Marketing Plastic Surgery Practices: Analyzing Your Website's Traffic

Analyzing website traffic is an important part of marketing plastic surgery practices on the Internet. Traffic to your website is recorded in your web server or visitor log. Server logs contain very valuable information about the people visiting your site, including the following:

• The pages on your site receiving the most traffic
• The pages on your site receiving the least traffic
• Those sites that are referring visitors to you
• The browsers and operating systems used by visitors
• When search engine spiders and directory editors have visited your site

By analyzing this information, you can uncover potential problems on your site and address them. For instance, your conversion rates may be low, that is the number of visitors coming your site who become actual patient. You can check your visitor logs to determine the overall amount of traffic to your site. If it's low as well, this may be the problem and you may need to put more effort into getting people to your site. If, on the other hand, your traffic is high, the problem may be that your site isn't convincing visitors to become patients or even that your contact information isn't readily available.

Your visitor logs also display those pages within your site receiving the most and the least traffic. This can be very helpful in determining what works and what doesn't. Look at the pages that are particularly popular and try to determine what about them makes them so. The least popular pages can then be redesigned to be more like the popular ones or even removed if you find that they're unnecessary. Analyzing the referring sites will help you to determine which search engines are sending you the most traffic. You may then want to put more effort into optimizing your pages for those search engines, or even better optimizing pages for those search engines that aren't sending you much traffic. By determining the browsers and operating systems used by your visitors, you can optimize your website for those browsers and systems used by the majority of visitors.

Another important thing to look for in your web logs is the amount of time visitors spend on your website and where they go within your site. If you are getting a great deal of unique traffic but that traffic isn't actually going anywhere within your site, this can indicate problems with your site's navigation or even with your design, something that is keeping visitors from continuing on your website. Take a close look at your visitor logs. You'd be surprised by the wealth of information they hold.