Chiropractors work in one of the most competitive industries out there for getting new patients. Chiropractic offices seem to be on every other block and even though you and I know that no two chiropractic offices are the same, how can you portray what sets you apart to potential patients?
How can you even get the attention of potential patients in the first place?
The solution is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your chiropractic office. Today people trust Google just as much as your patients trust you with realigning joints, and if potential patients don’t see you at the top of Google searches, that’s a problem!
Why SEO Is Important For Chiropractors
As a local business, SEO is one of the most important digital marketing strategies to focus on, especially for chiropractors. Potential patients are searching online for chiropractors like yours every single day.
While these monthly search volumes above are for the entire United States, this is a very common search term at the local level as well.
SEO is how you compete to be able to be at the top of SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages for terms such as, “chiropractor near me” or “chiropractor” and capitalize on this volume!
The better your SEO is, the higher your web pages will rank for specific keywords on these SERPs. This is so important because the #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in #10 spot. The higher your ranking, the better the chance to bring new patients to your website!
A keyword is an idea or topic that defines what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called “search queries.”
For local businesses, this traffic will often lead to new customers, or in your case, patients walking into your chiropractic office. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it’s not, and you can do it!
Getting Started With SEO For Chiropractors
Maybe you’re diving into SEO for the first time or maybe you’re already a seasoned veteran with SEO for your chiropractic practice. Either way, our goal here is to break down as simply as possible what specific things you should look to focus on to rank #1!
We’re going to be breaking down each of the following chiropractic strategies for SEO:
- Local SEO: Google My Business
- Keyword Research
- Content
- Execution
If you can focus on all of these strategies, and implement them onto your website, you’ll be one step closer to seeing the results SEO can yield.
So let’s dive in!
Local SEO
As a local company, you have to look at SEO slightly differently than a national eCommerce website, for example. You actually have a huge advantage over any other company that operates only virtually, and that is something called Google My Business.
Google My Business
Google My Business is single-handedly one of the best things that you can do as a local chiropractic office trying to increase your online presence with SEO. GMB is a free tool that gives you a listing of your business that appears on Google and Google Maps. Your listing can include things like:
- Business Name
- Location
- Business Hours
- Customer Reviews
- Photos
- Analytics for your use
Make sure to set up, claim, verify, complete, and optimize your GMB page. If you need any help doing this, we created a Google My Business guide to help you out!
Reviews
One of the huge benefits of having a GMB page is the ability to collect reviews from customers. Customer reviews are gold in the digital marketing world as people tend to trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations.
The reason they trust these reviews is that it isn’t easy to collect positive reviews, and people are much more likely to leave a review when they are upset than happy. So if a company has a good star rating, that’s a great sign!
It also makes a difference in how you respond to bad reviews. It will happen, and it’s important to try and make bad situations better. It may not erase the review, but it does show potential patients that you tried to right a wrong.
Local Information
Making sure your website has local information throughout it is important too. Make it as easy as possible for someone to figure out how to get to your chiropractic office if they so choose.
Having your address in places like the footer of your website and the contact page are two crucial areas for your address to live. Having your phone number and a contact form is a nice way for potential patients to reach out too. If you have a good rating on your Google My Business, it’s a great idea to link to this on your website to show that off as well!
Choosing The Right Chiropractic SEO Keywords
Another very important step in a successful SEO strategy is finding the right keywords. You want to make sure that you pick keywords that people are actually searching for and will also convert into patients for you.
Go ahead and do a Google search for “Chiropractors near me” and see what comes up. Depending on where you are, these results are going to be different.
The chiropractors that are at the top of the SERP are not there by chance. They’re at the top because they used many of the SEO strategies we’re covering today.
This is a great time to mention that if there are any local directories that rank highly when you conducted this search, you should make sure you’re listed on them as well. ie – if Yelp was one of the first results, it’d be well worth your time to make sure your chiropractic practice is also listed on Yelp.
Keyword Research
Choosing the right keywords can seem like an incredibly hard task, but there are tools out there to help you make educated decisions and improve your chances of success! This step is incredibly important, so make sure you don’t skip!
When doing keyword research, put yourself into a potential patient’s shoes. What type of things would they search for? What are the common problems of your existing patients? Search for these things in Google, and add them to a list to do more research on.
Before we talk about some of the tools that you can use to your advantage when picking the best keywords for your practice, there are some terms to get familiar with first.
Trend is the search volume for a specific keyword over the last 12 months. You can use this to see if said keyword has been searched more or less lately.
Search Volume is the number of monthly searches that are done for a particular keyword.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC) has to do with paid ads and isn’t something you’ll have to worry about for SEO.
Paid Difficulty (PD) is how competitive a specific keyword’s paid ads are. Another thing you won’t have to worry about for SEO.
SEO Difficulty (SD) is how competitive a specific keyword is. The higher the number, the harder it will be to rank highly for this keyword.
Keyword Research Tools
Neil Patel’s Ubbersuggest is a great tool for keyword research. You’re able to see search volume, SD, and trends for specific chiropractic specific keywords. Ubbersuggest will also give you advice for different keyword ideas based on the keywords you first enter. You can also run a monthly SEO audit and track the results of your efforts!
Moz is an amazing tool if you’re looking for something a little more advanced. The price tag is not cheap for this tool, but it can definitely be worth it if you’re serious about SEO. Moz has all of the mentioned tools above but also has the ability to store results and look at them month-over-month to be more specific with analytics.
Google Auto Suggest Research is a great tool for discovering additional keyword ideas. Simply start typing in a term related to keywords you believe your potential patients would search and you can see additional options to think about.
These are some of our most used tools for keyword research, but there are other uses for these tools. For instance, a great blog post for you could potentially be “benefits of seeing a chiropractor while pregnant” based on the search we did above.
Use these tools to not only find pieces of content to create but to figure out what types of keywords you should be targeting on the main pages of your website too!
Another thing to note about your keyword research is that it’s not always the best to find the keywords with the highest traffic and shoot for those. Keywords with smaller monthly volume can still be beneficial. Specifically when they’re what is called “Long-tail keywords”.
Focus On Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are those three or more keyword phrases that are very, very specific to whatever your services are. A perfect example of this, using the Google Auto Suggest above would be “Chiropractor for Pregnant Woman”.
These types of keywords are great because they are typically much higher converting. If a pregnant woman can find your services by searching that term specifically vs searching for “chiropractor near me”, there is a much higher chance that she’s going to find the type of chiropractor she’s looking for.
Creating EAT Content
EAT stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And it’s one of the most important factors that Google looks at when ranking your web pages is the EAT of the content on your website.
Google wants to make sure that your content is well written, not spammy, and provides value. Content is the main course of your SEO strategy. Once you figure out what keywords you want to focus on, you’ll know how to create content around those keywords. Whether that is building on the pages that you already have created, or creating brand new pages and blog posts, you want to make sure that the user that comes to your site gets their questions answered!
Put Yourself In Your Audience’s Shoes
We’ve already mentioned this briefly earlier, but it’s incredibly important to put yourself into the shoes of a potential patient of your chiropractic practice if you want to succeed at SEO.
What types of problems do your potential patients have? As a chiropractor, will potential patients be looking for help with their back pain? shoulder issues? their joint-related problems?
Conduct searches, take a look at who’s ranking highly, and the content that is on those pages. Take notes and figure out what the common qualities of each are. For example, if every single page on the top page has a video front and center, you probably should too.
Your main goal of SEO should be to provide value to anyone getting to your website. If their problem wasn’t solved by reading your content, that’s a loss.
Another thing to mention about your content and the overall website is to make it your own. What separates you from other chiropractic practices? Show that by the content you put out! Even though your content needs to show expertise, it can still be fun! Crack a joke! (HA, get it?)
Starting Your Chiropractic SEO Strategy
We’ve learned a lot so far! And you deserve another chiropractic joke for making it this far…
Why was the chiropractor a good interrogator? He always got the suspect to crack!
You’re welcome.
But on a serious note, now the SEO fun begins! You have your Google My Business page made, you have your keyword research done, and some great ideas for copy. Now what?
Now we need to put all of the work together, and that’s where the execution comes in. We’ll do this by laying out SEO best practices and things to make sure each of your pages has so you’ll be able to rank right for chiropractic keywords!
Keywords In Your Content
You’ll want to make sure the content you create is created around the chiropractic keywords you’ve decided on.
Create the content so that if someone got to your website by searching for the keyword, their answers would be answered with the content you create. Google typically likes to see each page on your website with at least 500 words.
Don’t force it though.
Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
You’ll want to customize each of your pages’ titles and descriptions to describe what the individual web page is about. This helps not only Google get a better understanding, but it also helps users get a better understanding and will help them click through.
If you’re on a WordPress site, a plugin called Yoast SEO can help you out a lot with this.
Header Tags
Part of SEO is making your content as “readable” as possible. You do this by breaking your content up by using things like header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.).
Another way to break up your content is by using lists, bolding important pieces of your content, or italicizing special notes. If it helps a user read and find answers easier, Google will like it.
Images & Video
Adding media such as images and videos into your web pages is a great way to engage your website users! It helps break up your copy, helps grab users’ attention, and can answer questions easily for someone who is more of a visual learner. Just make sure the images you are uploading aren’t so large that they slow down your website and be sure to add a description for that image.
Mobile Friendly
Chances are that most of the people coming to your website are going to be mobile users. Check your analytics to confirm, but you’ll want to make sure all of the web pages you create have a mobile-first mindset and that they’re very easy to use on a mobile device.
And there you have it! Building your SEO as a chiropractor can be tough, but is definitely rewarding. Feel free to reach out if there are any questions after reading this guide or if there are any ways we can help!