Why Your Clinic Needs an SEO Campaign to Thrive

Hello, and welcome to the Propel Your Practice Podcast, where we discuss actionable marketing strategies clinic owners can use to help them propel their practice’s presence online. I'm your host Darcy Sullivan.

On this episode, we're going to be discussing why your clinic needs an SEO plan.

If you're not familiar with SEO, SEO is search engine optimization. So, we're talking about the organic positioning of your brand and your website on Google and those other search engines. 

And in some of the past episodes, we've talked about strategies for improving your local rankings. We've talked about your Google Business Profile listing, and we've talked about blogging.

We've talked about a number of different strategies you can put in place to help you improve your online presence. But today, we're talking about the why. So, we're not discussing so much the how; we're talking about the why. 

Why your clinic really does need an SEO plan for its website.

When we dive into analytics, whether it's Google Analytics or other analytics that's used to track website traffic and the actions people take when they're on websites, more often than not, organic search is the primary source of website traffic, day in and day out. 

We're talking to clinic owners, chiropractors. physiotherapists, physical therapists, acupuncturists, and we're looking at and diving into their website traffic. And again, more often than not, most of that traffic comes from organic search, which is one of the primary reasons you need an SEO plan. 

An SEO plan also helps you understand what your audience, your target audience, is searching for. It does this by us digging into the analytics and seeing what pages they're coming to on your website or which blog posts they're connecting best with.

SEO is the best way to understand the voice of your customer. SEO also helps build trust and credibility. Think about it, what happens if somebody tries to find your company online or they do a search, but only your competition is what they're able to find? It's not going to position you as a credible source or a credible clinic.

So, so far, we talked about how organic search is most often the primary source of website traffic. That it's a great way to understand the voice of your target audience, that it helps you build trust and credibility that you might not have considered. 

Next is the fact that SEO is actually relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing.

Sure, it can cost money, or it can cost time or energy. But so do all avenues of marketing. SEO is relatively inexpensive in the grand scheme of things. And the payoff is most likely considered to be long-term and will help your bottom line. 

This isn't necessarily a marketing cost. It could even actually be considered a business investment.

And think about it, while you can run ads day in and out, as soon as you turn off those ads, your influx of leads could stop if that's the only way that you're gaining leads. Whereas, if you put in the time and energy, and financial resources to invest in SEO, a blog post that you created two years ago could still be driving quality traffic to your website.

You can also use SEO to lower the cost that you're spending on ads. And how do you do this? By running retargeting ads. So, you can leverage your ad spend by only spending money on ads that reflect the people that have already visited your website organically. Meaning that they're already primed up and could be better leads.

I think that's one thing that people don't really think about when it comes to how SEO and ads can work together.

It's also important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy.

As I mentioned before, if you turn off your ads and that's your main stream for collecting leads, your leads would dry up. Versus if you have a website that's properly optimized, and you're creating quality content and continuing to do that, you're going to reap the rewards for years to come. 

As in the example that a blog post from four years ago could still drive quality traffic to your website.

SEO should support your other content marketing efforts. 

You know, a few months ago, we did a really successful webinar, and we included it in our Ready.Set.Rank! program, on how to take a short video and turn it into an SEO-friendly blog post. 

Most likely, most chiropractors or acupuncturists, physical therapists that we're talking to on a daily basis, are doing some form of content marketing.

So you might as well properly optimize the content that you're currently producing and make sure that your target audience finds you online.

SEO can lead to a direct correlation between, not only you getting new patients through the door, but when done appropriately, SEO can also help you increase retention. because you're going to be easier to find online.

All right. Let's do a recap of the reasons why your clinic should have an SEO campaign right now:

• Organic search is most often the primary source of website traffic. 

• SEO is the best way to understand what your target audience is searching for. 

• SEO builds trust and credibility. 

• SEO is relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of advertising.

• SEO can help you lower the cost of your pay-per-click ads.

• SEO is a long-term strategy, meaning the effort and time and energy that you put into it today will help you reap rewards for years to come.

• SEO supports your current content marketing efforts. 

• SEO can lead to a direct correlation between not only getting you new patients into your clinic, but also in increasing retention due to findability online. 

And finally, I want to leave you with this one thought. SEO will help you get the competitive edge.

If you're not currently taking actions to support your current SEO plan or putting an SEO plan in place. Most likely, your competition is. So now is the perfect time to get started with your SEO campaign or revisit your current SEO efforts to see how you can improve them and to continue to improve your presence online. 

Well, hey, before we head out, I want to invite you to join in on a free masterclass I put together on the Five SEO Secrets to Owning the First Page of Google Without Buying Ads.

You can find a link to sign up for this free masterclass in the Show Notes of this episode or by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. 

During this workshop, we do a deep dive into strategies to help you improve your online presence. Including your Google Business Profile, that's what used to be called the Google My Business listing and what controls the Google Maps section, along with how voice SEO plays a big role in today's search and where you should be focusing your efforts online for the biggest impact. 

All right. Well, that's it for today. Again, you can join the masterclass by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/learn. And if you have a topic that you would like to hear on an upcoming episode of Propel Your Practice, please send it in by visiting PropelYourCompany.com/podcast-topics or looking for the link in the Show Notes. 

Thanks so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon.