Have you ever wondered if there were any quick fixes for improving the performance of your dental website? Better yet, what if your office staff could do them for you? Well, you’re in luck. Even though promoting and enhancing your own website may seem daunting, there are a multitude of ways you can improve it that you may never have thought of.
Below, we’ll discuss four easy ways that your office staff can help improve your most important online tool: your website!
1. Create New Content
Give your office staff some credit! After all, many of them are responsible for answering practice phones and providing solutions to patient questions. These questions can be turned into interesting blog posts!
For example, if a patient calls and asks “What’s the best option for whitening my teeth?” your well-trained office staff will more than likely give them the fantastic explanation they’re looking for and set up an appointment. To blog about this, all your staff needs to do is put that question and answer into written form on your website and—presto, fresh, new, unique content is born, increasing the authority (and ranking) of your website.
Find out if there is a budding writer on your team by asking around. You may be surprised to find a staff member who would be more than happy to update your practice blog on a weekly basis. Because search engines love to see new and engaging content posted, this can have a positive impact on your dental website’s SEO.
2. Respond to Website Inquiries Promptly
If your practice has a website, then you’re probably receiving email inquiries from patients who would like to schedule appointments. Because your office staff is already answering phone calls to book appointments, they are fully capable of responding to email inquiries as well.
In today’s day and age, many people actually prefer email correspondence to phone calls, so it’s a great idea to properly train one of your staff members to specialize in patient email etiquette. Typically, a response time of 24 hours (if not sooner) should always be your goal when it comes to handling email inquiries from your dental website. We all have a growing expectation of instant answers, and when electronic response times lag, we tend to think less of the business.
So how does this ultimately improve your website? If your office staff can promptly and effectively respond to patient questions or appointment requests that come in via the Internet, you can expect to see an improvement in the overall new patient conversion rate of your website.
3. Direct Patients to the Website
If you’ve got a beautiful website full of engaging and helpful information, make sure your patients know about it. In your waiting room, set out a stack of your most recent newsletters, business cards, or brochures—all of which should include your website URL. When your patients are checking in, have your office staff point out your new material and give them a copy.
If a new patient is inquiring (whether by phone or email), it’s a great idea for your office staff to mention the practice URL and invite them to learn more about the treatments and services that you offer.
Bonus tip: Make sure your office staff includes the practice website as a clickable link in their email signature—a quick and easy way to direct qualified traffic to your site!
The more people who know about your website, the better. Not only will current patients know to look there for information, but they may even share your link with someone else—a new, prospective patient! It’s also a great idea to post your new patient paperwork to your website, which in turn helps to speed up the new patient processing once they arrive for their appointment.
4. Promote Your Website on Social Media
Sites like Facebook and Twitter aren’t just for sharing status updates and photos—they’re also a great way to promote your dental website. Because your office staff knows the ins and outs of your practice, they’re the best choice for regularly posting on your social media channels. In fact, sharing a helpful tip with a link back to your most recent blog post on the subject may also help improve your site’s SEO, as it seems social signals carry some weight with the search engines.
Remember—you don’t want to bombard your followers with post after post promoting your website, so simply beginning with a few posts on each social media outlet per week is a fantastic start!