AI and Your Dental Marketing: Why Your Website Matters More Than Ever

Everywhere you turn, the conversation is about how AI is upending the workplace. While I'm not here to argue against that, I am here to share some truths about AI and how it's impacting digital marketing for your dental clinic. In this post, I'll explain why your website deserves more attention, why SEO fundamentals are more important than ever, and why you shouldn't panic about AI changing the game.

Your Website: Your Digital North Star

In a rapidly changing digital environment, your website is your digital North Star. Everything about your digital strategy should focus on pointing people to your website, and your website should be designed to funnel visitors towards booking a checkup or consultation—either directly online or by calling your office.

Mobile-First Design Is Non-Negotiable

Your website must have modern design fundamentals to be valuable to your business. First and foremost, it needs to be built mobile-first. You may view your website primarily from a desktop or laptop, but 95% of the time, your potential patients are looking up a dentist near them on their phone.

Accessibility Equals AI-Friendliness

Accessibility considerations are also a key component of designing your website, especially when mobile-first. Ask yourself:

• Do the colors and copy have enough contrast to be easily legible, even outdoors in bright light?

• Do your links and buttons have a large enough tap area and enough space around them to be easily tapped?

Accessibility is a major contributor to AI-friendliness as well. The more accessible and easy to read your website is, the more likely an AI bot will incorporate it into responses.

Structure and Content: Making Your Site Easy to Understand

Clear Page Structure Matters

It's extremely important for your web pages to have a clear and obvious structure. Having proper H1, H2, H3 tags and hierarchy makes it easy for both humans and AI bots to scan your page and understand the content. Being able to quickly and easily summarize your web page is what allows AI bots and search engines to index and reference it when and where relevant.

Write Clearly and Simply

Using clear and simple language is an important aspect of search engine optimization for your dental clinic website. What AI is really good at is consuming a large volume of written copy and distilling it down to a succinct summary. Like humans, AI appreciates when you make things easier for it.

Don't Forget Alt Text

It's important that you use alt text for any images or visuals. This boosts SEO by referencing the content of your images with keywords, but it also improves accessibility for individuals with visual impairments who use page readers. Alt text helps describe images and provides context for humans, SEO bots, and AI bots alike.

Technical Factors That Drive Results

Having a well-built website is extremely valuable to your potential patient experience, as well as the indexability of your pages.

Page Speed Is Critical

In this day and age, nobody is waiting more than a couple seconds for a web page to load. If it's not nearly instantaneous, they'll hit that back button and move on to the next site listed in their search. AI bots may just "blacklist" you from future referencing.

To optimize your page speed:

• Minify your CSS and reduce unnecessary code

• Ensure your website is hosted on a fast server

• Secure your site with SSL

Schema Markup: The Secret Weapon

Both search and AI bots rely on schema markup. Schema markup is structured data added to a webpage's HTML to help search engines like Google, Bing, and others understand the content's context and meaning. This improves their ability to deliver precise search results and enables enhanced features like rich results (star ratings, prices) in the search engine results pages.

Schema markup is a standardized vocabulary developed by major search engines to clarify the relationship between different pieces of information on a page. Without schema markup for each page on your website, you're making it more difficult to index and reference your web pages, thus deranking your website.

Build Your Domain Authority

The other major component of both SEO and AI referenceability is your site's domain authority. Also commonly referred to as offsite SEO or backlinks, the number of other sites that link to your site indicates how valuable or important others find your website's content. The more sites you have linking back to yours—including listing sites like Canada411 and YellowPages—the more valuable your site will be deemed.

The Human Touch Still Wins

Here's the bottom line: Artificial Intelligence is exactly that; artificial. While it can do a tremendous amount of work in a very short amount of time and might help speed up some administrative tasks, it does not have the human connection component that many patients seek when searching for a medical care provider.

From your front-line staff answering the phones to your assistants and their chairside manner (as well as your own), the human experience will be the biggest factor in whether your patients come back and recommend you to their friends, family, and colleagues.

Ready to optimize your dental practice's website for the AI era? Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly, accessible, fast, and technically sound will help you capture more patients and grow your practice—regardless of how the digital landscape evolves.

Book a call with our team of website and SEO specialists to learn more about how we can help improve your website conversion rate, and search rankings.