In “Nobody asked for that”, we told the story of a pair of headphones: a great product, buried under a feature nobody wanted. That was a big brand, a long way from Louisville.
This time it’s closer to home.
What follows is a made-up example. The dental practice in it doesn’t exist, and neither does the patient. But the pattern is real, and it happens on local business websites every day, in every kind of business. We chose a dental practice because the stakes are easy to feel. Swap in your own business as you read, and see whether any of it sounds familiar.
It’s late on a Sunday and her tooth is throbbing
Karen lives in the Highlands. On Sunday evening, halfway through dinner, she bites down on something hard and feels a crack. By ten o’clock the tooth is throbbing. By eleven she’s given up on sleep.
She hasn’t been to a dentist in a couple of years. She doesn’t have one she’d call “hers”. So she does what nearly everyone does now. She picks up her phone and searches for help near her, something like “emergency dentist Louisville” or “broken tooth dentist near me”.
A list of practices comes up. One of them is a few minutes from her house, with good reviews and a nice photo. She taps it.
She wants one thing. She wants to know whether someone can see her tomorrow, and how to get that appointment. That’s all. Everything else can wait.
She lands on a smile she didn’t come for
The practice’s home page opens with a huge photo of a laughing woman with perfect white teeth. Across it, in big letters: “Transform your smile.”
Underneath, a row of buttons: teeth whitening, veneers, a “smile makeover”, clear aligners. There’s a short video about the practice’s new cosmetic suite. There’s a paragraph about the dentist’s passion for beautiful smiles.
It’s a lovely page. It’s clearly cost money. And for Karen, at eleven o’clock at night with a cracked tooth, it’s the wrong page entirely.
Nothing on it is false. The practice really does do cosmetic work, and it’s probably proud of it. Cosmetic work may even be the part of the business the dentist most wants to grow. But Karen didn’t come for a better smile. She came because she’s in pain. And the first thing the website tells her is that it’s about something else.
Then a pop-up offers her a whitening special
Before she’s had a chance to scroll, a box slides over the page. “New patient whitening offer! Sign up for our newsletter to claim yours.”
She closes it. It takes two tries, because the little cross in the corner is small and her hands aren’t steady.
It’s a small thing. But think about how it lands. She’s anxious, tired and in pain. The practice’s first move is to ask for her email address so it can sell her teeth whitening. It’s like walking into a pharmacy with a fever and being handed a perfume sample at the door.
Nobody at the practice meant it that way. The pop-up was probably set up months ago to grow the mailing list, and it shows to everyone, on every page, whatever they came for. Nobody thought about who might see it at eleven on a Sunday night.
But the answer she needs is three clicks away
Karen starts hunting. She opens the menu. “Services” has a list of more than twenty items, from implants to sleep apnea appliances to children’s checkups. Somewhere in the middle, she finds “Emergency care”.
The page exists. It even says the practice sees emergency patients. But it doesn’t say when. It doesn’t say whether “tomorrow” is possible. It doesn’t have a phone number at the top, only a link back to the contact page.
On the contact page, there’s a booking form. It asks for her name, date of birth, insurance company, policy number and preferred appointment type, from a drop-down list that doesn’t include “I’m in pain”. Her insurance card is in her car.
Each of these is a small hurdle. Any one of them she’d get past on a good day. Together, at the moment she most needs help, they say one thing: this place wasn’t expecting you.
So she goes back to the search results
Karen taps the back button.
The next practice on the list has a plain website. Not much to look at. But across the top of the home page it says, in big letters: “In pain? Same-day appointments for toothache and broken teeth.” Underneath, there’s a phone number she can tap, and a line saying the first slots open at eight on Monday.
She sets an alarm for 7:55.
On Monday morning she gets an appointment. The dentist fixes the tooth. She’s relieved, grateful, and a little embarrassed she left it so long since her last checkup. So she books a cleaning. A few months later her husband needs a dentist too. Then her kids.
One emergency visit turned into a family of patients, possibly for years. All because one website answered her question in seconds, and the other made her look for it.
And the practice never knows she was there
Here’s the part that should worry any business owner. The first practice has no idea any of this happened.
Nobody called. No form was sent. No one complained. On the practice’s side, Karen simply never existed. If anyone there looks at their website numbers, they might see one more visit that lasted under a minute, if they look at all.
The website still looks great. The dentist is still proud of it. And the practice will keep losing the Karens of Louisville, quietly, one Sunday night at a time, without ever knowing why its phone isn’t busier.
This is what makes a muddled website so costly. It doesn’t fail loudly. It fails in silence, with the people you never got the chance to help.
It happened because nobody asked why patients arrive
It would be easy to blame the web designer, or the pop-up, or the photo. But those are symptoms. The real cause is the same one behind the headphones story.
The practice built its website around what it wanted to sell, rather than why people actually come.
Nobody stopped to ask a simple question: when someone lands on our website, what are they looking for? If they had, they’d have found that people arrive for very different reasons. Some are in pain and need help now. Some want a routine checkup and a new dentist. Some are curious about cosmetic work and are happy to browse. Some are parents looking for someone good with kids.
Each of those visitors needs something different from the first few seconds. A home page built for only one of them, and the one the practice most wants to sell to, at that, lets the others down.
This is the finding-out step we wrote about in “Do the marketing first, then let your website sell“. You are not your customer. What you’re proudest of isn’t always what brings people through the door.
So match your front door to the people who knock
You don’t need a dental practice for this to apply. An accountant gets the tax-letter panic and the routine bookkeeping enquiry. An IT firm gets “our server is down” and “we’re thinking about new laptops”. A plumber gets the burst pipe and the bathroom remodel. Every business has its urgent visitors and its browsing visitors, and they want different things.
Here’s how to check your own front door.
1. List the reasons people contact you. Think about your last twenty or thirty enquiries. Why did each person get in touch? Group them. You’ll probably find three to five main reasons, and one or two will be far more common than the rest.
2. Check what people searched for. If your site has a search box, read what people type into it. It’s your visitors telling you, in their own words, what they came for. We wrote about this in “Your search box is market research you’re not reading”. If your site is connected to Google Search Console, a free tool from Google that shows which searches brought people to your site, look there too.
3. Look at your home page through each visitor’s eyes. Take each reason from your list and imagine arriving with it. Can you tell within a few seconds that you’re in the right place? Can you see what to do next? If not, that visitor is probably leaving.
4. Put your phone number where a hurried person will see it. At the top of every page, and tappable on a phone. Someone in a hurry won’t go looking for your contact page.
5. Switch off pop-ups where people arrive in a hurry. If you must have a sign-up box, don’t show it before someone has read anything, and never on the pages urgent visitors land on. Make it easy to close.
6. Make the first step as small as possible. If someone urgent can’t book without their insurance card, let them call instead, or ask only for a name and number and fill in the rest later.
And give each kind of visitor their own page
The home page can’t do everything. Its job is to say who you help, and point each visitor to the right door, quickly.
Behind that, give each main reason its own page, written for that visitor in their words:
- A page for the urgent visitor. For our made-up practice, that’s tooth pain and broken teeth. It says when you can see people, how to get an appointment, and what to do in the meantime. The phone number is the biggest thing on it.
- A page for the routine visitor. Checkups and cleanings, what a first visit is like, which insurance you work with. Calm and reassuring.
- A page for the browsing visitor. Cosmetic work, with photos, explanations and plenty of room to read. This is where the lovely smile photo belongs, because the people landing here came for exactly that.
Pages like these do two jobs at once. They help the visitor who’s already on your site find their way. And they help search engines send each visitor to the right page in the first place. Karen’s search for a broken tooth dentist would have been far more likely to land her on a page about broken teeth, if one existed. Instead, it sent her to a home page about smiles.
Nothing has to be thrown away. The cosmetic work still gets its spotlight. It just gets it in front of the right people, instead of everyone.
So the next Karen gets an answer in seconds
The first practice in our story isn’t a bad practice. Its dentists are probably skilled and kind. Its website just wasn’t built around the people who visit it. It spoke to the visitors the practice wanted most, and let everyone else find their own way, or leave.
Your business has its Karens too. People who arrive at the worst moment, with one urgent question, ready to become loyal customers if you answer it. They’ll never tell you if you don’t.
So it’s worth a few minutes this week. Open your website on your phone, pretend you’re in a hurry, and see how fast you can find what you’d need.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on it, we’re happy to help. Working out why people come to you, and making sure your website meets each of them at the door, is what we do before we build anything. Book a 15-minute call. No pitch. Tell us who your Karens are, and we’ll tell you honestly whether your website is ready for them.