What a dental clinic website needs: a checklist for clinics in Turkey

What patients come for

• Treatment: whether the clinic offers the treatment they are looking for (implants, orthodontics, root canal treatment, teeth whitening and so on) and roughly how the process works.
• Getting there: address, a map link, parking or public transport, the building entrance and accessibility (lift, ramp).
• Time: opening hours, weekends, and what to do in an emergency outside opening hours.
• Trust: the dentists’ titles and specialities, and the clinic’s full name and address.
• Contact: one-tap calling, an appointment request form and WhatsApp if you use it.

The home page should either answer these questions directly or lead to the page that does in one tap.

The checklist

1. A short page per treatment: what it is, who it is for, the steps and common questions. Separate pages can make information easier to find; they do not guarantee search rankings. A qualified dentist should prepare or review medical content, with a clear statement that it does not replace an examination or diagnosis and that the treatment plan may change after examination.
2. A dentists page: each dentist’s name, legal professional title and registered speciality, if any; do not present a course or certificate as a specialist qualification. If you use photos, keep them current, and remove dentists who have left.
3. An appointment request form: name, phone, preferred day and time window are usually enough; omit a free-text field unless needed. Say clearly that the form is a request and the appointment is confirmed when the clinic calls back. Send it from a phone and check it reaches you, using the steps in the contact form guide.
4. One tap on a phone: the phone number should be a link that starts a call, and the address should open in a maps app. Both belong in the footer of every page too.
5. Opening hours and emergencies: keep the hours identical on the site, the Google Business Profile and social media accounts, and update all of them when one changes. Add one sentence on what a patient should do about pain or a broken tooth outside opening hours.
6. Insurers and partner institutions: if you have agreements with insurers or institutions, describe them within TDB rules and without promotional wording or suggestions of discounts or campaigns; include the last update date. An outdated list sets the wrong expectation before the patient arrives.
7. Patients from abroad: if you treat patients in other languages, say which languages you can communicate in. Before adding language pages, decide whether you can keep them updated. For health-tourism promotion abroad, also check authorisation and the specific promotion rules; using another language alone is not enough.
8. Basic technical checks: does the site open over HTTPS without a warning, does the page move sideways on a phone, are photos uploaded at full camera size? The steps are in the mobile check guide.

Two sensitive points for healthcare sites

Personal data. Turkey’s Personal Data Protection Law (KVKK) treats health data as a special category of personal data. For an appointment form this means:

• Do not ask for complaints, diagnoses, medication or treatment history in the form. Name, phone and preferred time are usually enough for an appointment request; details are discussed at the visit.
• Assume patients may write health details into the note field anyway. Do not collect form messages in a personal inbox, on a shared phone or in a spreadsheet shared with anyone who has the link.
• Link to a privacy notice next to the form. Providing a privacy notice and obtaining explicit consent are separate obligations. KVKK includes grounds for processing health data other than explicit consent; assess the applicable ground, security, retention and any international transfers with a legal adviser. If consent is needed, it must be specific, informed and freely given; do not turn the notice into a consent checkbox. See the KVKK authority’s explanation.
• Check whether analytics and advertising tools on the site pass form content, or visits to the appointment page, to third parties.

Advertising rules. In Turkey, the promotion of healthcare services is restricted by Ministry of Health regulations and the professional rules for dentists. For details, rely on the current regulations and guidance from your regional chamber of dentists. Consult the Ministry regulation and TDB publishing guidance (in Turkish):

• Avoid words that promise results or compare you with other clinics, such as “painless”, “guaranteed” or “the best”.
• For domestic promotion, exclude discount, campaign and promotional offers and posts using patient satisfaction as advertising. Before-and-after images are subject to specific visual-content requirements; patient consent alone is insufficient. Assess the separate health-tourism provisions where applicable.
• Use informative language and avoid advertising that steers patients towards a particular dentist or clinic. Clearly show when the information was updated and how to contact the site editor.

Fix or renew?

Hours, the form address, the certificate or individual pages can usually be fixed on the existing site. If every treatment is squeezed onto one page, the site opens as a shrunken desktop page on phones and nobody can update it, renewing the site may be less work.

We describe how we renew dental clinic sites while keeping the existing content and domain in the dental clinic section of our site renewal page (in Turkish).

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