Competitive Analysis: 5 Reasons Why Your Healthcare Practice Needs One

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What’s a competitive analysis, you ask? 

A competitive analysis is a detailed study of competitors’ online presence and website statistics. It’s how you assess the competition, find out what’s already being done, and determine where your healthcare practice can find an audience.

Good competitive analysis is essential for the success of just about any business. Healthcare practices are no exception.

To see what a professional competitive analysis can do for your practice, please read on!

Competitive Analysis: 5 Reasons Why Your Healthcare Practice Needs One

Competitive Analysis: 5 Reasons Why Your Healthcare Practice Needs One

In this article we’ll discuss 5 key reasons why your healthcare practice should perform a competitive analysis.

We’ll cover topics like studying website traffic, gaining audience insights, and performing organic research.

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1. Study Website Traffic

Certain analytics tools will show traffic metrics not only for your healthcare website but for just about every other website you can think of.

It should be pretty obvious how this is useful to medical practices, but we’ll go over the basic perks anyway.

With a website traffic overview, you can track trends and set benchmarks for your website to aspire towards. You can measure things like:

  • Number of visits
  • Number of unique visitors
  • User engagement, such as what users do on a page and how long they stay there
  • Percentage of traffic on mobile vs. desktop devices

By studying your own website and those of your local competitors, you can spot gaps in the market and carve out a niche for your practice.

One common use of a website traffic analysis is to assess which countries traffic primarily comes from and direct marketing campaigns towards those countries. However, a small healthcare practice primarily catering to its local community will not find this feature especially useful.

What you can do is compare your local traffic to your competitors and look for areas of improvement.

For example, if you notice that your day spa website has a significantly higher bounce rate than competing day spa websites, you probably need to rework your landing pages and make your CTAs more prominent.

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2. Gain Audience Insights

In addition to what people do on yours and your competitors’ websites, you should also know what else they’re doing online. If you’re wondering:

  • What other websites do my target audiences frequent?
  • What are their interests and brand preferences?
  • How to I reach them in different ways?

A good competitive analysis can answer these questions and then some.

Audience insights are crucial for knowing when and where to advertise your medical practice. Study audience trends to see what other sites they visit and advertise appropriately.

Web Optimization Concept Design

3. Organic Research

Few things depict the concept of “business competition” quite as vividly as a Google search.

Suppose you’re running a dental clinic in New Orleans. One day, a prospective patient googles “dentist New Orleans.”

Within half a second, your dental website is ranked on a single page alongside all your local competitors. The best rise to the top; the rest sink to the bottom.

Is your website stuck at the bottom of search results? If so, that’s where organic research comes in.

Organic research reveals your competitors’ most successful SEO practices. You can see how they climbed to the top of the rankings and modify your own website design accordingly. Things like:

  • What keywords they use
  • What new keywords they’ve introduced
  • How much traffic each keyword generates

As with all things in marketing, the name of the game is to replicate, not imitate.

Never copy the competition word-for-word. However, with some skillful organic research, you can uncover the secret to their success and replicate that success on your own terms.

Mind The Gap

4. Spot Keyword Gaps

Even cooler than seeing your competitors’ keywords is discovering which keywords they might have overlooked.

With a competitive analysis, you can study what keywords your competitors are beating you on and find valuable opportunities to carve out your own keyword niche.

Even in this digital age, when everyone and their mother is using the latest SEO tools, valuable keywords do occasionally fall through the cracks.

Once you find these gaps, you can leverage them towards your website SEO, your PPC ad campaigns, and all your other digital marketing goals.

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5. Analyze Backlinks

What are backlinks? A backlink is simply when another website links back to your website.

Backlinks are true SEO gold. And like gold, they don’t come around often.

So, here’s how a competitive analysis can help you build backlinks. Study the backlinks to your competitors’ sites. See where they come from and try to procure those kinds of backlinks for yourself.

Moreover, you’ll be immediately informed if backlinks are deleted, either from your own site or competing sites.

If it’s your own site, you can take immediate action to recover the backlink. If it’s a competing site, you can attempt to procure a backlink for yourself instead.

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Conclusion

These 5 points are just the tip of the competitive analysis iceberg.

Researching competition is a complex and multi-faceted process.

We at Practice Tech Solutions are experts in leveraging website analytics tools to help small healthcare practices succeed. Check out our Analytics & Reporting services to see exactly what we can do to improve your overall website operations.

Are you interested in a free competitive analysis for your healthcare practice? Fill out this form!