Once you have built a great-looking site that has a high conversion rate (meaning, you’re getting 2-5 or more of every 100 visitors contacting you via phone or form), the next thing you’ll want to do is flood the site with potential patients to increase your new patient load.
(Side note: if you aren’t seeing at least 2-5 “leads” from every 100 visitors, your site is underperforming and should be optimized for conversions before you put any resources into driving more traffic to it. Otherwise, you are just wasting your marketing budget!)
Some of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your practice’s website include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Online ads, aka pay-per-click ads (PPC)
- Retargeting
- Social media marketing
SEO for Chiropractors
Search engine optimization (SEO) is often the best long-term strategy for chiropractors as it builds over time, and you don’t pay per click as you would with ads. Rather, you “earn” the right to be found at the top of the search engine results when potential patients near you are searching for services you provide.
This is done by optimizing your chiropractic site at a technical level, keeping it in line with the latest in best practices from the search engines, and ensuring it is full of helpful, engaging and informative content for your site visitors to enjoy. That way, your site appeals to both the search engine bots and the users they seek to serve.
With an ongoing SEO plan in place, your site can continue to be found for virtually unlimited keyword searches, and has the potential to attract as many as thousands of visitors a month, depending on the size of your market.
Online Ads for Chiropractors
Another way to send more traffic to your site is through online paid ads, also called PPC, or pay-per-click. The great thing about PPC is it can be set up quickly and more or less turned on like a faucet, to start the flow of more traffic to your site at the drop of a dime. This can be a great place to start on your new marketing campaign for your chiropractic practice.
On the flip side, its greatest fault lies within its name – you are paying each time someone clicks on your ad. The price you pay for each click depends on a complicated formula, and that price is constantly changing depending on a number of factors that the Google artificial intelligence is running off of behind the scenes. There is a lot that can be done by your marketing company to improve the scores you are getting from the AI, which can help get your ads seen more often and even lower the prices you are paying for each click. There are also some search terms that are less competitive and will be much cheaper per click than those that are in high demand.
We also recommend chiropractors on our marketing programs to utilize what is called “retargeting.” These are the ads that tend to follow you around the internet after you’ve visited a site. Most chiropractors can, with a really good website, get as high as a 5% conversion rate. That means 5 out of every 100 people who visit the site will reach out to find out more or make an appointment on their first visit. That leaves 95 or more of those 100 visitors who haven’t reached out to you yet, and are still undecided on who their chiropractor will be.
How do we get those people to come back to your site and choose you? Through retargeting. By using carefully crafted messages that follow them around the internet, they can be reminded of your services and the value you will add to their lives if they become your patient. Most patients require seeing your marketing messages at least 9 times before becoming a lead, and retargeting is one cost-effective way of doing just that.
Which traffic strategy or strategies are right for your practice? Set up a free consultation with one of our marketing specialists, and let’s help you determine where to best allocate your resources to bring you the most new patients in 2021 and beyond.