Search Engine Optimization
Improving your search rankings is essential for digital marketing success. Organic traffic is one of the largest channels of traffic for chiropractors. If you aren’t on the first page of Google, then you are lost beyond the top ten search results. As a result, the chances that you’re going to be found by potential patients searching for a chiropractor go way down.
That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. SEO is the practice of fine-tuning your website and your content to help you rank better in search results. As a chiropractor, you’ll want to strategize your rankings around local search. You’re not going to be trying to get patients from another county, out-of-state, or abroad. You’ll want to get local patients who are within an hour’s drive of your practice.
Pick your keywords
One of the first steps to establishing your chiropractic SEO strategy is to pick your keywords. There are two categories of keywords:
Short tail keywords
Are, you guessed it, shorter search queries that tend to be broader and have more search volume. Here are some examples:
Short tail keywords are great keywords to use throughout your website, in your URLs, in your page titles, headers, and text.
Long-tail keywords
Are longer, more specific, and get less search volume. Here are some examples of longtail keywords:
Long-tail keywords are great to write about on specific pages or to explore in-depth in a blog post.
You’ll want to have a keyword strategy that focuses on both types of keywords. Do some keyword research to see what keywords you want to rank for and pursue.
Then make a list of those keywords. You might want to start small, let’s say less than 10 keywords. Next, you’ll want to set up keyword tracking and SEO reporting to help you gauge how you’re performing for those keywords. If you’re not ranking for some of them, then you might want to revisit your content strategy and website to include those keywords, and their synonyms, more frequently, but in a natural way.
Another benefit of setting up keyword reporting is that you can get more insight into other words that you’re ranking well for that you might not have thought about before.
Optimize your website structure
Another area that you have control over that will help with SEO is your website structure, which is the more technical side. You can work to improve your website in a number of ways to make it more friendly to search engines and website visitors, but here are a few of the main ones:
Page titles and title tags
Title tags help Google and your patients understand what’s on a page on your website and can improve click-through-rates in Google search. A title tag is a line of code on your web page that doesn’t actually show up on your web page; that’s probably why it oftentimes gets ignored.
It would be worthwhile to do an audit of your page titles and title tags and make sure that each page has one and that they reflect the content on the page and a keyword that you want to go after. Read more about .
Your URLs are another part of your website that is ripe for improvement. You can improve your URLs in a few ways:
Now, let’s say you have a page about Dr. Jones listed under the about us section. You would want this page to nest under that page and you would reflect it in a URL like .
If you did your page title and title tags audit, then you might have gone through and adjusted the page titles and title tags for different pages of your site. You’ll also want to make sure that you adjust your URLs to reflect those changes.
You want your URLs to be logically structured, include keywords when possible, and to keep them descriptive but as short as you can.
Your website pages have something called headers. In HTML speak, these headers go from an <h1> all the way down to a <h6>. These used to be more important for SEO than they are today, but they are still important for your website visitors. They help provide structure and flow to your website pages and highlight what your visitors will be reading about in a particular section. If you aren’t using headers, you should be. And if you are using headers, take some time and audit them.
Here is a great article in Search Engine Journal on everything you need to know about .
Meta Description
Moz defines meta description as an HTML attribute that provides a brief summary of a web page. Search engines such as Google often display the meta description in search results, which can influence click-through rates. Each one of your website pages has a meta description. It’s a best practice to make sure that your meta descriptions are filled out for every page and that they are descriptive of what content is on the page, but not too long-winded.
Image Titles and Alt Tags
Your image titles and alt tags are other areas you can optimize for SEO. Your image titles are displayed as pop-ups if a user hovers over an image. Whereas your image alt texts will appear on a page whenever the image can not be displayed. This is super helpful for accessibility purposes for some users who might be using screen readers because they are blind or visually impaired. The screen readers will let these users know what the image is by reading the alt tag. Finally, Google also places weight on what alt text you use to help determine rankings. It’s not a bad idea to weave your keywords into your image alt tags where appropriate.
Page Speed
Your page speed is how long it takes to fully display content on a specific page. Google looks at site, and page, speed in its algorithms. Meaning that you will be viewed favorably with a faster load speed and you will be penalized for a slower one. Not only does Google factor in your page speed, but so do your website visitors. If your site doesn’t load in a timely manner, then many of your website visitors will exit your site – this leads to a higher bounce rate.
You can check your page speed with tool. If you’re looking to improve your page speed, you can try a number of different technical fixes like enabling compression, minifying code, reducing redirects, optimizing images, improving server response time, and more.
If you can make good tweaks to any number of those items and then come back to review your rankings, the chances are you will see a positive boost.
Are you interested in trying to manage your own SEO? Check out this blog: DIY Chiropractic SEO to get some more details. Or would you rather have someone manage your SEO for you? If that’s the case, then give us a call at 1-800-295-3346.
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