Search Engine Optimization is a process which supports the visibility of a website in a web search engine’s (like Google) unpaid results – often referred to as an organic result.
In the present age, your medical SEO or dental SEO plays a vital role from a healthcare marketing perspective. In this fast paced, competitive digital world, SEO acts as the guiding light for your healthcare practice. So, if your medical or dental practice does not have a marketing strategy that incorporates current SEO techniques, your competitors’ website may show up when yours does not.
Search engine Optimization is one of the best, most cost-effective, medical marketing strategies available as it targets the specific online users who have been actively looking for your products and medical services. The inbound nature helps dental providers save money and time as opposed to outbound strategies like cold-calling and advertisements.
The battle for supremacy starts once you have incorporated the SEO process. But this is only the beginning, the climb to the top of search rankings does take time. Having the right strategy doesn’t guarantee you a win, but its execution and a continuous monitoring of progress that is pivotal to improve your results.
Now, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of what metrics show if your SEO is effective to improve your websites search rank. Let me review indicators which tell you if your medical and dental marketing SEO is working:
Increased Website Traffic (New Visitors to Your Website)
Top position on the search engine result pages (SERPS) receives a majority of the impressions and clicks, so getting ranked at the top is the ultimate goal for all websites. This happens, only if your SEO strategy is working. If you enter the keywords that you have optimized for into different search engines and continually monitor your search rank, or your website’s Alexa Rank, then you can analyze the qualitative success of your SEO strategy.
Return on Investment and Cost Effectiveness
For medical websites or dental websites, SEO marketing agencies like IntellaHealth.net can see the exact path your patients take to find your website or register for an appointment and even see the exact keywords they have been used to search for your practice. Also, if your SEO strategy is working, then you can attribute values to your lead conversions, like a ‘contact us’ form completion, and assign a value to your SEO strategy.
Increased Website Experience
Search engine robots have tools to evaluate if your patients value your website’s usability or experience then reward you with higher medical and dental SEO when it is working properly. Essentially, what SEO does is rearrange the website’s architecture and backlinks to make pages within the website easier to find and navigate through. Overall, a properly functioning SEO strategy makes it easier for search engines to crawl through your website and find pages but also makes it easier for patients to find the desired information on your website.
Increase in your Brand’s Awareness
An effective medical/dental SEO strategy helps your website reach the top position in Google rankings which results in significant increase in impressions. Having your website amongst the top ranks on the result page translates to more exposure for your website and hence your brand as a whole. If more of your pages and content rank in higher positions of a search engine result page (SERPS), then it answers the question “How do I know if my SEO strategy is working properly?”
Technically speaking, once you implement SEO and check if it is working correctly, you would find that:
- Over time, you would see your position improve (for example: position 5 to position 2) for the keywords that you are targeting.
- Your click through rate would increase.
- Your organic, qualified traffic to your website would increase.
- Over time, your bounce rate (the rate at which patients are leaving your website immediately after visiting the first page) would decrease.
- You Top Landing pages are identified which give the maximum conversion, so a correctly working SEO strategy would work to enhance these landing pages to turn more visitors into new patients.
I hope this review was useful to help you decide if your medical and dental SEO strategy is working. To discuss a strategy for you medical or dental practice give me a call and we can discuss this more.
For more information on SEO strategies and its execution, click here or contact Kristine Grace at KristineG@IntellaHealth.net.
by Kristine Grace, Feb-21-2017