I may be opening the flood gates here, but I feel morally obligated to share the truth; ClickFunnels more likely than not, will damage your site. Below I will explain exactly why they damage your site, what you can do instead, and provide a takeaway message.
The Purpose of ClickFunnels
The purpose of ClickFunnels is to gain visibility through a large audience, resulting in a small conversion (or impression) rate from that advertising. This is where those promises of 3-5 new clients a month come from. ClickFunnels does do what it advertises, but that has a disastrous effect for your Google ranking.
ClickFunnels sends a large number of people to your site to guarantee these numbers and only a few commitments are gained from it. To anyone who doesn’t know much about Google penalties, this seems like a win. The result is that you may get those 3-5 new clients, but you have made it monumentally harder to do the same thing next month because you now have a site with a high bounce rate and a low Click Through Rate (CTR).
As depicted above, Click Through Rate (CTR) is the number of clicks navigating to your website, divided by the number of impressions (or positive interactions) with your site, multiplied by 100. Impressions typically are subscriptions to your email marketing campaign, making a purchase, or making an appointment.
If you have a high bounce rate and a low CTR, this means that the majority of people glance over your site and “bounce” before navigating to a second page, which results in a low conversion rate. Google sees this as, most people who visit your site do not find what they’re looking for.
Google doesn’t care how many people navigated to your site, however, Google requires that you have a high success rate. If you do not have a high success rate Google is far less likely to recommend you in future searches. This negatively impacts your site by lowering your ranking in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), making you less visible.
This defeats the purpose of ClickFunnels. Originally, you joined to gain visibility, when in fact ClickFunnels effectively makes it harder for clients to find you organically. Now you will have to pay more and put in more effort to maintain the amount of growth you saw, because you are burying your site deeper with each transaction.
Do ClickFunnels Always Damage Your Site?
I have yet to see a case where ClickFunnels has not damaged a website. You can decrease the damage done by pairing it with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to attract more of your desired clients. Pairing advertising with SEO is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Unless you are a large corporate company, SEM typically isn’t recommended. As a small business, even if ClickFunnels gave you a high conversion rate using SEM and didn’t damage your site (which I have yet to see), you wouldn’t have enough time to respond to each client in a timely fashion. That would result in a situation where you lose a significant amount of quality clients, and you essentially paid to lose them.
People will tell you that you can avoid this issue by not providing a link back to your website. While this may seem like a loophole, it isn’t. If ClickFunnels is linked to a phone number or email that you use in any affiliation with your website, you run the risk of your phone number or email being flagged as spam. This negatively impacts your Google ranking. If you would like to know about other practices that can get you flagged as spam, click here to learn more.
How do I Obtain Quality Clients Without ClickFunnels?
SEO can make you more visible in general, but it also allows you to be more specific. What I mean by that is that you can chose to become more visible to the exact clients you need to continue your business model, which increases your job security.
It may not be realistic to be the highest ranked physical therapy company on Google for your state (especially if you started last week), but that can be a long term goal. Being the highest ranked physical therapy company in your city is easier to obtain, and can be obtained after a few months of work on your SEO.
Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need ClickFunnels and to post to social media multiple times a week to succeed. Next month, I will let you know how to effectively post to social media with minimal effort and maximal pay off.
It would be awesome if you had the time and capacity to handle 30 incoming patients a week, and post to social media multiple times a week. However, that is a model that doesn’t work unless you are a large corporation. It’s necessary to scale that model down to the point of capability for smaller healthcare businesses.
Realistically 1-4 patients a week would allow you to hire help without sacrificing quality. I know, because I have worked for a large company that could handle the 30 incoming patients a week, and I have also worked with a small company to get them to 1-4 patients a week, which allowed them to hire a team to help with this new workload.
Conclusion
You don’t need ClickFunnels to succeed, but you do need SEO. Funneling a large number of people to your site, phone number, or email damages your site. Instead, focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that you appear at the top of search results organically for the results your clients are searching for.
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