News

Three Website Design Trends Every Dentist Should Embrace

Three Website Design Trends Every Dentist Should Embrace
by Naomi Cooper

Keep your dental practice website working for you, your patients, and Google

Want to know the secret to making your practice stand out from your compe-ti-tion online? Invest in your website.You've likely already spent countless hours with a design team and a good portion of your marketing budget to build and maintain your current site, but in the fast-paced world of online marketing, resting on your digital laurels simply won't cut it.

Today, a website that isn't mobile-friendly could be doing more damage than good. Users are five times more likely to leave a website if it isn't mobile-friendly,1 which could mean countless lost new patient opportunities for dentists with desktop-only sites. And search engines are increasingly shifting their algorithms (ie, formulas for deciding the order in which websites appear in search results) to reflect a preference for mobile sites as well.

As web browsing continues to become increasingly mobile-centric, embracing these three trends in website design can help you keep your dental practice website both patient- and mobile-friendly.

1. Converting to a Mobile-First Strategy
"Mobile first" is a website design concept in which a site is initially built from the perspective of a mobile user rather than a desktop user. Google has influenced the proliferation of this strategy by indicating during the past year that they will be changing their algorithm to preferentially index mobile websites, which means that sites that are not mobile-friendly could potentially appear lower in search rankings.

If you have yet to convert to a responsive website design, now is the time to consider making that investment. A responsive website will automatically resize based on the device being used to view it, which makes a site much more convenient for mobile device users.

Google will continue to index and rank desktop-only sites and for the moment, will continue to display them in mobile-based searches, but in the near future, websites will not rank in mobile searches if they are not mobile-friendly. And as Google continues to roll out its mobile-first strategy, dentists without mobile-friendly websites may eventually notice that their sites no longer appear in search results (even in desktop search engine results), causing a significant drop in overall website traffic.

This shouldn't create panic. Your website will still function, and patients will still be able to use it; however, a mobile-friendly revamp is something that should absolutely be included in the practice's marketing budget as a priority upgrade for the near future, at least by the end of 2018.

Read full article on Inside Dentistry.