As a healthcare business, you may have invested in a healthcare SEO campaign that is vital for your online success. Most business owners and managers measure the success of their SEO campaign by Googling the keywords they think are most relevant to their business to see if their website figures on the first page of Google. However, now keyword ranking has become by and large an irrelevant metric to measure your online success. It is important to understand which metrics are significant now.
- Relevancy: Your website content must be relevant for it to appear among the search results for the right people in the right places.Long-tail keyword phrase is an SEO strategy that lets you optimize content, metadata and link-building strategies. Such keyword phrases help to increase your website’s relevancy. However, how your website ranks for the exact search phrase has become less important now because with the popularity of voice searches especially, there is a wide variety in how people search. Google displays results to each person based on their history, location, device and other relevant data. This means that there is no universal page 1, or in other words, a page that appears first to you on Google may not be the same that your friend located at some distance sees. Now Google’s RankBrain customizes search results; its artificial intelligence analyzes search queries to provide better answers. So,
- You need an SEO solution that can enhance your website’s authority and relevancy in your preferred geographic area.
- Ensure high-quality web content (both on and off your website), and implement tactical link-building tactics.
- This will help safeguard your website’s feasibility in the face of frequent Google algorithmic updates.
- Measure organic growth: Following are the tips to measure whether your organic search relevancy and visibility are improving or not:
- Make sure that the number of new users to your websites via organic search is growing every month and year over year.
- The number of visits and new visitors from within your target market should be increasing.
- Conversion: The rate of conversion, particularly of visitors who arrived via organic search should increase. Keep track of the volume of unique phone calls to a website call-tracking number and the number of contact forms submitted. Google Analytics helps to get all information about how visitors arrive at your website.
- Search engine indexing: Search engines work by scanning web pages and adding keywords from those pages into a giant and searchable index. Search index is important for any website for users to view your content. Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster Tools help to understand how popular search engines see your website. Check how often search engines scan your site, what pages are being recorded into the search index and what pages are excluded from the search index. With these tools, you can identify the problems Google or Bing are having collecting information from your website, and you can then work to fix those issues.
- Site uptime: Check if your site is working and users are converting. You can hire uptime monitoring services that will give you basic coverage or implement your own monitoring service using Google Docs.
- Usability: It is essential to know how visitors click on, and how they navigate your website. Google Analytics offers many ways to look at your traffic and gain a clear understanding about visitors’ behaviour.
- Bounce rate: This signifies the number of visitors who come to your site but leave immediately without exploring. The more time a visitor spends on a website, the more likely he/she is to transform into a potential client. With the help of Google Analytics you can measure bounce rate. A high bounce rate shows that either your content was not interesting or relevant, or poor site design prevented the visitors from staying on the site.
- Page load time: This refers to the average amount of time it takes for a web page to load into a visitor’s browser after the user clicks on the link. Researches and studies have shown that reducing page load time minimizes bounce rate and improves user experience. Tools like Yslow (Yahoo) and Page Speed Tools (Google) help to measure the page load time of your website.
- Click through rates: Measuring click through rates is essential if you have paid ad campaigns and email marketing. In a PPC campaign, a higher CTR can reduce the cost per click whereas a lower CTR can drive costs higher.
- Mobile Traffic: Today mobile use is at its peak, so it is important to monitor mobile visitor metrics to increase your conversions. You should know the percentage of traffic coming from mobile search, the browsers and devices used, their sources (organic, direct or social), and lastly the type of content they like.
- Keyword ranking: Keyword ranking performance metric analyzes the keyword ranking of your website and how your SEO efforts are taking organic search traffic to your website. This metrics give an overview of keywords and indicates whether the website has the capability to be in the game and improve ranking on new keywords.
- GCR: GCR metrics refers to Goal Competition Rate metrics that evaluates the total number of people that achieve a particular goal. GCR is a marketing metrics that shows the conversion rate from the awareness stage to consideration stage. It is also used for website optimization.
- ROI: ROI(Return on Investment) is an important factor for any marketing campaign. It is calculated by comparing the cost per lead against the lead to close ratio and evaluating that figure against your average customer value. Positive ROI signifies a successful marketing plan and a negative ROI means you need to fine tune your marketing strategy.
- Returning visitors: This metric measures customer engagement for your website. A higher rate of return for a specific keyword/set of keywords signifies the need to focus more strongly on those visitors. Typically, keywords with a high rate of returning visitors have an impact on the sales cycle.
Medical search engine optimization is a series of tactics aimed at increasing your website’s visibility in search engine results and this improves the chances of being found when healthcare consumers are searching for your products/services.Today, a very important thing to remember is that your personal search results are not necessarily what other internet users searching for the same may see. These results also do not represent the success of other companies’ SEO efforts, and do not indicate whether those websites successfully convert customers. The right appropriate SEO techniques must be tactfully implemented in keeping with Google’s changing requirements. It is best to have highly skilled SEO strategists who keep a keen watch on the current market changes, your targeted audience and other aspects, and optimize the website accordingly. They will routinely check all the above metrics to ensure that your healthcare digital marketing campaign is effective. They would analyse and modify SEO tactics and ensure that their efforts are meeting the objectives.
