Chiropractic News
March 2010
Let your patients find you
By: Nathan Smith and Cole Erikson
Face it, the internet is becoming more and more popular with each passing day. While every industry is starting to see diminishing returns from tradition print marketing such as yellow pages, newspaper and direct mail advertising, revenue from Internet advertising continues to increase. We truly are living in the age of the internet. In fact, aging Americans are starting to use the internet on a more regular basis. A survey done by PEW in December of 2008 shows that 41 percent of adults aged 65+ use the internet. This number increases to 72 percent for ages 50-65. As the generation paradigm shifts, the internet plays a bigger and bigger role in the lives of your potential customers.
The bottom line is, if you're interested in selling your wares in this day and age, it is paramount that you have a good looking, properly functioning website. And yet, sometimes even that isn’t enough. After all, what good is a website if no one can find it? Just because you have a website, don’t think that you are connecting with the ever emergent online consumer. It is no longer enough to just “have a website.” Your website needs to be streamlined and built correctly to utilize its full value. The majority of websites on the internet right now are using technology that is over 3 years old. Technology over 3 years old would be considered outdated.
You’ve probably heard of the old stand-by advertising phrase “Location, location, location.” Well, it’s absolutely no different when it comes to the internet. Think about it, where do you want your chiropractic clinic to be? Someplace where there is a lot of traffic, like the main street in a downtown city, or a highway intersection. Maybe you’ll put up a sign so people can see and find your clinic even easier. Now take this philosophy and apply it to the internet. What drives the most traffic on the internet? Search Engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These are the big hitters, the interstates of internet. Together they funnel a vast majority of all internet traffic. If your web site doesn’t show up on the 1st search engine results page, your chances of being found by your customers is less than 2 percent. That’s a lot of potential customers lost just because no one can find your website.
This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is a method of increasing the amount and the value of traffic a website receives via search engines and their results. By ranking higher on a search engine, otherwise known as having a high ‘page rank’, a website will receive more visitors based on specific keywords typed in. By optimizing your site for search engines such as Google or Yahoo, your company will be found easier and receive increased exposure, which will lead to an increase in revenue. SEO provides a service that has a relatively low cost with high ROI when compared to many other marketing mediums.
The only problem is, most web designers aren’t familiar with the correct practices of SEO. Many designers come from an art background or perhaps a highly technical IT background. Maybe they can make a pretty website, or program a custom application for a website, but more often than not they don’t understand the value of or how to implement online marketing strategies such as SEO.
There are many subtleties within SEO campaigns and it is impossible to go over them all in this article. However, here are a few primary things you should go over with your web designer. You’ll want to make sure they understand the importance of SEO and what it can do to help your chiropractic clinic.
Know Your Keywords
Keyword research is the bread and butter of all SEO campaigns. Without the proper keywords and target analysis any and all SEO attempts will be for naught. For instance, about 1.5 million people every month are searching the term "chiropractor.” Now you might be thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot of people, I should try to rank for that and get a lot of traffic!” And yes, if you managed to rank for chiropractor your website would receive an astronomical amount of traffic. But, first off, that general of a term is prohibitively competitive and secondly, the conversion rate would be incredibly low. Meaning that hundreds of other companies want that same keyword and it won’t matter anyway if someone from New Jersey clicks on your site, when you are located in Florida.
This is particularly important for local businesses such as chiropractic clinics. A person searching for "chiropractor" in New Jersey isn’t going to give you any business if you are located in Seattle. Remember, “Location, location, location.” Market to an audience
you can actually serve. If you are based in Minneapolis something like "Minneapolis back pain" or "Twin Cities spinal alignment" would probably be a more realistic and beneficial keyword phrase to shoot for.
Content Is King
After your designer or SEO firm has done the necessary keyword research, it’s on to creating relevant, high quality content that is rich with keywords. Basically, you want the text on your website to capture the potential customer’s attention and keep them there. At the same time, you want to implement your keywords into the content. This can be tricky to do without interrupting the content’s natural flow. The last thing you want is for someone to stumble over your content because of bad keyword placement. Every page on your site should have content. If there is no relevant, keyword rich text on a page, it renders that page practically useless for search engines and thus it hurts your website. Remember content is what the customer is here for, without good content there is no reason for the potential customer to stay at your site.
Behind the Scenes
The next step is implementing the keywords into what is called “metadata.” Metadata includes things such as: title tags, description tags, alt tags, etc. More often than not, you probably won’t even realize the metadata is there. It works behinds the scenes, only popping up when it is necessary, but search engines put a lot of weight on all of these metadata categories. However, title tags are by far the most important piece of metadata. You can see title tags on websites at the very top of your web browser. Many sites merely have “Home,” their company name, or nothing at all in their title tags. This is a huge mistake. The title tag should be relevant to what is on the page, but also be very keyword rich. Search engines read title tags before anything else and because of this, a lot of weight is given to them.
Build Your Links
This is probably the most complicated and difficult of all SEO practices. Link building is the process of finding and producing relevant sources that will link back to your website. The more popular the website the more “linking power” they have, and the more it will help your website rank. Link building generates traffic via visitors clicking on outside links while also helping you increase your own page rank by having a website with a lot of clout vouch for you. There are many types of link building strategies, from reciprocal links, to blog posts, to online press releases and articles. Each link building campaign must be taken individually, because what works for one company may or may not work for another. Make sure that your designer is familiar with “black hat” SEO techniques such as “link farms,” and “spam-dexing” and make sure at all costs that they do not use them. Black hat link building will eventually get your website blacklisted by the major search engines.
Keep It Fresh
In addition to having good original content for your website, it is also important to make sure your site maintains relevant content from day-to-day or week-to-week. New, fresh content not only illustrates to your customers that you are on top of your game and know the industry, search engines also give points to sites that are constantly updated with relevant information. The easiest way to keep your current content updated is with a blog. In addition to the benefits of constant updating, it also gives your company a more human face. Blogs allow your company to interact with people via comments and help your company bond to customers on a more personal level. Just remember that it is important to have an internal blog implemented into your website and not an outside blog that points back to your site. Unlike an external blog, an internal blog gives the benefits of constantly updating the content on your website. Therefore, it is much more effective for SEO purposes if the blog is part of your website.
The Work Ahead
These are just a few of the things that your web designer should understand and talk to you about. There are many more techniques and nuances of SEO, but taking these 5 categories into consideration will help you form a strong foundation for your website. If you are serious about having a strong online presence for the ever growing online consumer, it is time you sat down with a web designer or SEO firm to go over the finer details of what SEO can do for your chiropractic clinic. Just remember, “Location, location, location.”
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