Implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy requires time, effort, and money, so it makes sense that you want to know how effective your SEO plan is. If you’re working with us at Dental Intelligence, we can help you with your local dental SEO return on investment. If you’re still planning your marketing strategy yourself, you’ll have to learn how to measure SEO ROI for your dental practice to avoid spending money on strategies that don’t work.

The Three Major Key Performance Indicators

A dental SEO campaign will have three areas of performance. Each of these plays an important role in getting new patients through the door, so you must consider all three while calculating your ROI. 

Rankings

The main purpose of SEO is to give your site more visibility by ensuring that it places somewhere on the first page of a search result. The simplest way to measure the effectiveness of your SEO plan is to keep an eye on how well your site does in search engine rankings. 

However, while a rise in rankings is an excellent sign, it may not always immediately result in potential patients coming through the door. If you’re seeing your site climb the rankings without a corresponding increase in new conversions, you may need to look more deeply into why you’re not getting high-quality traffic.

Traffic

The quality of traffic to your site plays a massive role in your SEO or social media marketing strategy’s effectiveness. If you’re getting increased traffic, but it’s not the right type, you may be focusing on the wrong aspects of SEO. The main way to measure the quality of your traffic is to look at:

• Pages per visit: How many pages does a person look at before they leave the site
• ‍Average visit duration: The time a visitor spends looking at the site
• ‍Bounce rate: How many people leave your site after only looking at one page

These metrics reflect the quality of your website and the traffic arriving at your site. If people don’t spend a lot of time browsing, it may be that your site could be more engaging or persuasive in order to turn a potential patient into a lead. However, a high bounce rate may also indicate that your traffic quality is low — the person may not need a dentist, and they arrive at your site by mistake.

Conversions

The ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to get more people through the door. Metrics for tracking conversions can include contact forms, phone calls, or simply the number of views your site received compared to the number of new patients at your practice.

Using Google Analytics Conversion Tracking to Measure Your ROI

While you can manually track conversions, you can also use SEO tools such as Google Analytics to calculate the financial impact of your marketing investment. 

Determining the Value of On-Site Conversions

Google Analytics is an excellent tool for measuring your website's overall performance and can also help you determine how well your dental SEO campaign is doing. You can set your goals for on-site conversions by going to Admin > View > Goals. Good goals for on-site conversions include contact form submissions and phone calls via call tracking. 

The second step of using conversion tracking to measure your ROI is to assign a value to each conversion goal. This value assignment may not be accurate, as you’ll need to base the value of a contact form submission on prior data, but by identifying the value of each lead and using that value consistently, you can get a good estimate of your ROI.

Narrowing Down Leads to SEO Traffic

Since Google Analytics will assign a value to every lead, regardless of its source, you’ll need to set up a conversions report by going to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions and only looking at the “organic search channel” to get an idea of how many leads came from your SEO campaign. 

Calculating ROI

The standard ROI calculation is (Gain from Investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment x 100, giving you a percentage of your return. Anything over 100% means you’ve made more money than you invested in your SEO strategy.

Leave Marketing to Our Pros at Dental Intelligence

Knowing how to measure SEO ROI for your dental practice requires understanding how SEO works. However, if you’re too busy to learn about the best practices for dental marketing and prefer getting results, reach out to our team at Dental Intelligence and book a demo today!