Your medical office website has the potential to drive patients to your practice, increase income, and improve patient care. How well is your website measuring up? Website statistics can tell you where you stand and where you need to improve. Let’s look at the most important statistics for your medical office marketing.
Search engine ranking makes a big difference in the amount of traffic your website receives. If your website ranks first for a major keyword, you can expect to get nearly 30% of the click-throughs. If you rank third for the same keyword, you will get approximately 10%. The lower your rank, the less traffic you receive.
It’s important to track your search engine rankings for critical keywords. For example, if you are a dermatologist in Virginia Beach, check “dermatologist Virginia Beach” or “Virginia Beach skin doctor.” You want to be as highly ranked as possible.
You might not think website load time makes that big of a difference. However, it makes a huge difference, even for medical office sites.
Google will penalize any website that offers a poor user experience. A user’s time is valuable. They don’t want to wait around for a web page to load. That’s why Google will drop the rank of any website that loads slowly.
Potential patients also think less of any practice that has a poorly performing website. Two-thirds of users say website performance influences their impression.
So, how fast does your website need to load? 64% of smartphone owners expect a website to load in less than four seconds. 74% of the same people will leave a site if it takes five seconds or longer to load.
Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors who enter your website, then leave rather than look at other pages. A lower bounce rate is better because it indicates people are finding reasons to stay on your website. This indicates they see value in what you’re offering.
When people stay on your website, it helps improve your reputation as a subject matter expert. That makes them trust you more and more likely to book an appointment.
Known as average session duration, this metric looks at how long a visitor spends on your website in a single visit. More time spent on the website is an indication visitors think you’re providing something worth their time.
On average, a good session time is between two and three minutes. This is enough time for people to read content or watch a short video. It offers time to sign up for a newsletter or read your latest blog post.
You will see visitor count in a couple of metrics. New visitor count tries to track the number of new visitors your website gets. Returning visitor count tries to track the number of visitors who return to your website.
Notice the use of the word “tries.” It’s difficult for Google to get an accurate count for a couple of reasons. Google counts a “new” visitor when there are no tracking cookies present. It’s counted as a “returning” visitor when there are tracking cookies present. If someone clears or blocks cookies, or uses a different browser or device to return, the count becomes inaccurate.
Despite the inaccuracies, visitor count can still give you a good idea of how many people are visiting and returning. This indicates if your medical office marketing efforts are attracting more potential patients or not.
Some pages on your website will be more popular than others. These pages indicate what content your visitors like the most. They can tell you what type of content you need to expand.
It’s also important to see which pages get the most social shares. When visitors think your content is high quality, they tend to share it more often. It can tell you what content they think is most informative.
Where are your visitors coming from? You can get them directly when someone types in your medical office URL. You can get them via search engine results. And, finally, you can get referral visitors who come from another website such as a physician directory.
Each traffic source gives you critical medical office marketing information. A direct visitor is likely using a business card or brochure for the URL. The search engine visitor may be coming due to a new blog post or improved SEO. A referral visitor may be through a guest post on a medical blog or through a physician’s directory.
These metrics will help you measure the progress of your medical office marketing efforts.
Best Edge Medical Marketing is a medical marketing agency that provides marketing, SEO, design, and development services to businesses in the medical industry.
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