Everyone that has an online marketing campaign, even if it’s just the simplest of websites, tend to have the same goal, driving traffic. Whilst this is all well and good, after all it’s pretty exciting to see high numbers of visitors in your websites stats; an article from the the daily SEO blog brought to my attention the importance of turning this traffic into quality acquisitions and ideally long term customers.
Traditional SEO tries to shamelessly send as many people to a website as possible without thinking about the intent of the customer, which is of course is of key importance. If you are targeting the wrong people and they are simply bouncing off the page as soon as they get there, you risk alienating the consumer and thus wasting clicks and everyone’s time in between.
Many people still think that throwing as many people towards the website as possible must end in a few conversions, but surely it’s better to have less traffic but more quality leads and therefore more return on investment?
This means that there needs to be a change in thinking for both website owners (in this case dentists) and for those that work for them (in this case me!) towards the customer and what they value, rather than just assuming and being complacent. In order to do this, we both need to be confident that we have compiled enough research into our potential customers, their demographic and what messages are attractive to them to ensure messages and keywords are relevant.
That’s the before work, it’s also very important to do the end work too and ask patients how they found your practice. If it was through the website, ask them do they like the website? Is there anything they’d like to see on there? Would they recommend you on dentist finder? All of this will put the patient back in the driving seat to make sure that your marketing messages are relevant. Further, it will probably make your patient feel happy that you appreciate their feedback too, which could lead to a longer term customer relationship.
To be honest it’s not hard to drive traffic to a site, its turning them into patients and more importantly long term patients; that’s the skilful part, and the part which is potentially highly profitable.