In a busy online marketplace getting traffic to your private practice website must be a primary concern. A huge number of your potential clients will seek therapy solutions online — you need to make sure you’re one of the first options they see.
There are two distinct methods for increasing website clicks: paid ads and organic traffic. While paid ads can show immediate results, we recommend investing in organic traffic for long-term consistency.
Why You Should Invest In Paid Ads
Paid traffic refers to website visitors who come to your site via adverts. These adverts can come from Google AdWords, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, and other social media advertising.
Quick Results
The advantage of paid ads is that they can bring visitors to your website quickly. They’re good at getting eyes on your practice and seeing an immediate boost in traffic. Even high-quality good content can lose out on clicks to low-quality paid ads.
Of course, paying for an ad isn’t all you need to do. You need to ensure your ad follows best practices and links to a compelling landing page.
If you’ve noticed a dip in traffic that you can’t explain, paid ads can be a way to improve visitor numbers while you deal with a problem.
Immediate Response
One of the best uses for paid ads is getting traffic when you have an immediate need for visitors. For example, if you’re running a conference, paid ads can be a good way to fill seats.
However, these results will drop just as immediately when you stop paying for the adverts. While paid ads might be best for efficient marketing, their benefits only last as long as the ad campaign.
A Hands-Off Approach
Paid advertising isn’t a completely hands-off approach. You need to ensure your advert conforms to standards and best practices, appeals to your audience, and leads to an efficient landing page.
However, once your ads are running, the ad service does the bulk of the work for you, except to periodically tune them.
This is definitely advantageous for a busy practice, but the ease of the method is reflected in the price.
Why You Should Invest In Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is visitors to your website who come from unpaid search engines and social media results. This is driven by content, rather than adverts. For example, a good blog post can drive organic traffic.
Consistency
Organic traffic comes from moving your website up the search engine results page (SERP). The higher-ranked results are more likely to get clicks and visitors. Those languishing further down the Google search results are less likely to be seen.
Once your content starts ranking, you should start to see a consistent increase in traffic. While paid ads only bring in traffic as long as the ads are running, a good piece of content can continue ranking long after it was originally posted.
Once you’ve started with one ranking page, it’s easier to see what works and develop further ranking pages. This way, when that first piece of content starts to lose relevance, you’ll have other traffic streams.
Increased Professionalism
For a private practice, investing in organic traffic instead of ads can help increase the relevancy and professionalism of your website.
Google values websites with authority, and this isn’t unique to search engines! Potential clients want to know that you’re a therapist they can trust. They’re more likely to get this feeling from quality content than a pervasive ad campaign.
Good content and a well-put-together website will improve your search engine rankings and your reputation with website visitors. It also means that when visitors click on your site, they’re more likely to stay and look around.
Investing in organic traffic can also boost the results of paid ads. When each ad links to an optimized webpage backed by professional content, clients will be drawn to what you have to offer.
A Long-Term Investment
Organic traffic is all about long-term results. This might mean you pay more upfront than you would for an ad campaign, but in the long term, the investment should pay off.
Paid ads are excellent at getting immediate results, but the clicks will stop as soon as the adverts aren’t running.
Paying freelancers and website builders to create an SEO-rich website can be expensive, and you might not see a difference for a while. However, when those clicks start coming, they will keep on coming.
You can also keep costs down when building organic traffic by taking on some of the work yourself. It’s time-consuming, but for new practices that might be time-rich and cash poor, this is a good way to get your name and brand out there.
Increased Target Audience
One single piece of good content can spread to audiences far beyond your original target. A blog post that gets lots of clicks can attract visitors from across social media, and clever keyword usage can target various Google searches.
While it is possible to reach a large audience with ads, you’ll have to pay more to do so. With organic traffic that growth can be, well, organic!
Should I Invest In Paid Ads Or Organic Traffic?
The best choice for your practice is to invest in organic traffic, instead of paid ads. High-quality SEO-rich content can draw large numbers of consistent traffic, delivering an audience to an effective website.
Organic traffic will also keep on coming. You might pay more upfront for slow results, but when a page starts ranking highly, clicks can be consistent. While paid ads deliver faster results, these clicks will stop just as immediately as they arrived.
However, the best strategy is to combine SEO-rich content with the occasional ad campaign. Organic traffic is a long-term strategy while allowing paid ads to work in the short term.
Final Thoughts
Both paid ads and organic traffic can be effective methods to draw clients to your website, but for a private practice, we recommend concentrating on building organic traffic.
This strategy targets consistency and helps increase the trustworthiness and professionalism of your page.
