The arithmetic nobody runs
Write down four numbers for last month: sessions to your site, calls and forms from those sessions, calls answered by a human, and patients who started care. Multiply the rates and you have your conversion from visitor to patient. Divide your spend by the last number and you have your cost per patient.
Doubling traffic doubles the cost of traffic, every month, forever. Moving answer rate from 60% to 90% costs one scheduling change and raises answered calls by half. That is why the audit starts at the bottom of the funnel and works up.
visitor-to-call rate and call-to-admit rate across our client accounts — verify with Tim
Answer the phone
Pull the call recordings for one week. Count how many rang more than five times, how many hit voicemail, how many landed in a phone tree, and how many came in after 5pm or on a weekend. In behavioral health much of the inbound arrives after 5pm and on weekends, often from a family member who has finally gotten the person to agree.
The fixes are unglamorous. A number that rings to a mobile after hours. A missed-call text-back. Someone who can verify insurance on the first call instead of promising to call back tomorrow. None of it requires a marketing budget.
Call tracking is what makes this visible. Without it, every conversation about marketing performance stops at "the phone doesn't ring enough," and nobody can say whether the phone rang and nobody picked up.
The pages that produce calls
Three page types do the converting: the service you provide, the place you provide it, and whether you take the caller's insurance. Everything else is support. A page per service per location, written by someone who knows what happens clinically, beats a hundred blog posts on general wellness topics.
The insurance question blocks more admissions than any other. Publishing the plans you are in-network with, and a straightforward verification path, removes the reason people hesitate before calling. If you are out-of-network, say so plainly and explain how out-of-network benefits work. Vagueness reads as a trap.
Every one of these pages needs the phone number visible without scrolling, on mobile, above everything else. Most of this traffic is on a phone already.
Referrers are a channel, and they are searching too
Discharge planners, primary care offices, EAPs, probation officers, and alumni send patients who are already qualified. They also look you up before they refer, and what they find is your website and your Google profile.
Give them a page written for them, not for patients: your levels of care, your admission criteria, what you do not accept, average time from call to intake, and a direct line that does not go through the general queue. A referrer who gets a voicemail once stops referring.
Ask every new patient how they heard about you and record the answer in the same place you record everything else. Referral volume is invisible in analytics and is often the largest source in the building.
What to stop doing
Stop buying leads priced per patient. In addiction treatment that structure runs directly into EKRA, and in the rest of healthcare it tends to produce contacts who called five other providers the same afternoon.
Stop redesigning the site as a substitute for adding pages. A new template does not change what queries you are eligible to appear for.
Stop reporting on rankings and impressions internally. Report calls, answered calls, and starts. The rest is diagnostic detail for whoever is doing the work.