The Opportunities Presented by SEO for IV Therapy Clinics
As an IV therapy clinic, your most valuable clients are generally clients local to your clinic. In today’s day and age, traditional marketing (billboards, radio, tv, etc.) only goes so far in generating new clients, making it essential to have a strong online presence.
Google and other search engines are typically how potential patients will find an IV therapy clinic, which is precisely why SEO can be so impactful in driving new business.
The alternative to SEO for an IV clinic is Google Ads, which can drive leads, but are typically competitive/expensive, at around $60-$150 per conversion.
An IV therapy clinic that is in a position to be able to think more long-term about its marketing would be well advised to invest in SEO over PPC, so we’ve created this article as a way to help you maximize your online presence and bring more qualified traffic through organic search.
3 Steps to Follow For a Successful IV Therapy SEO Campaign
Building Location Pages for Areas Your IV Clinic Serves
Local landing pages are must-haves for any IV therapy clinic that serves clients in more than one area, whether in the same city or across multiple states.
Searchers are always looking for businesses local to their area, so the best way to put your clinic in front of potential clients is by creating local landing pages that target IV therapy and related keyword variations such as IV drip therapy, IV vitamin therapy, IV hydration therapy, and any other relevant variation to IV therapy.
Each local landing page should be centered around IV therapy and your target location. So if your IV therapy clinic is located in Miami, and you want to expand your audience reach, you can create targeted location pages for areas surrounding Miami such as Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale.
Another item to consider when creating content is to understand the intent behind a search.
In other words, when someone searches for “IV therapy” from our office, this is what they find:
The top result is an informational page, while the others are location pages. This is likely because Google has determined that when someone searches for “IV therapy,” there’s a good chance they’ll want information about it, but they also may be actually looking for a provider.
An informational page will likely be an article which typically does not have any transactional intent and is more so there for educational purposes like a guide, a how to, or a list. With transactional content, it usually indicates intent to complete a transaction, whether it’s looking for products you can buy online or searching for a local business like a restaurant or medical spa. Navigational searches are generally branded searches where a user is looking for a direct result like Nike shoes or Adidas pants.
The reason this is so important to understand is because the intent behind a search will ultimately determine whether your content will rank or not.
By optimizing your page around these queries and your target location, you will increase the relevancy of your content to better match the user intent of the search.
Once you have your pages written, you will need to properly optimize them to maximize their relevance to your targeted “IV therapy” keywords.
Experienced SEOs normally begin this process by editing the content to include semantically-related keywords and follow up by using tools like Surfer and Google Cloud’s Natural Language Processing tool. These can be used to measure how edits increase the salience and the categorization of the entities found within the content.
By using natural language processing tools to optimize your content, you will be effectively increasing the relevancy of your content to a user’s search, which can lead to a better likelihood of getting your content to rank for a particular query (I will illustrate how to optimize your content using Natural language processing more in detail further on in the article).
Keyword Research Is an Important Part of SEO for IV Therapy Clinics
Keyword research is essential for IV therapy SEO because it helps marketers understand what potential clients are searching for and why they search for it. Since we do not want to target just one keyword, we can use keyword research to discover related keywords that are relevant to your business and can help drive more clicks to the website.
In addition to understanding how potential clients are searching for IV therapy and local competitors, search engines also use keywords and entities within your content to determine the relevance of your content to a search.
Even though “IV Therapy” will likely be the main keyword, you’ll ideally want to include other keyword variations such as “IV Hydration Therapy” “IV Vitamin Therapy” or any other keyword that’s semantically related to IV therapy. Even using terminology like “client” and “patient” can help with semantic search when it comes to IV therapy SEO.
With that being said, when optimizing around your location, you will not need to over-optimize and add your location next to each keyword. Keyword spamming not only hurts the readability of your content but also can negatively impact your SEO efforts as it can be seen as search engine manipulation.
Since Google understands entities and not just keywords, their algorithm can process that your content is based around a certain region. This can be processed based on natural language processing and the salience (importance) of that location in regards to the content written.
Google Ads’ Keyword Planner Can Be a Valuable Source of Keyword Data
The keyword planner, as mentioned before, is a great way to find keywords related to IV Therapy and their corresponding keyword volumes. Taking this a step further, the keyword planner can also provide search data for specific locations (zip codes, neighborhoods, cities, counties, etc.).
So, if we wanted to research IV therapy searches in New York City, we can look at specific keyword data from that area. The keyword planner also provides data for branded search terms which will show you how users search for your IV clinic and your competitors.
Google Search Console Can Provide More Precise Data than the Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google Search Console can also be used as a keyword research tool. Impressions in Google Search Console will tell you how often your URL showed for a specific keyword, which can provide real-world insights into their search volume.
The keyword data found in Google Search Console is an arguably more reliable data source than Google Ads’ keyword planner.
The only downside to relying only on Google Search Console for keyword data is that it will only provide you with data after your content has been indexed and ranking within the search engine results page. So it may take a little bit of time and effort to receive keyword data from Google Search Console, but when you do, it will be some of the most valuable compared to any other SEO tool.
This is because Google Search Console will not only provide you with data related to your targeted keyword, but it will also provide you with keyword data for numerous keyword variations.
So if your page ranks for IV therapy, your performance data will likely look like this:
In this data, we can see that GSC provides us with over 419 keywords that are all in some way related to IV therapy.
Most of these keywords are not even included on the website; however, Google can determine that these keywords are all related or variations of each other, leading Google to rank our content for these terms.
With this data available, we could look for opportunities to include these keywords within the content to help improve rankings and thus drive more traffic to the website.
Third-Party Tools
Lastly, for keyword research tools, we have third-party tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. These tools not only provide you with keywords and their volumes, but they’ll also provide you with questions, phrases, and related keywords all based around your target keyword.
So, in this case, if we use our head term, “IV Therapy,” we will receive thousands of related keywords, questions, and semantically related keywords, all with their corresponding search volume attached to them.
However, there is a downside to solely relying on these third-party tools. The keyword volumes they provide us with are generally not accurate. Compared to data provided by Google Ads and Google Search Console, it commonly does not reflect the actual search volume.
While these tools are great for finding related keywords and frequently asked questions, free tools like Google Ads’ Keyword Planner, and Google Search Console can provide more accurate data to guide your keyword research.
On-Page Optimization Using Natural Language Processing
On-page SEO is the practice of maximizing the relevance of your page’s content to the searches your customers are performing.
On-page SEO consists of editing metadata (title tags and meta descriptions), setting headers, internal linking, optimizing the body of the content around your target keyword, secondary keywords, and semantically related keywords and entities.
On-page usually comes after the content has been created and is ready to be published; this is generally the last step to complete before the content goes live.
Here’s a quick on-page checklist to follow when optimizing your content
- Make sure your targeted keyword is in your title tag
- While meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, include the target keyword to influence a higher click-through rate
- Include your target keyword in the URL
- Link from other pages on your website to the pages you hope to rank on Google. It is advisable that you use anchor text you wish those pages to rank for when adding these hyperlinks.
- Use your keywords within the headers (use it when it applies, don’t spam it)
- Set alt text for your images Using semantically related terms whenever possible
- Use your target keyword (or a variation of it) in the opening paragraph of your content, As we have seen machine learning models deem such entities as more salient when they’re found early in the document
- Run your content through Google’s natural language processing tool and edit it to maximize the salience of entities related to your target keywords
Natural Language Processing Tool
One tool that can help guide you when reviewing your content is Google Cloud’s Natural Language Processing tool. The NLP tool provides us insights into the ways machine learning interprets a piece of content.
Here we have the demo text for Google’s free natural language processing tool. In its example, we have four categories that are identified by the tool:
- an organization,
- a location,
- a person,
- a consumer good item.
Google can pick apart and categorize different entities based on the text provided in the box here. There is no limit to how many times you can use the tool or how many characters can be used.
Not only that, but the tool will also categorize based on the content provided. Meaning if your text is solely about IV therapy, this tool will be able to categorize this content under beauty and aesthetics. Similarly, for legal help, if you are writing a service page for a law firm, your content will be categorized as legal services.
You can see a complete list of Google’s categories here.
Internal Linking to Your Most Important Pages
Internal links are important for both users and search engines.
To start, they are needed for visitors to navigate through your website, being the way visitors can click through to pages they wish to visit.
In addition to being beneficial for the user, they’re also helpful to search engines as they make it easier for search engines to navigate through your site and index your content.
Links also pass along PageRank, which Google uses as part of its calculation of the “authority” of a page. The way you structure the internal links of your website can have a tremendous impact on these pages being able to rank highly on search engines (or not).
Having a Compelling Meta Title and Description
Ensuring you have a compelling title tag and meta description is important when you are first publishing a page or post related to IV therapy. Meta tags are often what a searcher sees when looking through the search engine results. You’ll want to ensure your title tag is set and enticing for when a user is looking for a nearby IV therapy clinic.
You want something that will immediately catch a searcher’s attention and show them why your page is worth being clicked on. Preferably, in this case, you want to ensure your title and description are not being cut off.
Optimize your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile, or GBP, will likely be one of the main ways you bring searchers to your IV therapy clinic’s website.
The Local 3-Pack is valuable because it is usually the first organic result for searches related to IV therapy and it presents an opportunity for your clinic to stand out by displaying positive reviews.
If someone were to search for “IV Therapy in Philadelphia,” the first organic results they will scroll past are three top-rated Google Business Profiles of IV Therapy clinics located in Philadelphia. This top position is critical because Google’s Local Pack shows up in the number one position 93% of the time. That means that if your GBP profile is strong enough, you can be at the top of the SERPs 93% of the time.
88% of consumer local business searches on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours. That is precisely why it is so important to have a strong business profile for your clinic. If your IV therapy clinic is at the top of the local pack, then you have a better chance of acquiring the majority of the search volume for any keywords related to IV therapy. So if a user searches for IV hydration or IV drip therapy, your clinic’s business listing will likely still show up.
Now that we are done with the “why,” now it’s time for the “how.” The main goal of your Google Business profile is to give users all the information they need without having to go to your website. You will need to include your clinic name, address, phone number, business category, business description and services provided, business hours, pictures, and more.
Adding all of these fields to your GBP profile helps improve the chance of your IV clinic showing up in Google’s local pack, which improves the likelihood of someone calling your clinic or visiting your physical location.
Generate Quality Reviews
Generating reviews is one aspect of your GBP profile that you will have less control over. Having reviews on your GBP helps your profile perform better both in the eyes of Google and searchers, and you can use the reviews to help with your standard organic search results.
Google’s search algorithms are secret, but one thing that we know for certain is that Google reviews have an impact on Google’s local search. According to a Moz study, review signals such as review quantity, velocity, diversity, etc., make up 15.44% of local pack ranking factors and 9% of localized organic ranking factors.
On top of helping your GBP profile rank higher, reviews make your business look much better. 91% of consumers regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more.
How do we go about getting reviews? The most effective way to generate reviews for either your website or for your GBP listing is to just ask your customers after you provide a service with a positive result.
It may seem too easy, but if you provide a service for your customers that ends on a positive note, they are more likely to leave a review. In fact, in-person review requests are the most popular method of asking for reviews.
Another method of acquiring reviews is by using services like Square as they will completely automate all review follow-ups. Making all of the hard work that typically comes with review acquisition fully automated.
Square can also help with acquiring emails as well, which is beneficial for email marketing campaigns as they allow you to convey to previous patients any new deals or offerings at your clinic.
Link Building
There are two ways that search engines use links: to discover new web pages and to help determine how well a page should rank in their results.
The most common and effective way to build quality links for IV therapy clinics is through Digital PR and contributing articles to other websites. Generally, guest bloggers write for similar blogs within their industry and location in order to attract traffic back to their website, boost their domain authority, increase brand awareness, and build relationships with peers in their industry.
Citation Building
Citations refer to online references of your business. Google Business Profile is by far one of the most important to maintain, but there are several directories and websites your IV therapy clinic should be listed on, such as Facebook, Apple Maps, Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Bing.
To start, potential clients do check these websites to read reviews of IV therapy clinics like yours.
In addition, Google uses data found on directories such as Yelp, Facebook, and Twitter to collect information about businesses. The more confident it is in the accuracy of the name, address, and phone number found in your Google Business Profile, the more likely Google is to show it in the map results for searches such as “NAD+ therapy near me.”
Improving Your Visibility in Search through Technical SEO
In our last step, you’ll want to ensure that your site is properly optimized from a technical standpoint. This includes checking that no links are broken, your pages can be crawled and indexed, your site is loading fast, and your site is mobile friendly, but isn’t limited to that..
Below we’ll mention a few ways to improve your technical SEO and prevent technical issues from hindering your clinic’s SEO efforts.
Some of the ways to improve your technical SEO is by looking at the following:
- Make sure Google is able to crawl and index all of the important pages of your websiteUsing HTTPS instead of HTTP
- Ensure your website loads quickly
- Have a mobile-friendly website
- Fix broken outbound and internal links
- Get rid of any thin content with no clicks or impressions
- Delete any duplicate content
- Make sure your URLs all have a clean and easy-to-follow structure
- Add any relevant Schema data to the website
- Remove links to pages with little to no visitors from your top navigation as well as your footer
Having a technically-sound website will ensure Google can optimally crawl and index your website.
Make Sure Your Pages Are Getting Indexed
First and foremost, if you have any service or location pages, or blogs your clinic is trying to rank for, the most important step is making sure googlebot is able to discover, crawl, and index pages on your website. If you’re unsure whether your website can be crawled and indexed, you can check in two ways.
The first would be to view the source code of the individual page you are inspecting to see whether it can be indexed or not.
Once you have the page source opened, you can just do a “command f” to find <meta name= which will tell you whether your content is set to be indexed or not. If you have this tag switched to “noindex” this will disway search engines from including this page within their index thus preventing it from showing in the SERPs.
The next way to check whether your content is being indexed or not, is by checking in Google Search Console. If you open the coverage report for your business’s website, it will tell you the pages that have been excluded from Google’s index for whatever reason.
The most common reasons we’ve seen is between discovered currently not indexed and crawled currently not indexed. With “discovered,” the page has been discovered by a crawler, but has yet to be crawled. For crawled, it means that the page was discovered and crawled, but was not included in Google’s index. This can be caused by numerous things, ranging from poor content quality to duplicate content.
For any URL, whether it’s broken, marked as excluded, or perfectly fine, you can request to have priority crawled. So in the case of the pages marked as discovered currently not indexed, you can submit that specific URL to be added to a priority crawl list which will then give that page a better likelihood of being crawled and indexed. It’s not always guaranteed that the page will be indexed, but as long as the page quality is high and there are internal links on the website pointing to it, then it should have no problem being indexed.
Have a Clean URL Structure for Service/Location Pages
When following a location page strategy, it’s always important to have your URL structure as clean as possible. Meaning we would want to have a parent page (a page that will likely be found in the navigation and footer) with a bunch of child pages attached to it. So it will look something like this: www.website.com/iv-therapy/location.
Our /iv-therapy/ part of the URL will be our parent page which will likely be dedicated to a larger area like a whole state or part of the state, and then the individual locations will be branched off of this parent page. This allows the URL to look clean and easily navigable for users and search engine crawlers.
Having a clean URL structure with these location pages also presents the opportunity to add breadcrumbs to the site. Breadcrumbs, which are considered internal links, act as a way back to the home page.
No matter the depth of your page, the breadcrumbs will have an internal link pointed at each section along your URL hierarchy allowing for PageRank to be passed around and for the home page to accumulate more authority. The home page will always pack the most punch so that’s why it’s always optimal to internally link your target pages on the home page.
Most importantly, we want to make sure our URLs are user-friendly, meaning that we want users to easily understand the page they are going to just by looking at the URL of the slug. This will build trust with users and leave them with a positive experience with your website. What you want your URL to avoid is this: www.website.com/22-19-2022/iv-3920239, as it looks less trustworthy and doesn’t prompt a user to explore more within the website.
Run a Site Crawl and Correct Any Issues Found
As mentioned above, one way to derail your SEO efforts is by having numerous site quality issues like broken links and redirect chains. One way to monitor this is by using Ahrefs and SEMrush to find any technical issues that might be hindering your SEO efforts.
SEMrush and Ahrefs will both provide information on the specific issue found (broken links, redirect loops, broken images, missing alt text), the number of issues found across the site, and how to fix each issue.
It’s crucial to check these reports at least once a month to make sure none of these issues are hindering your SEO efforts. Broken links are an absolute must fix as it can make users frustrated and waste PageRank that’s being passed through internal links.
Google Search Console can also be used for determining any errors with the site. While GSC will not provide you with a whole list of issues like Ahrefs and SEMrush, it will still provide you with any dire errors that need to be fixed like “submitted URL blocked by robots.txt” or “redirect errors.”
The coverage report will provide you with 4 different tags for URLs found on your site. errors (anything that needs to be fixed immediately), warnings, valid (properly submitted and indexed), and excluded.
SEO Best Works When Combined with Google Ads and both Paid & Organic Social Media
It is not advisable for any business to rely on one marketing channel, and this remains true for an IV clinic.
To start, if anything were ever to go wrong with that marketing channel, your clinic could find itself with a client acquisition problem. Second, SEO, social media, traditional advertising, paid search, email marketing, and other types of marketing all feed into one another.
The best way to maximize the ROI on SEO is to combine it with other marketing channels. For example, social media can help increase mentions of your brand across the web which can help SEO as it helps Google better understand and classify your business within their knowledge graph.
PPC can help increase the CTR of an organic result thus increasing click volume, and overtime, potentially increasing search rank.
Once your ad is set up and running, you will start to see more conversions start come in immediately. Organic social will take slightly longer than PPC as results are not immediate and it does take time to build a loyal following. With consistent brand messaging and posting, you will help drive qualified traffic and loyal customers who will likely convert more than once to your site.
Lastly with a combined SEO and PPC strategy, initial visits can become regular clients through consistent email marketing and social media.
Sagapixel offers SEO, PPC, and social media services for IV therapy clinics who are looking to grow their traffic. Call us today to learn more about how we can help grow your clinic.
