How often does your site appear in search results? The number of impressions for your site are an indication of how well your site is doing in terms of search ranking. As your search ranking improves, the number of impressions will increase. Impressions are the first step, but only the first step, in getting leads. To convert site visitors to appointments, you will need to get browsers to actually click through to your site.
What are impressions?
Impressions are the number of times any URL from your site appeared in search results viewed by a user. Impressions counted by Google Analytics exclude paid AdWords search impressions. The higher the search ranking of your site, the more impressions that your site will garner. Impressions are the first step in getting people to the site.
What are clicks?
Clicks counted by Google Analytics are the the number of times that a person using Search clicked on any link to your website from a Google Search results page. A click actually brings a visitor from a search result to your website. Clicks exclude clicks on paid AdWords search results
What is the clickthrough rate (CTR)?
The CTR, or clickthrough rate, is calculated as Clicks/Impressions. For example, if your site appeared 100 times in Google Search results pages last week, and on two of those times a visitor clicked on the URL and went on to your page, your CTR for last week would be 2%. If you have many impressions (that is, a high search ranking), but a low CTR, you will get too few visitors to your site.
You can only convert visitors to appointments by getting them to your site first!
How can I go from page ranking to clicks?
Ultimately, your goal is not to appear in search results. Your goal is not a high search ranking or a high page ranking. Your goal is get visitors to your site, and from your site into your appointment book. Improving your click through rate is possible.
The single most effective step that you can take to improve your clickthrough rate is to improve the “snippet” that the search result displays below the title of the page and the URL of the page. As reported in a study by the SEO Roundtable:
I would think the primary influencer for a click on a search result would be the title, not the snippet. But I guess people actually read those snippets, which can be pulled from your META description tag or dynamically curated by Google.
At TherapyEverywhere, we pay special attention to your clickthrough rates. Our goal is always to get potential clients from a search results page and into your site. Of course, once a visitor reaches your site, our goal is to convert visitors to appointments.
What should I do next?
You can, and should, keep track of your site stats in Google Analytics. Click here to learn more about how to read and understand how you can use Google Analytics. Feel free to reach out to TherapyEverywhere. We are expert in using the Internet to help psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals grow their practice. Just call, or fill out the contact form and click Send. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.