Veterinary Website Statistics and your Veterinary Practice

The Value of Veterinary Website Statistics

The simple truth is this: The more visitors you have on your veterinary hospital website, the more clients you have at your door. More than ever, pet owners find their veterinarians on the internet. In previous blogs we discussed veterinary Search Engine Optimization and how to get your website ranked high in Google’s Search results. It’s easy to see how your website is ranked, but do you know if your website traffic is increasing?

Measuring Website Traffic to your Veterinary Hospital Website

In the early days of the Internet, website traffic analysis consisted of counting the number of requests (or hits) for a particular web page. This was a reasonable method initially, since each web page often consisted of a single HTML file. As website pages got more complex, the measure of hits became less relevant.

By the mid-1990s, the focus turned to the amount of “human” activity on a website, and two units of measure were introduced: page views and “sessions.” A page view was a request to see a single web page, while a visit was defined as a sequence of requests from a single client that expired after 30 minutes of inactivity. Page views and visits are still measured by analytics programs, but modern technology has been able to do better.

Today, third party analytics use JavaScript and cookies to track website traffic. In simpler terms, the website owner or developer adds a bit of code to a webpage that enables another service such as Google Analytics to track the activity of that page. Google Analytics can give the website owner information about where the website visitor lives, which page they visited first, second and last, how long they remained on the site, and even tell what search terms were used to get to the website.

Statistics about the visitors to your website are gathered by “cookies,” small pieces of code dropped into computers which identify the user during his or her visit and in subsequent visits. That cookie remains on the visitor’s computer and tracks return visits.

Increase your Hospital’s Website Visibility to Attract New Clients

Website traffic is the number of unique visitors that come to your website over time. Google Analytics presents this statistic in a graph by the day, week, month or user-defined time period. This is the stat that really matters to the owner of a veterinary website. As we stated earlier, the more traffic to your website, the more pet owners at your door. The internet – not the Yellow Pages – is now the preferred method of finding a veterinarian.

If your veterinary website traffic is not being measured and analyzed, you may be missing opportunities to increase your revenue. If you are not gaining visitors over time, there are methods to improve traffic to your website. Adding a blog, optimizing for certain search terms, adding an e-commerce store and registering the site with local services such as Yelp are ways to attract new clients. Your veterinary website should target local pet owners since they are the people who call for an appointment.

VetNetwork helps veterinarians increase their revenue by boosting their web presence. With veterinary SEO plans, veterinary hospital newsletters, veterinary blogs, and other online veterinary marketing/branding ideas, we can increase the traffic to your website and bring more clients to your door. Call VetNetwork today to start increasing traffic to your hospital’s website.

Article Written and Copyright © by
Mark Feltz, DVM, Owner
VetNetwork, LLC
603-743-4321
http://vetnetwork.com

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