The Best Online Chiropractic Marketing Strategy
Online chiropractic marketing is an essential piece of any chiropractic business today. It has multiple moving pieces and it tends to be more than most offices can handle on their own. At Inception we know that our clients make a financial gain by investing in us, but we also understand that there are clinics that want to try to do it on their own.
This article is here to be a stepping stone for your office if you wish to go it alone. It’s a difficult journey, but it is possible to do if you are willing to spend the time to learn the key steps. We hope that this information can help you develop a successful chiropractic marketing strategy for your office.
Step 1: Choose a Good Domain Name
There’s a lot of debate over what type of domain name you should choose. What I can tell you today is that it’s still very helpful to have a domain name that matches your main keywords. If patients looking for you are typing in “chiropractor Chicago” then it’s a great idea to have a domain name like www.chiropractorchicago.com. Take a look in most cities and you’ll see that exact match domains are ranking very well.
Now you don’t have to follow the above advice. You can choose something like your office name, but I want to get every advantage that I can and this is an easy one to get. As a word of caution. Some of the really good exact match domains have been purchased by companies that want to sell them at a high price. Don’t spend thousands of dollars on a domain like this. It’s not worth that much.
Step 2: Build a Conversion Optimized Chiropractic Website
A conversion optimized chiropractic website is one that is designed to influence potential patients to take action. Early chiropractic websites were built for the purpose of patient education, but it’s pretty clear today that patients are not looking to educate themselves in this way.
What we know today is that patients come to your website to do a few things:
- They want to see that you have a professional office.
- They want to see what you look like.
- They might want to see what others are saying about you.
- They will give you about 5 seconds once they land on your website.
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a clean design that quickly and professionally shows a new patient all of the above. Overwhelm people with too much information and you are sure to lose them.
Step 3: Locally Optimize Your Website
If a local chiropractic website is not ranking well it’s generally because it is not optimized properly. The metadata of your site must be optimized for your local area. If you live in Chicago then your home page title tags should be something like: Chiropractor Chicago IL – Anderson Chiropractic. This tells Google that you are a chiropractor in Chicago, IL. Look at a poorly ranking website and you’ll find something like: Anderson Chiropractic – Family Chiropractic Care. It sounds good, but Google doesn’t know in the second example where you are.
Outside of the metadata you also need to be sure that your on page content is optimized. The pages of your website should make it clear what you are trying to rank for as well as where. If you want your back pain page to rank well then you need to include information about your city in the article. If your page only talks about back pain then you are competing with the entire world and you can’t win that search.
Step 4: Confirm Your Local Profiles
One of the simple steps that most chiropractors don’t know to do is to confirm their local profiles. Google, Bing, and Yahoo all provide businesses with local profiles that must be confirmed. Failing to confirm your profiles can lead to a number of problems including a lower organic rank.
When you setup your profiles it’s very important that your use the exact same business data in all three. Confirm that your business name, phone number, address, etc…. matches in order to avoid significant ranking problems. In the eyes of the search engines businesses that have three different names and addresses don’t look very legitimate.
In addition to the major profiles there are also a hundreds of directories that you can submit your information to. The number of citations your website has (especially local ones) has a big impact in your overall local rank.
Step 5: Create YouTube Videos
YouTube is a great way to connect with new potential patients, but it’s also a great way to rank well in the search engines. YouTube videos optimize very well in Google search and they are one more way for you to build credibility online.
Here are some great topics for your videos:
- Create a video series on a subject you know a lot about. Something that your potential new patients might be searching for.
- Create individual videos on all the different symptoms that you can help in your practice.
- Ask your patients to help you with testimonial videos.
Step 6: Blog Posting
Blog posting is what I’m doing right now. It’s creating valuable content that your followers will want to read. Something that helps them and creates a potential new customer for you. Google loves to see unique well written content being added to a website. A chiropractic blog is a great place to add content as well as links to other parts of your site.
Blog topics should be anything that you have a good deal of knowledge about that your customers are searching for. If you optimized your posts properly you will see them showing up in the local search results for that topic in your area. The more fishing poles you have out in the water the better chance you have of being found by new customers.
Step 7: Grow Your Online Reviews
Reviews are something that every chiropractic business can obtain and that every chiropractor should be using to their advantage. Unfortunately most chiropractors ignore this area until they start to accumulate bad reviews. Watch how quickly a bad review can hurt your business and you’ll see how important this area is to work on.
I encourage chiropractors to start a review contest in their office. Offer a great prize like a free year of care to the winner of a drawing. Every time a patient does a Google review, a Facebook Like, a Bing review, etc… they get an entry into the drawing. It’s a simple system, but it can be very effective at growing your online reputation.
Step 8: Build External Back Links
No website is complete without the addition of external back links. A back link is a link from someone else’s website to yours. You can gain back links from a number of sources such as guest posting, blog comments, article directories, etc… It’s more important than ever today to make sure you are getting high quality links.
In the past it was more about quantity than quality of back links, but the opposite is true today. Having a small number of high quality links is a much better plan than trying to game the system with a bunch of automated low quality links.
Step 9: Hire an Expert Company
As a chiropractor I understand what it takes to run a successful office. I also understand clearly how much time, money and energy it takes to build a comprehensive online presence. The truth is that our team at Inception will make you money and save you from a thousand headaches. There are some things that are smarter to outsource and this is certainly one of them.
