One of the key metrics I often speak to my physician clients about is the website’s bounce rate.
Why? Because the lower the bounce rate, the more engaged people are with the site. Plus, the longer someone stays on your website, the more likely they are to book an appointment.
Here are three ways physicians can reduce their bounce rate.
Disclaimer: Physicians who engage in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads, i.e., Google or Facebook, often recognize a higher bounce rate, which is normal. However, the steps below will still provide benefits.
1). Optimize Page Speed
One of the best improvements you can make on your website is to optimize the site/page speed. With more people visiting websites on mobile devices, this is more important than ever to create a positive online experience for patients.
People hate waiting for a webpage to load, so if your page loads quickly, people are much less likely to “bounce” off.
Not only does improving your site speed help reduce the bounce rate, but it helps with SEO as site speed is a ranking factor that Google utilizes. Also, page speed is an important element of the upcoming Core Web Vitals update.
2). Improve Your Site Search
Having site search may sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many physician websites don’t have this incorporated well or at all.
As you continue to build up a lot of content, other questions patients may have for themselves or people they know might also be found on your website. If they see an option for search on your site, they are more likely to initiate the search on your site rather than going back to Google and starting over. The more time they spend on your site, the lower your bounce rate becomes.
You want to make site search on your site easy to find and use.
3). Add Media
Written content is a large part of what makes or breaks a website relative to SEO, and adding media such as images, video, or audio complements the text well.
Pages with video or images embedded tend to have a much lower bounce rate than pages with just text. Why? Most people are visual, and in today’s environment, have shorter attention spans than ever. They’re much more likely to spend more time on a page that also includes media.
By taking action on these three items, you should see a pretty significant reduction in bounce rate, and ideally, increased click-throughs to your appointments page.