One of the questions that dentists, physicians, and other healthcare provides often ask is, "What pages do I need to have on my website." The question is a very important one so let's take a look at the answer.
At it's core, a website for a healthcare provider most likely is split between two primary purposes --- to provide information to existing patients, and to attract new patients. Fortunately a well-planned and well-designed website can (and should) be successful at both.
At its core a website for a dentist or a physician should have the following 4 or 5 pages:
1. Home - the homepage should welcome your visitors, briefly describe the office, and have some attractive stock photography if applicable.
2. About - the about page should introduce the patient to the office and to the doctor(s), and should talk about how long the office has been there providing care and serving the community. It may also be helpful to have a separate page for the doctor or doctors in the practice.
3. Services - the services page should briefly discuss what you do. Do you provide all dental services? Are you a dermatologist that provides specific treatments only? Because the services page can start to get very long with multiple services, it's often a good idea to separate each major service into a a separate page.
4. Contact - other than the home page, the contact page is the most important page on your website. You must have a contact page that has your address, phone number, office hours, and possibly a contact form so people can reach you (without you having to expose your email address to the world).
(As a fifth page you may want to have an "Insurance" page as many patients will want to know if you participate in their particular insurance plan. In the above model your navigation would then be Home, About, Services, Insurance, Contact).
Each of the above pages should also have your phone number and address in the same location on each page (i.e. in the header or footer).
Yes and no. When it comes to search engine optimization, the process by which web pages are tweaked to rank well on search engines, Google is obviously able to do more with websites that have more pages. But when you are first starting out, your goal should be to establish a neat, clear and concise 4-5 page site that provides the basic information listed above. Then as your practice grows, or when you decide to expand your site, you can then add more pages to get more search engine exposure. Breaking up your dental website services pages into a single page for each service is a great way to start, as is adding a blog to your site.
