This series has used Google Ads as the example throughout, because the money is easy to see. You know what you spent, you know how many clicks you got, and the gap between the two ends is uncomfortable enough to be useful.
Google was never the point.
Everything has the same last step
Think about the ways a new patient reaches you.
Somebody sees your advert and clicks it. Somebody picks up your leaflet in the café next door. Somebody spots your name in the parish magazine, or on the back of a local team’s shirt. Somebody follows you on Instagram for a month before their shoulder gives out. Somebody’s colleague says you sorted her sciatica out.
Six different routes, six different costs, six different amounts of effort from you. Every one of them ends with a person typing your clinic into a phone and landing on the same handful of pages.
That last step doesn’t change. The person who heard about you from a friend still checks your website before booking, and they check it for the same six things as the person who arrived from an advert: what it costs, whether their insurance covers it, whether you treat their problem, when they can come, what happens on the day, and who they’ll see.
Which means every pound you spend on anything is a bet that those pages do their job.
What that makes the page worth
A leaflet drop improves the leaflet drop. A month of Instagram improves Instagram. Sponsoring the 10k improves the 10k.
The page lifts all of them at the same time, including the ones that cost you nothing. Word of mouth runs through it too. Your best referral source is a patient telling a friend, and that friend still looks you up before they ring.
If your page converts at 4%, every route into your clinic is running at 4%. Not just the paid ones. The recommendation your most loyal patient made last week arrived at the same page and hit the same missing price list.
The bit that catches people out
Most clinic owners, when the diary looks thin, go looking for another channel. A different platform. A directory listing. A leaflet run to a new postcode. More effort, more money, another thing to keep going.
It’s an understandable instinct and it usually makes things worse, because you’ve added cost to the front of a system that’s losing people at the back. Doubling your reach at 4% gets you twice as many people falling out of the same hole.
Improving the page raises everything you already do, and you were already paying for all of it.
What a year of this looks like
Take a clinic spending £600 a month on ads, converting at 4%, booking around 12 patients a month. That’s £7,200 a year for roughly 144 new patients.
Take the same clinic to 12%, which sits comfortably inside what the top quarter of pages already achieve. The same £7,200 brings in around 430 new patients instead.
Now add the leaflets and the Instagram and the word of mouth, all of which just went up by the same proportion and none of which cost a penny more.
Where to start
Work out your cost per booked patient and check it against the benchmark. Open your own page on your phone and run the six questions a patient asks. If the number comes out low, the five page fixes are where to spend your afternoon.
And before you conclude that the problem is your fees, your postcode, or the state of the economy, check the page first. It’s almost always the page, and it’s the only one of those you can do anything about.
The page is where the leverage sits
Ad budgets are expensive to raise and painful to cut. Prices are easy to drop and very hard to put back. New channels take time you don’t have.
Your website works on every visitor who arrives from anywhere, which is what makes it the place where a small improvement is worth the most. It is also why it repays being treated as something you keep working on rather than something you finish. Patient expectations move, the clinic down the road updates its site, Google changes what it rewards, and a page that converted well two years ago is now being judged against different company.
If you’d like a second opinion on yours, we’ll take a look and tell you what we find. Thirty minutes, a written report you keep, and no obligation at the end of it.