The SiteRoot team6 min read
Saturday morning in Brunswick, and a molar that was fine on Thursday is not fine now. Somebody searches, opens four tabs, and by the time the kettle has boiled three of them are closed.
The one still open is rarely the best looking site. It is the one that answered three practical questions without being asked: can I be seen soon, what is this going to cost, and do you take my health fund. A dental website is a front desk that has to work at 7am on a Saturday, and most of the work of building a good one is putting boring facts where they can be found.
The three questions that decide it
Can I get in. Not your general availability. Whether somebody in pain can be seen today or tomorrow. If you hold emergency appointments open each morning, that sentence belongs near the top of the home page, because it is the only thing that matters to the person reading it in that moment.
What does it cost. Publish a price for a check up and clean and say what a first visit includes. Practices resist this, reasonably, because treatment cost depends on what is found. But the first appointment does not, and a patient who cannot find a single number anywhere assumes the worst and rings the practice that gave them one.
Do you take my fund. Name the health funds you work with and say whether patients can claim on the spot at the desk rather than paying in full and claiming later. That detail decides appointments, and it is often nowhere on the site.
Say whether you are taking new patients
Both answers are useful, which is why it is odd that so few practice sites give either.
If you are taking new patients, say it plainly, because somebody who has just moved to the suburb is specifically looking for that sentence. If your books are effectively full and you are running a waitlist, say that too. It reads as a busy practice rather than a closed door, and it stops your front desk fielding calls that end in an apology.
Hours, and the ones that keep changing
Hours are the most valuable four lines on a practice website and the ones most likely to be wrong.
Late nights, Saturday mornings, when the last appointment of the day actually is, and the public holiday and Christmas closures. A patient who turns up to a locked door on a Saturday because the site said open does not come back, and worse, they tell people. If changing your hours on your own website is awkward enough that you put it off, that is the thing to fix first, before any redesign.
A page per treatment, in patient words
People do not search for services. They search for what is happening to them, in ordinary language. Wisdom tooth out, sore tooth, chipped front tooth, teeth straightening, kids dentist, dentures, missing tooth.
So a page each for the appointments you actually run: check ups and cleans, emergency appointments, children's dental, wisdom teeth, crowns and fillings, implants, whitening, clear aligners, dentures. Not a clinical essay. What the appointment involves, roughly how long it takes, how many visits, what the cost depends on, and how to book.
Put the clinical word on the page once, for the patients and referrers who use it, and lead with the word the patient typed.
The people, with names and faces
Patients do not choose a practice. They choose a person and then tolerate the practice around them.
So the team page is not a formality. Photographs of the dentists, actual names, what each one does, who is good with children, who takes the longer surgical work. And the languages spoken at the practice, which is one of the most useful and least published facts on any clinic site in Melbourne or Sydney. Somebody looking for a dentist their mother can talk to in Greek or Vietnamese or Mandarin is looking for exactly that line.
Reviews: check before you publish them
Advertising by health practitioners in Australia is regulated, and the rules around patient reviews are not the same as the rules for a plumber or a cafe.
We are a website builder, so we are not the right people to tell you what your practice may publish, and neither is anybody's marketing copy. If you are not certain, check with your professional association or your own adviser before patient reviews go on the page. It is a five minute question that is much cheaper to ask first.
Parking, the tram stop and the front door
This is the section that gets cut and should not be.
Where to park and whether it is metered. Which tram or station and how far the walk is. Which door to use if the practice sits above a shop. Stairs or a lift. Pram and wheelchair access. What happens when they arrive and how early to get there for a first visit.
Anxious patients read every word of this, and anxious patients are a large share of anybody's book. Nervous people are not reassured by the phrase gentle dentistry. They are reassured by knowing exactly what is going to happen to them between the car and the chair.
Booking: the phone still wins, so make it one tap
Most dental appointments are still made by voice, which means the number on every page should start a call when it is touched rather than sitting there as text to copy.
Behind that, an enquiry form that reaches an inbox somebody actually watches, asking for a name, a phone number, and a preferred day or time. And if the practice already uses an online booking system, the link belongs on every page, not only the home page.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
Describe the practice and the site gets built around it, in about 15 minutes, free to build, A$16.50 a month including GST if you keep it. danthu-dental.siteroot.com.au is a practice site we built and published.
Your number is a tap to call link on every page. The enquiry form emails the practice directly, so a Saturday morning message is in the inbox on Saturday morning. Your hours, your address and your service area go onto the site in the form search engines read, including the business category they publish for dentists specifically, and the same facts sit in a plain file that AI assistants can read. Images load as the visitor scrolls to them, so the site opens quickly on a phone. We watch that the site stays up and that its certificate is current.
The part we cannot do for you is keep the hours honest. That takes a minute and it is the single most valuable minute anybody spends on a practice website.
