Why You Need to Grow Your Website Traffic if You Want to Grow Your Practice
If your health and wellness practice is surviving, chances are you got here with a lot of hard work and fairly basic marketing. However, if you want to grow your practice and have it thriving, it’s time to improve your marketing and focus on website traffic and conversions.
Most likely, you’ve grown your practice to its current level of success through networking, referral marketing, and being on insurance panels. You may have even dabbled in social media or Google ads.
But when you’re ready to take your practice to the next level, you need to make sure you’re showing up well online. And focusing on website traffic can help you develop a more effective strategy for growing your practice because it’s based on knowing the people who become your patients/clients.
So, let’s start looking at how website traffic is tied to practice growth.
Your website (yes, I’m assuming you have a website, and if you don’t, it’s time to get one) is essentially your virtual office. The more traffic it receives, the more likely your practice will grow. This is because website traffic means greater visibility, enhanced credibility, and improved chances of conversion. (Conversion means someone makes a purchase, takes you up on an offer, or becomes a patient or client.)
Let’s put this into more relatable terms. Imagine you’re a chiropractor, and you want to expand your practice. By increasing your website traffic, you can reach a larger audience and attract more individuals seeking your services. This increased visibility can result in more appointment inquiries which can lead to more patients and, of course, practice growth.
The next thing to understand is the relationship between website traffic and client/patient acquisition.
You can think of website traffic as a rough measure of how popular your website is. The more traffic you receive, the more popular your website is. Yet popularity doesn’t guarantee practice growth. You need to make sure the right people are visiting your website.
Here’s an example. Dr. Smith, a nutritionist, noticed a steady increase in her website traffic after implementing targeted SEO strategies and combining these with content marketing. As a result of her efforts, she received more inquiries from people interested in her personalized nutrition plans. She nurtured these leads and provided valuable information on her website. This resulted in a significant proportion of these leads becoming paying clients.
You can significantly grow your website traffic and practice by following the steps below.
1. Enhance your website’s visibility to drive traffic.
The foundation for increasing your website’s visibility is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO helps to attract organic traffic and increase your website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). (Organic traffic = people finding your website through search engines, not ads.)
SEO requires keyword research, content optimization, and a user-friendly website. And when it’s done well, SEO can significantly increase website traffic.
Imagine you’re a physical therapist who specializes in sports injury rehabilitation. By conducting keyword research and optimizing your website content for relevant keywords such as “sports injury rehab,” you increase the chances your website will show up in search results when they search for this term.
When you use targeted optimization like this, you’re more likely to attract the right traffic to your site. And by the right traffic, I mean people who are more likely to become clients/patients.
2. Use content marketing to drive traffic.
Content marketing is most effective for growing your practice after you have a solid SEO strategy in place.
When you adopt effective content marketing strategies, you can position your practice as an industry authority which will attract more of the right people to your site. At the heart of content marketing is, of course, content. In this case, content refers to high-quality blog posts, articles, and resources that are optimized for keywords that reflect how your ideal clients/patients search for your services.
To help the idea of content marketing make more sense, consider how a fictitious psychologist, Dr. Johnson implements her content marketing strategy. She regularly publishes informative and interesting blog posts about mental health, personal development, and stress management. By doing this, she establishes herself as a thought leader in her field and attracts individuals seeking expert advice.
The key to her success in growing her practice with content marketing isn’t just that she published great blog posts. It’s that she also includes a call-to-action and provides valuable resources like a free e-book on stress management. When people register to receive her e-book, she can nurture them through email marketing. And she converts many of these website visitors into clients/patients, which helps to grow her practice.
3. Use social media to increase traffic.
You can use social media platforms to drive traffic to your website and expand your practice’s reach. Although there are two challenges with social media. The first is that you need content, and the second is that you don’t have any real control over who sees your posts/stories/lives/reels/shorts/carousels/etc.
You can’t do anything about the algorithms the platforms use to decide who gets to see what you post. However, you can use the content you create as the foundation for your posts. All you need to do is make sure your posts capture people’s attention while scrolling through social media. And once you have their attention, you can encourage them to click on the links to your content. Which translates to website traffic.
Imagine a dermatologist, Dr. Rodriguez, who uses Instagram and Facebook to share skincare tips, educational videos, and success stories from her patients. Through regular engagement, she builds a loyal community of followers interested in skincare. By strategically including links to relevant blogs and pages on her site, Dr. Rodriguez drives traffic to her website, where visitors can explore more in-depth information and book appointments.
4. Analyze your website traffic.
Tracking and analyzing your website traffic data is essential to achieve sustained growth. When you understand your key metrics and see the patterns in the data, you can identify areas of improvement and make data-driven decisions.
Google Analytics is the first tool I ask all of my clients to enable on their websites for analyzing website traffic. It’s free and lets you see how people are getting to your website. With a little configuration, it can also show you how the various pages on your site are converting.
Another tool you might consider adding later is a heatmap tool like Hotjar or Glassbox. A heatmap tool can help you understand how people interact with specific pages on your website.
Here are a couple of examples of how analyzing your website traffic can help you increase your conversion rate.
First, imagine a dentist named Dr. Thompson. Dr. Thompson analyzed her website traffic and found that most traffic was coming from mobile devices. So, she realized she needed to make sure her website worked really well on phones.
Once her website was optimized for mobile devices, people engaged more with her site, leading to a higher conversion rate, and her practice grew.
Next, imagine a chiropractor named Dr. Lee. Dr. Lee noticed that many visitors to her website would leave without taking any action. By looking at heatmap data, she saw that people weren’t seeing the call-to-action button on her homepage, which offered a free consultation. So she made the button prominent, and many more website visitors suddenly scheduled free consultations. And many of the people who had consultations became new patients.
Continue the marketing you’re already doing.
When you choose to focus on increasing website traffic to grow your practice, that doesn’t mean you should immediately stop the marketing you’ve already done. You’ll still want to continue networking, referral marketing, insurance panels, and using your social media channels as you’ve been doing. After all, this is how you achieved your current level of success.
However, depending on your practice, you may, like many of my therapist and psychologist clients do, start tapering off on your insurance panels and grow the full-pay portion of your practice.
When you really look at what it takes to create a thriving practice, website traffic is vital. And by persistently and consistently implementing SEO, content marketing, and social media strategies, you’ll gather the data you need to determine how to grow your practice online effectively.
If you’re ready to take your practice to new heights and need a little or a lot of help to implement the strategies mentioned here, reach out and accept our gift of a free consultation.
