What you need to know about online marketing

Part 4 - Increase traffic to your site

Instructors:

Peter Boulden, DMD

Peter Boulden, DMD

Dr. Peter Boulden graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry and practices in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Boulden has experience lecturing locally and nationally.

Now that your website is optimized, what can you do to increase traffic to your website. Dr. Boulden breaks it down so that you can start making a difference in your page rank.

Let's talk about how we're going to track and look at the changes that we've made over time. And the best way to do that is through a friend at Google is installing what's called Google analytics. And I'm sure most of you are very familiar with that. If you don't have the code already on your site, it's very easy to insert. There's some how to videos and I won't go over how to install that here. There's a lot of how to videos published by Google to show you how to install that coding on your site. But basically you're going to have a Google account or a Gmail account and then you can just log in to Google/analytics and it will show you the data for your site in real time. So the cool thing about installing Google analytics on your site is that you can take a snapshot from today and you can also then in six month's time go back and look at the progress you make, and hopefully see the trend upward. And I guarantee you you'll see a trend upward if you apply the things that we're talking about today. So let's jump into the page on Google analytics and I'll show you kind of what I look at when I open up my Google analytics on a daily basis. And you don't have to do it on a daily basis but it is pretty cool to kind of look at the changes that transpired. So we'll jump in. We'll just assume that you have installed. As soon as you've [read] the tutorial and such that you need to do that Google provided, we won't waste the time here. I'll just kind of just jump in and say here's the thing to kind of look at real quick. And this can take five minutes of your time that's it. So basically you would log in and you would kind of look at the traffic that transpired. So this number right here this is the visit on a 30 day cycle. So if today is December 5th, it's looking at it from December 5th backwards to November 5th. Okay. So it's always a 30 day slice of a metric. So this number will be the first thing I go to. The visit is the unique people not the page views but that's the unique amount of people at 6400 Mrs. Jones and 6400 Mr. Smith. It's different people. Okay. Because I don't really care so much, well I do but I don't really care so much about how many page views I've seen. My first matrix is I want to see how many people had come into. That page views will then be, that page view number right here will be how many times or how many pages had been seen by those people. So typically if we have 6,000 visit and you have 1500 page views that means on average there's been about 2.36 pages per visits. So that's where that number comes from. Okay. So first number I'll look at is visit. Second number I look at is over here called the time on site. And you'll remember earlier I talk about a metric that Google kind of looks at and they do this because they want to know how long people are spending on your site. Obviously, the higher the better that has search you as the authority. So if you're keeping people on your site 5, 6, 7 minutes that's awesome. In this examples, we're just showing 2.3 pretty respective. A lot better than 15-20 seconds which is what I see on a lot of people's site when you're just kind of looking at something. You know that's probably the average. Cause people will hit the site and they will bounce back off. And believe it or not Google tracks that kind of stuff. They know everything. They know what color car I drive somehow. But they know if a mass of people are jumping on site and saying it doesn't look so good and hitting the back button they're tracking that data. So the longer, if they land on their site, the longer you can keep them on there, you know, the timer just keeps clicking away and your authority in their eye climbs. So I look at this number, I look at this number. One more thing I do look at from time to time not on a daily basis is just where is that traffic coming from because I have a lot of sites out there. I click on that link over there that says traffic sources and I have a lot of referring sites. TopUSAdentist.com is a referring site. You know some of my other websites send in traffic. I want to know how they're helping me out. It's good to kind of monitor. Cause I'm seeing kind of a bump in that. Wow I'm getting a ton from X, Y, Z site. I may put a little bit more energy or more juice into that site to capitalize on that trending upward. So here you kind of see the top 5 for this site which Google cause they're finding it from organic searches. Direct. People are typing in that domain directly. Yahoo, Bing, Facebook is a big one for this one as well. And you can go in to dive into you can click here and say view full report. It will show you where 2000 sites are sending you traffic. So that's one more thing to kind of look at. So really for analytics, I could spend a whole day talking about all the cool things that it does, but I don't see, at the end of the day you just want to know a couple of quick matrix to make sure that you're trending upward. So the graphical presentation here and then you can also change, up here, you can change day and time. Remember how I'm saying in six months we could be, let's say we're in May 2012. You applied the things you've learned here in the HDiQ video and now you want to kind of look at well I forgot where I was back in November or December. Change that and they show you the graphical trend. All right. Let's talk about something pretty cool that is a new statistic that many people know about. But in dentistry more than 50% of your traffic on average is coming from a mobile website. It's pretty cool. An iPad, an iPhone something that is using that does not display flash. So the problem with this is if you're website that has this component on it. You know it looks pretty good when I'm looking at on the iMac here. It looks pretty good. The problem is that when we go to a mobile device is that this is what it looks like. So this is one of the biggest problems that I see is that people aren't looking at it on mobile devices. You know it's there. It's there. People are looking at it on their phone just as much on their iPad and in their computer. There's no just saying oh it looks good on a computer and not worry about it. You have to worry about it on a mobile device. You have to. So if your site isn't showing up the same on this screen as it is the iPhone as it is the iPad talk to someone who knows how to fix it. If you're talking to your current web designer and you're identifying this as a problem for you, what I don't want you to let them do is establish a dotMobi site or something that is you probably seen those sites where the version that shows up on the iPhone and it's not the real version here. It's just the truncated version of all that stuff. Don't do that. That's a terrible fix. Have it show up the same here, here, here. You can continuity across all medium platforms. Done. Now as you apply some of the principles that we've talked about earlier, you got beautiful site, it's optimized, it's structured correctly, you're ready for more traffic. Here's how you do get more traffic and link tubes, more credibility whatever you want to call it in the eyes of Google. Here's how you build the roads. Remember I talk about the mansion earlier when I apply and explain that. But here's you build the in roads to the mansion. So your main site is the mansion. Now we have this beautiful site. This beautiful mansion created. Now we're building the roads into the site. So now everyone sees our pretty new house. So the inbound links we want to create and that creates the currency or the link tubes I'm talking about. So here are some things. I've just kind of sketch out on this dry board. Some things that will build into your main site. So here you can see all the arrows are coming inbound to the main website, your main website dot com. Okay. So I'll just quickly go around some of the things that are used to create inbound links. So one of the cool things that I think that dentists are underutilizing is they're not submitting press release. Press release can be pretty powerful. If you go online and you read how to write a correct press release. If you submit through PR web or something like that, it will actually include your link. You can include your link to your website on that press release. So let's say you just won an award or you did something for some charity work or you did something that's anything that's newsworthy don't be afraid to pat yourself on the back and get it out there to the world and submit a press release about it. So I think press releases are a pretty cool way to do it. So that means like I said the press releases are syndicated. They're picked up many many times and that would create a lot links for you into there. So press releases are a good way to create some linkage into your site. There's other referring dental sites. Some of them are paid. Some of them are not. But anytime you can get a link from dental related website is a cool thing to do. You know even some dental blogs are a cool thing to do. Some of them you have to pay. There's a real sell and other websites. I'm not going to promote one or another. But there is some other sites that you can actually get referred linkage and those are sometimes pretty powerful links into your site. So there's other dental referring site. I'm going to come back to this one because this will take a little bit more time. But let's go over here down to the left corner and talk about how Facebook and Twitter in the social media and everyone is talking about social media buzz. I think it's something you have to have. I do not think it's the answer and the end all be all to the marketing efforts and needs. Studies have shown that it may increase even done in the most effective manner the best campaign in social media campaigns run will maybe add 2% of your bottom-line and it takes a lot of time as many of you who are doing social media. But I do think it's something you need to have and it can create a lot of linkage, inbound linkage for people to find yourself. So make sure that your office, when I say your office I mean I don't think the dentist themselves will really devote a lot of time a lot of time on their social media. I think that should be delegated to a staff cause they're better at it than you are probably. And they're probably already doing it on this time. So delegate that to someone else and let them in. But create a good social media campaign because I don't want to spend too much time on it cause I'm not the biggest fan of social media. But I do think it can create some cool inbound linkage. It's one more way for people to find the mansion in the wood. Okay. Another thing is make sure you're doing video. Make sure you're doing video. It's talking about you. Anytime you're doing a procedure, anytime you have a testimonial. Anytime, I mean just use video. I mean people love to watch video. Our society is not so much a readers anymore. They'll scan and stuff but they'll definitely watch a video. Keep your video at 60 seconds or less to keep people's attention. And just kind of optimize the videos the right way to bring it traffic. So if you're playing dental sealant. Hey there's a video in the dental sealant in my website. If you want to introduce yourself to the world. Hi, I'm Dr. Smith, make sure you become personable and put those on YouTube which will then when people it will then you can link into your main website. And those can be posted on your domain site. That make sense. So to kind of slow down a bit so if you have a video on dental seals makes sure it's on the dental sealant page. But make sure it's hosted on YouTube. So it's actually search at youtube.com. Because many people are using YouTube now like a search engine just like they would go to Google and type in dentist. They'll go to YouTube and type in Houston dentist, Alaska dentist whatever it may be and you want some of your videos to be on. Okay.

Blogs you know were hot a long time ago where people with people talking about oh you need a blog and blog this and blog that. And I still think that is true today. It's not the newest thing in the world but it definitely is something you need to have. You need to be writing content cause content is king. And that phrase is thrown around and Google is kind of reverting back at content, unique, fresh, content is king. The best way to do that is to have a block for your own website and that's a completely different domain. So maybe it's something like blogger or blog spot or whatever it may be. And you're kind of talking, you being personable. And you talking about kind of the case of the day or the procedure of the day or the new technology you got and that then with the inbound link to your main site. So that's one of the link. Also look at commenting on other people's dental blogs and thing or other blogs is a good way to kind of make a comment and then some of those spaces when you're making comment on a blog, it will actually have a space where you can put in you website. And that website then will serve as an inbound link to your website. So again thus creating all this inbound links is a way to create Google currency or link tubes or whatever you want to call it is just a way to gain more credibility in the eyes of Google. Touching kind of the blog and writing. If you write something cool on the blog and you writing about it, I would look at looking at something called Squidoo lens, doing a Squidoo lens. You know an ease on or ease it on article. There's a lot of article submission sites so look at doing some of those. Cause again that's a unique site, that's sending a unique link right back to your site. So there's a lot of sources here. So you can probably tell all this stuff takes time and that's kind of the whole point with SEO is that there's no magic bullet with any SEO. It's a component and a lot of things. It's multi-factorial that are all kind of coming in to a synergistic effect for your main website. The last thing to talk about and this is a little bit more of an advance thing. The last thing to talk about is being open to the idea of niche websites. And when I mean niche websites it's actually you have a different website for specific service you're going to talk about. Being very laser targeted with a service that you want to promote. So kind of going back to my advice in the beginning of you know pick three things or pick two things that you love to do you're the best at and you want more business of doing that. So if it's Invisalign. If you love doing Invisalign cases pick something that people are searching for in the domain. So let's use Alaska cause that's an easy example. So trying to get something with the keyword Alaska and Invisalign in the domain. So it may be able to register through go daddy, may be even register in Alaskan Invisalign or Invisalign Alaska or Alaska-Invisalign or whatever it is. But you want to look at how people are typing it in. But it may be implant. So you maybe have Alaska implants, Alaska dental implants. But you kind of see where I'm going with that is that you want to set up a micro site that is laser focus just for that procedure and it has different content, don't just cut and paste the content that's on your main site. It has completely different content. It's a completely different website than your main site. But it's laser focus to talk about just what that user is talking about and micro site are very very powerful and they're exceptionally powerful at feeding more traffic into your main site.