Ranking gets someone to the page. Nothing about ranking makes them book. Those are two separate jobs, and a page can be very good at the first while being actively bad at the second.
This matters more than it sounds, because the two failures look identical from the outside. Traffic is fine. Position is fine. The phone does not ring. And the usual response — buy more traffic — makes the loss bigger, not smaller, because you are now paying full price for every visitor the page then drops.
The three questions a page has about ninety seconds to answer
Someone considering IVF has usually been reading for weeks before they land on you. By the time they arrive they are not browsing. They are comparing. And they are looking for the answers to three questions:
- Do you treat what I have? Not “fertility services”. The specific thing — IVF, IUI, egg freezing, donor eggs, recurrent loss, secondary infertility.
- What does it cost? Not a precise figure. A range, what is included, and whether you take their insurance. (More on how to talk about IVF cost on your website.)
- What happens if I contact you? Who calls, how soon, and whether it commits them to anything.
Most clinic pages answer none of the three. Not because the clinic is hiding anything, but because the page was written to describe the practice rather than to answer a stranger.
Where it actually breaks
The click lands on the homepage. Someone searched a specific treatment, and they arrive on a page listing nine services with a photograph of the building. They now have to work out which link is theirs. Some will. Many will not. If you are paying for that click, you paid full price for a visitor you then asked to do your navigation for you.
Cost is not mentioned anywhere. This is the most common single omission, and the most expensive. Fertility treatment is a five-figure decision. A page that will not go near the subject reads as evasive, and the visitor’s next move is to find a clinic that will say something. You do not need a price list. A range and what it includes is enough to stop the back button.
The phone number is not tappable. On a phone, a number that is an image, or
text without a tel: link, is a number nobody rings. It is a five-minute fix that
almost nobody makes.
The page loads slowly on a mid-range Android. Not on your laptop on the clinic wifi. Test it the way patients use it — on a phone, on mobile data, on a device that is three years old.
The form asks eleven questions. More on this below, because it deserves its own point.
The form is where the money leaks out
If someone has read your IVF page, understood the cost, and decided to make contact, they have already done the hard part. The form is the easiest step in the whole funnel to get right, and it is routinely the one that loses the most people.
The pattern is always the same. Somebody at some point wanted a field, and nobody ever removed one. So the form asks for date of birth, partner’s date of birth, insurance provider, how they heard about you, previous treatment history and preferred contact time — at the exact moment the visitor’s commitment is at its lowest.
Every field is a chance to leave. You do not need any of that to make the first call. You need a name, a way to reach them, and — if you want it — one line about what they are looking for. The rest is a conversation, and a conversation converts far better than an interrogation.
While we are here: check that your form actually accepts what your own placeholder
text asks for. A website field set to type="url" will silently reject
yourclinic.com because there is no https:// on the front. We shipped that exact
bug on our own site and caught it during a mobile pass. If it can happen on a site
built by someone who does this for a living, it is worth ten minutes on yours.
Trust has to be visible near the decision
A patient about to contact a clinic is asking one more question: can I trust these people with this? The answer has to be on the page, close to the phone number and the form, not three clicks away on an About page.
What works is checkable: the names and photos of the physicians who would actually treat them, their credentials, membership of SART if you report to it, a link to your published outcomes with a note on what the figures measure, and recent reviews from your Google Business Profile. What does not work is a stock photo of a smiling baby and the word “compassionate”.
Website design built for the phone first
Most fertility research happens on a phone, often late at night. Responsive design is not enough on its own: a page can technically resize and still be hard to use. The tests that matter are whether the text is readable without zooming, whether every button is easy to tap, whether the phone number dials, and whether the page passes Google’s Core Web Vitals, which measure how fast the main content appears and whether the layout jumps while it loads. Google uses them as a ranking signal, and patients feel them as “this site is slow”.
Measure the page, then test it
A page that ranks but does not book needs numbers before opinions. At a minimum, track calls from the page, form submissions, and how far down the page people scroll before leaving. If most visitors never reach the cost section, move it up. If they reach the form and stop, the form is the problem.
Then change one thing at a time and watch the result for a few weeks: a clearer headline naming the treatment, cost moved higher, a shorter form, physician photos beside the call to action. Small, measured changes on a page that already ranks are the cheapest consultations a clinic can buy.
How to check your own page this afternoon
You do not need a tool or an agency for the first pass.
- Open your top treatment page on your phone, on mobile data, and time how long until you can read something.
- Try to find the cost. Count the taps.
- Tap the phone number. Did it dial?
- Fill in the enquiry form as if you were a stranger. Count the fields. Try the
website field without typing
https://. - Search your main treatment plus your city. Where does the click actually land — the treatment page, or the homepage?
If any of those makes you wince, that is your first fix, and it is almost certainly cheaper than the ad spend currently pointed at the same page.
Why we go in this order
We fix the site before we send traffic to it, and this is why. Traffic is a multiplier. Pointed at a page that answers the three questions, it compounds. Pointed at a page that answers none of them, it multiplies the loss and gives you a bigger bill for the privilege.
If you want a second pair of eyes on it, the free website plan is exactly this, done properly and written down: what we would change, what each change does for patients, and what we would do first. There is also a worked teardown of the six changes we make to almost every IVF page, each shown before and after.
