7. Strong S.E.O. foundation - If you want to really grow your dental practice from your website and not just have an online presence, it must have a strong dental SEO foundation. If you don't know about S.E.O., it is Search Engine Optimization. Your dental website will not automatically start showing up on the search engines like google, bing, yahoo, etc. It needs to be optimized for SEO. It is a big topic in itself, which cannot be explained here in this post. In brief, the content of the website is organized and placed in such a way that when the search engines go through your website they can easily understand what your website is about and what type of users can benefit from this. Only after that, they start showing your dental website to the people who are searching for services or info that you are offering.

Looking for a new dental website?

If you do not have a dental website yet, and you want to get yourself a new, modern dental website that has all the features required. We can help you with that, DigiTooth Designs provide the best quality, mobile responsive, high-speed dental websites that have all the modern features that you will ever need. You can check out the following plans we have.

Basic Dental Website Pack

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Advanced Dental Website Pack

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Pro. Dental Website Pack

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Step 2 - Get some traction for your online dental practice

Once you have the basic things in place as discussed above, the next step is marketing. Now, marketing is a very broad topic that we can discuss in the upcoming posts. Here, we will discuss the necessary steps you need to do to get the ball rolling, especially for the dental practice and dental website.

 

1. Start a Newsletter - Yes, once you have the website and social media handles ready, you need to make a list of all the patients that you have served, if you have their email addresses, you can send them a newsletter introducing your new website and social media handles. You can also tell them to contact you via the website directly and book appointments from your dental website directly from now on. This will also help you gain some followers on your Instagram page and Facebook page.

 

2. Start posting regularly on social media - You need to start posting on Facebook, Instagram, and other channels regularly. Generally, for a good engagement, you need to post 3 times a day. It should be some relevant content, related to your niche. How you can provide value to your audience, how they can take better care of their teeth, symptoms of common dental problems, how to avoid them, etc.

 

3. Growth on Instagram - To grow on Instagram, you have to use 30 relevant hashtags. You can find it online. There are many websites that can tell you about the most active relevant hashtags to your niche.

 

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4. Growth on YouTube - Some of the content ideas can be interviewing your patients who had some dental problems that were cured with your treatment. It will also work as a testimonial. One interview every week can be published on YouTube and you can also share it on Facebook and Instagram to get more views and engagement.

Step 3 - Scaling your dental practice

After setting up basic things as discussed above, you can start paid advertising to grow your dental practice and dental website. Now, there are many different strategies when it comes to paid advertising. There are many platforms available as well where you can advertise. Let's check one by one -

 

1. S.E.A. (Search Engine Advertising) - You can start ads or campaigns on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. for keyword targeting. For example you can advertise your website for a specific keyword "Dentist near me" or "Best dentist near me", and target your area only. This way, if anyone in your area or nearby location searches for those keywords on Google, your website will show up. The users can go to your website from there and book an appointment with you directly.

 

2. Guests blog post - You can also write a guest blog post for other platforms and get yourself credited for that. The users can find your dental website from there and can contact you.

 

3. Utilizing Reddit - There must be many topics on Reddit for dentists or people with common tooth problems. You can provide your suggestion and valuable info there to help them and leave a link to your website. If they find it helpful they will directly come to you next time for consultation.

 

4. Utilizing Quora - Quora is also a community portal where people ask questions. You can answer people who have asked about tooth problems and consult them. You have to first provide value to get value.

 

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These were some of the things that you need to make sure are in place to start your online dental practice with the dental website. The opportunities are endless. We just need to keep putting in our sincere efforts and keep hustling to grow. The things mentioned here are just the tip of the iceberg. We will be discussing in-depth each and every point, best strategies to get the maximum out of every point.

 

So, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and stay tuned. Don't forget to share it with your friends on social media so that they can also benefit from this post.

If you want a new dental website or upgrade your current dental website, you can check out our plans and book yours now to get started. Feel free to reach out to us at info@maxadvancedsolutions.com for any questions.

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Dental Practice

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