Prefer video? Here’s our founder’s take on the topic of SEO for med spas! Also be sure to check out our other medical spa digital marketing videos on YouTube.
We’ve been doing SEO for medical spas since 2017 and we’ve learned a thing or about what works—and what doesn’t.
In this article (and the video above) we’re going to get into the details of what an effective medical spa SEO campaign looks like, but before that, it’s important to talk about what SEO can do for your med spa and what it cannot do.
To start, SEO will have the lowest cost per lead of any marketing channel available to you.
Unlike Google Ads, social media, or even traditional outdoor advertising, your med spa’s SEO will not stop working the moment you stop spending on it.
We have done SEO for med spas such as BeYouth Medical Spa, who continued to rank both in the map results and the blue link results long after they stopped spending money on SEO:
There is no other marketing channel that continues to be this effective long after you’ve stopped spending money on it.
If you’d like to learn what our approach to SEO for med spas looks like, read on.
If you’d like to speak with someone from our team about SEO for your medical spa, click here. We are a specialized med spa marketing company that can also discuss other channels to grow your business.
What Is Medical Spa SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a marketing channel that aims to increase the visibility of a med spa’s website in the organic search results of search engines such as Google. Effective SEO should increase the amount of traffic to your website from the organic search results.
In other words, SEO will place you in front of the patients your medical spa treats when they search for the treatments you offer in the market where you offer them.
Med spa SEO has 3 parts:
- Ensuring Google can optimally crawl, index and understand your website
- Ensuring you have pages that are as relevant as possible to the searches your potential patients are performing
- Maximizing the trustworthiness and authority of your website by earning backlinks from other websites and building a track record of fulfilling the search intent of internet users
There is a big difference between being #1 and #2 in the SERPs: (tens of) thousands of dollars difference for your business and the livelihood of your employees.
Last thing: SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it feature of your website. The medical spa marketplace is changing, and the products offered are changing. An effective SEO strategy changes with that.
What Can SEO Do For A Medical Spa?
A large number of your clientele perform a Google search at some point before walking through your doors. This is a prime opportunity to be the medical spa they find.
These searches may be informational, asking a question such as “how much do fillers cost?”
They also may be transactional, as in the case of someone searching for “fillers miami.”
In either case, your medical spa can clearly benefit from getting in front of these potential customers as they perform searches on Google.
Are you a wellness-focused spa offering holistic treatments? Or perhaps you specialize in anti-aging procedures? Identifying these unique aspects helps tailor your SEO content strategy.
It’s likely your medical spa offers injectables and users need to know how much it costs, what results they will receive, how soon you can schedule them to receive an injection, and how to get to your location. In short, users have lots of questions about fillers and other injectables and your medical spa could be the one in your market answering them
Making sure that users can find these answers on your website is what SEO does.
Interested in how SEO compares to social media? Check out our “SEO vs social media for medical spas” article!
Medical Spa SEO Begins With An Audit
The first step in medical spa SEO requires performing an audit of your website to find opportunities for technical improvements that can benefit your search visibility.
There are lots of things we’re looking for doing an initial SEO audit for a new client, but a few of those questions that must be answered are:
- Are all of your pages indexed by Google? Have you submitted a sitemap?
- Do you have a Google Business Profile that has a consistent name-address-phone number and listing of services? Have you collected reviews? Is your site link UTM-coded?
- Does your site have a sensible folder hierarchy that reflects dominant keywords? Do pages exploit appropriate keywords in their slugs?
- Does the site have broken links? Redirect chains? Excessively long title tags? Missing alt text?
This data helps identify opportunities for quick SEO wins through technical and qualitative improvements to your website.
These improvements could include:
- Opportunities for better user engagement.
- The discovery of what keywords your website is already ranking for, paving the way for further keyword optimization.
- Optimizing your Google Business Profile
Essentially, this initial analysis provides the foundation for your customized SEO strategy. One of the first parts of that will be the Google Business Profile.
Why is a Google Business Profile (GBP) So Important to Med Spa SEO?
As they say in real estate, it’s all “location location location!”
As you can see above, directly following advertisements and the first of the blue links for “med spa near me” are the “Businesses” listed in the map results. You will not be surprised to learn that many of our clients get between 25%-60% of their website traffic from their Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business).
Because GBPs are so close to the top of the page, they get the most traffic. It’s not your geographic location, but your location on the SERPs.
Where a business appears in the map listings depends on its Google Business Profile.
A Google Business Profile will list your business and its services, anchoring them to a very specific location. Your business must have a GBP, and it needs to have a consistent NAP, which stands for Name Address Phone number. If your name, address, and phone number are not the same on your site and in your
Important Med Spa SEO Data In Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) collects detailed information about user experience in addition to more general data about traffic sources. Look to GA to learn how:
- Users are interacting with your website
- How long they are staying on pages
- The frequency with which they are converting, like booking appointments.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC), by contrast, will show you how your website is being found by search engine users.
Namely, it collects information about the queries (searches) users make, the frequency with which your site is listed in pertinent searches, and the ranking of your website in those searches. This is incredibly important SEO data.
If your med spa SEO agency doesn’t lean heavily on GSC, they are not a good choice.
GSC also highlights any technical issues affecting your site’s SEO, like mobile usability problems or crawl errors, which should be promptly addressed.
Audit Complete, Begin SEO-Informed Content Creation
Once you’ve digested information from Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you should have a sense of how well your site is performing. Now you need to figure out what is possible.
Your medical spa’s SEO strategy will be based on creating service pages and location pages. Depending on the competitiveness of your market, you may also want to work on a content strategy.
Do Keyword Research to Identify Terms to Target
Start by identifying the keywords your potential clients are searching for around the services and treatments your med spa offers. Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google’s Keyword Planner to find high-volume and relevant keywords for your medical spa.
- Identify Seed Keywords: Begin with broad terms related to your services, such as “medical spa,” “chemical peel” or “laser hair removal.”
- Explore Long-Tail Keywords: These are more specific phrases that potential clients might use, like “medical weight loss clinics for semaglutide in Dayton” or “lip fillers Boca Raton” (vs. a generic “fillers” keyword).
- Analyze Competitors: Look at the keywords your competitors are ranking for and identify gaps or opportunities. Sometime these can be helpful.
- Use Keyword Variations: Incorporate synonyms and related terms to cover a broader range of search queries.
By focusing on the right keywords, you’ll ensure that your content meets the needs of your audience at every step of the buyer’s journey and ranks higher in the SERPs.
Create Services Pages Optimized For Your Location
Your medical spa’s website undoubtedly has a menu listing your services, but only having a single page that lists all of those services will not be as relevant to “service + city” searches as competitors that already have dedicated pages for each of their offerings
Instead, the first step in your medical spa’s SEO strategy will be to construct pages for each of those individual services and to optimize them to include references to the city where you would like customers to find you.
For example, if someone searches for “fillers Cherry Hill, NJ,” a local medical spa that has a page that includes the offering and city name in the title tag, H1, and throughout the content will be more relevant to that search than a catch-all page that talks about all of your offerings.
The goal of SEO is to make your website’s content as relevant as possible to the searches your prospective customers are performing. A dedicated page optimized around “fillers miami” will be more relevant for internet users than a general page about injectables.
Read The SERPs (Search Engine Result Page)
A quick look at the search engine results for any given query will tell you what Google has learned people are interested in finding when they perform a search.
For example, look at the results for the query “fillers:”
This is a purely informational query—Google does not show local map results, nor does it show a single local medical spa, dermatologist, or plastic surgeon. Targeting “fillers” as a target keyword for your fillers page would be unfruitful as it doesn’t align with what people want when they perform this search.
To create service pages, examining Google SERPs can be incredibly informative if you know how to read them. It can be easy to just see SERPs as simply a listing of sources of information. But remember that a lot of choices have already been made before this list was created.
For example, you need to pay attention to the way that your competitors are writing title tags, as they will be one of the factors under your control that may entice someone to click on your result instead of theirs.
What value can you communicate about your medical spa in the search results?
Are you better? Cheaper? Faster? Whatever your value proposition is, this could be a way to get people to click on your result despite lacking a #1 position.
Frank talks about this in this short video:
Perhaps more importantly, SERPs show you what Google thinks is valuable content and what is not. Click on the “blue links” in the SERPs and examine the content found on the ranking medical spa websites. The best ranking pages show you what you need to have in order to beat those web pages. So when you look through a page’s content, keep in mind that Google decided, based on this content, to give it a specific priority.
Publish Location Pages Where You Want to Attract Customers
If you’re thinking seriously about SEO, it is because your city or neighborhood already has other medical spas and you need to differentiate your business from those. For this very reason, a location page strategy is necessary.
A location page strategy is an SEO plan that aims to make sure that your services dominate searches for specific cities or neighborhoods. For this, we create a service page for one of your basic services (e.g. fillers), and then we create individual location pages for each of the places where you want to be found. For example, even though your medical spa may be located in Cherry Hill, we want it to be found when people in the other municipalities surrounding Cherry Hill, such as Mt. Laurel or Maple Shade or Haddonfield, search for fillers. So we would create pages for fillers Mt. Laurel, fillers Maple Shade, etc.
One of the primary benefits of location pages is improved local search engine rankings. By optimizing these pages with location-specific keywords, you increase the chances of appearing on the search results when potential clients search for services in their specific area. This can significantly enhance your visibility and attract more local traffic to your website.
PRO TIP: Searches are determined by the search terms (the much vaunted “keywords”) AND the location. All searches are indexed to locations. Google knows where you are searching from (or thinks it does).
If you’re searching for “death of God theology” (oh, it’s as real as a heart attack), the location doesn’t matter. But if you’re searching for “juvéderm lip filler”, Google will show you who sells it locally.
Give that a think.
Optimizing Your Google Business Profile
Where a business appears in the map listings depends on its Google Business Profile.
A Google Business Profile (GBP, formerly Google My Business) will list your business and its services, anchoring them to a very specific location. Your business must have a GBP, and it needs to have a consistent NAP, which stands for Name Address Phone number. If your name, address, and phone number are not the same on your site and in your GBP, Google’s algorithm will be confused.
Don’t hesitate to add images in your Google Business Profile that put the best face (ha!) on what you do. Unless your side hustle is as a commercial photographer, hire someone to do the job. Remember these images will do a lot of work for you: they’re a valuable investment.
Last but probably first: category selection.
Google Business Profiles require you to select a category that accurately reflects the services offered by your business. In this case, it will be “medical spa.”
Develop A Content Strategy Informing (And Converting) Your Clients
While creating services pages is the sine qua non of SEO and location pages are required for all but the least competitive of markets, a content strategy — blogging — is another tool that can help raise the ranking of your website.
But first, let’s correct a misconception about blogging and content strategies: Lots of people think you must have a blog! Au contraire!
Not all businesses need a content strategy!
For example, a local medical spa ranking for a keyword such as “what is microneedling” can count on getting lots of traffic to that article. The problem is that almost of it will be coming from visitors that live too far to become a customer.
The goal is not to get visitors to the website; your goal is to get customers through your website.
There are, however, opportunities to rank for blog topics that need a local response.
The results for a query such as “how much does a hydrafacial cost” will give results from a website that Google has deemed “local” if possible. This can be an opportunity to get in front of prospective clients in your market.
Featured Snippets?
If you are using a content strategy—and even if you’re only creating service pages—you may have created content in competition for what are called “featured snippets.” These are the answers to what SEOs call “long tail keywords” like “how many units of B-t-x will I need?”
Although in the past we have optimized our content to be able to answer these questions—and we still do because users perusing your content will have those questions—featured snippets are like what art was for Hegel, a vestige of the past. Before long search engines will provide these answers without citing “featured snippets.”
So, still write answers to long-tailed keywords, but don’t expect them to win a snippet. Expect them to win a conversion.
Integrate Video Into Your Content Marketing Strategy
Video content is one of the best ways to engage potential clients and improve your SEO. In fact, we’ve seen it’s often better at establishing a relationship with prospective clients before they even contact you. It’s much easier to get a feel for someone through video, so you start building trust with your patients on the outset.
- Create Informative Videos: Produce videos that explain your services, such as “What to Expect During a Chemical Peel” or “Benefits of Laser Hair Removal.” Even better, repurpose your blog articles into videos. You already have the outline and topic, all you need to do is record it.
- Use YouTube: Upload your videos to YouTube, optimizing them with relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags. Long-form videos are best suited for YouTube which means your repurposed blog content is ideal here.
- Embed Videos on Your Website: Add videos to your service pages and blog posts to enhance user engagement and reduce bounce rates. Embedded videos are great for increasing time-on-page and user engagement both of which Google considers in their rankings.
- Leverage Social Media: Share your videos on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok to reach a wider audience. You can cut out short clips from your long-form videos to use on your social channels to easily add a good amount of content you post.
Integrating video content will not only boost your SEO but also help build trust and credibility with potential clients.
Off-Page SEO Tactics to Expand Your Reach
Off-page SEO focuses on activities outside your website that influence your search engine rankings. We already touched on your Google Business Profile, but two other elements you need to put effort towards are link building and reputation management. Both of these tactics boost your authority and reputation in the med spa industry and can help improve your rankings in the search engine results pages.
Link Building to Boost Your Site’s Authority
Link building is the process of securing backlinks from other websites back to yours and is essential for increasing your website’s authority and improving your search rankings. Think of backlinks as a vote of confidence in your site; the more you have, the more Google thinks your site is reputable and relevant for target topics within your market.
Here are some link building tactics for medical spas:
- Guest Posting: Write articles for reputable websites in the beauty and wellness industry. Include a link back to your site in your author bio. Guest posts have become less and less valuable as Google devalues links on them. That said, they still have a place in off-page SEO for medical spas as they can help extend your reach to clients you might’ve missed.
- Create Shareable Content: Produce high-quality content that others will want to link to, such as infographics, case studies, or comprehensive guides. This is a bit trickier as you need to put in the work to produce this content, but becoming a source of information will boost your authority and reputation which can lead to more leads and patients.
- Local Directories: List your business on local directories and review sites like Yelp, Google My Business, and Healthgrades. This is one of the most basic and integral forms of link building for medical spas. A lot of people turn to these directory sites first when researching local services including medical spas, so getting listed there further cements your NAP (name, address, phone number) for Google’s local search results and gets you in front of potential clients early in the buyer’s journey.
Building a robust backlink profile will enhance your site’s credibility and drive more organic traffic.
Reputation Management to Engage with Your Clients
Managing your online reputation is crucial for attracting new clients and retaining existing ones. Attracting and interacting with reviews shows you’re dedicated to providing the best service possible.
- Encourage Reviews: Ask satisfied clients to leave reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Positive reviews can significantly impact your local SEO as Google considers reviews in their own local rankings.
- Respond to Reviews: Address both positive and negative reviews promptly. Show appreciation for positive feedback and offer solutions for any issues mentioned in negative reviews.
- Monitor Mentions: Use tools like Google Alerts to monitor mentions of your spa online. Address any issues or engage with positive mentions to show your responsiveness.
- Showcase Testimonials: Display client testimonials prominently on your website and social media pages to build trust with potential clients.
By actively managing your online reputation, you’ll enhance your medical spa’s credibility and attract more clients.
Not the Last Things for Med Spa SEO: User Experience, Mobile Usability, Technical SEO
Now that your site’s content has been created, be it in the form of service pages, location pages, and possibly a content strategy, you need to address backlinks, your site’s user experience, mobile usability, and “technical SEO.”
In truth user experience is something that should have guided the creation of your service and location pages. Similarly, you should already have been attentive to mobile usability.
User Experience
Your website’s effectiveness in conversion depends on how seamless its user experience is. Can users find what they need quickly? If they cannot, don’t expect them to stick around. Must they scroll to the bottom of the page to find contact information? I sure hope not! Is a call to action visible before the fold? Does the page load quickly?
A positive user experience increases the likelihood of users taking desired actions, such as booking appointments or making inquiries.
By prioritizing user experience, med spas can foster trust, credibility, and satisfaction among visitors, encouraging them to convert into loyal clients. Ultimately, a superior user experience plays a significant role in maximizing conversions and driving the success of your med spa business.
Mobile Usability
Depending on your services, your website’s users could be accessing it as much as 60% of the time by mobile devices, making it necessary to optimize for this experience. Google and other search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites, considering factors such as responsive design, fast loading times, and easy navigation on mobile devices. This means that responsive web design, legible fonts, intuitive menus, and touch-friendly buttons are all absolutely necessary. By prioritizing mobile usability, med spas can enhance their visibility in mobile search results, attract more mobile users, and ultimately improve their SEO performance.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves elements such as website speed, mobile responsiveness, XML sitemaps, structured data markup, canonical tags, and optimizing URL structures. Ensuring proper technical SEO implementation can improve your website’s crawlability, indexability, and user experience. Med spas should pay attention to technical SEO to ensure their websites are technically sound, which contributes to a strong foundation for successful SEO strategies.
Schedule a Time to Talk with Us
I hope that this information was helpful as you begin building your medical spa’s online presence. Because so many factors affect how lucrative your online presence can be, it’s vital to know each aspect of the SEO process so you don’t waste time and money.
Sagapixel is a full-service SEO agency that can handle every aspect of your medical spa SEO strategy. We have experience working with medical spas and know what keywords and strategies lead to traffic growth and conversions.
Schedule a meeting so we can show you what’s possible.
