Performance SEO — is it a legit strategy worth investing in or is it just a buzzword that agencies use to get you to pay a higher rate?
It’s a fair question. Lord knows not all marketing agencies are on the up and up when it comes to what they’re providing and what you actually need. It is definitely hard to know if performance search engine optimization (SEO) is right for your organization or if you should be investing in it when you don’t know what it is. So, we’re going to break it down for you.
We’ll talk about what standard SEO is as a refresher, and then we’ll go over our team’s take on performance SEO and how we use it to drive the bottom line for our clients.
What is standard SEO?
You’ve probably heard of standard SEO as just plain SEO, but it never hurts to make sure we’re all on the same page. Especially when you’ll need to understand the basics of standard SEO to see the difference between it and performance SEO.
Standard or traditional SEO is the art of getting your business found on Google for keywords that relate to your services. For instance, if you’re a mental health organization, your potential patients might be searching for keywords like:
- Therapist for anxiety.
- Therapist for depression.
- Why is my depression so bad?
- Can’t go to school because of anxiety.
Our SEO specialists analyze these types of keywords and work to ensure that when someone types them in, they lead the searcher to your website. This is traditional SEO, and it’s very effective. But oftentimes, especially when we get into how marketing agencies use traditional SEO, the game plan kind of stops when people get to your site.
It’s like, “OK, we did all the groundwork. We got you found on Google. They got to your site. Now you take over as a client.” And we’ve never really loved that because there’s a lot that can happen between somebody getting to your site and somebody getting to your clinic. Enter performance SEO.
How is performance SEO different from standard SEO?
Performance SEO is different from standard SEO because it covers the gap between when someone gets to your website and when they actually get through your doors. Because getting them in your door is what actually drives your bottom line.
So, why would you pay an organization to get you listed on Google and to get you ranking for all of these things and then not have it touch your bottom line? That’s exactly what so many healthcare and mental health providers do, and it, understandably, frustrates them. They’re paying for someone to only do half the work.
However, at BURG+CO. Marketing, we want to help organizations get people to your website AND through your doors. That’s why we invest in and practice performance SEO.
How does performance SEO work?
For BURG+CO. Marketing, performance SEO means that we cover the gap between when somebody gets to your site and when somebody comes to your clinic. Our job is not done by just getting people to find your website. That’s the start of our job.
And that’s why we use performance SEO with our clients. We cover traditional SEO. We get you found on Google, and then we actually start digging into the traffic coming to your site. We follow people’s patterns on your site and ask questions like:
- Where are they going?
- What are they engaging with?
- Where are they dropping off?
- What do we need to do to build trust, increase engagement and increase conversions?
We also do deep dives into user psychology that goes behind how they’re interacting with your site. We look at what their behaviors are based on what keywords they’re typing in. For example, if you have a teen residential treatment center that handles suicidality, you likely have a parent of a teen who’s struggling with suicidal ideation coming to your website.
That parent is in a frantic state, and they’re going to intake information and engage very differently than a college student or an adult who has anxiety and is looking for a therapist. It is a very different pattern. Our performance SEO, because we’re looking at users all the way through their journey, is able to:
- Detect how people are responding to your website’s structure and content.
- Perform behavior analysis to see how people are engaging with your site.
- Detect how people are engaging with the information on your site based on what keywords they’re typing in.
- Determine where they are in their emotional and mental state when they type in those keywords.
5 reasons performance SEO is better for your practice’s bottom line
And so, again, performance SEO starts when we get people to your site. Traditional SEO gets them to your site, but that’s not the end for us. Once they’re on your site, we flow right into performance SEO, which helps us ultimately drive more conversions to your bottom line by:
- Allowing us to better measure user behavior on your site.
- Allowing us to more accurately measure how much users interact with your site.
- Providing us with a clearer picture of how and where users interact with your site.
- Helping us inform our efforts to create a more effective user experience on your site.
- Allowing us to create content for your site that better fits where your users are emotionally and psychologically.
All of these things are possible because we’re not just letting go of the reins once somebody gets to your site and saying, “OK, here you go. Good luck.” We’re following their journey all the way from their initial search to the time they walk through your door.
At the end of the day, it’s this full-journey attention that helps you get a better user experience on your site. Even more importantly, you’re building trust in every step people take before they meet with you, and you’re ultimately getting more people into your clinic.
That’s performance SEO.
Ready to put performance SEO to work for you? BURG+CO. can help
Increasing traffic to your website plays a major role in increasing your practice’s new patient numbers. However, it’s only the first part of what you need to do to get more new patients in your practice’s door. Fortunately, BURG+CO.’s performance SEO services can help you
Our team has years of experience in helping businesses improve their digital presence to attract new patients and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results, attract more potential patients to your site and get more patients in your doors, we’re ready to talk to you about how we can help.
Contact our team today for more information about how we can help you bring in more new patients or to schedule a complimentary consultation.
