Re-design your dental website with optimisation in mind

Why a content spring-clean is useful for users and for SEO

Re-designing a dental website is not simply about an aesthetic face-lift and transferring stale old content. If done well, a re-design will not only improve user experience but also help your search ranking.

These are two great reasons for taking the time to do some thorough planning before jumping into the re-design proper. It’s also well worthwhile making sure that you dental web designer has all of the bases covered, so here are a few key elements to address before starting to push the pixels around.

Content

Review your content to ensure that it is logical and user-friendly. Are you showcasing your main treatments appropriately for your target audience and for Google? A re-write of your main sections will not only bring a fresh perspective but can also be useful for improving search ranking. It’s often said that Google loves fresh content and a page re-write, if done well, can yield big benefits.

Website structure

It’s amazing how “messy” websites can become as they evolve over time. New sections get added on but sometimes in a less than optimal way, perhaps because the navigation structure was inflexible or perhaps it was all done in a rush by an inexperienced designer. This can lead to a poor data hierarchy within the website which, in turn, produces a confusing user-experience and poor on-site SEO.

It is therefore extremely important to review your website structure in full at the start of the re-design process. There is more detailed information on website structure in this blog post here.

Page addresses (URLS)

We are currently re-designing a couple of websites for new clients where the previous designer had used an incredibly “spammy” url structure in an attempt to cram lots of keywords into the page addresses. You may have seen this old-fashioned technique on some websites – e.g. www.trumpton-dentist.co.uk/cosmetic-dentistry-trumpton/best-dental-veneers-trumpton.html or similar? The benefit of this is minimal and it can also attract a Google spam penalty if overdone.

It’s important to rationalise all of this old-hat SEO during any site re-design to bring the site in line with modern best practice. As you might expect, tools are available to help us achieve this without obliterating the rankings of redundant pages. Using a technique called a ‘301’ re-direct, we can effectively recover the ranking of an old page and transfer it to the new, optimised version.

Are you targeting correctly?

As your dental business evolves, it is likely that your treatment range has changed and also, perhaps your target market? Currently, the most popular and lucrative treatments are dental implants, fast orthodontics and increasingly, sedation. As an example, if you actually offer these services, it’s important to ensure that your new website design showcases them prominently and offers a clear and friendly user experience. To support this, you should also ensure that your on-site search optimisation is excellent to give those treatment pages the best change of being found in Google.

Publish a new site-map to let Google know you updated

A site-map is basically a list of page addresses which can be submitted to Google via a Google Webmaster Tools account to assist the search engines to crawl and index all of your pages. This is particularly important when a website has been re-designed and re-organised.

Finally, let the people know!

Hopefully you’ll love your new dental website but don’t forget to broadcast news of the update using your social media channels, e-newsletter and perhaps a couple of posters in the reception area.

Summary

Periodic website updates are essential to stimulate new patient enquiries and to help you compete on-line. The re-design process should not be taken lightly as it presents an ideal opportunity to spring-clean the site, re-target your services and re-focus your SEO. Using an experienced dental design team is recommended to help ensure that all the important bases are covered. Please call us on 01332 672548 for free and friendly guidance.