What metrics to track to see how many visitors are coming to your site—and whether they’re converting
In a previous post, we discussed 8 ways video can improve your practice’s website SEO and ultimately convert visitors into patients. But once these strategies are implemented, how do you know they’re working? Rendia’s Customer Success (CS) team recommends that practices focus on certain key metrics.
SEO doesn’t happen overnight, but by tracking these metrics, you can keep track of the impact that your strategy is making over time. Read on to find out what to pay attention to, how to measure it, and how Rendia can help.
Site traffic
The first metric you want to track to measure your website’s reach is how much traffic is going to your site, referred to as visitors or sessions in analytics platforms. Traffic, in this case, would be anyone who finds themselves on your website, not necessarily just prospective patients. Sessions are instances where someone visited your site. By knowing what pages people are visiting on your site, you can add strategic content to pages you know get more traffic, or use links to drive more traffic to less-visited pages.
One metric to track to measure your website’s reach is how much traffic is going to your site.
A free tool like Google Search Console will track a site’s growth in visibility and traffic. Impressions show you how many times your site was shown in search results, even if they didn’t result in clicks. Impressions lead to traffic.
Visitor behavior
There are a few important metrics related to visitor behavior you’ll want to look at. For example, maybe a prospective patient is looking online for eyecare services and your practice appears in the search. While impressions will tell you how many people saw your page in results, click-through-rate (CTR) represents the percentage of people who clicked through to your site out of the total number of people who saw it. Having a low CTR may indicate that you’re showing up for the wrong audience, or that you’re not showing up on the first few pages of search results. One way to boost your SEO ranking is by including video content on your website, as we explained in our previous post.
Metrics can help you better understand visitor behavior on your site, such as average time on page and bounce rate.
Another metric that can help you better understand visitor behavior on your site is average time on page, which is just what it sounds like. If you saw, for example, a page on your site with important patient information had a low average time on page, this may tell you that patients are not engaging with the information for as long as you’d like. To counteract this, you might want to add images, video, or other interactive content to the page to engage visitors and keep their attention. The longer people stay on your pages, the more likely they are to convert.
Conversions can be defined as specific actions that you want visitors to take on your website, whether that’s scheduling an appointment, opting-in to email, etc.
Bounce rate tells you how many visitors who came to your website left after landing on a page. This may indicate that they didn’t find what they were looking for or that these pages are not engaging enough to entice visitors to stay. Again, ensuring that you have compelling content that visitors can interact with makes it more likely they’ll convert. Rendia users have a tool at their fingertips to see what visitors are doing on your site: the Rendia Stats dashboard provides real-time insights that tell you if visitors are watching the videos on your site.
Applying metrics to boost engagement
Once you know how much traffic is going to your website, to what pages, and if people are staying on or leaving those pages, you can dive deeper to learn more granular details about what leads your site visitors to stay — and more importantly, convert into patients.
Rendia’s Customer Success team can help practices with SEO strategies and website content recommendations.
Rendia’s Customer Success team can help practices with website content strategies, working with you to place compelling video content on your site to drive traffic and increase conversions. Here are a few Best Practices that our team recommends:
- Embed videos above the scroll line on a web page.
- Keep videos under 5 minutes long if you want patients to watch a few in a row.
- Turn on closed captions or remind patients they can turn them on themselves using the CC button.
- Include videos on pages that include forms (LASIK Evaluation, Dry Eye Questionnaire).
Want more ideas to improve your practice’s online presence? Download our Online Brand eBook to learn how.