10 Awesome Local SEO Tips for Medical Spa

Running a medical spa can be difficult in itself, not to mention wearing different hats as the business owner.  One of the more time-consuming and technical hats to wear is marketing, especially online marketing. When it comes to medical spa SEO, you need to keep up with the changes.

What is Medical Spa SEO? Essentially SEO is anything that is done to work towards increasing online traffic. Usually, the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. However, this is not limited to search engines these days.

Places like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and other online traffic services are all important.  A good SEO consultant can help you structure your marketing strategy around all aspects to help increase your traffic from these sources. One of the more time-consuming and technical hats to wear is marketing, especially online marketing for spas.

1. Google My Business

If you don’t already have a Google My Business listing, create one as soon as possible. This is how people find your medical spa business in Google Maps and the Google Local 3-pack.  The local 3-pack are the three listings you get in the search results when you search for a local service or local businesses.

One of the biggest features of Google My Business is that customers of yours can leave your business reviews. Reviews are a huge aspect of SEO nowadays.  Google considers the sheer amount of reviews you have and the quality of your reviews.

Another way to increase visibility is to take advantage of and publish posts on Google My Business.  You can now publish up to 1,500 words; there is no minimum.  You should publish posts around 200-400 words in length.  These posts expire after seven days, so you should have a strategy in place to post a new post every seven days.

2. City Pages

You must create a city page for your business with multiple locations.  Each page should have schema markup with your physical address.  Don’t mistake creating a page with little to no content.

Many companies will create a city page, put a map on it, and call it a day.  City pages can be powerful pages that can bring your website good traffic.  When creating these pages, you should clearly describe the location and city it serves.

Ensure you add each location in Google My Business as this is the only way to show up in the Google local 3-pack.

3. Yelp

One of the biggest local apps today is Yelp. Ranking well on Yelp can drive some serious traffic to your business.  Yelp will rank businesses within close proximity and those with lots of positive reviews.

This is why it’s important to put a policy in place to help encourage your customers to leave reviews. But don’t ask for them, as that is against their policy.  You can encourage people to check-in to your business and even offer them special offers to do so.

This will help gain more reviews as it will prompt the Yelp user to write a review when they log back into their app.

4. Citations

Citations are listings in business directories.  Don’t get this confused with online web directories these are business directories from major publications.

Yelp and Google My Business are two very important location citations, but you need more citations to rank locally.  Some of the major business citations your website should be listed in are:

• Superpages.com
• Yellowbook.com
• Foursquare.com

The more credible listings you have, the stronger the signal you send to Google that your business is listed correctly.  But ensure you are using a consistent name, address, and phone number (also known as NAP) across all these listings.  An inaccurate or inconsistent NAP will not help your local rankings.

5. Website

Two of the biggest technical issues that face medical spa websites are the lack of mobile-friendly usability and not having an SSL installed. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website by now, you are far behind the times.

With how advanced our smartphones are, many people use their phones for local searchers.  In July, Google changed its algorithm to demote websites that are not mobile-friendly.  Not sure if your website is mobile-friendly? Check out Google’s free tool and run a test.

The other big issue is non-secure websites. A few web browsers will indicate if a website is secure or not right in the search results.  When a website is labeled, non-secure people will not click through to view the website.  This results in a decrease in web traffic.

6. Schema

Schema is code that you place on your web pages that help the search engines determine information about the web page.

Some more popular schemas are address, organizational information like business name and phone number, product information such as stock levels and pricing, and event schema that provides details about the date and time.

Here is an example of how to include Schema markup for locations:

<div class=”center-address” itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>

<div itemprop=”streetAddress”>

<p>2401 Utah Avenue South</p>

<p>Seattle, WA 98134</p>

<span itemprop=”addressLocality” style=”display: none;”>Seattle, WA</span>

</div>

</div>

7. Blog at Local Events

Blogging helps create content and, with the right strategy, will bring targeted visitors to your website.  Creating locally based content can also be a powerful signal that your business is hyperlocal.  Also, blogging about local events and businesses can lead to other local websites linking to your website.

You can also include a spotlight business of the week or do roundups with local business owners. In any case, blogging is a great way to create content and open up your blog to a wider audience.

Ever seen the “People Also Ask” section in the Google search results? Creating content that specifically answers these questions is a good strategy.  Perform a search for your keywords, and then write down all the questions you see in these areas.

This way, you can create blog posts around this content that will give your website a chance to show up in these results.

8. Review

If your business doesn’t have a review strategy in place starting now. Reviews are a huge part of the local ranking algorithm in Google. Some software companies can help aid in the process of getting more reviews.

Services like GatherUp not only professionally get more reviews on your behalf but has some display widgets you can use to display the reviews on your website.  These are not only good for local rankings, but these reviews will also help conversion purposes.

Some specific tips about reviews.  It is against the TOS of Yelp to specifically ask a customer for a review.  However, there are ways to encourage reviews without asking.

A good technique for Yelp is offering discounts for customers that check in on the app.  When a Yelp user returns to the app after a check-in Yelp promotes the user for a review of the business they visited.

Google, on the other hand, allows businesses to ask for a review from their customers.  The one caveat is that you don’t cherry-pick the reviews.  Google deems it unfair if you only ask happy customers for reviews.

It’s best to put a policy in place when you capture a customer’s email address and send all customers an email asking for reviews.

9. PPC

A good marketing strategy will encompass a pay-per-click campaign to help immediately get you up and running. A medical spa has a lot of keywords they can bid on to increase traffic to their business.  Some of the keywords will be more costly than others.

Recommended: PPC Trends In 2018: What You Need To Change In Your Game

Words like “Botox” and “laser hair removal” will generally be more expensive than local keywords like “Botox in San Francisco,” so pick your keywords carefully.  If you go after keywords that aren’t specific to your business or location, you can easily blow your budget.

10. SEO Tools

SEO Tools can save you a lot of time and money and, if used correctly, can help you increase your website traffic. There are some really good free tools on the market and some that are defiantly worth paying for.

At the very minimum, you should utilize a keyword, website analytics, and tool that can check backlinks.

i. Rank Checkers

There are a lot of SEO Tools to help create and monitor the success of your efforts. To get better results, you need to track and measure your current progress.

BrightLocal offers a rank checker that tracks both organic desktop and mobile rankings.  They even have an option where you can track map rankings as well.

ii. Keyword Tools

SEMRush is one of the best keyword tools on the market. In fact, they offer an entire suite of tools that include backlinks, rankings, traffic, and listing management for local citations.

Their keyword tools are widely used by most SEOs and are a great way to discover keywords you might not know about.  Usually, these types of longtail keywords are much easier to rank for.

iii. Google Search Console

The Google Search Console is a must-free tool offered by Google that provides ranking data, keyword volume, and indexing information about your website. The absolute best function of the search console is the ranking data.

In these reports, it shows you the average ranking for each keyword. Often times you will find keywords in there that you weren’t targeting and should have been.

The medical spa industry is growing faster and faster each year, and competition is getting tougher. It is of vital importance that you do everything you can to gain more customers from the local search results.