As an optometrist, you understand how important it is to take care of the details and provide patients with the experience they are looking for. The same principles can be extended to your marketing tactics. While you might not be a marketing expert, you likely have a good idea of how important online marketing activities are to bringing more people to your business.
Website traffic, or the amount of visitors that come to your website, is incredibly important for increasing your business and getting more patients. Your website is like your virtual storefront. It’s the place that people go to learn more about you, your business, the services you offer, your reputation, and any other information they might be interested in learning about your optometry office.
You want to channel potential patients to your website, where you can then nurture them and help convert them into patients. But first you need to get that traffic coming your way. Traffic also helps you see how well your marketing tactics are working, allows you to gather insights into your audiences, improves your SEO and search engine rankings, and gets you more patients.
It’s also important that the traffic you get on your website is quality traffic. A bounce rate is a metric that calculates how many people open a website page on your site then immediately exit. A high bounce rate isn’t a great thing, and it can damage your SEO and your search engine results page rankings. However, when the people who are visiting your website are invested in your optometry business and genuinely want to learn more, they stick around for longer and reduce your bounce rate.
There are online marketing strategies that will bring in a bunch of free traffic, but unless that traffic is high-quality, you won’t be getting the best results. We’ve put together a list of some of the best online marketing activities to increase the flow of high-quality traffic to your website. And, of course, these tactics are made all the more easy with the help of a tool like Surefire Local.
Surefire Local provides business intelligence marketing software that allows you to manage every aspect of your marketing from a single platform. Avoid wasting time signing in between programs and devices, and managing your marketing efforts from any device anywhere in the world. With the power of the Surefire Local platform behind you, you can easily implement these tactics and strategies into your marketing plans without skipping a beat. If you want to learn more about Surefire Local, attend a demo and discover how optometrists can increase website traffic.
1. Manage and Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business profile is one of the most powerful tools you have for SEO and local ranking. When you have a fully optimized Google Business page, you get more visibility on Google searches and on Google Maps. Your listing allows you to post information about your business like your address, hours, contact information, services, and photos. You also need to be sure to include your web address and links on Google posts back to your website to increase the amount of traffic you have coming in.
A Google Business listing is easy to set up, and allows you to increase your visibility on the platform where people are searching for your business or location. It also allows you to drive traffic to your business who have the intent to purchase.
2. Claim and Manage Your Local Business Directories
While Google Business Profiles are maybe the most well known directory to get listed in, it’s far from the only one. The more local business directories you have your optometry business listed in, the more chances you have of getting discovered and capturing the attention of your potential patients. You can claim these pages and make them your own, which guarantees that the information on them is accurate and updated.
Directories like Yelp have a strong search ranking on Google, which means that even if you don’t appear in the first Google search, you will still appear high up on the list of results. You can also add in new posts regularly to let search engines know that you are active and are partaking in updates. And you can drive traffic to your site by including links to your website in the directories you claim.
3. Get More Reviews on the Top Platforms like Google & Facebook
Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. We are hardwired as people to believe and listen to the recommendations of others. That’s why having positive online reviews about your optometry business is essential to growth and success. When a potential customer can see highly rated reviews where people say you do a great job and recommend your optometry services, they are much more likely to visit your site.
You’ll want to come up with a marketing strategy that includes getting reviews on big platforms like Google or Facebook. These reviews can bring in more traffic, rather than reviews that you just keep on your website that don’t bring in new visitors. Don’t be afraid to reach out to your patients and ask them to send reviews after a great experience to increase your ratings.
4. Be Active and Engaging on Social Media
Social media is another powerful tool that can be used to bring in more traffic, and therefore more business, to your website. Social media is free to use, and you have total control over what type of content you post. When you approach social media strategically, you can connect with key audiences and engage with potential patients one on one.
Social media allows you to showcase your optometry business’s personality, and you can have a lot of fun with what you do. Just be sure to include links back to your website in your posts and in your profile information. That way, your followers and those who come across your profiles will be able to click on the links and get back to your site, which increases your traffic.
5. Ensure Your Website has High-Value Content
The content you post on your website also has an important impact on the amount of traffic you have coming in. Content includes things like website copy, blog articles, photos, infographics, videos, and much more. By using keywords that people are searching for in your content creation, you can optimize for SEO and improve your search engine rankings. In addition, you can focus on providing value to your patients and audiences so that they are more interested in the content you have to share.
The more high-value content that your website has, the more it will appear in searches for traditional Google searches and visual searches. And, when your content appears in searches, it’s more likely that people will click on it and visit your website.
6. Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing tools. It is very low cost, and often brings in great results when done correctly. Building an email list is an important part of email marketing, as you can’t send out emails when you don’t have any email addresses in your database. Whenever you post content like a blog post or a content offer, make sure that you ask for an email or require it to access gated content.
Once you’ve built up your email list, you can send out engaging emails to your contacts and prospects and encourage them to visit your website with a relevant CTA within the email. Just make sure that the emails you are providing value, otherwise you might appear as spam to your contacts, which is a bad thing you’ll want to avoid.
7. Set Local Targeting Parameters for Your Digital Ads
Digital ads are a great way to ensure that you are getting in front of your target audiences. However, you’ll want to be very sure that you are targeting the right people. Digital ad platforms like Google ads and social media ads will give you the option to set local targeting parameters for your ads.
Narrow down the area you want to serve, and make sure that you’re not targeting anyone outside of that area. That helps to ensure that the traffic that comes to your website through digital ads is invested in your business and won’t bounce from your pages because your location is too far away.
8. Establish Hyperlocal Signals through Check-Ins
Another way to make sure that the traffic you bring in is high-quality and won’t bounce from your pages is to establish hyperlocal signals. When you allow check-ins across your online presence in places like Google, you can make sure that your audiences and search engines know exactly what areas you serve. That helps to make sure that you get more relevant traffic coming to your optometry website.
Take your marketing to the next level by attending a demo of Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software and see how you can manage all eight of these Local SEO strategies from a single, easy-to-use platform.
