Step 1: Domain
Claim your dental practice domain name. GoDaddy is a great domain registrar. This is essentially a place where you store your .COM website domain name. You do not need to host your website with the domain registrar as many will offer both services.
Step 2: Hosting
Take a moment to consider your hosting requirements for your dental practice website. Many hosting providers will offer numerous plans to meet the needs of various sized websites with different traffic patterns. Choosing a hosting provider is a long term decision and should require some research and plan comparisons. If you have any questions about which hosting plan you should choose, or if you need recommendations, please reach out to us.
Step 3: Choose a Website Designer
Seek out professionals that have website design experience in the dental industry. There are a lot of aspects in dentistry web design that benefit from finding a website designer that has specific dental industry knowledge. Dental practices offer a wide array of dental services that typically span across 30+ pages. When designing your website it helps a lot if your designer understands the services that you want to market to clients.
After you’ve chosen your web designer, you will want to decide on which platform you should build your practice website on. Dental Doctor SEO recommends WordPress. This is a CMS (Content Management System) that offers the latest cutting edge design technologies, a ton of support, and a gazillion plug-ins to seamlessly integrate features without the costs associated with custom development. We champion WordPress to our dental web design clients because it’s SEO friendly, user friendly, secure, responsive, and highly customizable. There are many other benefits to using WordPress, but for those reasons alone, we recommend it to our clients!
Step 4: Time to pick a Logo
Work with your dental web designer and communicate what image you want to represent. Your logo will be on your website, directory listings, social media platforms, and even the reception area of your practice. This is when you should take note of trends, conduct color comparisons, try different fonts and design combinations. Your website designer should be able to present you with multiple options to choose from. From there it can be further refined to meet your dental logo design requirements. A logo can be the stepping stone to the entire website design theme.
Step 5: Design your Dental Practice Website
Collaborate with your dental web designer to develop a website that captures your brand. It’s important to maintain transparency with your designer. If you don’t like a certain aspect of the design, no worries – just communicate with your dental web designer.
This is an opportunity to canvas your imagination into your dental practice website. From color schemes, fonts, headers, call-to-actions, to content placement and layout designs – this is a time for creativity and imagination. Write your ideas down on a napkin and give them to your designer so they can make them come to life. Send them examples of other websites you like and want to model after. Collaborate.
Step 6: Choose a Dental SEO Company
Sometimes the same company you chose to design your website also offers SEO services. We make the same recommendation to find a SEO company with dentistry experience. Dental Doctor SEO offers web design and specializes in SEO for dentists.
It’s not uncommon that after a website has been designed that it is ridden with technical SEO errors. This is where your dental SEO company will optimize your on-page data across all of your content to make your website optimal for search engine results.
Ranking in top Google results is one of the primary motivations behind dental SEO. Most clients that are looking for your services do no scroll past the top 3 results, and even fewer past the top 5 results. Choose a dental SEO company that will drive revenue to your practice by putting you in top results for clients find you.
Step 7: Manage and Maintain
SEO is a long term strategy to effectively drives clients to your business. This includes on-page changes due to algorithm updates, ongoing PPC campaigns, content writing, social marketing, traffic analysis, local SEO heatmap index, reports, and data management.
Your website will need ongoing management from a Webmaster. This includes making content changes, updating software, updating security, backing up databases, and processing change requests from clients. A change request is when you need content modified, deleted, or uploaded to your website. Dental Doctor SEO does this all for you in one complete service plan.