How creating traffic for your website– and successfully turning the traffic into fresh patient leads – is capable of hugely benefitting your practice.
Every month, renowned dentist, Dr. Lou Shuman seeks the input of a digital marketing expert in dentistry to talk about the recent advances on website optimization, SEO techniques, trends in Social media, management of reputation online, marketing and promotion and more.
This month, he is sitting down with an expert, Ian McNickle, MBA who is a partner and joint founder at WEO Media, to discuss the reason for the importance of the lead conversion of a website and the way it can enhance the marketing ROI of a practice.
I was told that you give lectures on the subject of lead conversion of websites. Can you please talk more about the meaning of that?
Why I frequently lecture people on the subject, is the fact that only a handful of people are knowledgeable about the subject, this is the reason, it is quite essential.
In order to study the lead conversion for websites, we should first step back and talk about online marketing. In online marketing, there are usually two main objectives:
1). Create as much vital traffic as can be created, and
2). Convert the created traffic to many fresh patient leads as well as appointments as achievable.
The second stage is really what is known as the lead conversion of a website.
Please, take us through every one of the mentioned steps
Certainly, we can begin with website traffic. We have numerous methods of creating website traffic on a particular website, like having great search rankings when it comes to Yahoo, Google, Bing, etc., that can be achieved by a great search engine optimization – SEO. Collecting numerous reviews of patients on Facebook, Google, Healthgrades as well as Yelp also creates a positive effect on your websites searches rankings as well as its traffic. Your activities on Social media, engagement, improved posts as well as paid ads are all able to direct traffic to your website too. Online directories have the capability of driving traffic to your website, and the possibility continues.
As soon as you have a very robust program in generating traffic, then it is also vital that you are aware of how to transform the traffic to fresh patient leads. A lot of things impact the lead conversion of a website, like:
- Having the latest website design as well as a nice layout.
- The position that the phone number is located.
- Appointment request forms or buttons
- Distinct calls to action (CTA).
- Effectively using videos
- Persuasive offers
- Links for online scheduling
- Using genuine photos as against using stock photos
- A perfect doctor bio page as well as great team page bios
- Testimonials from patients; both written and video formats
- Useful and precise information.
The internet marketing agency that is experienced with the dental industry expertise such as WEO Media can be consulted to get best practices within this area.
In this case, what way can somebody monitor and estimate this to determine the level of performance of their website?
The rate of lead conversion is estimated through dividing the quantity of activities of conversion (such as appointment requests, phone calls, and so on) by the traffic in your website every month. If this is done, you can easily create a baseline estimate of the way that your dental website converts traffic. Additionally, a dental practice should ensure that the website of a dental practice comes with a tracking number present for them to accurately track the number of calls that hits the website on a monthly basis.
Check out this example: assume that your website has a website traffic of about 400 visits in one month. You had received about 30 calls through the website, and you also got 10 appointment requests from the website. Your rate of conversion would simply be 40 activities of conversion splitted into 400 website visits to give you a rate of conversion of 10 percent. If this rate is monitored overtime then you will know the performance of your business website as a tool for marketing. Typically, we prefer to see business websites that convert at the rate of a minimum of 10 percent.
Based on your experience, is this capable of making any potential impact in the marketing return on investment (ROI) of a dental practice?
Yes, sure. This is the interesting part. If you can enhance things on the website which improve the rate of conversion then a little improvement could create about tens of thousands or even about hundreds of thousands in dollars per year as extra revenue.
A typical website can generate about 500 visits on a monthly basis while converting averagely at a rate of about 10 percent. If you could execute plans that boosts your rate of conversion and this gets improved by 12 percent, you should assess the impact. The little improvement of two percent amounts to 10 extra fresh patients leads in one month or just about 120 in a year.
If you are able to convert just 25 percent of all these fresh patient leads, then you have been able to generate about 30 additional patients in a year. What is the value of that?
The great news here is that nearly all of the things you shall be needing to boost the conversion rate of your website do not really involve continuous costa, but instead a specialized knowledge as well as industry experience in appropriately designing and constructing the website.
