The amount of visitors to your website is, of course, one of the most important factors in attracting new patients to your dental practice.  But once you have established a steady stream of traffic it is very important to analyze its different sources.  There are only 3 ways potential customers can find a website.  They can make a search on one of the many search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, they can visit it directly by typing in its address, or they can be referred to the site via a link on another website like SuperPages or other large directories.

Search Engines

Google, Yahoo, and Bing account for 94.9% of the global search marketplace as of December 2009, with Google accounting for 85.34% of that.  A PatientScout PatientPortal’s internet reach is enormous and search engine traffic accounts for 50-80% of your overall visitors to your site.  There are literally hundreds of search terms your PatientPortal is optimized for. Your PatientPortal will be submitted along with a XML sitemap to Google, yahoo, Bing, AOL, and Ask.

Referring Sites

A referring website is anything on the Internet that links to your site.  This can be blogs, review sites, directories, local listings…anything, even if you own the website the visitor came from.  PatientScout has over 150 preexisting channel partners to facilitate your ongoing link building campaign.  This means we syndicate your name and your site’s address to create  and update business profiles on the largest and most-used directories on the internet.  These all point back to your site and help ensure constant flow of visitors, driving targeted prospects to your practice.

A link building service of this volume would normally costs thousands of dollars, but since we have automated this process and have established these channel partners it means YOU, the dentist, can realize the added value while not experiencing added expenses.  This ongoing link campaign comes standard with ALL PatientPortals.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is attributed directly to you because it is either people who already know your practice (and are thus returning patients), or have heard the address through offline media.  Radio campaigns or something as simple as having your web address on business cards are both ways to generate direct traffic.  This segment usually accounts for the lowest percentage of traffic to a website, that is, unless a practice is running considerable amounts of offline media like radio or television ads.

If you are looking to begin an internet marketing campaign for your practice, a PatientPortal is one of the best available tools to take advantage of Search Engine Optimization for local keywords and also for generating many inbound links.  Furthermore, our monthly traffic reports provide easy, at-a-glance statistics on how the traffic breaks down and allows for ongoing analysis of your traffic sources.

Knowing the breakdown between each traffic source can provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your efforts in each category, whether that is SEO for targeted keywords, creating a web of inbound links, or even tracking the effectiveness of specific campaigns and marketing efforts.

Below are a few of our client’s traffic breakdowns:

Figure 1	Figure 2

If you take a look at Figure 1 you will notice that search engines account for 72.39% of all website traffic.  Figure 2 is considerably lower percentage wise, only accounting for 44.90% of overall website traffic.  Through a quick analysis however, we can see that this is not due to ineffective SEO because the number of visits from search engines is actually greater in Figure 2.  Instead, this range can be attributed to offline marketing done by that particular dental practice.  They happen to have run several television commercials and have placed their website address on their business cards and all print collateral.  Both sites have near identical referring traffic, which has been growing steadily for about a year.  Overall, they both have a very healthy traffic breakdown and appear as we would normally expect, especially with the unique marketing efforts shown by the second practice.