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The Importance of Local SEO for Chiropractors
Digital marketing is here to stay.
Over the past few years, you’ve probably noticed that your SEO (or lack thereof) can play a pivotal role in your ability to generate new patients.
That’s because, in today’s world, digital marketing generates more revenue than traditional advertising.
Know This
If you want people to find your business, they’re going to have to land on your website, and you need to be taking action steps each day to Teach & Invite your audience.
One of the best ways to positively impact the bottom line of your business is to implement and actively maintain a local chiropractic SEO strategy that helps you rank higher on Google.
So, how do you make sure people find your chiropractic practice in 2022?
The Smart Chiropractor's Guide to Converting More New Patients From Your Website
Exactly. Local chiropractic SEO.
The term SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, refers to the process of optimizing your online website and social channels so that they are more likely to appear at the top of search engine results.
When someone in your town is either looking for your practice specifically or just searching “chiropractor in my town” on Google, the higher you show up in the search results, the more likely you are to attract and convert that potential patient.
Know This
Remember, as a small business, you want to “think local” with your SEO.
You don’t need to (and can’t and shouldn’t try to) compete with Harvard or Wikipedia when people simply search using terms as broad as “back pain.”
You simply need your website and your social channels to be more thoughtfully optimized and to objectively provide more value than those of other nearby chiropractic practices.
But what does that mean in practical terms and how can you get started without needing to constantly divert your attention away from caring for your practice and serving your patients?
"The Smart Chiropractor has helped me stay constantly booked. No bait and switch discounts that make you look worse than a used car salesman."
Dr. Sam Liveriadis, DC
North Road Chiropractic
Let’s dive into a few simple cornerstones of local SEO for chiropractors.
3 Easy-to-Implement Strategies Designed to Boost Your Local Chiropractic SEO Efforts
When we say easy, we mean easy, Doc.
Consistently updating your chiropractic blog, regularly featuring and adding reviews on your website, and building referral relationships with other local health and wellness professionals can all help you rise to the top of Google.
See? No doubt without your having ever read a single article about local chiropractic SEO, you already realized it’s all about value.
Within the walls of your practice, you and your team do everything you can to make sure your patients see the value you provide.
You make sure your front window, reception area, and adjusting rooms all look great.
You make sure helpful information is readily available on your monitors, your walls, and everywhere in-between.
You make sure your patients are treated promptly, all their questions are answered, and you even work with their medical doctors when needed.
That same mindset that inspires every action you take in practice also applies online when it comes to your local chiropractic SEO efforts.
It’s all about providing value, and knowing that is all you need to get started.
So, without further ado, let’s break down each of the three common-sense local chiropractic SEO boosting strategies we – or rather, you – first mentioned.
Strategy 1: Fill Your Website with Helpful, High-Quality, and Highly Searched Content
Perhaps the best way to make sure that your chiropractic website ranks higher than others in relevant search engine results is to continuously and consistently add quality content to it.
The most straightforward way to do this is to add and maintain a blog on your website.
To decide what you might write about, create a general list of the reasons someone in your community would visit your practice – the more specific, the better.
Use this list to inspire the posts you’ll feature on your blog, and, if you can, shoot to deliver a new post each week.
Then, for each item on your blog post list, make a secondary list of some of the words and phrases that your potential patients might use to get matched up with your practice in their search results.
These are the words and phrases (known as “keywords” in SEO lingo), you’ll want to pepper throughout your website and blo g posts to help bump your practice up in those local search engine results.
Know This
It’s vitally important to make sure your content is high quality.
Most people only spend a fraction of a minute on any given website.
To obtain a good SEO ranking, you need to make sure people are sticking around on your website.
As you can imagine, the more time people spend on your site, the more likely it is that a search engine will assign more value to your pages over other similar pages and the more likely it is your website will be bumped to the top of local search engine results.
Here are a few other considerations you’ll want to make when creating content to improve your local chiropractic SEO.
Best Practices for Producing High-Quality Content That Converts
Topics/Title: Choose a blog topic and title that is benefit-driven and attractive to prospective patients.
Keywords: Selecting the right keywords can help Google find your blog and rank it higher.
Meta-Description: This is the snippet of text someone will see on Google. It needs to be short and punchy to attract as many clicks as possible.
Length: Ensure that your blogs are at least 300 words in length. This help improve your visitors’ “on-page” time and sends positive information back to Google.
Post Often: Posting at least once each week will help amplify your results. Without consistency, you’re like to fall in the Google rankings.
In a nutshell, making sure your content is relevant to your practice, valuable to your potential patients, easy to understand from a search engine’s point of view, and updated regularly will all help ensure your content is viewed as quality content.
Strategy 2: Post Your Best Patient Reviews Directly on Your Practice’s Website
Just as producing high-quality and engaging content is critical to your local chiropractic SEO success, so is making sure you’re doing so consistently and utilizing your entire website with it.
In other words, all of your content doesn’t need to be blog content.
When you open your practice up to receive reviews and take the extra initiative to post them on your website, you’re adding valuable social proof of your practice’s excellence on your website for all to see.
Pro Tip
When you open up your practice to receive reviews, you also giving yourself the opportunity to respond to each review and to even work your keywords into your responses.
It’s an undisputable truth – online reviews have legitimate power, and you might be surprised to learn just how much.
In one recent study, administrators found that a whopping 84% of people trust them as much as their friends!
So, while it might be nerve-wracking to open your practice to potential online criticisms, giving your community the opportunity to leave reviews will show your patients and community you care.
That said, always be smart when it comes to your review request process.
To ensure the most positive experience for your team and your patients, make it a point to only ask directly for reviews from those patients who you believe have had a truly wonderful experience they’d be happy to share with others.
And if you’ve hired a chiropractic website company to manage your practice’s website, odds are they can automatically import your reviews from other places (Google, Yelp, etc.) and embed them on your website for you, no additional work required.
The bottom line behind this strategy is that testimonials and reviews are an excellent way for your new website visitors to see themselves in your practice and those 5-star reviews are absolute magnets for many.
The more positive reviews they see, the more likely they are to believe you’ll be able to help them overcome their health challenge, and the more likely they are to become a patient.
Get This
Chiropractors have some of the highest patient satisfaction stats of any healthcare provider.
You can never have too many testimonials, and those testimonials can open other doors for your practice, including referral partnerships.
Let’s take a look at how referral relationships can be used to improve local chiropractic SEO.
Strategy 3: Build Referral Relationships With Other Local Healthcare Professionals
Many of us have most likely encountered a mainstream medical professional who looks unfavorably on our practices.
Or we’ve surely run into someone – healthcare worker or not – who doesn’t quite understand what it is we do and the very real benefits many enjoy as a result of our care.
Those are just a couple of the reasons that building referral relationships with primary care doctors and other trusted healthcare professionals in our community is so important.
Trusted doctors who understand what you do will refer patients to you.
Trusted doctors who trust you will refer patients to you.
Other healthcare professionals who understand what you do will refer patients to you.
Other healthcare professionals who trust you will refer patients to you.
Know This
Building referral relationships is not about pandering.
It’s, in part, about discovering who has your patients in their practice.
And such relationships can also help you, directly and indirectly, boost your local chiropractic SEO efforts by way of more searches and a larger presence in search results..
For example, to build these relationships and a winning chiropractic local SEO strategy, you may interview other doctors in your community, invite them on your podcast, or take a selfie together and then feature these items online and ask your referral partner to do the same.
By using this content on your website and highlighting the other doctor, you’re likely to experience some big wins.
Showcasing your ability to work alongside other healthcare providers generates goodwill among colleagues and patients and also provides a powerful boost to your social proof or social influence locally.
And, of course, you may gain some additional traffic from those people who originally searched for your referral partner and came upon your information as well in their Google search results!
Either way, building referral relationships with other healthcare providers is a cheap, effective, and worthwhile way on many levels to improve your practice’s local chiropractic SEO and sustain growth.
A Winning Local Chiropractic SEO Strategy Means Teaching and Inviting, Consistently
As you can see, these local chiropractic SEO strategies can be readily used by all DCs.
It’s all about providing value to patients and search engines alike.
All it takes is some consistency, a little know-how, and a solid process to achieve success.
A Word About The Smart Chiropractor
We created The Smart Chiropractor to help DCs like you do just that.
We’ve also created a Chiropractic Content Marketing Guide to help you get started.
You can download it right here.
And if you could use some help putting out great content consistently, we invite you to schedule a 1-on-1 demo to see how our team at The Smart Chiropractor can help.
We’re here to help, and we’d be honored to help you boost your chiropractic sales funnels and patient retention efforts.