Chiropractic Marketing | Chiropractic Advertising | Chiropractic Ads

Are you using the internet to its full potential in your practice?

Most chiropractors are only touching the tip of the iceberg. The list is almost endless of tactics to use: email marketing, PPC ads, blogging, mobile apps, Facebook pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google SEO, etc., etc.

In every country around the world more people are using the web every day. Check out this short video showing just a few stats:

The most difficult (and most frustrating for some) part of Google Adwords is dealing with the quality score.

The quality score is a way for Google to keep a high “quality” advertising network. It punishes people for being dishonest and stupid.

So if your website is selling chiropractic services, you are going to pay a lot more for running ads that only talk about back surgeries and don’t mention chiropractic. In many cases you will pay 10 times more!

Therefore, you do not want to make Google mad when it comes to quality score.

Let’s look at some things you can do to raise your quality score…

1. Make sure your keyword is in your ad headline. This means if your ad is about back pain, you should have the word back pain in the headline for sure, and possibly the first line and the domain name. That means in this example, don’t write an ad all about chiropractic and not mention the keyword “back pain”. Google will just think your site has nothing to do with back pain and make you pay a lot more for these bids.

2. Use ad groups in your account. We looked at this one above.

3. Use your keyword in your headline on your landing page. Continuing our “back pain” example above, if your site is really about “back pain”, then you should have that phrase prominently on your website somewhere right? If you don’t, another strike against you in Google’s book. More strikes = higher bid prices.

4. Make sure your landing page or main website loads fast. If your site loads slow, and Google’s searchers are going there, then it can make Google look bad. Would you refer one of your patient’s to a restaurant where the service was slow?

5. Use items on your landing page that makes the visitor stay longer (video,
audio, etc). The longer people stay on your site, and the more pages they visit, the more relevant Google thinks your site is to that keyword. If people go to your site after clicking your Adwords ad, and then click the “back button” immediately, that’s going to lower your quality score.

6. Make sure your landing page has a privacy policy link on it. For an example of this, go to http://www.ultimatechiropracticads.com and look at the bottom of the page for the privacy policy.

7. Put a link on your landing page that links to another website with a lot of
content (your blog!). This one is a big factor of quality score. Basically, the more pages you have on your site (or a site you link out to) that is relevant to a keyword, the better off you are. So for the keyword “back pain”, you can’t just have a small website with very few pages about back pain. This is why the blog is so important, because it gives you an “article database” of information to link to, some of which will be about “back pain”.

To  learn more about how to get new patients with Google Adwords, watch a free webinar at ChiroPatientsOnline.com

Google Analytics is a free website tracking program,  to use it you’ll need a Google account setup (like gmail, Adwords, etc). If you haven’t, you can (and should) get started with Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics/

It’s fairly easy to install and I’ll show you again in the beginning of today’s video. If you have a techy person who does things for you, the installation should take less than 5 minutes.

Here’s how analytics works. Enter the website you want to track, then they give you a short “script” to put on your page.

Every time someone comes to your website, the script is activated and starts tracking what that visitor does. The script is hidden in your website code, so it’s not even visible on your page.

What This Software Can Tell You

Analytics offers many features and Google adds new features monthly. What I want to do is show you which aspects you need to use and how it will increase the amount of new patients you get from the internet.

Here’s what Analytics reveals about your website and why it’s important to you.

Unique Visitors. What you need to know is the number of “unique visitors”. The stat only counts the visit when they first arrive on the site. No matter how many times they return to the website, they will only be counted as one visitor.

Time on site. Time on site is almost always a good thing. Assuming you have some content on your website (articles, videos, etc) the longer a person stays there, the more involved and interested they are in what you have to say. This is not justification for putting up lots of boring content, as people will still leave fast if it’s not interesting.

Sidenote: Also, “time on site” is very important to your Quality Score when running Google Adwords. You may remember in the last lesson we spent some time on quality score. At this point in time, it appears 1 minute is the critical time for your Adwords landing page. If visitors are staying less than 1 minute, you will be punished on your quality score.

Page Views. Depending on the type of website your tracking, a higher number of page views can be a good indication. For example, a blog site where you aren’t selling anything but just giving away free information is a place you want people to view a lot of pages. This is an indication of someone who wants more information from you.

If you have a “traditional” website with navigation bars and links, a high number of page views may be a bad sign. It’s likely that people are clicking around and having trouble finding the information they want.

Pages/visit. “Pages per visit” is a similar stat to the above page views. This is an important number to track if you have a blog. When running a blog, you want visitors to visit quite a few pages per visit. The reason you want this is because it means they are connecting with you each time they come to the site.

Traffic sources. In my opinion, this is one of the most important stats you can know about your website. Your traffic sources will tell you exactly where people are coming from when they land on your blog, landing page or website.

It will tell you if most of your traffic is coming from Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. Use this information to go to these search engines and do pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. If you’re already doing PPC,  use this info to increase the PPC according to where your traffic is coming from.

You’ll also know if another website has linked to you, since people will click through the link and visit your site. The traffic sources page can tell you if your social networking is effective, since you may see visitors coming from LinkedIn or Facebook.

After you release a press release on PRweb, you’ll be able to tell how effective it was as a traffic generator. The same goes for posting articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com

Location of your visitors. Analytics will tell you where your website visitors are located down to the city level. This can be valuable if you practice in a populated area with many surrounding cities. You may notice a majority of your traffic coming from a certain area. Using this information, you can make some offline marketing decisions like where you want to advertise in the newspaper, with direct mail, etc.

Bounce Rate. This is one stat you want to be low. The bounce rate is how many people only see one page of your website and “bounce” off. So if you have a 71% bounce rate, that means almost 3/4ths of the people visiting your site are leaving before viewing another page. A high bounce rates means that people are not finding what they want and are hitting the “back” button on their browser. (A high bounce rate can also hurt your Adwords Quality Score.)

A good bounce rate is between 50-60%, as you can’t expect everyone that hits your site to view more than one page.

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.

Google has released their attempt at social media. Many internet marketing gurus suspected that with the rise in popularity of sites like Twitter and Facebook, it was just a matter of time before Google launched something of their own.

While I don’t think Google Buzz has huge new patient generating compatibility, it certainly is a place to build valuable “back links” to your website. The more links you have, the higher your SEO ranking will be on Google, which means you’ll come up higher when people search. And of course coming up high on Google certainly means getting more new patients!

To participate in Google buzz, you’ll need to have a Gmail account. And frankly you should already have a gmail account. No free email account is easier to use, filters spam, and delivers the correct email message:

Sidenote on Email Delivery: It’s will known in internet marketing that certain email carriers have a really bad delivery rate. Yahoo, Hotmail, and the worst, AOL all have a terrible delivery rate, which means they either don’t deliver your messages sent out to patients or they wrongly put your messages in the spam folder. I cannot tell you how many times doctors using an AOL email account have become upset with us, thinking we were refusing to reply to their support questions. However, we had sent them numerous emails, but since they an an aol account, it’s pointless to expect they even received those replies. My point is, if you are using these email providers, especially aol, you’re missing a lot of important emails that people are sending out to you.

Now, back to Google Buzz. Check out this short video with summarizes what Buzz is all about:

http://dcincome.com/blog/how-to-use-google-buzz-strategically/

It’s time for you to experience growth in your practice, even during the recession.

http://www.chiromarketingacademy.com

If you’ve been following my blog lately, you know that I’ve been releasing a sample of the content from the new ChiroMarketing Academy. The Academy is a membership site unlike anything else in chiropractic. Each month, you’ll have access to private lessons and training videos that teach you how to…

- Bring in more quality new patients using print and internet marketing, referrals, internal promotions, and more.
- Convert patients to care using non-forceful techniques. (It took me years of trial and error to discover these!)
- Keep patients for life with very specific high retention strategies and tactics.

I even captured a short video that gives you a sneak peek inside the membership site. You can see for yourself exactly what’s included in ChiroMarketing Academy.

Check it out now:
http://www.chiromarketingacademy.com

If you’re wondering why the membership is such a low price right now, it’s only the first 50 (only 45 remaining) members who join that will get a special charter membership worth 50% off. With over 1000 chiropractors reading this today, I can’t say how long the remaining 45 memberships will last. It could be a week or it could be less than 24 hours. Once all the charter memberships have been taken, the price will double and likely double again in 6 months (since new content is added every month.)

Either way, I advise you to at least take a look at what’s been added to ChiroMarketing Academy and see how the new strategies can help you grow your practice. There’s a 30 day guarantee on your membership, so you risk nothing by giving it a try.

Yours for a more successful practice,
Michael Beck, D.C.

P.S. As a special bonus for those who join ChiroMarketing Academy, I’ve thrown in The Renegade Marketing Letters…proven marketing letters for referrals, reactivations, and event promotions. With these easy-to-implement marketing tools, you can start seeing new patients this week and easily get back your investment in ChiroMarketing Academy immediately.

http://www.chiromarketingacademy.com

With the recent buzz about my ChiroMarketing Academy that launched last week, I wanted to delve more into advanced chiropractic internet marketing strategies. Today, I’ll review 5 advanced strategies you can use with your Google Adwords campaign.

Adwords is Google’s version of pay-per-click ads. These are the ads that come up on the right hand side of the page when you do a search on Google. Each time a person clicks through the ad to your website, Google charges you a certain bid price. This can be a very effective way to get targeted traffic to your website.

#1. Improve Your CTR

CTR is your Google Adwords Click-Through-Rate. Your CTR is shown as a percentage, and is the your clicks divided by your impressions. So if your ad shows 50 times (impressions) and 2 people click on it, you will have a 4% CTR for that keyword. The higher your CTR is, the lower your bid price with Google and the higher your ad can be.

One way to improve your CTR is by testing 2 different ads at the same time. Create two ads and let Google rotate them for you. After 30+ clicks, you’ll clearly see which one is the winner. Delete the looser and try to beat your winner with another one. This will continue to improve your CTR over time.

#2. Improve Your Quality Score

Google has three levels of quality score — Ok, Poor and Great. You can see your score by mousing over the spyglass icon on the keywords tab inside your account. 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. The score is based on your keyword relevance, your landing page relevance, and your landing page load time. Therefore, you should make sure you landing page loads fast and has your keyword in the headline. Also, make sure your adwords ad has the keyword in it and you will get a better quality score.

#3. Use A 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 page be on your “main website”. A simple page that collects information like name and email address works much better than putting them on a website with too many choices and options. You should have a headline, some copy, some bullet points, and testimonials. Videos and audios work very well too. If done right, you can expect anywhere from 20-50% of the visitors to your landing page to leave their name and email.

First build 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 (as mentioned above). 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.

#4. 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, sciatica, etc have great potential. People searching for these conditions are looking for health information, usually have or know someone who has the problem, and will be 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 or at SEObook.com.

#5. Write effective ads.

This one sounds simple, but don’t underestimate it’s power to lower bid prices and increase your CTR. 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

We’ll go into greater detail in the course about how you can affect and improve these 5 strategies. If you haven’t signed up, what are you waiting for?