What eye surgeons need to know about SEO
[Music] so what is organic traffic and how can you use medical seo for your practice when we look at driving people to a website which is one of the goals that we have we create a website we we have to get traffic to it one of the ways that you've probably heard is called organic organic traffic and you need to create um content to attract people to your site so channels are just different ways people get to your site organic traffic is one of the channels you've probably heard of paid traffic that's paying people to get to your to your site there's direct traffic people type in your website there's referral traffic people come from other sources so just to give you that context organic traffic though is one of the most cost-effective long-term ways that you can use to drive traffic to your site on an investment basis so that you're not continually having to pay to the traffic store pay google pay facebook to drive traffic you can actually get your money invested in creating really really wonderful content that is highly value optimized so that you're really giving things to people that they want at different stages of their buying process so if you think about that how do you do that how do you actually produce valuable content because i can't count i suppose the number of times that i talk to clinics and say well i'm doing seo and you ask them what are you doing well i'm just producing content and and they're a content producing factory and they have hundreds of blog posts but when you look at those blog posts those blogs are really they're they are sort of old school and that they are keyword optimized so they've kind of cherry-picked keywords which is a good start you you have to do you do look at that as part of your process but they're not interesting they're not engaging they're not they're not entertaining they're not really something that will turn somebody who's glancing at you into a stare turn somebody says if you use a dating analogy turn somebody who's going to stick around and find out more about you because when they read that very um you know boring unengaging piece of content they're not going to think yes i should book a consultation yes i should call this clinic because that is the aim of this that the aim of this is to impart your personality your brand your usp into that content in a way that you're actually producing that response in somebody so how do you do that you you in a nutshell you want to look at the different phases of a person's buying cycle and ask yourself some questions what would i want to know if i was you know going to purchase laser eye surgery what would i want to know and better yet ask your patients what what did you want to know what are the questions and we know that google is basically a question asking device these days so you can look exactly at the keywords that people are looking up and you can divide them into categories of what do i ask at the beginning of my journey what is lasik that's a that's a beginning of my journey question versus the middle of my journey you already know what it is a little bit and you're starting to investigate you know more of you know how does it work and what happens later and you know you you get you dig a little bit deeper you're willing to spend more time and then finally at the bottom of the funnel you're looking at okay you know i'm almost ready i might want to see a patient testimonial story i want i might want to see my testimonials done up in an engaging faction too so that i can see what other people experienced when they had the they had the procedure so you want to really ask yourself what do people want at which stage of their journey and break it up into sort of the beginning the the middle the end of their journey so that you can produce content that is engaging and what we call exciting at each stage of the journey the way to look at organic traffic is that it's a result of an input that you that you put in input is the effort and the creativity and the understanding of who your customer is that creates the ability to generate good organic content so this is a content marketing question because content marketing is what you need to do in order to engage people after you've generated attention organically through search engines and people raising their hand and you know by typing in a keyword search and saying i'm interested in for example cataract surgery then they land on your website if you don't engage them with some really good organic content then it's going to be quite challenging to get them to the next stage in the journey which is to either download a lead magnet or take a self-test or potentially make a phone call or even better make an online booking and just schedule an appointment with you so organic traffic needs to be content that does one of two things and ideally both it needs to inform people it needs to be something that provides uh interesting information to questions that people are actually asking so there's no point in generating lots of content that responds to questions that nobody's asking because nobody's ever gonna see that content right so you need to really think what are my avatars what are my ideal patients what are they questioning what do they want to know most people are now using google as a question and answer device almost the way you might use alexa you know alexa what temperature is it alexa where can i get laser eye surgery think about it like that that's what google it works like now so people are typing in questions and if you know the questions they ask and we do know what questions they ask because we do this all over the world we're able to provide them with informative content that responds to those questions appropriately the second thing that good organic traffic has to do is it needs to potentially entertain people it needs to excite people so information is one thing but information alone can really be a little bit boring so you need to present it in such a way that it's engaging that it provides some some level of entertainment possibly so you want to think beyond just a written blog post you want to think how can i potentially create an interesting infographic how can i create a video that will deliver my content in such a way that makes it interesting how can i create images how can i create gifs how can i create lots of different even like potentially i have no practices that have done comic strips and coloring books you know how can i present my content in such a way that i can make it both informative and entertaining and those are the two recipes or the two ingredients i should say that generate really good organic traffic that drives customers to your website and engages them to stay there so that they can perform actions that you want many people are wondering how does one go about measuring one's organic performance and again organic is the type of traffic that you might receive through efforts that most people refer to as seo search engine optimization so how do you do this right so what do you measure well one of the key things you've got to know is uh what's going on on your website because there are technical barriers again that that stop robots google robots from entering your website crawling it and determining whether or not it's worth sending visitors there okay so some of these technical barriers that i see most commonly on websites uh of customers before we work with them is their websites are way too slow okay so they have created websites that are bloated in images bloated with video and just are not designed for mobile so that because as you know in the laser eye surgery space most people are looking at websites on mobile devices and so your websites have to be lightning fast in order for them to really engage people today in an environment where everything is attention quick so that's one thing the second thing is is that they're not laid out properly in terms of a folder structure they might not necessarily have on-page seo factors like appropriate titles appropriate heading tags appropriate keyword density sometimes these keyword densities are way overstuffed if you've gone to different seo providers in the past who really had to focus on keywords mainly which is kind of old school seo from i'd say probably about five years ago if you've had your website seo than the last like previous to five years ago then or potentially even now you might be suffering from uh keyword density overload so i think the key thing to think about is what's the intent behind what people are looking at because that is how you serve up good organic content so what you're measuring here is how many views you get on a page how much retention in other words how much time on the page you can get this from google analytics and you also want to be measuring as well what happens do people bounce off the page and go somewhere else because they didn't find what they were looking for their intent was not served or if they move on to other places in your website and and potentially even better perform an action that you wanted okay so those are the key ways to measure it you can measure it with impressions you can measure it with click-throughs you can measure it with conversion rate but really really importantly you also want to get to a point where you're identifying how many leads you're getting from your seo efforts so that's where a lot of agencies don't go they don't go into leads they don't even go into patients by far they don't go into patients so what you need to do is you need to find an agency who really understands the whole funnel and can track people from organic awareness all the way through to becoming a patient and every step in between back when you're in school you had a relatively easy way to ascertain where you stacked up against your peers and colleagues however now that you're in a practice setting it's a little bit tougher to know where you stack up not only against your ideal but also against your peers and your colleagues and that's why we created the premium practice score and if you'd like to take that test if you'd like to see where you stand up against the best in the world or perhaps the best for yourself you're able now to take that and then see where you stack up [Music] you
