Getting the Most Out of Your Practice’s Website

Google Analytics is a free service. Google wants you to have this information because the company makes its money selling advertising. Anything that helps increase their advertising will help their bottom line, which, in turn, will help your bottom line. Your website provider should be well attuned to using Google Analytics. If not, then it may be time to look for another website company. Only a few lines of code need to be added to your website in order to glean mountains of information about its performance. Make sure that your website company sets you up as a user on the Google Analytics account so that you can access the reports directly. This way, you eliminate the middleman and put yourself in control. Here are some of the many incredibly useful statistics that you can get from Google Analytics.

This is how users (who are your prospective patients) have stumbled upon your site. Hopefully, a huge majority of them are coming to your site from organic search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. This is essentially free advertising, so you'll want to take advantage of it as much as you can. Google Analytics will also give you the results of any traffic from sites that you have paid advertising on, such as Yelp.com, YP.com, etc.

This is what users typed into the search box before choosing your site from the listing. This information gives you an indication of what your potential patients are interested in. Using keyword data, you can enhance the web pages that were clicked on to increase your prospective patients' experience and hopefully nudge them into picking up the phone.

Another thing to look for from the keywords data is what important keywords are glaringly absent from your details. This means that your web pages with those keywords are not appearing high enough in the listings for those keywords to evoke a click from the users. If that's the case, it's time to revamp those pages. Ensure that the keyword or keywords appear near the top of the page and have your web designer place them in text, such as a heading or subheading, with an H1 tag. This renders the text in a very large font, and Google interprets that as being important. In addition, ensure that your web pages have at least 500 to 800 words so that Google considers them to be "unique pages." If they do not, they will be relegated to the 29th page of users' search results with little chance of being seen. Take every opportunity to add your important keywords into the text in a readable fashion. Furthermore, plaster your pages with images and place the keywords into their alt tags so that the search engine spiders can detect them. This will help you showcase the different services that you provide that match what users are looking for.

From which page did users enter your site? This data can provide you with a good indication of what a prospective patient's interests and concerns are. Some may enter more generally through your homepage, whereas others may enter more specifically through pages about your offerings or your blog. Once users are on your site, you can see what other pages they are clicking on, so even if they arrived through a simple search for a dentist in their area, you can learn what services they are interested in.

This data allows you to gauge how much interest users have in any particular page. If users are attracted to a page, but they only spend a few seconds looking at it, it may be time for a redesign—anything to keep their attention focused on your site.

This is extremely important data that you can use when making marketing decisions. Let's say that you are getting a lot of traffic from one particular site. You can now look at the users that come from that site and see what their bounce rates are. The bounce rate is the percentage of users who only view one page without clicking anything and then go elsewhere. If the traffic that you receive from one particular site has a high bounce rate, especially if the average time spent on the page is only a few seconds, then this is obviously not a quality referral source. If this particular site is one on which you are paying for advertising, then it is probably a good time to drop them.

Alternatively, when users from a particular source not only spend enough time on a page that you know that they are reading your content but also visit multiple pages, that is a considered a quality referral source. For those sources, it may be a good time to consider ramping up more advertising to increase the quality traffic even further.

When looking at statistics from Google Analytics, remember to keep in mind that there are bots lurking in the shadows of cyberspace. These bots can visit your website multiple times and skew your statistics so badly that you become excited about how wonderful the source website is that is sending you all of these visitors who need to get their teeth fixed. Unfortunately, these bots have no human teeth—just statistical ones. You can easily identify them by the fact that their bounce rate is 100% and that their time spent on your page is 0 seconds. If you identify any of these bots, you can have your website provider filter them out for you, but even then, there will always be a few that get through, so try to weed them out of your statistics before making any marketing decisions.

Google Analytics can be an absolutely wonderful tool to keep track of your web marketing results. But remember, it is important for you to be able to access it directly so that you can get the real data, not stats that have been manipulated or watered down by your webmaster. Monitoring your website traffic will enable you to make marketing decisions that will increase your return on investment as well as the amount of new patients who are coming in the door.

Richard P. Gangwisch, DDS, a master of the Academy of General Dentistry and a diplomate of the American Board of General Dentistry, is a clinical assistant professor at the Dental College of Georgia at Augusta University and practices in a Heartland Dental-supported office in Lilburn, Georgia.