With over 5,000 medical spas working all over the United States, the competition for patients is becoming more and more fierce every year. Since many of these businesses use expert search engine optimization (SEO) services, common SEO strategies are no longer enough to keep you ahead of the competition.
Today, it’s imperative to dig deeper into cutting-edge SEO techniques and tools. A combination of traditional and advanced strategies can help steal market share and boost your medical spa’s revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at the SEO tactics that you may need to consider.
What is Medical Spa SEO?
Regardless of the stage of the sales funnel, a med spa’s potential audience is doing research online. From simple chemical peels to botulinum toxin injections, as soon as patients start typing queries, your SEO strategy kicks.
Medical spa SEO focuses on bringing your website to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and making it visible to your target audience. Since around 70% of search engine users click the top results on the first SERP, a robust SEO strategy is a key to generating organic traffic.
Successful medical spa SEO starts with a high-quality website that:
- Offers high-quality content.
- Has a responsive design
- Is optimized for mobile-friendliness (today Google focuses on mobile-first indexing).
- Provides excellent user experience.
- Has useful and valid internal and external links.
A robust website coupled with excellent SEO techniques can attract leads, convert them into patients, increase your med spa’s credibility, and improve patient satisfaction.
What are some common SEO strategies for Med Spas?
When you just begin your journey through med spa SEO, you need to start with the common strategies. They are the backbone of your marketing efforts that keep yielding results throughout your entire campaign.
Keyword Research
Keyword research involves making a list of terms that your potential patients are likely to search for. Since Google’s algorithms are becoming more and more sophisticated every day, you no longer need to provide exact keyword matches. The search engine can figure out the searcher’s intent and list websites that match it. Marketers need to do the same.
For example, if one of your services is skin resurfacing, you need to list it as a keyword. However, you should also use such keywords as “old skin layer removal” or “how to make skin younger.” Focus on what patients really want instead of hoping they can come up with a comprehensive query.
When it comes to med spa keyword research, you need to use both concise short-tail keywords, such as “med spa treatments” and long-tail keywords, such as “is body contouring right for me?”
Your goal is to find high-volume keywords (terms that many patients search for) with low difficulty (how easy it is for content optimized for this keyword to rank high on Google).
Page Title and Meta Description Optimization
Page titles, meta descriptions, and other metadata let both the user and the search engine know what your website content is all about. Optimizing this information is imperative to making your website more appealing to search engine crawlers and easier to use for visitors.
When it comes to SEO, metadata shouldn’t just be descriptive. It should also be accurate, concise, catchy, and optimized for your keywords. This information is the first thing a patient sees when they look at the SERP. It becomes the calling card of your med spa.
The more work you put into metadata, the more likely you are to improve your click-through rates.
Local SEO
Since med spas mostly cater to local audiences, they need to pay more attention to local SEO. Local search engine optimization focuses on attracting local visitors to your website and, eventually, your doorstep.
The most important elements of local SEO for med spas include:
- Google Business Profile – filling out and updating this profile helps patients find you online, leave and read reviews, learn about available services, and much more.
- Google Maps – more than 72% of people who do a local search, end up visiting a business within five miles of their location. That’s why it’s imperative to put your med spa on Google Maps so it becomes visible to local internet users when they search for “skin tightening near me” or “medical day spa in Seattle.”
Besides the above Google services, you can create profiles on directories and review sites, such as Yellowpages, Webmd.com, and Doctors.com.
You also need to pay attention to other search engines, such as Bing. To optimize your med spa for local Bing searches, claim your profile on Bing Places.
Link Building
Both internal and external links contribute to the success of your med spa’s SEO strategy.
- Internal links – linking one page of your website to another helps with navigation and improves user experience. It also shows the search engine how well organized your website is. Review your existing pages to find opportunities for internal linking and always keep them in mind when adding new content.
- Backlinks – when reputable websites link to your web pages, they become more trustworthy in the “eyes” of the search engine. Websites with more high-quality backlinks generally rank higher than others.
To gain backlinks, you need to work on the quality of your content to make sure it’s worth linking to. You can also write guest posts on authoritative websites. Some of them allow inserting a link to your website at the bottom of the post.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a major part of any marketing campaign. Content plays a leading role in SEO since it:
- Implements keywords
- Builds authoritativeness and trustworthiness
- Creates backlinks
- Keeps your website up to date
A strong content marketing strategy also complements your SEO efforts by keeping the visitor on your website longer and guiding them to take action.
What are some advanced SEO strategies for Medical Spas?
Once you implement all the traditional SEO strategies into your marketing campaign, you may want to focus on advanced tactics.
Reputation Management
When it comes to medical spa services, reputation is everything. While you are working to build your reputation offline, your marketing team should be honing it online. The main part of reputation management for SEO is online reviews.
Reviews in the Google Business Profile are one of the top-five ranking factors for your website. That’s why it’s imperative to encourage reviews and reply to them timely.
Another way to collect positive reviews is to create, manage, and update your social media profiles. Since social media marketing is an integral part of local med spa campaigns, asking for reviews in your profile is a simple yet effective strategy.
With the right tools, you can encourage, collect, and display Google-friendly reviews on your website and social media.
Phrase-Based Indexing
Phrase-based indexing is the way Google tries to react to the user’s intent. Instead of matching the exact query “do I need extensive body contouring” with the content on your website, it considers the sentence structure and looks for websites with information on “body contouring,” “weight loss,” and “med spa treatment.”
The algorithm matches only the important words in the query to your web content. It also checks if the keywords on your website appear in a close semantic context to the search phrases.
Marketers need to keep this indexing in mind when creating content around keywords. The more relevant content you produce, the more likely you are to rank higher.
A.I.-Driven SEO
Traditional SEO agencies conduct standard keyword research that ends up producing only a handful of relevant local keywords.
Modern patient acquisition platforms use artificial intelligence to generate tens of thousands of relevant keywords automatically. They can also help create content with keywords placed in an SEO-friendly manner.
A.I.-enabled SEO tools can help you increase visibility on the SERPs and steal market share from the competition.
A Case Study in Advanced SEO for Medical Spas
Sonterra Dermatology is a San Antonio medical spa that had a tough time outdoing the high competition in the Texan market. After partnering with DoctorLogic and leveraging A.I.-powered SEO tools, the website’s visibility increased dramatically. This led to a 48% rise in conversions and a 60x increase in reviews.
It can be nearly impossible to survive the fierce med spa competition by implementing traditional SEO tactics that the majority of agencies already use. To gain a competitive edge, you need to be a step ahead. One of the ways to do it is to partner with a comprehensive marketing agency that offers A.I.-driven SEO tools.