When running a med spa, most of your patients will likely be from your local area. Unless you offer specialist services that no other local med spas offer, you’re going to be competing against every other med spa in your area for business.
To do this well and stand out in the search engine results, you need to focus on local med spa marketing tactics. While you shouldn’t neglect general, organic SEO and other strategies in your marketing mix, local marketing really can bring you excellent results.
Read on to find out why local marketing is so important for med spas and what our top five local med spa marketing tactics are.
The importance of “local” in marketing
When seeking treatment and help from a med spa, people tend to consider a variety of things, including price, services available, reviews, other people’s experiences of your services, and, of course, location.
While competing on price is rarely a good idea, you can do something about every other consideration that potential patients have. You can create the best possible first impression for new patients via your customer service and attention to detail, your general marketing efforts, and your local marketing.
Local marketing in particular can have a big impact for any business with a fixed location or service area, and med spas can benefit from this too.
You need to be found in “near me” searches and “open now” searches as well as in the local map pack. It’s important to be highly visible in local searches and stand out from, or at least alongside, your competitors.
From Search Engine Journal:
“30% of all searches it processes are related to location, according to Google.”
“A recent local SEO survey found that 82% of consumers read online reviews for businesses during a local search and spend close to 14 minutes doing so before making a decision.”
“83% of searchers use Google Search to learn more about nearby businesses; 55% use Google Maps, 44% Apple Maps, 39% turn to Yahoo, and 31% choose Bing.”
From Google Support:
“Complete and accurate Google Business profiles get 7x more clicks than those missing information and are 70% more likely to attract location visits.”
From these statistics, you can see how important local search can be to your med spa. You can also begin to see some of the things that can make a difference to being found in local search.
The next section will give you our top five local med spa marketing tactics and strategies and show you what you need to do to get attention on local search.
5 local marketing strategies med spas should invest in:
While, of course, med spas do have to bear HIPAA in mind when marketing, there is a lot you can still do to gain visibility in local search.
Check out what we recommend to our med spa clients below:
1) Local SEO
While you shouldn’t neglect the rest of your SEO activities, local SEO in particular is excellent for attracting those local leads and gaining visibility in local search.
When you think of SEO, one of the first things to come to mind is keywords and key phrases. It’s exactly the same with local SEO. Do your research and find out what potential customers are searching for. What keywords and phrases are they using? Do they use any particular jargon? What questions are they asking?
You should use a combination of these keywords, along with local search keywords in your copy. Customers may search for “med spa + your location,” or they may search specifically for “microdermabrasion + your county + your state” or “anti-aging treatment + your town.”
Try to use local keywords in your meta title and meta description, in the first paragraph of your copy, as close to the start of your heading as possible, and at least a couple more times throughout your copy.
Bear in mind that this applies whether you’re writing web copy, service descriptions, or blog posts. It also applies to filling in your Google Business Profile and any business directory listings you have. Using the right keywords well and answering the right questions really does make a difference to your local SEO.
If you complete your Google Business Profile fully, you may also appear in the top three listings in the map pack on Google. And if you do, with a highly attractive and appealing profile, you may well gain leads and more patients from appearing in the pack listings.
We’ll talk about your Google Business Profile in more detail later as it’s an important part of your local search visibility.
So often, with the search engines, you have to guess what ranking factors they consider, but with Google local search, Google is happy to spell out at least some of the factors that will get you found:
1) Recency
Whenever people talk about marketing, they talk about the importance of fresh, high-quality content that’s posted consistently and regularly. The reason for this is that the search engines favor fresh content as long as it’s of high quality and relevant to the search being performed.
If you can create and follow a good content marketing plan with local keywords included, you will gain visibility in local search.
It’s not all down to you, however. The search engines also highly value user-generated content, such as reviews. Part of your local SEO plan should be to encourage fresh reviews.
2) Relevance
The search engines will do their best to tightly match the relevance of any content they show to what searchers are looking for. Again, good keywords and content can help you show that you offer the services local searchers are looking for.
3) Distance
If you are the closest med spa to a searcher, you will show up at the top of the local listings, but only if you also show you are relevant in the search. For example, suppose you don’t offer chemical peels but another clinic further away does. In that case, Google will prioritize their listing over yours, even though you are closer, because they are more relevant to what the potential patient is looking for.
4) Prominence
If your med spa is known for treating celebrities or for being the largest clinic with the most services in the area, you will be considered more prominent by Google and show up higher in local search. Your prominence is directly linked to how many other sites/people are talking about your med spa and linking to your website. However, prominence is only one factor in the rankings. Relevance and proximity can help you overcome this factor even if your med spa wouldn’t be considered the most prominent in your area.
5) Availability
Potential clients want to be able to find businesses that are “open now”. They don’t always want to wait until the following day or later on.
All you need to do to ensure you come up on a search for “med spa, your town, open now” is to include your opening hours on your website and your Google Business Profile. It’s a small step that can make a big difference.
2) Digital Advertising
While local search tactics can take time to have an effect, you can use digital ads to get yourself to the top of the search engines immediately.
Good keyword search is extremely important here. You need to understand the audience you are aiming for and what they are searching for to do well with digital ads.
Of course, you also need a budget. Work out what you can afford to spend and then put some pay-per-click ads to work for you on Google and Facebook.
Both platforms will let you select the audience, particular keywords, demographics, locations, and more to help you tightly target the right potential patients.
With great copy on your ads, it’s also another chance to create an excellent first impression.
3) Reviews & Ratings
It’s highly likely that word of mouth is one of your biggest ways to get clients. Especially with any kind of medical care, people want to hear from those that have experienced your treatments. They want to know what to expect, how it will feel, if it works, and more. They want reassurance that they are choosing the right med spa for their own treatments.
While you can’t give away any patient details and what treatments they had due to HIPAA, you can ask your existing patients to write you a review and give you a star rating. If they then choose to provide their own medical information in that review, that’s their choice and HIPAA doesn’t come into play.
The best places for people to post reviews are on the major review sites, such as Yelp, on your Google Business Profile, and on your Facebook page.
Potential customers can then see social proof that you provide an excellent service and that you have many happy clients.
Reviews and ratings really do matter. In fact, many people won’t even look at a business with less than 4 stars. People are also interested in the most recent reviews, so it’s important to keep tracking and requesting reviews consistently.
There is one further step with reviews. Potential patients want to see that you do reply to your reviews and interact with people. This is particularly important if you ever get a negative review, as people want to see how well you handle a poor review and what you do to put it right.
4) Your Google Business Profile
We talked about the importance of your Google Business Profile or GBP earlier. A full and complete GBP really is the only way to appear in the map pack on Google, and those listings will provide your med spa with high visibility. A map pack listing has everything a customer needs to contact you and book, so don’t neglect your Google Business Profile.
Claiming your GBP also verifies your business with Google and provides you with space to add in all the information potential clients need.
As we mentioned before, make sure you use local keywords on your main profile and in the services section. You really do have to fill in every section on your profile to qualify for the local pack, but this is also a great opportunity to shine, show off your expertise, and include the right keywords to get you found.
Choose the right categories for your business so that you can be found for what you do. Include your opening hours too so that “open now” searches work for you.
Your Google Profile can do such a lot for you in creating an excellent impression on potential customers as well as being found in local search and the map pack. You can answer questions for people and show that you are the experts in your field, you can reply to comments and interact with people, and you can reply to their reviews.
You can also include high-quality images and videos, blog posts, and more to show people the very best of your med spa.
5) Optimize and re-optimize content
We’ve talked about the importance of content a little already, but it’s not just about writing great content. You need a content marketing plan so that you are prepared to post consistently and regularly. With a content plan in place, you don’t have to worry about what to write next. You’ll already have your next post listed on your plan. That makes life a lot easier and helps you to continue to post regularly. You can also gather together any statistics that you need or ensure you have your equipment ready if you’re creating a video rather than a post.
Preparation really does make things easier. And with a good plan, it’s possible to get ahead with your posts, and get them automatically scheduled to post on your website and social media. If you can do that, you won’t miss your regular posting dates if you are on holiday.
When preparing your content, write an outline for each piece and work out who your audience is and what you want them to know at the end of the post. In addition, look at how you can optimize each piece of content for local search. We talked earlier about where to include your local keywords and phrases, and it’s vital that you do keep your keywords in mind when writing.
The other important thing is to put time into your content plan to go through and re-optimize your older content. Your local keywords may have changed over the years and you may have added new services that aren’t mentioned in older posts.
Make a plan to work through your older content and re-optimize it where needed with good local keywords and updated copy. Doing so, not only adds better keywords but freshens your older content for the search engines.
As you can see, there’s a lot involved in dominating local search and gaining new patients. When you’re already running a busy med spa, finding the time to do all these tasks can be difficult. However, if you want to keep a steady stream of new leads and patients coming in, then it is necessary.
But you don’t have to do it alone.
With Surefire Local’s business intelligence marketing software, you can manage every aspect of your marketing from just one, easy-to-use platform. You don’t have to continually log in and out of Facebook, your GBP, your review sites, social media and more. Everything can be managed from our software.
You can request reviews and remind people to leave them, manage your Google Business Profile, update over 80 business directories at once, and you can manage your social media, paid ads, email marketing, and your content marketing, without leaving our platform.
It’s simple, straightforward, and highly efficient, saving you time and allowing you to simplify your marketing. You can do everything yourself, or you can hire one of our expert digital marketers to assist you or run everything for you. Everything is under your control.
If you’d like to find out more, then book a demo with us and see how our all-in-one marketing software can help you dominate your local marketing.