The healthcare scenario has become highly competitive and medical SEO is crucial to improve the visibility of your medical practice and attract targeted traffic. With right SEO strategies, physicians can ensure that their page or site is on the top of the search results and not lost in the millions of results. The use of effective SEO tactics will make a big difference in terms of rankings, website traffic, and patient growth.
Many physicians have trouble keeping their patients engaged with their practices, and as a result struggle with patient retention. Content plays a key role in online medical marketing. Leveraging health content marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to patients and engage them. Blogs, articles, videos, and social media posts on subjects that interest patients can help physicians build authority and trust over time.
Quality content with relevant keywords increases visibility and allows search engines to find your website easily. However, producing good quality content is not enough – practices need find out whether it can drive results. They need to track their KPIs to optimize their campaign over time. Here are the key metrics to measure to see how your content is performing:
Five Key Metrics to Track
Here are key metrics that can measure how your content is performing. Tracking how your content is performing can help you take steps to improve ROI and the effectiveness of your marketing campaign:
- Back links: One of the most important ranking signals of Google is authoritative links pointing to your website. Your website becomes more significant only when it has a lot of sites linked to it that pushes you up in the SERP. So it is important to track how many links your content can generate. You can measure this with the help of analytics tools like SEMrush that lets you use the free daily search component to check how many backlinks your domain has. Ir also shows which individual content are receiving them.
- Average time spent on page: Knowing the time that users spend on your content shows how engaging is your content. If they leave quickly, it shows that your content needs more work and also needs to target a different audience that resonates with the topic more. Google Analytics can help you find out how long users on your website. It will display the average time for your top performing pages. The average time can be improved by making your content more entertaining, adding visuals like infographic, videos and images and leading users step by step through instructions and tutorials.
- Unique visits: One of the main goals of creating content is to attract users to your medical website. Google Analytics helps you measure how many users your website is getting. The tool will record how many visits come to your website on a single day. This data can be used to focus on high quality traffic sources.
- Social shares: Social media and content marketing are linked. Your content can be shared using social media and it is a good metric to track in your content campaign. Publishing content and sharing it on social media platform provides a wide reach for your content without out spending much money. You can also track how many social shares your content has received within each individual platform. Social media platforms determine how your content is performing on social media.
- Bounce rate: Bounce rate means the number of people who leave your website without visiting other pages or interacting with the site in some way. The average bounce rate is 58.18 percent. (www.socialmediatoday.com). Ineffective content can increase bounce rates. High bounce rates can also be due to inconsistency between keywords and content or even the purpose of page.
Why Physicians Need Content Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that markets a business through story telling in many ways. Content is an oldest yet relevant marketing technique that is effective and continues to evolve with time. People respond better to showing instead of telling. Content marketing uses engaging material to apply a product and/or service in a way that meets the audience’s needs. To market a treatment or service, physicians can write blogs about their patients and how the treatment has benefited the patient. Content marketing lets people know about how useful the service is, making them much more likely to respond. So content marketing is vital for physicians to grow their practice. Transforming the way you promote the content can bring more organic search traffic. Medical SEO companies have skilled content writers who can provide customized content for all specialties. They will also implement effective SEO techniques that can improve a website’s organic traffic and online visibility.
