Here are some simple hacks to improve the health of your website traffic and conversion ratio.
For most clinics, their website is cornerstone of their marketing platform, with traffic originating from social media accounts, paid advertising and organic traffic as a result of search engine results. With your marketer selecting the amount of traffic originating from the first two, when was the last time you did a health check on your organic traffic?
With this traffic being the key to the success of a website. What happens when your traffic stalls, your visitors aren’t converting into consultations, or your site isn’t making it on page one of Google for the searched you specialise in?
It’s time your website had a check-up.
Do you know what your visitors are looking for?
Learn what keywords people are using to land on your site. You can collect this invaluable keyword research by signing in to Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a free service that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site. In conjunction with other Google tools like Analytics, Trends, and Ads it will help you with technical decisions for the website and to do sophisticated marketing analysis.
If you haven’t already set up Google Search Console and the other application in the suite, make this a priority; it’s easy to use and gives you access to loads of data, tools and diagnostics to improve your site.
Once you know what people are actually searching for, you can optimise your content and keywords accordingly. Remember, high raking SEO content isn’t about ‘keyword stuffing’. Mentioning the selected keyword two to three times on a page is sufficient and using related words and phrases in the post allows search engines to better categorise the page topic.
Search engine optimisation is a long-term, ongoing process – you’ll need to be vigilant in keeping on top of changing trends in keywords in the aesthetic medicine and beauty industries, as well as the viewing habits of your audience.
Do you have enough content?
Content will always be king when it comes to organic traffic growth, and the more quality (read: engaging and unique) content you post, the more information you are giving Google and the plethora of other search engines to work with.
If you’re only posting a blog or article every so often, it will be hard to make much of an impact in terms of growth and search engine rankings. More posts also mean more avenues for your audience to find and reach you, not to mention increased social signals and social traffic when you share on Facebook and Instagram, etc.
Don’t become overly preoccupied about the number of words per post. What matters most is quality and uniqueness of the content, rather than whether it’s short-form or long-form. If you don’t have the resources or time for longer form content, short-form posts should be around 400 words.
If you’ve been posting valuable content for a while, it might be of benefit to update that content, especially if after a while, you want to give posts about certain treatments and services a boost. And with the current developments in artificial intelligence (AI), you can now update your posts with the help of AI SEO tools. There are tools that can analyse the top-ranking pages on search engines and give you actionable recommendations to help you improve your chances of ranking higher.
The importance of links
Links are of vital importance to SEO page ranking because they demonstrate to search engines like Google that your website has authority, especially if other high-authority domains are linking to yours.
There are basically three types of links in your website content:
- external links should take visitors to other sites that you’re referencing to validate any claims in your content
- internal links should take your visitors to other pages/posts on your site to give them more or complementary information, and
- backlinks are a link from another website to a page on your website and signal to search engines that you’re providing high quality content.
All three link types are important to include in any SEO improvement strategy as they reflect favourably on your search engine page ranking.
Are your social signals optimised?
Do you have social media buttons on each page? Where are they positioned? Research has found placement of social buttons to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al, to greatly impact how many shares a post will receive?
Opinion is divided on the “holy grail” placement of social sharing buttons, but it seems the preferred options are left and top of the page. Considering the top-left portion is the most viewed part of a web page, it would appear the best choice for positioning social buttons is the top-left of each page.
To ensure social engagement of your blog posts, placing share buttons above and/or below them is a good way to accomplish that.
Is your site loading too slowly?
Google factors in the speed that your website loads when ranking your site, so ensure your site is running as cleanly and smoothly as possible. This is usually a job for a web expert, but small changes can also make big headway in helping your pages load more quickly. Some of these can include removing inactive plugins or widgets, poorly optimised images and bloated themes if you’re using WordPress.
To find out how your site fares, check out Site Speed in Google Analytics.
Visitors are not staying on your site or converting to patients?
There are some relatively quick and easy ways you can increase reader engagement and, ultimately, convert them into real-life patients! These include: Call attention to your call to action. Have a clear call to action, and a design layout that intuitively leads your readers to it. This might be a call to action to sign up for your newsletter, request a call back or book an appointment.
Rethink navigation and user experience. Keep it clean, with clear pathways to your different topics. Remove duplicated content and don’t overload pages with excessive information and widgets.
Don’t let your visitors hit a dead end on your site. Always keep them (and search engine robots) moving. In your blog posts, link to your treatment pages to offer readers comprehensive information. On your treatments pages add a simple call to action with a link to your contact form.
Deliver your message in a more compelling way. Is there a better way to grab someone’s attention once they land on your page? Consider an explainer video on your homepage and any other services/treatment pages. Keep it entertaining and educational and your conversion number is sure to reach new heights. And remember – invest in quality video that is a direct reflection of your brand offering.
Is your website mobile/tablet optimised?
It’s 2023, if your website isn’t mobile device optimised, you’ve been missing out on traffic since 2018 when Google made changes to their algorithm to rank mobile-friendly sites higher. However, with a reported 24% of the top 1,000,000 not mobile optimised, you may not be alone. But that is a lot of mobile friendly sites that have a BIG advantage.
With well over 55% of all internet traffic happening on a mobile device, and with Google’s page ranking algorithm penalising non-mobile optimised sites, it is imperative that your website is mobile/tablet friendly. Not being mobile-friendly will penalise your page ranking and make your website more difficult to find.
Depending on the platform that your site is hosted on (WordPress, Joomla, etc), this can be as simple as adding a plugin and/or an additional or alternative template for your site. Or it may be time for a website makeover that will allow you to utilise a responsive template to ensure that your website looks just as good and has the same functionality no matter what type of device your prospective patient is using.
So in conclusion, there is no time like now to ensure that one of your most important weapons in your marketing arsenal remains sharp. Review the content and design of your current website, prioritise upgrades and 2024 will be the year for increasing your ROI on your marketing budget. AMP
