Each month, over 90,000 Australians look up “chiropractor” or “chiropractor near me” on Google. Thousands more look for related searches, like “chiropractor Sydney”.
Many of these people are in need of immediate medical help. When they see a website on Google’s first page, they click on it. Many of them end up becoming paying chiropractic patients.
Getting yourself on that first page as a chiropractor can send dozens, hundreds, even thousands of clients your way. The only question is, how do you actually do it?
In this article, we’re giving you the answer, making it easy for you to grow your business. Here’s how you get a steady flow of interested prospects without paying for expensive ads. Here’s everything you need to know about SEO for chiropractors.
Why Do I Need SEO as a Chiropractor?
Generally speaking, the public doesn’t trust chiropractic ads – anything in the health industry requires significant trust. People like to evaluate chiropractors by carefully researching them online first. Eventually, they’ll choose one that looks good and book a session.
Since ads for chiropractors don’t get too many clicks, they’re very expensive. There’s not a lot of users engaging with the ads – so you need to pay more per click. It’s normal to see CPC rates of $100 or more as a chiropractor.
SEO allows you to skip the ads and get better clients; ready-to-buy clients who feel like they know and trust you. It gives you traffic from interested prospects and educates them about your service and your offer with blog posts, articles, reviews, videos, and more.
SEO is the magic tool that lets excited prospects find all your online content and grow enough confidence in you to schedule an appointment.
This makes SEO the bread-and-butter marketing channel for chiropractors. It’s how most practices find business, stay profitable, and grow over time.
What Is SEO for Chiropractors?
SEO is optimising your online presence for Google to increase rankings and get more visitors to your chiropractor website. There are three main areas you’ll need to work on to get page-one rankings and the traffic they bring:
- On-page SEO concerns the way your website’s content is written and displayed.
- Off-page SEO is the links that bring traffic from another site or platform to your chiropractic website.
- Technical SEO is about how your website performs technically — how quickly it loads, how the directories and pages are organised, and other factors.
On-page SEO for Chiropractors
On-page SEO is about creating content that gets discovered by your potential chiropractic clients as well as search engines.
So you’re creating content for two simultaneous purposes: 1) search engines like Google and 2) readers that want more information about how a chiropractor can help their pain.
Here are 6 tips for creating profitable content.
1. Find the Right Keywords
Keywords in your content are critical because they’re what prospective clients look up.
You can find the keywords people use to discover chiropractors with tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. Look for keywords with low ranking difficulty and high traffic volumes.
You’ll need to build a mix of content using different keyword types:
- Short or generic terms using one to three words attract a broad audience, but are hyper-competitive. “Perfume for men” is one example. Your site gets a lot of visitors, but getting a higher site rank is tough and expensive.
- Long-tail keywords are more specific and attract a small, targeted group with high conversion rates. You get fewer visitors but more customers. An example of a long-tail keyword is, “SEO for chiropractors”.
- Informational keywords like ‘How does a chiropractor help headaches?’ help you build trust and authority.
- Audience-based keywords like ‘chiropractor for children’ target specific demographics and are good for pillar content.
- Location-based keywords like ‘chiropractor near me’ get local area clients. Use your location in the keyword phrase, and Google will send nearby searchers.
After choosing a keyword, you’re ready to create content.
2. Work With Outlines
Once you’ve chosen your keyword, research what currently ranks on page one for it. This will give you a good idea of what your own content should look like.
For example, if every page that ranks for “cat food” features the same Purina product, you want to cover that product too.
Research by putting common and interesting points into an outline. Then go deeper by adding new analysis, statistics, facts, and current events. This will set you up to have incredible on-page content.
3. Write Your Article
Source: Chiropractic Australia
Remember, you’re writing for Google and humans. Humans need content that’s information-packed but easy to read. Google wants keywords in the right places. Use your primary keyword in the following places, but don’t overuse it elsewhere:
- In the title
- In the first 200 words
- In subheadings
- Sprinkled throughout the text
An SEO writer’s platform like Surfer SEO or MarketMuse will help you get the best keyword density and tell you what related keywords to use.
4. Connect Articles with Internal Links
Links between articles help readers find more information and keep them on your site. Internal links also enable Google to establish relevance so it knows whom to show your content to. InLinks can analyse your site and suggest linking opportunities.
5. Establish Relevance and Authority with Outbound Links
Links to other established chiropractors or medical sites that Google trusts put you in a good light. Google starts trusting your chiropractic site more and rewards it with higher rankings.
One thing you want to avoid doing too much of is linking to competing websites. This can hurt your SEO rankings by subordinating you to the competition’s domains in Google’s point of view.
6. Give Content Six to Nine Months to Mature
SEO content marketing takes time to develop. You can speed up the process by creating and linking to more pieces of relevant content. It also helps to drive traffic to new content through social media posts and emails.
Still… Search engines need time to push your content up the ranks. It usually takes content 6-12 months to mature; backlinks (off-page SEO) takes longer, 3-9 months on average.
Off-Page SEO for Chiropractors
Off-page SEO is different from on-page SEO. While you can control on-page SEO by creating the best content, Google also uses signals outside your own website. Below, we explain what these are and give you 3 tips on off-page SEO
1. Backlinks are Critical
The most heavily weighted factor Google uses in off-page SEO is the number and quality of backlinks. Backlinks are the links on other sites that direct people to your site.
Each backlink you get is like a vote of trust in Google’s eyes. It tells Google – “hey, other websites trust us enough to link to us”. This is a fast way to scale your traffic and increase SEO rankings.
One thing you want to do is get earned backlinks, e.g. from guest blog posts, media mentions, and press releases. Buying is discouraged by Google.
If the algorithm catches you paying for off-site SEO, the penalties can be severe. It’s not uncommon to lose all or most of your traffic and rankings instantly when this happens.
Fortunately, if you’re willing to put in the effort or hire a professional, there are many acceptable ways to get quality backlinks that will improve your rankings and get more visitors:
- Provide outstanding services or donate services to get media mentions. Google loves these because they provide social proof.
- Use press releases.
- Write guest posts for other people’s sites in exchange for a backlink.
- Create podcasts and list them on chiropractor podcast directories or be a podcast guest.
2. Local SEO Signals
Local SEO gets your practice found by people searching for chiropractors in your area. To understand it, you need to understand citations.
Citations are any online mentions of a business’s NAP (name, address, phone number) data. There are hundreds of citation sites, but being on the major ones is enough to get you found by hundreds of local prospects each month.
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the most powerful citation. Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, Foursquare, and Yahoo all have their own powerful local SEO platforms.
With each platform, fill in as much information as you can to avoid being confused with other chiropractor businesses. Use the correct information at the start of building citations; many sites automatically pick up this data and propagate it.
Anything you post that’s incorrect will likely be reposted to other websites. Finding and correcting misinformation manually can be difficult. There is a free automated citation finder tool that will help if this happens to you.
3. Social Media and Influencer Marketing for SEO
Source: Back In Care Chiropractor
Google has stated that social media metrics do not influence search engine rankings. Anecdotally, though, the number of visitors you get from Social seems to have a huge impact on SEO.
The biggest off-page SEO signal is if a famous person mentions or endorses your services. One way to get this is by paying for it.
One way to achieve this is to offer to pay influencers to create content for your site or mention you to their followers. Other sites will pick up those mentions and likely give you more off-page signals – mentions and backlinks – helping your SEO even more.
Technical SEO for Chiropractors
Technical SEO refers to website SEO signals that aren’t content-related. This means user experience features, site load speed, and directory structuring.
Basic technical SEO is easy to with WordPress plugins like SEOPress and Yoast. Advanced technical SEO is difficult and often requires an experienced developer. Either way, technical optimization makes search engines happy and rewards you with higher rankings.
One factor that’s especially important is site load speed. Google downgrades sites that take too long to load; users don’t like them either. You can make your site faster by:
- Using a caching plugin like WP Rocket
- Using dedicated hosting instead of shared hosting
- Paying a little extra for cloud hosting your area
Designing your site to display well on mobile first is critical because up to 63% of visitors come from mobile. The number in Australia is a little lower, but still high.
Ready to Take Over Google’s First Page?
Are you ready to get new leads and customers from SEO traffic?
Then you might want to talk to the experts at Megaphone: Australia’s #1-rated agency.
Our SEO experts will happily give you a free strategic consultation. We’ll break down what SEO can do for your website, how you can go about scaling organic traffic, and more. These consultations are usually $1,200 each – so sign up for yours while they last!
