How can you tell if your website is successful in attracting pet owners to your veterinary practice? SEO Metrics are one of the top ways you can tell. Discover the best SEO metrics to monitor so you can keep optimizing your practice’s website for new clients.

Optimizing your veterinary practice’s website is an ongoing process. Make sure that each campaign generates concrete results or you should stop the campaign. To do this, you need to be aware of the important SEO indicators you need to monitor in order to tweak your approach.

Chckup offers tools to help your veterinary practice succeed. One of those tools includes our local veterinarian SEO guide. We created this to help your practice rank higher in search engines in your respective area.  

Below we go over the top 6 KPIs you should monitor after putting our SEO techniques into practice.

1. Website Traffic

Although website traffic is the most obvious SEO metric to track, you can’t monitor it at face value. You have to get deeper than website traffic. Below we include the specifics of website traffic that you should pay attention to:

• Organic Traffic: 

  • Anyone who entered a search phrase and chose your website over a paid result (ad) is referred to as organic traffic. 

  • If your organic traffic is steadily increasing, that can indicate that your SEO strategies are working.

• Referral Traffic: 

  • Also known as a backlink, this is when other websites link to your practice’s website. 

  • Backlinks are fantastic SEO techniques that increase the authority of your practice’s websites.

• Social Media Traffic: 

  • Traffic that comes from your social media accounts.

• Paid Traffic: 

  • Any site visitor that clicked on your from an ad or paid result.

• Direct Traffic: 

  • A site visitor that enters your practice’s website URL directly is known as direct traffic.

  • This demonstrates a rise in brand authority and familiarity.

2. Keyword Positioning

When creating your practice’s SEO strategy, you likely chose a handful of keywords that you wanted to rank for. 

Make sure to track your progress to see where your rankings for certain keywords change.

Remember that it takes time to rank well for competitive terms with thousands (or more) of searches each month, so don't expect to be at the top right away.

Instead, we advise starting with keywords that you will rank for easily and slowly moving up to more competitive keywords as your practice’s site gains web authority.

An example would be one of your blog posts ranking highly for a separate keyword that is related to your main keyword but has less search volume.

3. Click-Through-Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) refers to how many people actually click on your website after viewing search results. Just because you are towards the top does not guarantee that users will click on your site.

A low click-through rate may indicate one of the following:

• You're ranking for the wrong keywords.

• Your title tags or meta descriptions are not compelling or relevant.

• Your metadata doesn’t answer the question a searcher has

We advise examining the search engine results page (SERP) compared to competitors to see if you have a low click-through rate. That way you can adjust based on what seems to meet the users’ needs.

4. Session Duration

Session duration describes the overall amount of time a visitor spends on your practice’s website. Tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar provide deep insights into website sessions, such as where users navigated, which sites they spent the most and least time on, and more.

Low session durations can indicate that your material isn't compelling enough. 

Users can give up, for instance, if they encounter lengthy passages of text without images or clear headings. 

Low session durations may also be a sign that your practice’s website is difficult to navigate. This makes it challenging for pet owners to find what they're looking for.

The pages on your site with the longest session times should be subjected to analysis. This means that visitors like it and likely want more content like that.

5. Bounce Rate 

The number of visitors who clicked on your website and then quickly left is referred to as the bounce rate. Bounce rates are caused for 2 reason

• Visitors find the info they were looking for very quickly, like a phone number, or

• Your website might have either a technical or user experience issue.

Poor loading times are one of the number one reasons for high bounce rates. If a website takes too long to load, users will leave. By reducing the size of your images and using proper website formatting, you can fix the issue.

6. Conversion Rate

The most crucial SEO metric to track is your specified conversion rate. In this case, it is the number of visitors that found your practice’s site and then booked an appointment for their pet. 

It can be challenging figuring out how pet owners find your practice. For instance, a Google search or a referral may have led a new client to your practice. 

To determine which of your marketing efforts are most effective, we recommend asking new clients how they found your veterinary practice.

Do You Want to Increase Your Conversion Rate?

As you work to improve your veterinary practice’s marketing, increase your conversion rates with Chckup’s online scheduling solutions! Never lose an appointment because your practice doesn’t offer an easy online scheduling solution (that includes appointment request forms).

Book a demo with a team member today and see how Chckup’s software can improve your veterinary practice.

In the meantime, here's a cute video you might like :-)