When building your chiropractic website's search ranking there are a few "simple" factors that need to be addressed for success:
- Content. Your site needs to have original content that tells Google what your website is about (i.e., this website is about a chiropractor in a particular city).
- Citations. You need to be listed in quality business directories that you are, indeed, a chiropractor in a particular city.
- Google Local Business. Google runs the show, so you better have a good, verified Google+ page for your business if you want to appear in the local search results.
- Backlinks. The more quality sites you have that link to your website, the better your ranking.
Now, the first three parts are relatively simple. You have to create content (or have us do it for you), you have to register you business in hundreds of business directories, and you need to setup your Google+ page. That's all manageable for most doctors. The problem arises with the last one: backlinks.
Getting Backlinks to Your Chiropractic Website
Some companies talk about "building backlinks" for you to boost your ranking, but you have to be careful and make sure that any firms are doing that ethically and according to Google's guidelines. Too often, these companies are doing one of the following:
- Paying someone for spammy backlinks
- Adding backlinks to your site as blog comments
- Adding backlinks to their own network of blogs
While these three techniques might garner you an increase in backlinks, they're going to hurt your search ranking, as they all violate Google's terms and conditions. If Google sees that your website suddenly has hundreds of backlinks appearing, it's going to become very skeptical and might decide to completely trash your search ranking. We've seen it happen. Clients will call us up and ask us why they're now at position #75 in the search rankings. When we do some digging, we find out they paid someone to do some "SEO" and the company simply tossed a few thousand spammy backlinks up. (For more about what happens when you do this, read our post on How to Destroy Your Chiropractic Website's Search Ranking.)
In short: Google is smart. Don't try to trick it with easy backlink strategies, because you will most likely get caught.
Building Organic Backlinks
So, if backlinks are important to build your site ranking and you can't cheat, what are you supposed to do? The answer is to think about it as link earning rather than link building.
That means creating content on your site that people will naturally and organically want to link to; content that is something that people like to share and resonates with others. What we do for our marketing clients is create content that other chiropractors find useful and then link to from their websites or blogs.
Let me show you an example of what we did for one of our clients just a few weeks ago. Dr. Ernst needed some more backlinks for his site, so we created this post for him:
9 Reasons Why You Need to See a Chiropractor
We wrote the post and keyword optimized it, then shared it via our social media channels and by email. The whole process took us a few days of work, but it was worth it.
First, we saw a huge increase in traffic from the article:
While normally, Dr. Ernst sees about 30-40 visits a day, the traffic on the day we posted the article jumped to 70 on the 20th, 493 on the 21st, 164 on the 22nd, and 93 on the 23rd. On Facebook, we reached 909 people with the posting, and 288 (so far have shared the article on their own Facebook feeds.
Looking at the important backlink data takes some time to register in our tracking tools, but the initial data shows that we've received at least 10 new links from the posting. Since new backlinks don't show up for some time in the tracking, we're confident that we'll see more over the next few months. Often, these posts get shared for a long time as new doctors discover them.
Increased Traffic + Increased Shares = Increased Ranking
Here's an important piece of information: when Google sees a ton of traffic going to a website, it pays attention. Increased traffic to a site means that something exciting is happening, and Google assumes that it's important. Here's what happened to Dr. Ernst's ranking when we did the viral post:
We posted the article on the 20th and began sharing it. Almost immediately, there was a jump in his search ranking for one of his primary search terms!
Want This for Your Practice?
Doing this kind of work takes time and expertise and that's what we do at ChiroHosting. If you would like the same kind of work done for your chiropractic website, give us a call at (800) 295-3346 or see some of our success stories here.
