How to measure your SEO success
You know your website should fulfill all your objectives. You know your website should 
provide return on investment (….or at least you hope it will!). But how do you go about ensuring your site is measuring up? This blog outlines the tools available to measure the SEO contribution to the bottom line of your dental practice business.
Any measurement of success is influenced by the initial objectives of the site and/or the SEO campaign. Without clearly defined objectives for which the work of the site can be focused towards, it will be very difficult to distinguish if they have been successful.
Differing objectives for a dental practice website, and therefore SEO efforts, range from; attracting new patients, promoting a new treatment in the local area, to a branding campaign for existing patients. Often all three of these are required to be fulfilled.
Having established what your objectives are, the measuring of them can begin to take shape.
For SEO the three key performance indicators (KPI) are;
- Rankings.
- Traffic.
- Conversions.
Rankings
Studies show that websites listed on the first page of Google receive up to 92% of traffic share. So it’s easy to see this as the most common and obvious KPI. As with most things with white hat SEO, time is needed to track the keyword rankings which will give the most accurate performance data.
You can then build your keyword strategy around these results. It may be that you track 20 keywords, and all but 5 of these are on the first page of Google. You know that in order to get these five keywords on the first page, you will have to invest more optimisation efforts into them. And it may be that you will have to utilise paid advertising to gain grounds on a much bigger competitor. On the other hand, this could present a real opportunity. By accepting that the 5 keywords are just too competitive, and based on the research, would not provide enough benefit to warrant the effort. It would then be more beneficial to focus efforts on the other 15 keywords in order to get them to into the top three positions, where they’ll really pay off. Without keyword ranking data, making informed strategic decision such as this would be difficult.
All this is effective, but it means nothing without understanding how these keywords translate into increased quality traffic.
Traffic
Measuring the volume and quality of traffic that first page rankings deliver is essential. First rankings are useless if they don’t deliver enough of the right kind of traffic.
The number of visits that come from the organic search should increase with any successful SEO strategy. Bear in mind the number of visits you can realistically expect from the site. This will be based on the size of population and the demographic of the area you are based in.
Think about the competition in the town or city in which you are based. A dentist in London cannot expect to get the whole of London population as there is so much other competition.
With traffic volume follows the quality of the traffic. The quality of traffic coming to the site can be measured using the following metrics;
- Pages per Visit
- Average Visit Duration
- Bounce rate
When reviewing these metrics, if you find that the average number of pages viewed per visit is low, the average time visitors spend on the site is also low and the sites bounce rate if high, you may have discovered there is either an issue with your website or with the type of traffic your keyword is delivering.
Understanding the relationship between the keywords your campaign is targeting, and the traffic they’re delivering is imperative in answering the latter issue.
An example of this relationship might be the dentist thinking they want to attract people who are wanting to avoid gum disease, so they optimise for the keyword, ‘avoiding gum disease’. This keyword can present two issues;
- Firstly, the person searching with this keyword isn’t necessarily looking for a dentist who can help them avoid gum disease. They could be researching ways to stop getting gum disease, like using an electric toothbrush or specialist chewing gums, or eating plans.
- Secondly, even if the person is open to trying to contact a dentist to find out a bit more about gum disease avoidance, they are still in the research phase and are far removed from becoming a patient.
Conversely the person that searches for the keyword ‘gum disease dentist’ or ‘periodontist’ is most likely looking for exactly that. They are past the research phase, as they have decided that getting a dentist who can help them with gum disease is the best prevention and cure and are simply finding the right one.
This person is more inclined to invest time on the dental website, researching the periodontal page or the information about preventing gum disease, etc. They are more likely to convert into making an appointment or subscribing to a newsletter of the practice. This leads onto the next KPI.
Conversions.
This is the ultimate KPI with which an SEO campaign can be measured.
Your conversion should be defined around your specific objectives set at the very beginning of your campaign.
If your goal was to get new patients, then contact forms, and phone calls are the best conversion metric. It’s important to note that not all would-be patients will send a form and/or call in on their first look of your site. They may want to get to know you better by reading your blog, checking you out on Facebook and subscribing to your newsletter, so don’t ignore these measurements.
By tracking conversions and gaining data, you can tale the campaign full circle by knowing which keywords generating these conversions and why.
Conclusion
Having a system in place to track the momentary value of conversions gives you the ability to determine the ROI of your SEO campaign. It’s important therefore to ask patients how they heard of you when they call in and to have a contact form on the site.
Furthermore, you can determine the monetary value of a customer’s lifetime loyalty. A new patient is generally a returning customer, so the effort spent in acquiring them gains value the longer the patient is having treatment with you.
Dental Design uses all these metrics in delivering reports to our practices of the work we do. To find out more about how our SEO team create, monitor and amend and create SEO strategy, call us on 01202 677277.
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