Online Chiropractic Marketing – What To Watch Out For?

Last Updated: June 24, 2019

Whether you’re an online chiropractic marketing expert or you’re new to the game this is an article that you need to read.  Doctors spend millions of dollars on online chiropractic marketing each year and very few see a solid return.  One after another they get sold into programs that don’t live up to their promises.

I’m a chiropractor just like you, but I’m also an internet marketing expert.  In this article I’ll help you see through the claims so that you can make the best choice for your office.  I’ve told many new clients that if I could spend 30 minutes teaching all the chiropractors what they need to be looking for I would have 30,000 clients the next week.  When you can see behind the curtain you will make better choices on your online chiropractic marketing providers.  I’ll pull back the curtain for you.

What to Watch Out For:

I did a quick search for chiropractic websites before writing this article just to see what I would find.  There were a number of websites making claims that they had an all in one online marketing system.  It looks like they cover all the basis for you such as:

• Patient Education
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Marketing
• Newsletters
• Automated Blog Posting
• 100% Mobile Optimized (I Love This One)

It all looks amazing, but now let’s look behind the curtain to see what you’re really getting from each of these services.  You’ll find that they are not as amazing as they sound.

Patient Education

When is the last time you heard one of your patients say that they were learning great things on your website from your canned content?  I know that I never heard any patient in our large office tell me that and we tried hard to push our patients to our initial education website 8 years ago.  The reality is that patients are not going to go to your website to learn about health or chiropractic.  They go to your website to:

• See Who You Are
• See What Others Are Saying About You
• See If You Look Professional
• Figure Out How To Contact You

So what I’m telling you is that patients are not going to read the pages on your website.  They are as busy as you are and the majority of the simply don’t care.  They just want to come in and feel better.

Don’t get me wrong our websites at Inception have more pages than any other competitor, but it’s for a different purpose.  All of our pages are locally optimized to show up in the search results in your area.  I want you to have as many fishing poles in the water as possible.

If we have a client in Columbus, OH and they do a search for “back pain Columbus” they will see that they rank first.  Do that search in your city and I bet you won’t show up.  Your company did not optimize your internal pages.  So no one can find them.  It’s just a pointless bunch of pages in your website that no one will ever read.

Search Engine Optimization

Every company that I looked states that they do search engine optimization or SEO for you.  What does that really mean, and what are they doing?  You won’t find and explanation of that on their websites.  I encourage doctors to call the company they are working with and ask for a detailed explanation.  I also encourage you to call me for an explanation of what we do at Inception.  I’ll walk you through step by step what it takes to rank number one in your city.

The reality of SEO is that the great majority of companies are doing little to nothing for you.  I can say they are cheating you.  Most companies know so little about SEO that they don’t even realize they’re not doing it or doing it wrong.  This is an area that requires a great deal of study and upkeep.  Google regularly makes adjustments to their system and if you’re not very on top of things you get left behind.

At Inception we are fascinated with search engine optimization.  We are constantly tweaking our system to bring our clients the results they expect.  As Google has turned the SEO world upside down this year we have seen a jump in rank for all of our sites.  We were ahead of the curve and that’s where you need to be if you’re going to have a successful online system.

Social Media Marketing

One of the big marketing pushes lately has been in offering social media marketing.  What this means for most companies is that they set up an account for you at some of the major social media outlets.  It does not mean that they grow your profiles or do posting in your accounts.  Without growth and posting social media accounts have no weight to help you.

If you’re going to have any effectiveness in the area of social media you need:

• A company that sets up your accounts for you and confirms them properly.
• A company that completely fills out your profiles and puts in custom backgrounds.
• A company that helps to grow your accounts.

The problem here is that doing all of this is a tremendous amount of work.  At Inception it takes us longer to perfect all the social media accounts for new clients then it takes us to build your website.  And we spend more time customizing our websites than anyone in the industry does.  Social media work is very time consuming, and it’s a place where most companies cut corners.  They skip the details that you don’t understand and they get away with it because you don’t have the knowledge to know.  The quality won’t change until you demand that it does.

Patient Newsletters

Patient newsletters sound great don’t they?  Done for you patient education that you can email to your patients.  It sounds amazing, but do the patients see it that way?  From my experience I would say that most patients see it as junk mail.  They are not interested in reading something that they know you didn’t write.  It’s really almost an insult to them.

I promise you’ll see more benefit from this simple task.  Collect emails from your patients and add them to an auto responder like Awebber.  One a week or every other week sit down and type out a heartfelt message that actually means something.  You’re patients will be impressed that you cared enough about them to do it and it will have 10x the impact of a canned newsletter.

Automated Blog Posting

A growing number of online chiropractic marketing companies offer monthly blog posting.  What can be wrong with that?  You get more great content added to your website to impress your patients.  Remember what I said earlier though, your patients do not read the articles on your website especially when they know you didn’t write them.
What every company does is they auto post content to all of their clients websites.  They write one post that has nothing to do with your office or your city and they post it by hitting send to all of their clients websites.  That’s the amazing blog posting you’re paying for.

In order for blog posting to be effective it needs to be personalized to your city and your office.  That’s a difficult task for most companies because it means that they would have to actually login to your website and customize the post each month.  They don’t do that and you don’t realize how important it is for them to be doing that.  Our clients at Inception have customized blog posts added each month.  Posts that are locally optimized with specific back links.  It’s a great deal of work, but it’s the way it has to be done.

100% Mobile Optimized

This is the one drives me crazy.  The public is so confused about what a mobile site is that I’m constantly getting questions from clients because marketing companies are using this as a hook to lure them in.  The reality about this topic is that pretty much every website works on smart phones.  It just depends on what you want your website to look like on mobile.

If I were a new patient considering our office and I came to a very small mobile website where it was hard for me to see who you are I would leave and go to the next.  Don’t get sold into the idea that you have to have some strange mobile version of your site created for a thousand dollars.  Every website we produce has mobile functions to it.  In fact all of our websites are so new that they use responsive technology to adjust to any size screen.

Small mobile websites were necessary when we didn’t have responsive website technology.  Good websites today have responsive technology built into them which automatically gives you a mobile optimized site.  All the mobile website talk is honestly a bunch of fluff to get you to buy.

Final Words on Online Chiropractic Marketing

I thought this would be a 500 word article, but it looks like it turned into 1600.  I get very passionate about this form of marketing and I hate to see people putting their dollars into something that won’t work for them.  When you choose a provider for online chiropractic marketing do your homework.  Ask them questions and you’ll start to see holes.

I hope this article has been helpful for you and you are welcome to call with any questions that you have on this topic.