How to Increase Traffic to Your CME Course Website

Your continuing medical education (CME) course website is the first point of contact for new students. Here, you can advertise your training program and take bookings. Still, attracting people to your site in the first place can be a bit of a challenge. These tips will show you how to increase sign-ups to your CME course.

1. Capitalize on Social Media

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter drive traffic to your website. Advertise your website content on these platforms to increase exposure to your CME course. Social media is a great way to increase website traffic because it has an enormous reach. Seventy-six percent of Facebook users visited the site every day in 2016, for example, while 35 percent of Instagram users say they look at the website several times per day.

Search engines favor social media profiles in search listings, too, especially if you update your pages with relevant content that resonates with your readers. If you want to boost your search rankings even further, encourage your followers to like, comment on and share your content with their friends.

2. Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are three-and-four-word phrases that are specific to the type of CME course you are trying to sell. These keywords help websites like Google and Yahoo index your website on their respective search engine result pages, showcasing your website to search users. 

Research shows that 70 percent of all search queries are long-tail and these search strings convert 2.5 times more frequently than other keywords.

3. Use LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social media site for professionals. It lets you connect with industry professionals (thought leaders, influencers, CME course providers, and so on) who have hundreds of thousands of followers, making it a great way to promote your CME course to people in the medical sector. When you post content on the platform, don't forget to include a link to your website — something that will boost traffic exponentially. LinkedIn had 467 million users and 3 million of these share content weekly.

You might also want to advertise your CME course on LinkedIn. The platform lets you create an advertising campaign that targets specific demographics, with text ads, sponsored content and dynamic ads all available. This is another way to increase the amount of traffic to your website.

4. Create an Email Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is one of the best tools for website promotion. You can deliver a marketing message every time you post new content about your CME course on your website, helping you generate a steady stream of inbound traffic. Research illustrates the power of email marketing: You are six times more likely to receive a click-through from an email campaign than from a tweet, for example.

You can use email to contact your students once your course starts, too. Send details of assignments, class schedules and lesson plans quickly. Emails in the education and training sector have a 22 percent average open rate — higher than e-commerce and retail emails.

Getting people to click on your continuing medical education course website doesn't have to be difficult. Social media promotion, long-tail keywords, creating content on LinkedIn and email marketing will attract more visitors to your pages and encourage them to sign up for your program.