Wednesday, April 23, 2014
In the modern online marketplace, it can be difficult to keep up with everything it takes to make your dental website stand out.
It is hard enough to achieve good search rank and get people to your practice’s website; so once a visitor arrives, you want them to be satisfied with their experience and convert into a lead. Creating a great user experience can help you compete in a marketplace where the shopper spends more time looking for information outside of your website than within your website.
Key Ingredients
A user’s on-site experience starts with the design. Your practice should have a comprehensive website with a carefully designed layout and information network. Everything from the color scheme and imagery to the actual information on your website is essential to the overall user experience. All of these components of your website should be working toward a single, identified goal:
- Headlines
- Content
- Videos
- Calls-to-Action (CTA)
- Forms
- Images
According to an article from Unbounce, color can be used to create an emotional response from your visitors. For example, orange is known to generate positive feelings; therefore, it is a great choice for the color of your CTA. You also can consider the positive affect of Green for go, and Blue as the classic "click-me" link color.
In addition to a good design, the site needs to work. Tech friendliness equals user friendliness. If your site has a slow loading time, broken links, or is not properly supported across any browser, then the user experience is negatively impacted. Beyond the basics, there is an overall trend towards mobile usage, so your site needs to be mobile and tablet-friendly (ideally, a responsive website) to effectively capture that audience. A case study conducted by Page 1 Solutions over the last 14 months showed a 42 percent increase in mobile traffic, compared to a 29 percent decrease in desktop traffic. Staying current with the trend towards mobile is more important than ever for your website.
Ultimately, people come to your site because they want information about your practice. How you deliver that information can make or break the user experience.
Information Flow
As the everyday web searcher is becoming more educated, your website needs to fulfill its main purpose of information delivery more efficiently. Many visitors are looking for quick information, such as the address, phone number, office hours, or specials, so your site needs to quickly deliver the necessities. For visitors seeking more descriptive information, such as services and the photo gallery of your dental work, the content contained on your site needs to have an effective, organized navigation system so the content can be easily found and accessed.
Another important component to keep on your radar is information consistency. From the search result optimization (page name, meta description) to the corresponding landing page (content, visuals), the information being provided needs to match. Once the user is on a page on your website, there should be on-page links that provide specific relevant information within your site (payment information, consultation experience) and sometimes externally if there is a reference of an association, brand or other external resource. In addition to the information you have within your site, the user should be able to locate your active social media accounts and ways to directly communicate with the practice.
Set a Goal
The overall goal of your website should be two-fold: create a great user experience on your website, and make that experience so good that visitors contact you. In essence, your site should be useful to your practice as a lead generation tool, but also practical to the users as an information gathering tool. Additionally, the website should appeal to an audience on any device: desktop, tablet or mobile. A good place to look is Google Analytics to see how much mobile and tablet traffic your site is receiving, and how many opportunities for leads you could be missing on these platforms.
It’s All About the User
There are still many other ways that search engines are grading your website, but the user—not Google—is the one who can become a patient. Creating a great user experience takes continual modifications, and if you do it right, those modifications also will enhance your website’s search engine positioning. If your practice website doesn’t meet these criteria, consider how visitors are affected, and consider a new website that meets their needs.