Your dental website is beautiful, it has unique content, as well as a blog, and you post to social media weekly. Great job! Now, on to another issue that has increasingly become more important to Google.
Have you taken voice and mobile search into consideration?
Mobile-First Mindset in Dental Website Design and Marketing
When building or updating your dental website, you must now take a mobile-first approach. In all likelihood, half or more of your website traffic comes from mobile device users.
Here are 3 steps to make your dental website mobile marketing ready:
- Responsive Design – Your site needs a design that will morph into a mobile version when viewed on any mobile device. Test your site now by viewing it here. Simply type in your domain and hit enter, then select a phone from the dropdown list (walkie-talkie looking icon) at the top of the page. On a responsive design, the navigation menu collapses into a hamburger (three horizontal lines); images stack vertically down the page; text does not shrink, is a readable size, and also stacks vertically.
- Call to Action Items at Top of Page – Desktop website visitors usually have more time and focus than mobile visitors, therefore they will scroll down a page. This has never been truer than today, since we now have parallax design, in which the foreground of a site moves along a stationary or moving background, which causes visual interest. In contrast, mobile visitors want immediate gratification. Often, they are looking for a phone number, address, email address, and/or map. This means, your website’s mobile layout may need to differ from its online counterpart. In the past, a site would require two different pages to accomplish this task; today, that’s not the case. The homepage simply has to be designed to accommodate the optimal layout for desktop and mobile viewers.
- Voice-Search Keywords – When you ask Siri or Cortana or Alexa for something, what words do you use? Are they different from what you type into your phone? Do you type into your phone, or do you always use voice search? Experts have found that there’s a difference between what we say and what we type, when searching online. For voice searches, we tend to be more casual and use long-tail keywords. To help us find exactly what we’re looking for, Google stores information about our search habits, preferences, and choices. To the dentist who wants to market services online, effective strategy involves coming up with long-tail keywords that are more casual and conversational. Long-tail simply means using a longer phrase as keywords. For instance, I once used “black triangle between front teeth” and found that it attracted quite a few search inquiries from cosmetic patients whose gums had receded between their front teeth. This description came from a patient testimonial on the doctor’s website.
Your Mobile Friendly Dental Website Design
Did your site look less than awesome in Quirktools (the link above)? Are you unsure of which long-tail keywords to try, or how to integrate them into your web text and blogs? Do you need new website copy or weekly blog posts? Identiwrite Creative is a dental copywriting and web design firm that can help your website rank higher and look better! Call me, Shauna Duty, the owner of Identiwrite Creative, today at 940-395-5115 or email me at shauna@identiwrite.com.