There are many ways to increase web traffic to your practice’s site through search engine optimisation, including the optimisation of meta tags and descriptions and creating a good network of links to your site from popular, relevant websites. Whilst this is a great way to get your site in a high position on Google, it’s not the only way to drive traffic to your site.
In fact one of the best ways to drive quality traffic to your site is through your own email and newsletter communications. By adding a link to your site on all of your emails and newsletters, recipients of your communications, who clearly have already shown an interest in your practice else they wouldn’t be receiving the emails in the first place, are more likely to click on the links and visit the inner pages of your website. This improves your traffic quality, lowers your bounce rate and improves the site’s perceived usefulness from a search engine point of view, which should increase your site’s rankings.
Another useful way of increasing your traffic is by creating an online archive of your newsletters, this is because it will increase the amount of keyword rich content (which Google loves!) and any links within the newsletters will still be active, extending the usefulness of the newsletters long after their original distribution period.
Finally, get social media savvy, whilst links from Facebook and Twitter aren’t currently crawled by the main search engines, it will still raise awareness and bring quality traffic to your site. LinkedIn links are crawled so make sure you and your practice have a profile in order to increase your sites rankings and to increase your visibility to patients.
As with all methods of search engine optimisation and the never ending quest for more traffic to your practice’s site, it’s a combination of techniques which will yield the most visibility, best quality traffic and result in higher patient enquiries.