Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Should you be building links to your website from your Facebook and Twitter accounts? How important are these to your Google ranking?

This is a question that I’ve been asked in our ChiroPatients Online program.

Here’s the short answer, straight from Matt Cutts (of Google). Matt answered this question in response to this article:

1. Get More Links
The number of incoming links to your website makes a big difference in where your website ranks with the big search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Links to your website are a way of measuring its authority in the industry. The big question often debated by SEO gurus is whether it’s the quality or the quantity? I would say both. Two years ago, Google appeared to put more weight on link quality (how important is the website, where your link is found). But with the new Panda update, it appears quantity is once again a big factor.

Here are three easy strategies to get good links:

A. Provide guest posts on other people’s websites, which includes a bio of you and a link back to your website.
B. Visit other blogs and leave comments, making sure to give your website link when asked in the comment box.
C. Register at popular forums, making use of the website links offered in your signature and profile features.

2. Increase the Content on Your Website.

The more pages of good content you have, the higher your rank will be. When Google comes to your website, do they see it as a massive university library for your subject, or is it more like a toddler’s bookshelf? Two factors to keep in mind with content is the number of words on a page and the total number of pages on your website. Every time you post a new article to your blog, you build a new page on your site. 500-700 word articles work best for good content. But any words on a page is better than nothing. Obviously you want the content to be readable, not just gobbledygook spit out by a software program (this will actually penalize your website.)

3. Make Sure Your Keyword is Mentioned

A keyword is simply the words or phrases people are typing in to find your business. For most of you, that will be “your town + chiropractor” or “your town + spinal decompression”. Other examples of keywords are “neuropathy treatment”, “sciatica help” and “back pain”. If you live in MyTown, USA, how often is “MyTown Chiropractor” mentioned on your website?

Now you can overdo this. If you’re keyword is mentioned too often, that’s called keyword stuffing. And it will cause your site to be penalized. So make sure your keyword occurs naturally in your articles and website.

4. Use Content Management Software

This sounds a lot more technical than it is. The most popular and common website software nowadays is called WordPress (WP). Many of my websites use this software. Originally it was designed for blogs, but not any type of website can use it.It makes pages out of our content, categorizes them and has tons of plugins to easily customize your site. WordPress is highly favored by search engines too!

The best thing about WP is that it is extremely easy to use once set up. I don’t recommend you set it up, so have someone else do that. We do this for a limited number of clients as part of my ChiroPatients Online program.

http://www.chiropatientsonline.com

5. Included Contacts Us, About, and Privacy Pages

The big search engines want to make sure you are a real business and that customers have a way of contacting you. This contact page should have a Google Places map in addition to your address and phone numbers. You should also have a page on your site that gives a bio of yourself: where you went to school, special services you offer, why you do what you do, etc. I’ve also heard that Google likes to see a privacy policy somewhere on your site, describing how you will protect your users.

Other “legal type” pages that you often see may be needed are Terms of Use, Warranties and Earnings Disclaimer. Your business may not need all of these, but ask an intellectual property attorney, as I am not qualified to tell you one way or the other on legal matters.

A big mistake in practice is that chiropractors do not nurture the relationship with their current patients. We take it for granted that if the patient starts care, they will always do what we tell them to do.

This is not reality. Look at your stats. How many patients have quit care and never been seen again. We may never know why they quit. But there are certain things we can do to help them complete their treatment plan.

I’ve never been a fan of strong arm tactics to get people to do things. Why?

Because it’s rude and it does not work. Sure you can convince someone with hype and “rah-rah” to stay on wellness or maintenance care. But the truth is a few weeks later, the “pep talk” has wore off and the patient will begin asking themselves…

“Do I really need to keep going to see that chiropractor?”

So what’s the solution to this mistake?

Consistent, monthly contact through direct mail (and email). The best and proven way to maintain a relationship with your patients is by sending them a monthly newsletter. This will keep your active patients connected to you and feel like they have a better relationship with you. After all, no other doctor or chiropractor sends them something in the mail each month.

I can not tell you how many patients I have had over the years “return” for care in my office, simply because they got a newsletter from me. Some of these patients we had ‘written off’ because we thought they were never coming back .

This works so well, we even had a few patients that we thought would never come back because they actually left the office upset about something.

And, we got new patient referrals from the newsletter as well. This is because every month there is a personalized letter from me with an offer on the back page.

Marketing guru Dan Kennedy talks about “putting a fence around your herd.” He says if you don’t put a fence around you’re herd, they will get out and go into other people’s pasture (you’re competition!)

And the #1 method Dan Kennedy recommends for keeping your customers is a monthly newsletter.

What should your newsletter be about?

It should include relevant topics to the care you give. Healthy living tips, studies, and seasonal articles are great content.

The slam-dunk thing about newsletters is that they are very inexpensive to produce and mail. For about $10-15 per patient, you can stay in contact with your patient list monthly for a year.

If you have the time and skill, you can write your own newsletter. Another option is to let a service do it for you. There are quite a few newsletter services out there, but not one that I specifically recommend at the moment.

Just make sure you get few samples of their newsletter before you sign up with the service.

If you stay in contact with your patients, they will stay with you longer. And if you give them an opportunity to refer other new patients, they will. Try it for a year and see if it isn’t an excellent low cost marketing strategy.

Are you staying in contact with your patients through email every month?

You definitely should be staying in contact with your current patients outside of their regular visits to your office.

Regular contact enables you to educate your patients. And this helps with your patient retention.

But the biggest reason to contact your patients regularly is to give them opportunities to refer their friends and family. While this should be done in person during a normal visit, I have found that sending the patient something in writing gets even more referrals.

If every new patient that starts care in your office got a letter in the mail plus an email with education and referral opportunities, do you think you will get some referrals?

Not every patient will refer someone else, but how much did it cost you in time or money to have an email company (autoresponder) send something out?

Nothing, it’s free (other than the low cost of the monthly autoresponder!)

You can also send out emails on for special events throughout the year. This notifies your patient list that your office will be focusing on specific issues and reminds them you can help their friends and family.

Here are 20 ideas you can use to send out a special broadcast email…

1. Patient appreciation days
2. Thanksgiving food drive
3. Toys for Tots at Christmas
4. Valentines day
5. Easter celebration
6. Dog days of summer
7. Back to school kids check
8. Tax man day
9. Chiropractic Birthday
10. Practice anniversary
11. Dr.’s Birthday
12. Staff’s birthday
13. Halloween bash
14. Scratch and dent sale (or we ordered too much of x product and don’t have room, need to get rid of it this week!)
15. FAQ (frequently asked questions) about chiropractic care, decompression tables, home exercises, weight loss, etc
16. July 4th
17. Labor Day or Memorial day
18. Any holiday you celebrate that I haven’t already mentioned
19. Local sports team day, i.e. Dallas Cowboys day
20. Newsflash on chiropractic or chiropractic research
21. Any current event in the news, i.e. political race, Olympics, Hurricane relief
22. Celebrity appearance event (retired, locally known sports greats that could use the money)

Do you see the possibilities for using email marketing in your practice? You could combine this with a snail mail letter or postcard as well. For example, let’s say you send a letter in the mail to announce the event, then do 1-3 follow up broadcast emails to remind your patient base of the upcoming event.

Remember, you should not be sending mass emails out through your normal email account. Most internet companies will mark your email messages as spam if you are sending out hundreds or thousands from your person account. Better to use a company that has all these snags worked out.

My favorite system that handles all my email lists and makes it very easy to send an email is http://www.easyemailsystem.com.

SEO is like Hollywood.  in so many ways…

But today this reference is to the fact that seo is going social.

You see Google has added a +1.  Facebook has added “like”.

Twitter has added “tweet”. LinkedIN has a new share button.

All this adds up to links to your site which is called link juice or back links.

Before you had to go comment on blogs or maybe ask to trade links etc.

Now you can get links from these social networks where people actually hand out online.

What is even better is when these links are created they are shared with the Friends, follows, connections etc.

That can add to lots of views and maybe even some re-sharing.

But why is this so important?

Because it should drive home the point that these sites or social networks are not some silly idea of marketing.

NO these are realty sites that can generate REAL targeted and relevant traffic to your site and therefore your office!

BUT imagine sending an automated robot to the chamber of commerce to do your “networking” for you.

You would be the joke of the town.

Lets get real folks social networking is NETWORKING!

Don’t be the joke of the town.  Take pride is what you put out.

Social networking is not about buttons on your site.

Social networking is not about a fancy designed page.  (not that there is anything wrong with custom pages)

Social networking is about getting good content out that people love and want to share and sharing it!

So be true to the profession.  Take pride in your marketing.

Write and produce good valuable content.

People will share it.

Their friends will like you.  And get links to make your site rank better all at the same time!

You really will become well known and because you added value you will make money.

So if you want links!  Produce good content.

If you liked this post share it, like it, tweet it, email it, google +1 and as many other things as you know how to share it.

Let chiropractors know to stop cutting corners on he marketing.  Tell the story and get patients that pay – stay and refer for life!

Be well.

Matt Prados
CEO ChiropracticTraffic.com

Recently we had an Internet Marketing webinar with Dr. Matthew Loop, the expert at getting new patients on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other online methods.

Dr. Loop showed us how he gets new patients every month, consistently with inexpensive strategies. Are you wondering if it’s possible to get new patients from social marketing sites like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, and other sites?

Watch the webinar replay and see how chiropractors are getting new patients every month from these websites.

Click Here to Watch the Full Chiropractic Internet Marketing Video

Here is just a short snapshot of what you’ll discover:

- The 7 Keys to Social Marketing Domination, which includes how to get ranked high on Google!
- The patient demographic that is visiting these sites (and how you can make sure to attract them).
- How to bring in new patients from Facebook, instead of wasting time there.
- Learn what micro-blogging is and how it can benefit your practice.
- The quick and easy way to use video marketing.
- And much, much more…

Watch the Webinar Replay Here

Millions of people access Google’s search engine every minute. Some of them are within driving distance of your practice, and they are looking for a chiropractor to help them. You can reach these prospective patients by running little pay per click ads on Google’s Adwords network. Here are 5 strategies for success in your Google Adwords campaigns.

#1. Choose the right keywords.

Keywords are the terms people are searching for. Doctors usually think of chiropractic, chiropractor, and all of it’s derivatives. But terms like back pain, neck pain, headaches, sciatica, etc have great potential. People searching for these conditions are looking for information, usually have or know someone who has the problem, and are motivated to do something about it. Think of the problems people come into your office with, and do some research using Google’s keyword tool.

#2. Write effective ads.

When writing your ads, you only have so many spaces to get your message across. No time for wasting words. You only get 25-35 characters for four lines of text, two of which are your headline and website address. Here’s the proven formula for your ads:

• First line should contain your keyword in a headline type phrase
• Second line should be a benefit you offer, for example “Get Rid Of Migraines”
• Line three should describe a feature offer, like “Without Drugs Or Surgery”
• Line four is your URL, with each word capitalized and using a keyword if possible

#3. Improve Your CTR.

Your click through rate (CTR) is very important to you and to Google. How much you pay, what position your ad is in, and your quality score all relate to your CTR. To get your CTR higher, make sure you are in ad position 2-5 on the first page. As your CTR goes up, you can readjust your bid to lower your position, and still keep your CTR up. If your CTR goes below .5%, Google can pull your ads from running on their searches.

One easy way to improve your CTR is through split testing. Adwords has a built in feature to their system that allows you to run tests. They will rotate your ads evenly and give you the stats to determine which ad is winning. By continuously testing your ads against each other, you can improve your CTR and your clicks.

#4. Watch Your Quality Score.

Google currently has three levels of quality score. “Ok”,”Poor” and “Great”. The better your quality score is, the less you will pay per click. Google won’t tell you exactly how to improve your score, but they do reveal a few keys to help you. One is to make sure you have your keyword in your ad and headline. Having it as part of your URL (domain name) can help to. Another way to improve quality score is by having a higher CTR. And the most important factor of all, and the one that will give you the most headache, is the quality of your landing page.

#5. Improve Your Landing Page.

A landing page is where the person lands after clicking through your Adwords ad. For multiple reasons I don’t have room to list here, I do not recommend the landing be on your “main site”. A simple page that collects information like name and email address works much better than putting them on a website with multiple options. You should have a headline, some copy, some bullet points, and testimonials. Videos and audios work very well too.

Use to, you built your landing page for your visitor. Since 2006, you also have to build it to please Google. This is because your Adwords ad quality score is based on the “relevancy” of your landing page. Google wants to make sure your page is relevant to your keyword and to your ad. If your landing page is not relevant, you can be “slapped” with a high cost per click, in the range of $5-10. To help with this, make sure you have a privacy policy, your keyword is listed about 10-20% of the time on the page, and that you have a link out to some “big” sites like your main website and blog.

If you’ve been putting off all the internet marketing your practice should be doing, today’s post is going to speed things along nicely. In fact, you could have everything up and running in a matter of days if you follow the advice below.

When it comes to internet marketing, there is a lot of technical stuff to know. There’s building websites, handling email, recording and producing videos, tracking statistics, and more. It can fell like you need a degree in computers just to do it all. This is where you have to make a decision. You can either do the work yourself, or pay someone to do it for you.

Most chiropractors will choose to hire someone else, and that’s a wise decision. This is what’s called “outsourcing”, finding someone else to handle the things you don’t want to.

Why Should You Outsource

There’s no rule that says you personally have to do everything in your practice. You can hire out for someone to answer the phone, clean your office, and even hire another doctor to see your patients if you wanted. It’s even easier online to hire or outsource your work.

Here are just a few reasons you might have for outsourcing your online marketing…

• You are too busy with your practice.
• You hate the technical stuff.
• You could do it, but someone else could probably do it better.
• You value your time and know that it would take awhile to do some of the technical parts.

How much is your time worth? I’ll bet it’s worth more than the $10-35 an hour you would pay someone else to do all the internet marketing for you. By hiring someone to do it for you, you bring on a “team member” that can help you build the marketing system you’ve always dreamed of. Two chiropractic systems that do it all for you are Get New Patients and The Chiropractic Dashboard.

Where To Find A Team Member

Outside of these Chiropractic-focused programs, you may want someone you have direct control over what they create and make for you, like an employee or independent contractor type setup. Here I’ve listed my most favorite to least favorite places to find a team member for outsourcing work to.

1. Friends and family

I prefer to have team members I know and trust already, instead of going out to find someone I don’t know. If you have a child or relative that’s good with webpages and blogs, they could help you put together the steps we’ve already covered.

2. Your own staff members or patients

If your current staff has the ability to help you in developing your chiropractic internet marketing plan, you should use them. Patients can also be a great source of finding help. Some of your patients will have the technical skills to help you and do so for very little pay. Be careful of the professional “web designer” though, as they are likely to charge you thousands of dollars and change your blog/landing page to their own liking.

3. Any of the following online outsourcing companies

• www.Elance.com
• www.Guru.com
• www.Getafreelancer.com
• www.99designs.com (for logo and graphics design)
• www.rentacoder.com

4. Craigslist.com

This site can be an easy way to find an outsourcer or “part time” work at home person to help you with parts of your system.

“What Can I Outsource?”

Here are just a few things you could outsource to the above companies, including the chiropractic specific ones.

• Build a landing page
• Set up your auto responder
• Setup a word press blog on your domain
• Ghost write your blog posts
• Create and install your web forms
• Copy for your landing page (most good copywriters don’t outsource their work on elance.com and other sites)

Other internet marketing tasks you might consider outsourcing are things like press releases, writing articles, blog and forum commenting and other link building strategies. A chiropractic specific service that does this is ASN Solutions. A popular general link building site is Linkvana.

As you can see, there’s plenty of work for an outsourcer or virtual assistant to do. You may like delegating your work so much that you find other things around your office to outsource like compiling patient data, making a mailing list, or doing research for health talks. Who knows, you may even cut back on staff and payroll as a result.

There is an internet marketing secret that most “website guys” would rather you not know. It has to do with something you hear about all over the internet regarding the word “traffic.”

The secret is…

“When it really comes down to it, the amount of website traffic doesn’t really matter.”

This applies to website visitors specifically, but more generally to office visits in your practice as well. Let me explain…

Regarding the internet, there is no end to the amount of techniques you can use to get visitors to your site. You can use Facebook, Twitter, social media, social bookmarking, Google organic search, Google Adwords, YouTube videos, article marketing, Yahoo organic search, Yahoo ads, Bing organic, Bing ads, Ebay ads, and on and on.

If the yellow pages rep. stops by your office and says he can guarantee you 300 clicks a month for X amount of dollars, what do you say to him? I would say, “so what, what’s 300 clicks to me! How about you get me 300 qualified clicks to my special landing page?” Of course he’s likely to say that’s no problem. But from my experience, these ad reps are clueless about how to really market online. They are still thinking in terms of how many people see your ad, like all the newspaper and yellow page reps have done for years.

But it’s not the same online. What you want to buy is qualified traffic. People who are interested in what you do and how you can help them. A patient with severe sciatica is 100 times more likely to respond to a special page on your website discussing sciatica, than is a person with only a stiff back.

But even if you get qualified traffic, that’s still not what you care most about. What you really care about first and foremost is conversions! You want your website to convert visitors to patients. Who cares if your site gets 1000 visits a day (which could be some bored teenager in China or something), if you don’t get any new patients out of it.

How do you track conversions from your website? The same way you do (or should be doing) with any other type of marketing. You ask the new patient where they heard about you. It’s best to have some check boxes on your intake forms with the major types of marketing you do, i.e. website, newspaper, referral, etc. Of course you can leave an “other” check box so they can write in someone other than the selections you’ve given.

So how does this apply to your office?

In a general sense, this is true of all your patients that come in. You want to measure and watch your conversions to care. If you spend $10,000 this month on marketing and that brings in 30 new patients, how many of them stayed around for your recommended care plan? What was your conversions percentage? How much are they paying per visit?

You see, if all you cared about were the total number of visits to your office (or total number of new patients), you’re missing the most important numbers to track. Would you rather see 500 visits per week and make $5000, or see 100 visits and make $10,000? ? In chiropractic its common to hear people talking about how many visits they see per week. Yet you’ll rarely hear anyone say how many conversion they had this month, or what their gross collections were or how much they average per visit in collections.

If the only thing you cared about was visits per week, you could have someone stand out in front of your office on the road with a sign that said, “Free care for everyone!” But unless you’ve got a huge trust fund tucked away, this “free care” strategy will run you out of business.

The point is don’t just measure the total number of visitors to your website. Or the total number of patients you see a week. This numbers might be used to check growth, but they don’t tell you much in and of themselves. More importantly you need to measure conversions on your website and in your office recommendations.

Advanced articles on this subject:

Your Website is Not Enough

6 Chiropractic Internet Marketing Tools

14 Ways to Increase In-Office Conversions

Is Google Adwords an effective way of doing chiropractic marketing? And if so why aren’t more chiropractors using it?

Before we go in depth with this question, let’s look at some basic terms. Adwords is a program by Google whereby you can place your ads on their search engine. When people type in certain phrases, called keywords, your ad will show up. If the person clicks your ad, they are taken to the site you have linked up with the ad. You only pay if someone clicks your ad (hence the term “pay-per-click advertising” is sometimes used) and do not pay if your ad only shows up but is not clicked. You bid a certain price for your ad to show for a certain keyword. So I might bid $2 for the keyword “back pain”. To keep it simple, we’ll say that if I’m the highest bidder my ad will show first. If the second highest bidder, my ad will show second, etc. (It’s actually a bit more complex than this, as you can beat out the highest bidder by having a higher click-through rate.)

So with that introduction, let us discuss the use of Adwords for chiropractors.

Fact #1
It’s a proven that your potential patients are on the internet, looking for solutions to their problem. Just look at how many searches Google’s keyword tool show occurred in the last 30 days in the United States:

chiropractor = 450,000 searches
back pain = 1.8 million searches
sciatica = 301,000 searches
neck pain =368,000

These are just a few general keywords. I haven’t even included all the specific keywords like “herniated disc back pain”. If we included all these specialty keywords, you could probably double or triple the categories listed above. Just click on this picture and you’ll see there are over 800 related terms just to back pain.

Now some chiropractors might say, “None of these searchers in my town!” Depending on how big of a city or town you live in, there may be only a few searchers for each keyword. But when you market to multiple keywords, you can bet all those keywords added up together make up some serious numbers. For example, my average ChiroPatients Online client has 798 keywords in their account.

Fact #2
Adwords does work to bring in more revenue. Google’s recent earnings report shows they made $7.29 billion last quarter, up 23% from this quarter last year! And guess where 99% of Google’s revenues come from? Their pay per click advertising. In addition to ads on their site, they also manage (or serve) ads on other large websites like Ebay, Blogspot.com, Youtube, and many more. So the question is why are more and more people spending money on advertising if it doesn’t work? Sure there are a few people out there who will spend money every month regardless of if they ever see a return. But in this economy, no small business is going to shell out tons of money on something if it proves to be a waste of time. And most of Google’s advertising clients are small businesses.

So given these two facts, why aren’t chiropractors making better use of Google Adwords? One of the biggest reasons is due to “bad experiences” with Adwords in the past. (Which sort of reminds me of the patient who’s uncle had a “bad experience” with a chiropractor, so he’s really scared to come in.)

Let’s look at some of the mistakes doctors have made:

1. Using XYZ yellow page company to send you “clicks”.
Clicks in general mean nothing in the broad picture. What you want is quality patients coming to your website and scheduling appointments. So these guys who promise “300 clicks a month” are really not doing much at all for you. You can hire a person in the back room to click your ads just as easy as they can.

2. Not setting a budget.
Some doctors will try Adwords a time or two, but forget (or not know how) to set a budget. Next thing they know Google is charging them $5000 for 1 days worth of clicks from China. Which bring us to the next mistake…

3. Not setting a geographical radius.
I usually set a 10-20 mile radius around the doctors practice. This means only people searching from computers inside that area can see the ads. If you’re in Paris, TX you don’t want your ad showing up in for people in Paris, France or Paris, Idaho. Plus there are bad people who will hire guys in India or Pakistan to just sit there and click your ad all day, running up your bill, which makes you stop advertising. This is called click fraud and Google will catch it most of the time, but some slip by.

4. Not cutting out bad keywords.
Sometimes you put in words like “chiropractic” but Google keeps showing your ad for searches on “Parker College of Chiropractic”, or some similar keyword. So now you’ve got to tell Google not to do that anymore by labeling that as a negative keyword. This will lower your costs since you won’t be wasting bad clicks anymore.

5. Not testing ads
Just like when you test offline ads, you should be testing Adwords ads too. In most campaign ad groups I’m testing two ads against each other. I’ll then pick the winner, delete the loser and write a new ad to start testing. This will gradually increase the number of people clicking on the ads over time, and lower your costs per click (due to complex algorithms we don’t have time to address here.)

6. Having an ineffective website.
Having a bad website is not a subjective term. Google has a complex system of analyzing your website to see if it will be pleasing to the visitor. Even if you’re not using Adwords, if you have a website they have measured it according to their standards called page rank, quality score, incoming links, internal links, number of pages, content, keyword saturation, and more. So the quality of your site can rise or lower your prices per click.

But more than Google liking your site, you want your site to convert visitors to patients. This can only be done by what’s called a landing page. A landing page will educate the visitor on why they should pick up the phone and call you to schedule now. Most landing pages are designed to fit the specific keyword the person was searching for on Google. So it works like this: person searches for “back pain” on Google.com, they see your ad that talks about back pain, they click the ad and land on a page that tells them why you are the doctor they should see for back pain. One of the biggest mistakes people can make with Adwords is by sending them to a non-specific web-page, like your homepage on your site.

Why aren’t you using Google Adwords? Leave a comment below.