Paid traffic vs organic content: the proper balance for health care websites

An advantage of paid traffic or purchasing online advertising is that it enables you to expand your reach locally, increasing your community’s awareness of your business

One of the primary reasons to create a website for your chiropractic practice is that it gives potential clients the ability to learn more about you, your staff, and your services even when you’re closed. Web content from organic and paid traffic never stops working until you tell it to.

This enables patients to find you and to begin to like, know, and trust you – the three keys to getting your site’s visitors to take the next step, which is to call and schedule an appointment.

But how do you get more visitors to your website, enticing them to take this next action? While there are many tactics for increasing your site’s traffic, they generally fall into one of two categories: organic and paid traffic.

Organic website traffic

Organic website traffic is traffic that comes to your site naturally. For example, if someone does a search for “chiropractors near me” on Google, Bing, or some other search engine site, finds your practice, and clicks on the link that takes them directly to your webpage, they are considered organic traffic.

Another way to get higher amounts of organic traffic is to maintain a blog. Regularly publishing content that is relevant to your potential patients increases their desire to want to visit your site. When that content is also keyword-rich, this helps you rank higher on search engine result pages, and you can additionally distribute this content through e-newsletters and social media.

Paid traffic for your website

Paid website traffic refers to all of the traffic that comes to your website via a paid medium. A good example of this is social media ads as you can purchase ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms to increase your exposure.

Other examples of paid traffic include buying pay-per-click (PPC) ads, utilizing banner ads, or purchasing advertisements that are placed on another company’s website in an effort to reach a larger viewing audience.

Worldwide, companies are spending more on digital ads every year and this trend is expected to continue. For instance, in 2018, digital advertising brought in approximately $283 billion. Yet, by 2023, that number is expected to almost double at more than $517 billion.

Pros and cons of each traffic type

An obvious pro of drawing in organic website traffic is that it doesn’t cost you anything. This can be especially helpful if you’re just starting out and don’t have a big advertising budget. Organic traffic is also traffic that is actively searching for your services, placing them further down the sales funnel since they’re ready to make a buy.

One major con of organic traffic is, if you don’t rank very high in search results, you’re less likely to be found. Therefore, unless you know a little bit about search engine optimization (SEO) and how to effectively use keywords on your site, you’re not going to get a lot of traffic from search engines. Unless you have staff with this skill set, this may cause you to reach out to marketing agencies who can take care of this for you, which increases your expenses.

A pro of purchasing online advertising is that it enables you to expand your reach locally, increasing your community’s awareness of your business and its chiropractic services. This gives you the opportunity to spike the interest of people who may have not considered you otherwise.

The one big con of paid website traffic is that this expense comes out of your practice’s budget. Depending on how much online advertising you do and how many platforms you want to increase your presence on, this number can quickly add up. But there are also ways to start out slowly and test the waters.

Striking the right balance

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all equation that will tell you exactly how much organic and paid traffic you need for an optimally functioning website. Instead, it is a matter of considering a few factors to better determine the right balance for you. These factors include:

• Your budget. Reuters shares that the health care industry as a whole spends roughly $30 billion annually on marketing efforts. Considering your practice’s budget, how much can you realistically afford to spend on digital marketing campaigns? What is the average practice’s spend for a practice of your size?
• Your competition’s use of paid advertising. Look at what your competition is doing with regard to online advertising. If they are pushing these types of ads, you may need to step up your game so you don’t get lost in the background. Also pay attention to which of their online ads seem to get the best response. This gives you a better idea of which ones may work best for you as well.
• How much time you have available. If you are a do-it-yourself kind of person, how much extra time do you have to invest in learning how to increase your organic traffic via the use of keywords and SEO? Also be aware that increasing your traffic organically isn’t a quick path. It takes some time to work your way up the search engines’ ranks.
• Your goals. If your goal is to simply get more traffic to your website, paid advertisements can help you achieve it. Conversely, if your goal is to get more people to your website who are actually interested in your services, organic traffic may net better results.

In the end, striking the right balance between organic and paid traffic varies based on these types of factors. They may also change over time as your budget, time constraints, and goals change. So, reviewing them often is a good way to help keep the right balance with your website’s visitors.