Jerry (0:00)

Foreign. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Rocket Chiro Podcast, the business and marketing podcast for chiropractors. My name is Jerry. I'm your host. So today we're going to talk about how chiropractors can get more patients from the Internet, specifically from Google Search. Uh, I'm gonna go through the thought process that I use when I do practice assessments for chiropractors. So if you've listened to this podcast before, you've heard me tell you that if you go to rocketchiro.com, you can request a free practice assessment. This is the type of conversation that I have when I do those practice assessments that lead to the information that I show people about their SEO and about their website. Now, obviously, you can get patients from the Internet a lot of different ways. You can do paid advertising through YouTube and Google and, you know, Instagram, Facebook. You could also do social media. A lot of chiropractors are really focusing heavy on social media. I just did a. A podcast and I did a post about the top chiropractors on Instagram. So that is a way of getting patients from the Internet. We're going to focus on Google, which is the people that are going to Google, and they don't know who they're looking for. And they're looking for a chiropractor. Chiropractor near me, chiropractor plus their zip code, chiropractor plus their city. And we're going to answer two questions. And these are the questions that you want to ask for yourself if you're trying to get more patients from local search. And the question number one is going to be, am I being found? Because if no one's finding you, then it doesn't really matter how great your website is or how great you are as a chiropractor, you're not going to get patients from the Internet. The other question you need to ask is, what are people seeing once they find me? And this has to do with conversion, because you could be theoretically the most found chiropractor in your area. But if your branding, your messaging, your website, and all of that stuff is very clunky and it's not very compelling, then there's not going to be many of those people that choose you. And you don't want to be in a situation where, you know, 2,000 people have to visit your website before one of them schedules an appointment. Like, that's not the situation you want to find yourself in. So if you want to get more patients from local search, you can Focus on improving your search results where more people find you, and you could focus on your branding and your marketing so that more people choose you. And if you do both of those things, if you improve both of those areas, then you'll find yourself in a situation where you're going to get the maximum number of people from local search. Now, if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see that I have my little cheat sheet that's up here. It's not sophisticated at all. It's just a list of things that we're going to talk about. Some of them are in red, some of them are in green. The ones that are in red are basically the ones I'm going to talk about first in regarding local search. And these are the things that do impact search, but you can't do a lot about them. So let's focus on that first. Are you being found? Now, before I get into the specific things, I do want to say this. There is no secret to SEO. Search engine optimization really is doing a lot of little things consistently, correctly. And when you do them over time, you build trust with Google. And essentially what you're doing in the same way that you build relationships with people in your area that refer to you because they trust you and they know you do good work, you're essentially doing the same thing with search engine optimization. You're trying to build a relationship with Google. And the stuff we're going to talk about here are the ways that you build trust and you build a relationship with Google. And when Google trusts you, they refer to you. So there are some things that impact your local SEO that you can't do a whole lot about. First, one we're going to talk about is just your practice location. Location matters. And if you want to rank well in St. Louis, your practice needs to be in St. Louis. There are chiropractors sometimes that try to rank well for the bigger city that's next to them or something like that. That's not typically a very good strategy in this day and age. If you were to go back in time 15, 20 years ago, that might work. Google's smarter now. They know where your business is located. Optimize for the practice. The practice location where you're actually at. Trying to jump over to another area is not smart. Another thing that's going to impact your SEO is going to be the density of chiropractors in your area. If you're in an area where there's not a lot of chiropractors, the reality is you could have poor SEO and get much better reach. If you're in an area where there's tons of chiropractors, you may be doing top level SEO and not getting near as much. Just reach like far reaching impact for your local SEO as someone who's in a less dense area. But just because you're butting up against other chiropractors in your area, so it's just something to keep in mind, that doesn't mean that it's more or less important in your particular area. It just means that you need to have set your expectations. If you're in a dense area like, like a New York City you written, you don't want to compare your reach to, to someone who's out in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. Like that's not a fair comparison. The other thing I just want to bring up before we get into the things that are going to impact your SEO is the newness of your URL. If a URL has been around longer, it has had the opportunity to build authority, it has the opportunity to have built a relationship and built some trust with Google. If you're brand new and you're saying, hey, I'm doing all these things right and I'm still not showing up, it could just be the fact that you have a new URL and you haven't done enough good things consistently enough for long enough to get on Google's radar. So just be aware of that. If you're brand new, that could be an issue. Your URL just might be too young to make an impact. Just keep doing the things you're supposed to be doing. So here are the five things we're going to talk about that impact. Your SEO number one is going to be your Google Business Profile. The important thing here is that you're in the right category. Chiropractors should be listed as chiropractors. I know that sounds silly and obvious, but it's not always. The other thing you want to focus on is just quality. Fill your profile out as completely as possible and you want to make through imaging, videos and the content that's on your Google Business Profile. You want to make it as compelling as possible so that when people visit your Google Business Profile, they spend a lot of time there. It's engaging. That's going to be a quality metric that Google's going to look at to determine whether your business is worth sharing with more people. But if you don't have a Google Business Profile, you're not going to show up in the maps like that's step Number one for new chiropractors. Next is going to be reviews. Reviews are the only thing that's on both of our list in terms of search engine optimization and conversion. When it comes to reviews on your Google business profile, it's important to have a lot of them, it's important to have recent reviews, and both of those things will impact your search engine optimization. The one thing about reviews that a lot of people don't understand, it's really not as straightforward as the person who has the most reviews has the best reach. You do see that sometimes. But in my experience, when I see the person who has the most reviews clearly having the most reach, they typically have two, three, four times the amount of reviews as everybody else in the area. So if you're really dunking on everybody else in your area in terms of review volume, that does seem to have a tremendous effect. Like more so than other things, if you're sort of in the same ballpark, slightly below, slightly above, a little bit different here and there, you're not going to see that dominant impact exclusively from the reviews. The other thing I will say, and this is more about conversion, recent reviews really matter because once a review has gone, you know, six months or older, it does lose some of its impact from a conversion standpoint. And the other thing I'll say about reviews is that a transformational review, and obviously you can't control what people say in the review, but a transformational review where someone says, I had this problem and now I don't, he helped me with this, he helped me with that. Those reviews are going to be more compelling than if someone just says, your staff is nice. The doctor was nice, he listened to me. He, they took my insurance. Those are kind of less impactful things from a standpoint of conversion. But even if you just get those type of reviews, the volume of them will help your search engine optimization. So it's important to focus on reviews from both standpoints. Next is going to be your on site SEO. Your on site SEO just has to do with the words that are on your website. This has to do with your metadata, this has to do with your structured data, this has to do with your image tags. This has to do with just all of the different words that are on your website. It also has to do with internal linking and sort of the way that your website is structured. And I don't plan on getting into a ton of that, but those things do matter. If you're doing your own website, it's important that you understand those things. And did you lay your website out in a way that Google can clearly know what you're about. I would say one of the biggest mistakes I see from chiropractors is that chiropractors will focus. They don't focus on the word chiropractor. They will put the word chiropractic in their website a lot, but not the word chiropractor. I think that's a mistake. I think the predominant thing you should be focusing on from an optimization standpoint should be the word chiropractor over the word chiropractic. Obviously you could focus on other products and services and things that you do, but the, the important thing is make the main thing the main thing. And for most chiropractors, the main thing is the word chiropractor. Next we're going to talk about backlinks. Backlinks are basically just when other websites link to your website. And this is, you think of it like a vote for your website. What matters here is quality and quantity. You want to have a lot of backlinks, but you also want those backlinks to be coming from really good resources. So if, if my website, I'll just kind of give you an example. If Rocket Chiro linked to your chiropractic website, that would be a vote for your website and you would get to rely on some of my authority of my website. Google would see that and, and say, oh well, maybe I trust this person more because they sort of get that transfer of trust from that backlink. The other thing that I will say is if you get a link from CNN.com or Fox News.com or some really, really big high authority website, that link means more than what a link means coming from mine. So the more strong the website is, the more authority the website is, the more, the more recognition that that website has that's linking to you the better. So quality, quality matters and quantity matters. On the flip side of that, if you go to a link farm and you just pay one of these Chinese companies to get you backlinks, when Google sees it, there's a bunch of junky websites that have low trust that are linking to your website that actually hurts you. So the transfer of trust happens with good websites linking to you. The transfer of skepticism happens when bad websites are linking to you. So don't go down that route. It's not just about volume, it's about volume and quality. Last thing we're going to talk about from a search engine optimization standpoint is citations. What a citation is is anywhere your business is listed Online, name, address, phone number, website. So your Google business profile is a citation. Facebook.com, appleMaps.com, YellowPages.com, bingPlaces.com like all of these are considered citation sites. You may say to yourself like, no one's going to bingplaces.com and finding me as a chiropractor and you might be right. But Google looks around the Internet to see if your business is listed around the Internet on these different citation sites. And since Google cares that you're listed on these sites, you need to care that you're listed on these sites. It does impact local SEO. New chiropractors have a tendency to have no listings. Chiropractors that have been around for a while have a tendency to have discrepancies in their listing. Maybe they've, maybe they've moved. Maybe you've changed your business name, maybe you've changed your website. Discrepancies are not good. Absence of citations are not good. So that's what you want to focus on when it comes to citations. Now let's talk about conversion. Conversion has to do with if someone finds you, do they choose you? Are they just are, are they getting this internal sigh of relief that says, oh, thank God, I found the right place. I'm looking for xyz. I found xyz. I'm ready to schedule my new patient appointment. For the vast majority chiropractors, the most important thing for you online and your website should be turning someone from a non patient to patient. That should be what your website is for. Like 99% of your website should be designed around that idea. So the things we're going to focus on are going to be your reviews. We've talked about that already. Getting those reviews, transformational reviews, recent reviews, that is all going to help when people find you. Whether they see those on your website, whether they see those on your Google Business profile. And I do know that some of you that listen to my podcast on like in Australia, I know that you guys can't do reviews on your website, but I believe you could still do them on your Google Business Profile. You still should focus on them. Just get them on your Google Business Profile. A lot of people are going to look at your Google Business Profile and in many cases chiropractors get more traffic on their Google Business Profile, it's not uncommon at all than on their actual website. So still focus on reviews. Even if you're in an area where they say that you can't get a lot of Reviews or you can't put them on your website, but those reviews will help with conversion because there's a transfer of trust. Review reviews are really the modern referral. So just make emphasis of getting more reviews on your website however you do that. Next thing I'm going to talk about is something kind of near and dear to me and I'm going to kind of bundle these together and that's website clarity and website layout. I think a lot of chiropractors don't really understand why how their website is laid out and the message they're putting on their website and how much that impacts the decisions that people make. I see all the time that chiropractors will have decent SEO, but they'll say I'm not getting any patients from the Internet. And the problem is I'll go to their website and it's just a cluttered mess and there's no real compelling statement. There's becoming a new patient isn't easy, it's just clunky. And chiropractors that build their own websites, you'll see this a lot. Chiropractors that even chiropractic companies, some of them, they're really, really well known, they make this mistake of just absolutely cluttering a website to the point that the a person who finds this and think about when someone finds you from Google, they don't know you, they have no trust built in with you. They're going to give you about 15 to 20 seconds of their attention. Are they going to find out within that 15 to 20 seconds what is the value that you have to offer and what they need to do next to get started. And if your website is not set up to where it's that simple, where a caveman could stumble upon your website and figure, figure out what to do next, then it's too complicated. And that needs to be done in the way the website is laid out and structured. So it really takes a person on that journey from non patient to patient and it needs to be structured that way from a clarity and a value standpoint. A lot of chiropractors, the most prime real estate on their website is the homepage and it's above the fold. So it's the stuff you see when you don't have to do anything else. You just go on the website and what do you see that above the fold content. Oftentimes chiropractors are just putting their practice name that's not terribly compelling. You know, if somebody goes to my, if I was still in practice and it's like, oh, they, they found this website and they found Kennedy chiropractic and that's what they saw. Well, all right, has that added, I mean, I'm not saying it's taken away from the situation, but it hasn't helped. But if they were to go to my website and they were to see, you know, we help you feel better faster, we help you get back in the game, we're helping you feel like yourself again, we're helping you, we help you through all phases of life. You know, it's, we help kids and moms feel better. Whatever, whatever that is that makes sense for your practice. And it's a really quick, simple, easy to understand value statement. Does that, is that more compelling to a person who visits your website who's looking for help? I think the answer is yes. I think it's very clearly yes. And I think it's a big mistake the chiropractors make from just a conversion standpoint is that they don't put a very clear, simple value statement and a very clear, simple next step on their homepage above the fold in the most predominant location. And they just make that mistake. So that's something that most chiropractors could clean up. And obviously if you're paying someone to do your website for you, you want to make sure that they're doing that. And if they're not, get somebody else to do it, like me, I'll do it right. So last thing I want to talk about is this is I want to talk about what impacts what. And the reason I want to say this is because some people think that like, oh, I'm going to have XYZ company do my website and they're going to take care of all my website and SEO. And I'll be honest with you, sometimes it's the website company's fault because website companies that market the chiropractors oftentimes will say like, oh yeah, we handle all your SEO. But they're not really being 100% honest there because we're website company is probably going to impact or should impact your on site SEO and they should impact website clarity and layout. Those are the things that they're going to have the biggest impact on. What they're not going to impact most likely is they're not going to impact citations, they're not going to impact backlinks, they're not going to impact your Google business profile and they're probably not going to impact reviews very much. And so if you want to have a complete picture of getting More patients from the Internet. You can't just say like, oh, I'm going to have Jerry do my website or I'm going to have this company do my website and then assume that all of it is taken care of. And it's important that you just understand what are they doing and what are they not doing. Now if you're paying someone 12, you know, $1,000 or $1,200 a month to do your website and they're like, and they're doing your SEO, they better be doing some top end stuff, they better be doing backlinks and content and, and citations and helping you with all of that, because you're paying a premium for that. But I would say most of the time, when a chiropractor's paying for a chiropractic website company to do their website and they're doing SEO, what they're doing is the foundational SEO and the on site SEO, which is still very, very important, but it's not a complete picture. And I would tell that with my new clients as well is, listen, understand what I'm doing and understand what I'm not doing so that you're not setting yourself up for disappointment. Now, on the other side of it is, let's say you wanted to do a reputation management service or reputation management software where you're like, I'm gonna get more reviews. Well, that will help you get more reviews and they might help you with your Google business profile. Sort of depends on how the service is set up. When we do reputation management for clients, we also help them with their Google business profile, but not everybody does. And if you're just doing a softw, like review wave, for instance, I don't think that there would be any Google Business profile help that goes along with that. But it's important to understand what they're actually doing. What they're not going to do is they're not going to be helping your SEO from an on site SEO standpoint, They're not going to be helping you from a backlink standpoint. They're not going to be helping you from a citation standpoint, because that's not what that service is, that service does. And so I say all that to say, if you want to have a complete picture of search engine optimization and conversion, you're probably going to find yourself in a situation where you're paying for some people to help you with certain things and you're doing some of those things, some of those other things yourself. What you pay for and what you do yourself really will just depend on the chiropractor. You might be comfortable doing your own website, but not comfortable getting more reviews. I have some clients that pay me to do their website because they don't want. They don't want to do that. But they're more than comfortable and they do a really great job of acquiring reviews. And I would never tell them to pay for my reputation management because they're doing a bang up job with what they're doing on their own. So it just sort of depends when you're just getting started and you're absolutely just strapped for cash. Maybe you're doing all of it yourself. But I would imagine at some point in the near future, if you get a little bit of money, get your nose above water, what you're going to end up doing is doing some sort of hybrid situation where you're paying for some things, you're doing some things yourself. And the important thing is, is that you understand what impacts what. And we need to go back to those first two questions. Am I being found and are people choosing me? And if you can improve either one of those two things, you're gonna get more new patients from the Internet from Google Search. So I hope you find that helpful. Guys, like I said, I am. If you want help with your website and SEO, go to Rocket Cairo, request a free practice assessment. I'd be happy to look at your stuff and give you some recommendations. If you just want information, some DIY information so you can do it all yourself, check out my next step program. There's a great, a ton of information there. You can get started with a lot of this stuff and some of the foundational stuff for getting started with your practice. Other than that, I'm out of here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. I'll talk to you guys on the next episode. See you.