The internet has become central to addiction treatment marketing. This article will walk you through the marketing strategies that are most effective at driving qualified consults to addiction treatment centers like yours.
Addiction treatment centers are places of fresh starts and can help those rebuild their life from rock bottom and point them in the right direction. As great as your intentions, you can’t help those who need it most if they cannot find your website, and that is why you need to make sure that your addiction treatment marketing is strong enough to help bring in those new patients.
Below are the addiction treatment marketing strategies that will help bring those to your center who need it most:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Focusing on your Google Business Profile and other local directories
- Google Ads, including YouTube
- Old-school networking
In the following sections, I’m going to dive into more detail about these masrketing strategies.
SEO for Addiction Treatment Websites
Organic search is going to be one of the most cost-effective sources of traffic to your addiction treatment website.
If you stop utilizing all of your other addiction treatment marketing efforts that cost money, your website will always be indexed on Google and other search engines, which makes it a very valuable marketing strategy.
Because of this, you need to make sure that your addiction treatment center’s website is properly optimized so the potential patients who need to find your website the most are able to do so.
Optimizing your website begins with keyword research and then properly utilizing those keywords so they can show up higher in the search engine results (SERPs).
Service Page SEO
Your individual treatment pages are likely going to be what brings in the most qualified leads to your website through organic search.
In other words, the way potential patients will search for your services will extend well beyond “addiction treatment near me.” People perform very specific searches using “long-tail keywords”—searches such as “addiction treatment centers for opioids,” “outpatient drug rehab NJ,” or “drug rehab that accepts Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance.”
Because of this, your addiction treatment marketing efforts will need to make sure that you have formed a strong keyword strategy to ensure that have relevant pages on your website that show up at the top of the search engine results (SERP) when potential patients perform these searches. You can’t expect a catchall “addiction treatment” page to rank for all of these different types of searches—they simply won’t be as relevant as a dedicated “inpatient drug rehab treatment + city” page.
To that point, addiction treatment centers are a very geotargeted industry. A potential patient who is living in Philadelphia is likely not going to look for an addiction facility in Pittsburgh. This means that you should be targeting geocentric keywords on all of your service pages for your primary location. Your content needs to be optimized not only for searches such as “drug rehab Philadelphia,” but also for searches including nearby cities such as “drug rehab Bala Cynwyd” or even neighborhoods such as “drug rehab Northeast Philadelphia.”
These pages will be ultra-relevant to searches that happen to be looking for addiction treatment in these locations.
Doing that will increase the likelihood of potential patients finding your addiction treatment center in the search engine results.
We use a wide variety of tools to make sure our clients are using the highest volume keywords to bring users to their service pages. If you wanted to add a targeted keyword of “addiction treatment center” to your site, and that’s it, then you would be running into a major issue. While the number of searches per month is fairly high, it is a very difficult keyword to rank for:
These are the kinds of factors that you need to take into consideration when performing keyword research for your service pages.
Information Page SEO
Information pages should be on every addiction treatment website because they answer the kinds of questions people have about addiction treatment in their states. While your FAQ and blogs will take care of a large number of questions potential clients will have, there are some that need to be clearly laid out on one page.
These are common questions that are asked about addiction treatment facilities and addiction in general. These are the kinds of questions that can be answered on your Information pages. Utilizing these pages correctly in your addiction treatment marketing strategy can help with picking up the keywords that would otherwise be missed by your service pages and your blog posts.
Target Surrounding Areas Through Location Pages
While your primary service page may be targeting the main city that you operate out of, there are other, smaller cities that your addiction treatment marketing should also be targeting. But instead of stuffing your primary service page with names of the surrounding areas, you should make additional location pages for those users.
It may be tempting to just copy and paste the primary service page and replace the name of the location, but that is not the best move. While you should always try to get the same message across in your location pages, it is important to make sure that they are varied enough so the page can rank better and not look lazy to anyone who might come across both pages.
Content Marketing Is Central to SEO for Addiction Treatment Centers
Addiction treatment marketing can leverage content marketing to great effect. You can use your blog content as a way to bring more users to your site and helps readers determine how they will view your treatment center.
Our objective is to answer the questions people have about addiction, addiction treatment, and position your addiction treatment center as a trusted authority.
Find the Questions People Are Asking Online
The primary goal of content marketing is to find new ways to bring searchers to your website, and there is no better way to do that than by answering the questions that they are typing into search engines.
People have lots of questions about addiction treatments, and you can offer accurate answers from a professional point of view. This kind of addiction treatment marketing strategy is great for bringing users to your site because of the nature of the keywords.
When we enter the query “how long does it take to detox from opioids” into Google, we can see that this is an easily attainable piece of content that could rank high on the SERPs. This is due to the fact that both links in position 1 and 3 have low domain and URL rankings. These are the kinds of things that you need to take into consideration when creating a content marketing strategy.
Google My Business and Local Listings SEO
Your Google My Business listing, and other local listings, are just as important as your website showing up in the SERPs. This is for multiple reasons.
The first of which is because this marketing strategy gives you an even larger footprint on the SERPs which will make people that much more likely to click on a link you own, website or GMB profile.
The second reason is that checking a patient into an addiction treatment center can be a quick decision to make. Often, people who have hit rock bottom come to that conclusion quickly and decide they need to check in right away. A strong presence with your GMB profile can help ensure that they will find your center before another, less qualified, center.
Optimize Local Directories
Local SEO is one of the fastest ways to get your addiction treatment marketing to generate leads more quickly. To stand out in the sea of other local listings, you need to make sure that your profiles are as optimized as possible.
The first, and most important part of optimizing your GMB and other local SEO profiles is to ensure that your name, address and phone number (NAP) is consistent across all directories and your website.
Google scans all of these listings when searching for information about your business. This data is then stored by Google and used when determining ranking for both your local listings and for your entire website.
Encourage Reviews For Local Directories
Getting reviews on your local listings is the second crucial part of addiction treatment marketing. Getting consistent, positive and keyword friendly reviews is a key factor in helping your local listings rank better. This also gives users more of a reason to click on your page on a psychological level.
Let’s take a look at the top three local search results for the term “addiction treatment centers in philadelphia.”
There isn’t much to set these locations apart at a first glance other than their reviews. Seeing that the number three position only has one review with 3 out of 5 stars means most people will immediately look away from that listing.
Between the top two positions, the number one spot has 26 reviews at 4.7 out of 5 stars, and the number two position at 83 reviews at 4.4 out of 5 starts. The final decision may be up in the air at this point because some people may value the number of reviews more than the .3 difference between the ratings.
At the end of the day, we can clearly see just how important reviews are when it comes to making a final decision for picking an addiction treatment facility.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising for Addiction Treatment Centers
While Google Ads for Addiction Treatment Centers was temporarily suspended due to some unethical users in the field, it has once again become available.
Although this addiction treatment marketing channel is not as straightforward as before, it is still possible, and recommended, to market your addiction treatment center through Google Ads. Utilizing this marketing channel can effectively make sure that you show up on the top of the search results and bring more patients in who need your care.
Here we can see that if we enter the search query “drug treatment center in philadelphia” into Google, the top 3 ads show up well before the first organic search. Convenience is a major factor in how people use search engines, and oftentimes that means clicking on the first search result they see. This is precisely why Google Ads is such an important addiction treatment marketing strategy.
Certification Through LegitScript is Required for Addiction Treatment Centers to Advertise on Google
As we said before, Google Ads was suspended for addiction treatment ads due to unethical tactics that marketers were using.
This was not just restricted to Google Ads, but to other marketing platforms like Facebook. The reason these ads were able to come back was because of a certification process through LegitScript.
LegitScript provides the only certification service for drug and alcohol addiction treatment providers that is trusted by Google, Bing, and Facebook to evaluate advertisers for eligibility.
If you want to utilize Google Ads, as you should, or any other form of paid advertising as a part of your addiction treatment marketing strategy, then getting a LegitScript certification should be at the top of your to-do list.
Consider Hiring a PPC Marketing Agency
Paid search can be quite a difficult marketing channel to master.
You need to balance your keyword list with the proper match-types for your keywords, your negative keyword list, your bidding strategy, and more.
On top of that, you have the additional task of getting a certification through LegitScript. In many cases, addiction treatment facilities often look to a PPC management service to take care of this aspect of their addiction treatment marketing to ensure the best ROI possible.
YouTube Marketing Strategies for Addiction Treatments
Some may not expect an addiction treatment center to utilize YouTube or other video platforms as a part of their addiction treatment marketing strategy, but it can be an effective method of getting your information out into the public. Putting out this kind of content can help users in different platforms see that your center is a trusted source of information.
Testimonials From Recovered Clients
Testimonials from recovered clients is a great way to build trust for your brand across multiple platforms.
These testimonials can be about your clients’ personal experiences with the recovery process, or experiences about losing a friend. These testimonials will help position your brand as an addiction treatment center who actually cares about your patients and wants everyone to recover from whatever addiction they are battling.
These videos can then be shared on other platforms, specifically on social media. You do not even have to use the full video, but use one minute to post on Facebook and then link to both your website and to the full YouTube video. This further extends your reach, and shows off how you care about your patients.
FAQs From Treatment Counselors
On top of the personal stories that you share through client testimonials, you can help position yourself as an informational source by answering some common questions people may have about addiction. You can answer questions like “what is the average opioid detox timeline?” and viewers will be appreciative to have the professional information at their fingertips.
Entering the keyword presented above into the YouTube search bar shows that the top three videos have a total of over 211K views. Now, you should not expect to gain more views that a TEDTalk, but if you produce high quality content, you can generate a fraction of the views.
Chances are, if someone is looking up these kinds of questions, they, or someone they know, is going through a difficult time and it may be time for them to check in to an addiction treatment facility. If your content is giving them the information that they need, then they already have some element of trust towards your brand and might choose your facility if they are nearby.
Addiction Treatment Email Marketing
Around 90% of American consumers check their email on a daily basis. This combined with the fact that you can personalize your messages to different audiences means email marketing should be an integral part of your addiction treatment marketing strategy and is a great way to stay on your prospects’ radars.
Build Your Email List
The most important part of email marketing strategy is building your email list. This list will make up every email address where you will send your messages. You can build this list in multiple ways like in-person, or directly on your website.
When people check-in to your addiction treatment center, you may require contact information from both the individual checking in and a family member or friend. In this case, you now have two new email addresses to add to your email list.
Acquiring email addresses from your website can be as simple as including a “Contact Us” form and making the email address required to complete the form submission. You may also have case studies, or PDFs on your site that you can send to individuals through their email address. All of these methods are important for gaining a large quantity of email addresses, but that is just the beginning of the process.
Segment Your Email Marketing
Segmentation of your email addresses is quite possibly the most important part of your email marketing strategy, maybe other than the content itself. It is important to send the right messages to the right people, and that is going to come from segmenting your email addresses into the proper audience.
You may choose to separate your audiences into “loved ones”, “recovered patients” and “no action taken”. This will make sure that you are not sending emails that are about helping those who are on the road to recovery to the “recovered patients” audience.
Once your audiences are segmented, you will be able to serve much more targeted emails with CTAs that are more relevant to that group of people.
Contact a Addiction Treatment Marketing Agency
Creating a marketing strategy can be difficult for any industry, but there is a whole other set of difficulties that addiction treatment centers have to face. For that reason, a large number of addiction treatment centers will reach out to a marketing agency to take care of their marketing strategy for them.
We are an addiction treatment marketing agency that can take care of the heavy lifting of your marketing strategy so you can put all of your focus on helping your patients. Contact us to get a proposal.
