Getting the marketing right for your chiropractic office can be transformative for your practice. However, chiropractor marketing is among the most competitive in local healthcare and it can be tough to tell if you’re on the right path or if you’re simply wasting money.
We’ve handled digital marketing for chiropractors and other healthcare providers throughout the country, and in this article, I’m going to share chiropractic marketing strategies we’ve seen work — as well as what we’ve seen fall flat.
Chiropractor Marketing Strategy Comes Down to the Following
- Build a great website that entices new patients to schedule with you
- Build search-optimized pages for each and every town from which patients would be willing to travel to see a chiropractor
- Claim and verify your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listings
- Get as many reviews as possible.
- Claim your local listings. We call these “local citations” and they will help you show up in the Google local 3-pack.
- Get some links from other websites
- Develop a strategy for online paid advertising on Google and/or Facebook.
- Build a brand on the social media platforms where your prospective patients spend the most time.
1. A Chiropractor’s Website Must be Great
These days, having a mobile-friendly, responsive website is necessary for a chiropractor marketing campaign to be successful.
In our experience, roughly 80% of the traffic going to our chiropractor clients’ websites is visiting on a mobile device — it goes without saying that new patients won’t book an appointment if they are not even able to read your website.
In addition to the poor user experience of having a desktop-only website, Google demotes websites in the search results that offer a poor mobile experience:
Having a website that displays properly on mobile devices isn’t always enough to convert, however.
There is a formula that works for landing pages — ignoring this is a missed opportunity.
The Formula for a High Converting Landing Page
- Headline – start with a headline that includes the keyword you’re targeting (usually chiropractor + city) and that catches the visitor’s attention
- Include some sort of “book now” call-to-action (CTA)
- Establish social proof – for a chiropractor, this usually means reviews or years open
- Give your pitch – explain why new patients should choose you over the other dozen chiropractors in your area. Communicate your unique value proposition and differentiator.
- Overcome objections – this is often in the form of an FAQ section. What insurance do you accept? How long does it take to get an appointment? Do you accept walk-ins? Tools like Answer the Public can be useful to find common questions, but if you’ve been open for any amount of time, you’ve heard them over and over.
Get this right and you’ll convert a higher percentage of the visitors to your website into appointments.
2. SEO: Build Search-Optimized Pages Targeting Locations Near You
Check out this article you’re interested in learning more about SEO for chiropractors.
If someone performs a search for chiropractor Cherry Hill, NJ, they may be open to visiting a chiropractor in neighboring Voorhees, NJ.
A chiropractor in Voorhees would be well advised to create pages targeting neighboring Cherry Hill (and Haddonfield, Marlton, and other nearby towns).
These pages should be treated as second home pages, as they will often be the first thing visitors in these neighboring towns will see.
It’s also advisable to learn a bit about on-page optimizations. SEO is a lot more than “putting the keywords on the page” and setting the title tags with a WordPress SEO plugin.
Chiropractor marketing is competitive and you’re likely going up against a few competitors that have already invested in chiropractor SEO services.
Don’t worry though, odds are your competitors’ SEO agencies are mediocre to bad. We’ve yet to work in a market where we’ve had to compete against top-notch healthcare SEO companies; odds are your market is also being served by second-rate agencies.
The process we follow for on-page SEO optimization should get you moving quite along in the search results:
3. Claim and Verify your Google Business Profile Listing and Bing Places listings
Go to business.google.com. Sign up and follow the instructions to verify your listings.
Do the same for bingplaces.com.
This will be necessary in order to start showing up in the map results, as seen below:
It is critical that you get your website to rank in the map results and that you present your chiropractic office as trusted.
In the example here, the first two results have 45 and 115 review, respectively.
The third has only 7.
This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Even though Spine One Chiropractic Center is in the map results, the majority of searches are likely contacting the other two chiropractors in the map results.
4. Claim Your Local Listings
There are a lot of local directories out there. While listing a site on 150 different sites used to help quite a bit with SEO, that’s not necessarily the case any longer.
However, it is still important that you list your website on certain websites that are ranking in the results.
In this case, Yelp appears to be a top result and is likely a source potential patients are checking when looking into different chiropractors in their area.
As you’re opening these listings, be sure to maintain consistent “NAP.”
In SEO, NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. As I have outlined in other articles, your NAP must be consistent.
In the case of Sagapixel’s old mailing address, there are three different formats that I’ve seen:
- NJ-73 North
- Route 73 North
- RT-73 North
This can be further complicated by forgetting the “North” or abbreviating it with an “N.”
Pick a format and stick with it.
The same goes for your phone number and name. Don’t refer to yourself as “ACFS” on some listings and “Atlantic County Family Spine” in others.
The search engines are going to compare the NAP that you have on your site with what they are finding on other sites. If your site does not match with all of the other listings, the search engine may not understand that they are just different formats of your information; they may think that you’ve moved.
Once you’ve established a NAP to use, start claiming your local listings.
We have a checklist of websites that you can use to do your local citations. If you don’t have time to do it, click here and contact us. Local citations are not expensive and are a one-time fee until you move or change your phone number. We highly discourage you from paying a monthly fee for this service. There are companies like Yext Superlistings that will charge you thousands of dollars over the lifetime of your business for what is essentially a couple hours of work. Just pay it once.
5. Develop a Plan to Get Online Reviews
Customer reviews are a major ranking factor in the map results.
They’re also a decision factor for new patients — in one study I read, 71% of prospective patients reported checking online reviews of their healthcare providers.
Thing is, people are busy. They need a good reason to leave a review for you online.
Either you need to make them really happy or really mad if you want them to review you on their own. Usually, the really mad people are the ones that take the time.
By having a program to actively solicit reviews, you greatly increase the chances that your normal happy patient will leave you a review.
But where should you have them review you?
Your Google Business Profile is the best place for them to leave your reviews.
Email them links. Create a QR code and put it up in your waiting rooms and examination rooms. Get those reviews.
My prediction is that eventually, online reviews will become a bigger ranking factor than links, especially in healthcare. Chiropractor that actively build their online reputations through a solid review acquisition strategy will reap the benefits down the road.
6. Get Backlinks From Other Local Websites
Google uses links from other websites to measure the trustworthiness of your website. Think about it, if the local newspaper is linking to you, but no other chiropractor in town, it must be for a good reason.
While some of these may coincide with the local citations from the previous section, many won’t.
If you do business with other local businesses (such as personal injury lawyers), you should try getting links from them.
The same goes for local organizations that you are a member of, as well as others that you sponsor. Chambers of commerce, sports leagues, all can potentially help your website to rank better if they link to you. They serve as further proof that you operate in the area that you say you serve and that you have an actively maintained website.
Do you sponsor a local soccer league? Great, ask for a link on their website as part of the sponsorship.
7. Consider Doing Google Ads
If SEO is like planting an apple tree in your back yard, Google Ads is like going to the supermarket and buying apples.
The great thing about Google Ads is that it will start driving patient calls the first month you start. SEO will almost always take several months to deliver a return on investment.
There are few — if any — marketing channels that will deliver as immediate results as Google Ads.
The pay-per-click (PPC) ads in the search results drive roughly 80%-85% of Google’s revenue.
People do click on them. They are the first thing they see in the search results. In some cases, they’re the only thing patients see when they first perform a search (see photo).
Now, getting your chiropractic office’s PPC campaigns delivering consistent, predictable new patients is a blog post in an of itself.
Frankly, it could be a college degree.
For this very reason, you should hire a professional PPC manager experienced with running Google Ads for chiropractors. It will be many orders less expensive to hire someone that has already worked out the kinds and learned the important lessons about running Google Ads for chiropractors than to try to do it yourself.
8. Build Your Social Media Presence
Social media is a wonderful marketing channel for building trust and developing a personal brand.
It’s not something that usually helps overnight.
First, you need to figure out where your audience is. Are they on Facebook? Instagram? TikTok? Whatever social media platform they are on, you need to be there.
Do note, however, that on platforms like Facebook and Instagram it can be incredibly hard to obtain organic reach. As of early 2023, TikTok is actually quite easy.
The one exception to Facebook are the local groups — which you need to become a part of.
These groups often allow businesses to post non self-promotional content. Check them out and find out what the community rules are. Maybe you can start a local series on health.
Social media can be a great driver of personal brand for a chiropractor, but it takes time and it’s important to be sure that you’re doing it on the platform where you can reach your prospective patients.
There is No Panacea for Chiropractic Marketing
The best chiropractic marketing strategies are those that include all of the channels I’ve mentioned above.
To start, it is never advisable to rely entirely on one marketing channel. If anything ever goes wrong, such as an algorithm update that negatively impacts your website, or your PPC account is suspended, you’ll see your pipeline of new patients dry up.
In addition, they all work together.
Get more reviews, and you’ll rank better in the maps and get more calls.
Run Google Ads, and even those patients that scroll past them will be more likely to click on your website in the map results or blue link organic results.
Get your website right and it will help your SEO.
All of the tips above work cohesively to market a chiropractor or any other type of healthcare provider.
