Case Study: Does SEO Actually Improve Your Site’s Traffic?

The first step in building an online presence for your dental office is creating a high-quality, modern, and user-friendly website. If you’ve already done that, congratulations!

Once the site is launched, though, our team encourages clients to start Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) if their budget allows for it. You could have the finest, most functional site, but without a plan to make it easy to find, your competition may still beat you out! SEO is essentially a website’s best friend, primarily because it works to get your practice as high on a Google search as possible.

SEO creates visibility and accessibility for your dental website, and also builds a consistent presence and reputation over time, but it’s common for SEO to be met with some skepticism. This is why our team wanted to find out specifically how much better sites with SEO perform compared to ones without it.

The Case Study

Our team chose six clients – three practices that use SEO and three that only have a website with us and no marketing services. Their sites were all launched at the same time and are located in similar markets. We then tracked the following statistics over one year:

• Site sessions: How many potential patients visited the site?
• Traffic type:  Did the traffic mostly come through organically searching on Google, referrals from other sites, or direct entries to the site?
• Conversions: How many times did patients contact the practice via phone or contact form?
• Behavioral stats: How many pages are visited on average during a session? Are patients staying on the site longer than a few seconds? How many new sessions did the site receive?

Our Results

Even though websites with SEO only had slightly more overall site traffic, we found that the SEO websites received 100 percent more (or twice as many) conversions than clients who only host a site with us. With that being said, monthly SEO clients also had 28 percent more organic search traffic(typing in keywords into Google to find a site). This shows that the quality of site traffic increases with SEO services, and there is a higher likelihood that those who visit your site will make an appointment.

Some other improvements with monthly SEO included:

• Pages visited per session: 18 percent higher than hosting only websites
• Bounce rate: 13 percent lower than hosting only websites
• Average session duration: 56 percent higher than hosting only websites

Conclusions

The data makes the conclusion of this case study pretty clear – SEO creates a high-quality online visibility that results in higher traffic, better sessions on the site, and more contacts from potential patients. This is because SEO services include a dedicated analyst who consistently works on your site, month over month, to apply various best practices to create an enhanced online presence.

We believe every SEO campaign should be unique to a practice’s market and goals. This is why we offer free marketing audits and SEO quotes here at Great Dental Websites. Give our team (or your Account Manager) a call today to discuss your practice goals and see if SEO is right for your dental practice.