We talk to a lot of chiropractors every week about their online marketing, and a common problem we hear about is from those doctors who tried to do their own SEO and traffic generation and they've run into problems.
While it's certainly possible to run your own online marketing program, there's one good reason why you shouldn't:
You Should Be Focused on Being a Chiropractor!
You spent many years becoming a chiropractor, and you should be spending your time helping patients improve their health. You wouldn't tell your patients to adjust themselves at home, so why would you try to become adept at online marketing?
Now that we got that out of the way, I'm going to outline what we do for our clients to get them to rank well in Google. Successful online marketing isn't magic or a big secret; it just takes a lot of work and time to do it well. Here are the key components:
- A modern site. You need to have a website that is responsive and uses the latest HTML coding and standards. Google looks at things like that when ranking a site, so make sure your site works on mobile devices and loads quickly.
- Content. If you want the search engines to index your website, you need to give them something to index. That means that you need to have written content on what you do (chiropractic), how you do it, and how it benefits your patients. The more your write about what you do in your practice, the better the search engines can index your site and the more credibility you'll have. Let me make something clear, though: your content has to be original. Don't go to Wikipedia (or any other website) and "borrow" something. Google isn't going to take you seriously, first of all, and your patients aren't going to impressed with some generic content, either. If you don't have the time to write for your website, hire us or find a writer on Craigslist.
- Social media. Hundreds of millions of people are on Facebook, so your practice needs to be there, too. It's best if you actively engage with your patients, but at the very least, you need to have regular postings of content to keep you Facebook presence active. Again, if you can't do that, we can help you with that.
- Google Local Business. Your practice needs to be listed in Google maps if you want to get new patients. A Google Local Business listing is critical.
- Citations. Google wants to provide people with a good local search experience, which means confirming that you are who you say you are. If you're a chiropractor in Chicago, Google is going to look at directories and confirm that you are, indeed, a chiropractor in Chicago. Some of these business listings include Facebook, Yelp, Health Grades, Injury Resources, and Manta. There are literally hundreds of these directories, and you need to be listed in as many of those as possible.
- Backlinks. If you have great content that people find useful, people will link to you and share that with their customers via a backlink. The more real, good quality links you have to your website, the better Google will rank your site. The key here, though is "real, good quality links." You're going to see advertisements where you can buy links. You don't want to do that! Google is getting better and better at identifying spam backlinks and if you get caught, you're going to be very, very unhappy. Of the work we do for our clients, building backlinks takes the longest and most amount of time, but the payoff is worth it.
- Time. This is the toughest one of all. Everybody wants instant results for their online marketing programs, but Google doesn't work that way. One of the ranking factors that Google takes into consideration is the age of the domain and how stable a website is. A common problem we see is doctors who jump from domain to domain. Google simply doesn't take you very seriously if you keep changing your website address. It takes months or even years to build a solid reputation for your web presence in Google's algorithm, so make sure you have a solid plan of where you're headed with your marketing. If you have a new practice or domain, you have to be aware that it's going to take a lot of work and energy to build that credibility and it won't happen overnight.
If you work hard on all seven of these steps, you'll be successful. If you try to cut corners...well, you can find yourself in a bad situation or never really get good ranking for your site.
We've been helping chiropractors build a strong, stable web presence using ethical techniques since 2000, and we have the success stories that prove the quality of our work. If you would like us to help you with your chiropractic marketing, you can see our different pricing plans here. If you have any questions, give us a call or use our contact form here.
Mike Melton
CEO, ChiroHosting
