Time To Update Your Dental Practice Website?
The Update Conundrum. Yes? No? What About Return-on-Investment?
With business running costs seemingly increasing all of the time and with no real sign of abatement, many dentists are holding off with upgrade projects at their practices and understandably so.
This also extends to website development and even where the practice website may be four or five years old and fraying at the edges, dental business owners and managers are still holding off and waiting for better times ahead.
But is this particular delay a sensible thing, even when times are hard? To evaluate this, we need to look at value and payback to facilitate an informed decision about investment priorities. In this article we’ll take a closer look at why your new dental website really is a pressing need and why holding off is probably doing your business more harm than good.
How important is a dental practice website?
Behind word-of-mouth referral, it is widely acknowledged that a dentist’s website yields the second highest number of new patient enquiries. Our own marketing data, where we track the source of enquiries across many different dental accounts, also supports this.
Whilst a potential new patient may have been recommended to your service by friends, family or colleagues, the strong likelihood is that they will still take a hard look at your Google reviews and your website too. First impressions definitely make all the difference here and so if your website is old and unappealing, then that potential new patient may end up looking elsewhere.
This may sound like quite a subjective assessment but we also have lots of other metrics which show how older websites generally work less well than newer ones. Analytics data shows quite clearly how the performance drops away quite dramatically as websites age, become less well maintained and also less relevant. This ultimately leads to far fewer enquiries.
As a designer and marketer, this is actually quite frustrating and we go to great lengths to demonstrate to clients where their websites are starting to perform less well than desired. Even then, a lot of dentists elect to plod on with their existing web presence and park any proposed upgrades. Of course this is the dentist’s prerogative and they may well have more pressing issues to attend to, but if the payback potential of a new website was properly understood, then delaying does seem somewhat misjudged.
Payback potential of a dental website
Given that a good quality website can cost anything from £3k – £6k, what would be an expected payback on this investment?
For a complete new website development, this can be very fast indeed, even when the site is very young and still to develop good Google positions. As Google rankings develop and even more enquires come in, then return-on-investment can be exceptional.
Our data suggests that in the month after launch dentists will typically receive five or six new enquiries via their website, with some well in excess of this. Whilst it’s very difficult to determine whether the initial stimulus for the enquiry was a personal recommendation for example, we can see when the enquiry came from Google and hence where the website was instrumental in that conversion process.
It only takes one or two of those new enquiries to result in highly profitable treatment such as implants or teeth straightening and the website is already well on the way to paying for itself. That can easily be the case in just the first few months of operation. So whilst this evaluation is quite simplistic, it should be sufficient to demonstrate how quickly a new website can pay back.
Where a website becomes more established in the six months after launch and more enquiries come in from search engines, social media and other channels, then the original investment is eclipsed by the huge earning potential. However, where the website is old and unappealing, those enquiries may never happen.
On a much more detailed level, our marketing team looks closely at conversion rates for our dental clients and it’s easy to see where an old website starts to become less useful. It’s not unusual to see conversion rates (the ratio of traffic to enquires) drop to near 1% on older sites, whereas we prefer to see conversion rates of 3 or above for new websites. Newer, high performing websites with great Google rankings can have conversion rates well in excess of 5.
Conclusion
Whilst you may be holding back on updating an ageing dental website, I’d urge you to look at it again, particularly in terms of patient acquisition potential and return-on-investment. A new site for your practice can really make a huge difference and very quickly pay for itself. The earning potential thereafter is exceptional, particularly where the website also has great Google positions.
If you would like more advice and a proposal, please contact the Dental Media web team on 01332 672548 to discuss the next steps.