Appointment link increases appointments by 20%

[HoosierBuff]

Hi all,

I'm excited to share a little data this month - you guys are always so helpful, I'm glad to be able to give a little back:

I have a 20+ location healthcare clinic, and on September 1 we added a link the the GMB profiles to allow users to make an appointment:

- Organic Traffic landing on the appointments page soared, up 280% (page views of appointment pages increased only 30%)
- Total organic appointments increased 20%

This is only appointments made online, we aren't tracking phone conversions, but, I think it's a pretty cool case study show a very quick and easy improvement.

 

[heckler]

That's a huge win man. Congrats.

Thanks for sharing

 

[Tyson Downs]

Cool. Do you have a specific landing page made up for each location you are sending them to, or are you sending them all to the same page (perhaps to a scheduling page that used software for appt booking)

 

[HoosierBuff]

Good question:

It just sends them to poorly designed, generic page - no actual appointment scheduling or whatever. It then sends them an email with the users info. So, it's really a poor experience, yet, still yields results.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Can you share a little more how you're accomplishing this? Got a case study write up?

If you don't already, it's a fantastic topic to cover. Would love to read and share if you publish.

 

[HoosierBuff]

Eric,
Really there isn't too much to it. I guess it could be a blog article if I was so inclined (but I'm not).

It's a health care clinic, and Google allows them to have an appointment link in the GMB profile. I don't know when the appointment link became available, but, I didn't think much of it, it was a small little link in the GMB profile, and I didn't imagine it would make that much of a difference. Before this change, if users clicked on the GMB profile, they would have landed on the home page of the site. . . and looking at it now, it's kind of hard to find a way to make an appointment on the home page.

I went in the bulk tool of GMB, and for all 20 locations added a direct link to their make an appointment page (they have one single page appointment page for all 20 locations).

The results were pretty straightforward. Though overall traffic declined in September, appointments made thru the contact form were up 20% for the month. Traffic to the appointment page was up considerably (280%+). No doubt, not all of the 20% was not incremental - others would have maybe called (we don't have call tracking) - but, I'm guess that the real gain was around 15% or so. . . the client reported that they had seen an uptick in actual patients, so, that would tie in.

What I took from it:
1. The "make an appointment" link on Google is small. In fact, all it says is "appointment:", and it truncates the URL so you really don't know what you are clicking - yet, people clicked on that.. ...a lot. This makes me want to pay more attention to the GMB profile, especially the new features, and take any advantage of it.

2. Despite being able to make appointment when they came to the home page, people didn't follow through, and putting them right where they needed changed that pretty dramatically. This is kind of obvious, but, to see such a magnitude was kind of amazing.

3. The client needs to fix that home page, and make sure people can do what they want to do.

 

[CharlotteSEOExpert]

Thanks for the insights. That's awesome! In terms of appointment link, did you link to the actual appointment page from your website for each location or do you have a software that allows customers to book appointments through a 3rd-party software that you included as the appointment link in GMB?

Thanks again!

Lamar Hull
http://organiclicks.com/

 

[HoosierBuff]

Good question:

The page we send them to is really lame - not really a booking form, just a contact us with a drop down for "location" and the fields for "medical issue" and "preferred time" - literally, a text box for "preferred time". It's hard to imagine a worse experience.

 

[heckler]

I could see them boosting businesses using the new feature to get buy-in and then gutting it later. :\ #justgooglestuff

 

[CharlotteSEOExpert]

Thanks for the response. It is increasing appointments, so that is what matters. We have added the book appointment page to all our client's GMB's profile, so can't to see the results.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for sharing that HB!

I'm wondering if the new Google easy booking button could boost things even more?

 

[HoosierBuff]

"I'm wondering if the new Google easy booking button could boost things even more?"

Yeah, I was thinking the same. Made me re-think Google posts too! I'm getting on the phone with a couple of these guys today to learn more.

 

[Kostas Nicolacopoulos]

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->Those are great results HoosierBuff! Congrats!


I’m fairly new to local SEO (and brand new to this forum) but hopefully sharing my experience will be helpful to some:


Setup
- I manage an attorney’s site with 3 locations.
- I created a “Request an Appointment” page with a contact form with the following fields:
Name, email, phone number, preferred location, preferred day, preferred time and case description
- This is nothing more than an email form that is sent to the firm, which then follows up to actually schedule the appointment.
- I’ve added the new page’s url into the Appointments field on all three location
- This page is not linked anywhere on the site. It’s only traffic source is GMB.


Results
The results are not as impressive as HoosierBuff’s, but since I’ve added the links in mid September (about 1.5 months ago), 18% of the people who clicked on the appointment link in GMB, actually submitted the form.
To be totally honest the numbers are low (less than 10 requests) but the firm is not getting tons of traffic from GMB anyway and I’m happy that at least some people are using it.


GMB Insights doesn’t report the clicks to the Appointments link and I don’t know if it's added to the "Number of times customers have visited the website from this listing". Any insights?


I’d recommend to anyone who is considering taking advantage of this addition to go for it. Since you don’t need an full blown appointment system, the barrier to entry is pretty low.


I hope more people will share their results.

 

[JonClassyBrain]

Very nice! One thing we have learned recently with the call tracking is that you can use a tracking number in the Google my business page without loosing rank as long as you put the current phone number as the secondary.

Keep on killin it.