Why Investing in Industry-specific SEO is Important for Chiropractors
When was the last time you actually leafed through a paper phone book to find a local business or service provider? If you’re like most of your potential patients, it’s been years since you even considered using that once common method to select a new service provider.
Today, most patients look online to find whatever they need, so it’s vitally important for the health of your chiropractic practice that you appear at the top of local search results. The only way to accomplish that is to have a robust chiropractic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy in place to ensure that your page ranks high with Google and other search engines.
Most consumers never look past the first few items returned by the search engine, so if your site isn’t in the top two or three sites on the results page, you are probably losing business to your competitors.
Many people think the key to ranking high is to pepper the site with a specific word or phrase (aka keyword stuffing), but this is actually detrimental to your objective since Google and most other search engines would consider this the hallmark of a spam site.
Common words that have little to do with chiropractic will not help your site rank well when patients are looking for a new chiropractor, so using industry-specific words is crucial. However, patients may not always search using proper terminology, so you need to strike a balance between common usage terms and chiropractic terms.
Using phrases rather than individual words may be helpful as well. You also need to be certain that the terms you select for your SEO keywords are different enough from your competitors’ terms to help you stand out while still common enough that consumers are likely to search for them. Achieving exactly the right mix of industry-specific keywords requires careful research and analysis.
Effective SEO is actually a careful balancing act that mixes industry-specific key words and phrases, local data to ensure that nearby patients can find you and strategic links both within your own site and to external sites that help lend credibility to your site.
Search engines consider keywords, their location on the page, the quality and variety of the site’s content and site links in their proprietary algorithms to arrive at a page authority for a specific site in any specific search.
In addition, since most search engines, including Google, revise their search engine algorithm at least once or twice a year, strategies that once worked well may not provide the same results over time, so you need to revisit your SEO strategy frequently.
There are hundreds of SEO consultants and “how to” books available, but very few have insider knowledge of the chiropractic industry that can help you when choosing the correct keywords. Typical SEO firms expect you to spend time teaching them about chiropractic and supplying potential keywords and phrases for them to test.
In contrast, using an SEO firm like DCRank that already knows and understands the chiropractic industry inside and out allows you to bypass that lengthy education process and go right to content creation and testing to improve your search engine results.
You spent years becoming a chiropractor, and you want to devote your energy to helping patients and building your practice. Using industry-specific SEO practices can help you achieve more visibility in your local area without wasting time and resources on ineffective methods.
Industry-specific keywords, both on your page and on linked pages combined with local data should form the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy to ensure high visibility and a steady stream of new patients for a healthy business.
Patrick MacNamara, DC, is an Apple aficionado, blogger, chiropractor, public speaker, web designer and WordPress consultant. He writes extensively over at Next Generation Chiropractor, a blog that teaches chiropractors how to successfully market their chiropractic practices using the Internet and social media.