Moreso than ever, chiropractors need an online presence if they seek to reach new clients online. Following the pandemic, more people than ever search for local businesses online, find information online, and conduct their entire customer journey online where they can.
If your practice doesn’t have an online presence, you are missing out on more qualified leads and on building an audience of engaged followers who are looking for your services.
Don’t miss out. Follow our online presence guide for chiropractors and make sure you’re making the best impression on your online audience.
What is an online presence?
You can have a website for your chiropractic business but still not really have a strong online presence. How is that possible? Well, your online presence isn’t just built from what you do online.
Your online presence starts with you, including any actions you take and what content you create. However, that’s not all of it.
Your online presence is also made up of where your business is on the internet when it comes to the social media algorithms and search engine rankings.
Finally, your online presence is also built on how the general public sees your business, what your reputation is with your audience, what people say about you, and how they engage with your business and your content.
Benefits of having an online presence
With a strong online presence for your chiropractic business, you will benefit from greater awareness of your business. More people will be able to find you online, discover what you do and find information about you, and potentially approach you to book a session.
With a good online presence, you can build your reputation and be seen as a genuine, trustworthy business. You can promote the quality of your service and show your knowledge and expertise. All of this adds up to a great impression for new potential clients. It reassures them, encourages them to trust you, and nudges them toward buying from you.
This allows you to build relationships with your clients and keep nurturing them. You can provide them with information, answer their questions, educate them, and help them make informed decisions.
You can also gain in the search engine rankings and earn Google’s trust. They will also see you as a legitimate business if you have everything in place.
With a solid and strong online presence, your website, social platforms, and other listings can work for you, promoting your business even when you’re closed or fast asleep. You then save money when aiming to attract new clients and bring in new leads, because much of the work is being done for you by your online presence.
You can then build on that and keep enhancing your reputation by continuing to create great content that’s tailored to your audience.
How to increase your online presence
Here are our top tips to increase your online presence, build your reputation, grow your audience, and generate quality leads:
1) Website
If you haven’t refreshed or even reviewed your website recently, now’s the time to take a look. Website design has changed a lot and you can’t afford to have a site that doesn’t look modern and up-to-date. Nor will a badly designed site add to your online reputation.
Your website should be as welcoming as your bricks and mortar location. The branding should match and you should have a clean, clear design that’s uncluttered, with easy navigation. Your site should lead your visitors through to the information they need and to what you want them to do next.
It’s equally important that your site is responsive on all devices and browsers. People increasingly search and shop on their phones and tablets and your site needs to look great, however they choose to search or shop.
You should also have your contact information front and center. Many people look at company websites because that’s what they want. They want to find a phone number or an email address and speak to a real human who can help them. Don’t hide your details away on the last page in a tiny font. You could be losing clients.
When you do share your contact and business details, be consistent. It’s important for your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) to be the same across the internet. If it isn’t, you can confuse new clients who might wonder if it’s the same business, and even worse, you might confuse Google. Start as you mean to go on with your website and get this right.
Next, it’s important to optimize your website for SEO. Ensure you know your main keywords and phrases and use them throughout your site, without overdoing it.
Use your keywords in headings, at least one sub-heading, in the first paragraph, in your meta descriptions, and in your alt-text image descriptions. Every bit helps. Think about local keywords too. You want to make it clear where you are located and adding local keywords can help you be found in the search engines.
Create quality, well-keyworded content on your site and share it on your social media. Think about topics based on your keywords and what your audience wants to see.
You can also add to your SEO efforts by publishing quality blog posts on a consistent schedule. This is another place where you can include your keywords, including local ones. Even better, you can write blogs about specific keywords that you want to target. You are then more likely to show up in the search engines when potential patients are searching for a chiropractor or asking a related question.
Your blog does help your SEO, but it also contributes to your online presence by establishing your expertise and increasing your reputation. And your increased search engine presence will lead to more traffic, and potentially more targeted leads.
2) Social Media
While you can schedule in advance to a certain extent, social media isn’t “set it and forget it” marketing. You do need to show up consistently and be active and responsive. What this means is that you should only be on as many social platforms as you can actually manage well. It’s far better to pick one or two platforms and knock them out of the park than it is to be on ten platforms and do none of them well.
Your audience wants to see you posting, liking, and responding. They appreciate it when you respond to their comments and when you answer their questions.
Share excellent content. You can share your blog posts on your social platforms, and create content that’s just for your social media. Be educational and think about what your audience wants to know. Post about different conditions and how chiropractic adjustments can help. Talk about a typical day. Tell them what to expect when they come to see you so they aren’t put off by worrying about the unknown. Show images and videos of your treatment rooms and your practice. Introduce them to your staff. There are so many things you can do with social media to draw your audience in and give them an excellent impression of you and your business.
It’s important not to sell too much. Of course, you want to tell people what you do and show your services, but don’t overdo it. Additionally, be authentic when you post. Be comfortably you and people will be drawn to that. They will notice if you aren’t being true to yourself and that will put them off.
This all adds up to increasing your engagement and building an audience of people who like how you come across. With the right educational and informative content, it’s then a much smaller step to persuading them to either contact you or book.
We’ve talked about optimizing your site for SEO and you can do that on social media too. Again, use your keywords on posts and use relevant hashtags.
3) Directory Listings
It’s really important that you claim your business and establish a quality presence on the largest directory platforms, such as Google Business Profile, Facebook, Bing, Yelp, and others.
When you do this, complete every section possible on the listing. Make your profile as complete and attractive as it can be, including quality images. You should also think about SEO here and use your keywords and local keywords.
We already mentioned your NAP and this is where it gets really important. You must complete your listings with consistent information. You can’t refer to your business as “Chiro Company” in one place and “Chiro LLC” in another. It’s even important not to use abbreviations, such as Ave or St, in some places when you’ve written it out in full elsewhere. Watch your phone numbers too. Be consistent and write them the same way on every listing.
Again, this gives a good impression and helps both clients and Google to know that they’re dealing with the same business.
On many platforms, you can collect reviews. This is great for social proof and you should have a consistent review strategy to keep getting new reviews each month and responding to them. In general, most people will only look at the very latest reviews and they will notice if you haven’t had any for a long time. This could be the difference between them choosing you or the competition.
You will, invariably, get a negative review from someone who isn’t happy and you should reply to that and do your best to resolve it, but proactively seeking new reviews will also help to push any negative reviews further down.
Here again, you can’t just fill in your listings and then leave them. You need to maintain and monitor your listings for consistency. You also need to be available to answer questions and respond to new reviews. Don’t forget that you can also add special offers and deals on these sites too, to attract people to book.
4) Online Advertising
Online paid ads can help you get to the top of the search engines and gain visibility.
You can use a mix of different ads across different platforms, including:
Search ads
Paid search ads, such as Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, will bring you right to the top of the search engine listings if done correctly. And they reach clients when they are actively searching for your services.
Don’t give up on organic search in favor of these paid ads. It’s even more effective for clients, and for you, if you’re at the top of the paid search ads, and at number one in organic search.
Social ads
Facebook and most of the other social sites provide great opportunities with their paid ads. You can target by demographics, by competitor audience, and more. And you also get helpful analytics to show how your ads are performing.
Display ads
These ads get your practice in front of targeted, custom audiences, based on various criteria, including what apps they might have used, places they’ve visited, and more.
While perhaps not as effective as social or search ads, you should still get plenty of clicks.
Retargeting ads
If you’ve ever clicked on an ad for a company on Facebook and then seen a whole lot more ads from that company, that’s retargeting. They’re showing you ads because you showed an interest in an ad they placed. You can use these ads too to reignite interest in potential patients.
5) Email marketing
While email marketing doesn’t involve ads, it’s a highly effective way of reaching people. People on your list have signed up to hear from you. They expect that you will email them. Considering that most people check their emails multiple times a day, even more than their social media, this is an excellent way to send great content, provide offers, and send your news.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo
As you can see, building your online presence requires a lot of moving parts and an investment of your time, but you can make things easier for yourself by using Surefire’s local marketing platform. We provide quality business intelligence marketing software at a fraction of the cost of other tools or agencies.
You can manage every aspect of your online profile from one easy dashboard, with just a single login. You don’t need to learn and use multiple pieces of software. Everything is on one platform.
Manage your reviews, your email marketing, paid ads, social marketing, content marketing, and so much more, all in one place.
Book a demo today and see how we can help!