In the competitive world of dentistry, you have to keep up with best practices. Digital marketing trends are always on the move, which is why you put so much effort into keeping your dental digital marketing strategy up to date.

But how do you know if all this hard work is paying off? Unfortunately, many digital marketing techniques lack objective metrics to determine a strategy’s success or failure, but with the right metrics, you can find out.

Is Your SEO Strategy Successful?

SEO is a primary source of your practice’s leads, and should be the backbone of your dental digital marketing strategy. But with all the components that go into a successful SEO plan, it can be difficult to determine exactly which initiatives—number of backlinks, the quality of your images, or your keyword optimization—are contributing to your results. Here’s how to get started understanding what’s driving traffic to your site.

1. Google Search

To get an idea of whether or not your SEO tactics are working, do what a prospective patient would do—a Google search. If you currently have a list of keywords your SEO plan is targeting, take some time to search for each one and see where your website ranks.

The goal is to have your website at the top spot of the search engine results page (SERP) for each of your targeted keywords, since 28% of users click there.² But even the top five is an excellent achievement, since 67% of searchers will click on one of those results.

Ideally, your goal is to rank in the top spot for your keywords. But an additional, and equally important goal in terms of attracting new dental patients, is to outrank your competition. So if you aren’t near the top of the SERP and higher than your competitors, it’s time to adjust your SEO strategy.

2. Impressions

In SEO terms, impressions are the number of times your website’s pages have appeared in Google searches, not whether those searches resulted in clicks.

This metric is a valuable measure of SEO effectiveness because you now know how frequently your pages appear in Google searches. Impressions measure not only your targeted keywords, but let you know which of your pages are showing up on the SERP for non-targeted search terms. This information can help you identify additional keyword opportunities and further refine your content.

By measuring how many users visited your site without the assistance of PPC or other outbound marketing, organic traffic is a fantastic gauge of SEO success.

Is Your Content Strategy Successful?

While many may still consider content marketing synonymous with blogs, there’s a whole universe of possibilities you can include in a content marketing plan, including videos, podcasts, infographics, articles, social media, and more. Here’s just a few of the options you may want to consider as a part of your dental practice’s digital content strategy.

1. Blogs

Blogs have long been considered the standard for content marketing, and should be a consistent part of your dental digital marketing strategy. When it comes to measuring how successful your dental practice’s blogs are, most people think you should focus on pageviews. And while pageviews are important, they aren’t the best metric to measure success.

Instead, check the average time-on-page to find out if people are sticking around long enough to actually read your blog content. Many people click a link only to skim the first few sentences of content before bouncing off to the next thing.  Measuring your pageviews will let you know not only how many people are finding your blogs, but whether the content itself is engaging the people who click through to your site.

2. Social Media

There are many different ways of measuring social media success, and the metrics you should choose for your dental practice’s social media campaigns should match your goals.

If brand awareness is what you’re after, then looking at your social channels’ likes, follows, shares, and comments will give you a fairly good idea if what you’re doing is resonating with your target market. If you’re hoping to convert new patients, then examine page visits and click-throughs.

3. Email

Email marketing remains an effective way to reach your prospective patients, and to stay in touch with your dental practices’ current patients. While there are many different metrics that you can measure, when it comes to quickly determining if your emails are working start by taking a look at your open and click-through rates.

Right now, the average open rate for marketing emails is 20.5%, while the average click-through rate is 1.8%.³ Given these averages, you can quickly assess whether your email campaigns are performing as expected by comparing each email’s metrics against these numbers. 

With so many different ways of measuring success, it can be difficult to select the right metrics to be sure your digital marketing initiatives are truly delivering returns. If you’re interested in learning more about increasing your digital marketing ROI and improving campaign performance, Dreamscape Marketing can help. Call us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session.

 

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