Your website is the most important online marketing asset your business has. Not only is it a place where almost all of your traffic will filter through, but it is also the place where you can tell your customer story, invite new audience members to your business, and explain what it is you offer and why it ultimately benefits the customers of the med spa.
However, that is not to say that there aren’t challenges that small businesses face when it comes to optimizing their website and localizing their online presence. Increased competition, higher prices, and more time needed for upkeep can all slow down even the most well-intentioned med spa practices.
No matter how challenging it may become, it’s crucial to reach out to local customers through an optimized website. That’s why we have some local SEO website strategies for med spas to help increase local visibility online and increase your brand awareness in the community you serve.
Understanding Local SEO
Local search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of helping businesses get found online for searches that focus on a specific geographic area. By optimizing in key areas and focusing on local searches that matter most to your business, med spas and other health centers can get discovered by the right audience.
There are a few different factors that influence local search rankings and results, including:
- On-page content
- Online reviews and ratings
- Directory listings and profiles
- Backlinks
- Geotagging and search proximity
- Website analytics
The more effort you put into improving these factors, the bigger the impact your SEO will have on attracting nearby customers. As a small business, you want your med spa to become well known and recognized in your local area, not nationally. Rather than expanding too far beyond what is relevant for your daily business growth, you should instead focus on optimizing for local search signals, including optimizing your website for local SEO.
Keyword Research
The first step in optimizing your website SEO is to do keyword research. Keyword research is a practice that helps you find the most relevant keywords to target in your content that provides insight into your client’s needs. By finding these keywords, you can then use them on your website so that you can target the searches that your customers are already using.
Keyword research often involves the use of a digital tool. The tool will help you explore how often keywords in your area are being used and how frequently people use them to search for things relevant to your med spa business. However, you can also use common sense or customer feedback to gather information on what keywords will be the most relevant to your local SEO efforts.
It’s helpful to start by looking at what keywords you are already ranking for, as you don’t want to lose your position on those words or phrases. From there, expand your search for broad keywords or long-tailed keywords that can help you find keywords that aren’t being used by competitors that you can try to rank for. Some keywords will be more difficult to rank for, so think about how to approach your target keywords strategically.
Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to use in your website’s local SEO efforts, you can start adding them to your existing pages or to new blog posts and updates. Just be sure you don’t overuse them, as that can actually hurt your SEO. Instead, use them naturally and make sure they are backed up with relevant, useful content.
On-Page SEO Optimization
Outside of keywords, there are a few other on-page elements that can help improve your website SEO. Start by looking at your meta tags, including your page titles, descriptions, and header tags. You can add keywords or indicators of local relevance here, like mentioning the city you service in your meta description.
It’s also important to consider the user experience on your website. The more user-friendly your site is, the more people will stick around. Search engine algorithms also take things like your page load speeds into consideration when ranking local websites. Think about how you can enhance the user experience with mobile optimizations and faster page loading times.
Localized Content Creation
The next step is to take a look at the overall content on your website. We’ve already mentioned how you can organically add keywords to your content, but you can also create location-specific content for your site that goes beyond keywords.
For example, consider adding dedicated location pages for each city or town you serve, so you can focus each page on that specific area. On each page, make easily accessible contact information with quick links for phone numbers and email addresses, so someone can easily reach out with questions or to book an appointment. You can also embed a Google map on the page, so someone can easily familiarize themselves with your physical location.
Another great way to create local content is through your blog posts. Create blogs with local relevance that touch on local topics or events that your clients care about. You can use customer testimonials and success stories to build more local credibility and authenticity while incorporating locally relevant imagery where possible across your site.
Building Local Citations
Another way to get found in local SEO searches is by building local citations. A local citation is any mention of your business name, address, or phone number. Also called your NAP information, this type of citation helps ground your business and reference your basic contact information.
It’s important to make sure that your NAP details are the same across all your platforms, including your website, social media profiles, and online directories. By being consistent, you can build a stronger local citation presence and help search engines connect your online presence across multiple platforms.
To help the algorithms understand how your business is connected, make sure to link your website to your business listings on online directories, review websites, and any other listing of your business. You should also link your social media profiles to your website and, if possible, link them back to your social platforms. This linking helps build cohesion online and brings your presence together.
Implement Structured Data Markup
While using keywords and contextualizing your NAP information helps customers on the front end of your website, there are other ways to improve your local SEO on the back end of your website. One of these tactics is to use structured data markup in your website code. A schema markup for local businesses is a machine-readable representation of product data or service data that can be shared with Google and other search engines.
In short, it helps algorithms immediately understand what your business offers and what you do without having it parse through keywords and content. Instead, algorithms know directly what you do and what services your med spa offers. By incorporating structured data in your website, you can appear in snippets on search engine results pages that are utilized in specific industries.
Snippets are featured listings that appear on search engines outside of typical links and descriptions. For example, someone searching for med spas might get a structured snippet of a map with listings of local spas in their immediate area. Or if someone was asking a specific question about a med spa treatment, a snippet might be generated that pulls that information out of a blog post rather than having the user click into the blog. By optimizing for snippets, you can appear even higher in search result rankings.
Monitor and Analyze Website Performance
Finally, it’s important to track your performance and see if your local SEO efforts are paying off by increasing your website traffic or helping you get more conversions on your web pages. Start by setting up Google Analytics for website tracking so you can monitor your metrics.
From there, you can analyze user behavior and what traffic sources they come from, so you can make data-driven decisions and adjustments to improve your local SEO performance.
Improve Local SEO Website Strategies with Surefire Local
Localizing your online presence through your website is one of the most important steps in local SEO tactics that have a big impact on your business. The potential for increased visibility in specific zip codes, better customer engagement, and business growth all increase when you follow the best practices we’ve laid out for local SEO website strategies for med spas.
At Surefire Local, we work hard to help small businesses like yours excel at localized online marketing. That’s why we’ve created an all-in-one platform for local businesses that helps you establish your online presence and create local signals across platforms and profiles that make it easy for your customers to find you.
To learn more about Surefire Local and the tools, features, and enhancements we’ve created that can help your med spa boost online visibility, click the link to attend a Surefire Local demo today.