Measuring Success With Plastic Surgery SEO

Measuring SEO Success for Plastic Surgeons

It's one thing to engage in an SEO campaign for your plastic surgery clinic, but it is equally as important to measure its success so that you know you are leveraging your investment as best as possible. There's no doubt that SEO has an incredible and long-lasting ROI but measuring it is crucial.

Let's dive into how to best measure success in an SEO campaign for plastic surgeons.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Plastic Surgery SEO

KPIs are essential metrics used to track the performance of your plastic surgery SEO efforts. There are so many different things that you can track - rankings, page speed, bounce rate, time on site or time on page, and the list goes on and on. We've boiled down measuring success to three core metrics that you can measure so you have a good understanding of performance.

Website Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings are the first leading indicator for success in an SEO campaign. Assuming you have done proper keyword research, you should have a lot of valuable insight into which keywords to track. We typically break out the keyword rankings into three main categories:

Primary commercial intent - this is typically your "plastic surgery 'city'" term or "cosmetic surgery 'city'" term.

Secondary commercial intent - these are your service terms, also typically geo-modified for your specific area. For example, "breast augmentation 'city'" or "Tummy tuck 'city'. Depending on the scope and size of your campaign, we often further break these down into three categories, body, breasts, and face. This mirrors how a lot of industry websites have their services set up and provides a more detailed picture of success in each core area.

Informational intent - This is any keyword visibility for keywords supporting informational intent. These would include "recovery time for mommy makeover" or "how long before I can wear glasses after a rhinoplasty". Having data specifically around informational content will also help you shape your content marketing strategy and inform you on what content you should be creating and when.

Breaking down your keyword rankings and visibility like this will allow you to see areas of issue and opportunity quickly vs. having all of your keywords lumped together in one report.

Website Organic Traffic

Keeping with the same theme of breaking down the success into the above three categories (primary intent, secondary intent, and informational intent) we now look at organic traffic related to each of those.

Yes, it is important to know overall website organic traffic, but that number may not always represent success as well as understanding how traffic improves based on the specific types of intent. By showing organic traffic by type of search intent we see where we are excelling and where the opportunities are.

Website Conversion Data

Ultimately, the goal of SEO is to convert site visitors into leads and patients.

While conversion rate is often represented as a percentage of users that took action to the total users visiting your website, we find the conversion rate as a number does not quite tell the full story. Obviously, not all traffic is created equally, and not all conversion is worth the same.

What is important here is to define and track the most relevant conversions as possible. Perhaps it is phone calls over 20 seconds in length. Maybe it is appointment setting forms. Whatever makes the most sense for your plastic surgery clinic we can work with you to set up proper website tracking so that we are properly measuring these metrics.

Then breaking down these metrics by page or intent will show us how each area of the website is performing.

Local GBP Data

It is important to split out local Google Business Profile data separately from website data to understand how your local maps efforts are performing. Since this is largely impacted by your physical location and the proximity of the searcher, we sometimes have less control over the opportunity of GBP and 3-pack map visibility, but obviously, we want these areas to also improve over time.

Tracking the visibility, traffic, and conversion data from Google Business profile is fairly straightforward as Google provides this data for you.

Success Dashboards: Understanding Success Quickly

It is important to have access to a dashboard so that you can quickly and easily see how your plastic surgery SEO efforts are performing. This dashboard should bring the above data together visually so that it is easy to understand.

Our team at GrowthLift prepares success dashboards for our clients at the top of every campaign. These same dashboards also help our team of specialists and strategists make real-time decisions based on the data they are seeing on your campaign.

It's one thing to wait until the end of the month for a report, but in today's quickly evolving world and with the competitive nature of this industry, it is important that we leverage real-time data as much as possible so we can have the best return on your investment.