MY team and I have just done
a series of 121 marketing clinics
with practice owners at the BSAVA
congress (we do them at LVS as
well and they’re always popular).
The three most common questions
at these clinics are always the same:
- How do I get more new clients?
- How do I create more time to get things
done in my
practice? - How do I get
loads more
traffic to my
website?
For the
last question,
the answer I give is unexpected: “You
don’t want loads more traffic to your
website.” You see, there are hundreds
of ways to get more people to your
website. But traffic is just a process,
not an end result.
Sometimes, in the rush to improve
our businesses, we fixate on improving
the process we’re following, and lose
sight of the actual goal. The ultimate
goal is more new clients. So the
real purpose of traffic is to get hot
prospects onto your website at exactly
the moment they are looking for a new
vet; then get them to register with you.
Clever free tools like Google
Analytics will tell you all about who’s visiting your website and how they got
there. It’s good to have a rough idea of
what’s happening on your site. But if
you’re going to obsess over your traffic,
obsess over the quality of it, rather
than the quantity.
It’s better to have 10 unique visitors
a day who are existing clients or hot
prospects, than it is to have 100 low quality visitors. Here are the three most
reliable ways to get the right kind of
traffic to your site:
1. Dominate Google
The number one, most reliable traffic
method is to dominate Google.
More than two million searches a
month are made on Google in the UK
for a veterinary surgery; 40% of those
searches are now believed to be on
mobile devices (mobiles and tablets).
And according to some 2013
research into UK buying habits, 58%
of all purchase decisions now begin
with a search engine.
By making sure that your practice
has the top natural Google listing, you
will get an estimated 53% of all the
clicks on the search results page.
There are actually dozens of
different ways to get up to the top of
Google, but the single most important
thing you need to do is to claim your
practice’s listing within Google (it’s
called Google Plus Local), and add as
much information about your business
as you can.
You also need to look at how to get more independent Google
reviews. I’m not talking about sites
like VetHelpDirect here. Clients can
actually leave reviews within Google
itself. At the moment, Google seems to
place a very high weighting on reviews,
so the more reviews your practice has
on Google, the higher up the search
listings it should appear.
One thing you can do that works
particularly well is use more of
Google’s products. For example,
Google owns YouTube; it likes it when
you use YouTube and link between the two.
Google also likes it when you
use Google+ (Google Plus), its social
media network. It is desperate for
Google+ to work and has integrated
it into most of its products. It has
plenty of users outside the UK, but
here in the UK it’s
not that popular
yet. There’s no hard
evidence that having
a practice Google+
page helps your search
position, but plenty of anecdotal evidence flagged up by search
marketers.
If you’re struggling
to get good listings,
the other thing you can do is use
AdWords to advertise on the search
page. This is called pay per click, as you
only pay when someone clicks on your
advert.
You can set a geographical area you
want your adverts to appear within.
And a daily budget (when you’ve
spent the day’s budget, your adverts
stop appearing). Unless you’re in an
extremely busy city, £10 a day is plenty.
2. Use PR
The second thing you should do is
PR. By PR, I mean public relations – getting journalists talking about your
practice for free.
As a vet you bene t from instant
credibility. To the harassed radio
producer with too much content to
produce and not enough time to do it,
you represent an easy way to source a
trusted local expert.
To get great PR, you don’t need
to hire a PR company who will take
thousands of pounds from you. You
don’t need press releases, and you don’t
need to initiate charity drives. Sure,
these things can help, but what really
helps the most is connecting with the
people who control the media and
giving them fantastic story ideas.
Then make sure in every article
and after every radio appearance you mention that there’s
more information
available at your
website, and give the
address.
3. Embrace
social media
Twitter is very powerful
for a practice, but
Facebook is even
better. Facebook is
such an immersive
image-driven experience that if you can get someone
to connect to you, then that’s a very
powerful way of generating website
traffic.
However, having a large social
media following (for example, 200 likes on Facebook or 200 followers on
Twitter) isn’t enough – you need to
actually do something with that website
audience, such as send them to your
website to register for a free chipping
when they bring in a new puppy.
In other words, you need to use the
social media to actually drive traffic to
your website. Most practices don’t do
this.
