One of the most important factors driving your website’s search engine performance is its popularity. In order to have a site that ranks high in organic search listings you need to get visitors to go to your site and spend time there. Google, Bing and other search engines look at your site’s visitors and their behavior. If visitors go to your site and immediately click away, this tells search engines that your site wasn’t relevant to their search. Instead, having a site that people interact with will ensure that visitors to your site spend more time there and that they come back again.
Here are five ways to get traffic (and repeat traffic) to your website:
Have the information people are searching for.
Visitors to your site are looking for specific information. Make sure that your website provides your location and contact information as well as answers to specific questions you get most frequently. Providing useful information online will also help to reduce the number of phone calls your office receives.
Add forms to your website.
Online forms can help drive traffic to your website. Appointment requests, new patient forms and patient surveys will not only increase the overall and repeat traffic to your website, but they can also make systems run more smoothly in your office. Most forms can be imbedded in your site for patients to complete online. Our Patient Connect service is a great example of this. At the very least, your website should provide forms that patients print and bring with them.
Allow patients to pay online.
Collecting outstanding invoices needs to be as easy as possible. Adding this feature to your website will give patients a reason to go back to your site and interact with it. Again, the more useful you make your site, the more overall traffic it will receive.
Add a blog.
It’s an established fact in website optimization that search engines prefer pages with fresh content. Having a regularly updated blog will give your patients a reason to keep coming back to your website and will give you two of the most important factors in determining your website ranking: more content and more pages. Essentially, a blog gives search engines more to index which means that people can find your site using a higher variety of key words. And because each blog post is seen by search engines as a new page on your website, your site will quickly grow exponentially with a frequently updated blog. For maximum benefit to your website, your blog should be stored on the same server and under the same domain as your primary website. Smile Savvy provides our customers with customized blogs containing original content that we manage.
Use social media to drive traffic.
Include links to and from your website through your social media accounts. Posts on Facebook and Twitter should occasionally reference your website, encouraging fans and followers to visit your site for more information. If you are on Pinterest, add pins that drive traffic back to your site for more information on dental topics or staff bios. Social media has become an essential tool for marketing your dental practice online, but your website is still the central hub of your internet presence.
For more information on how Smile Savvy can help you grow your practice through internet marketing visit www.smilesavvy.com or contact us!
