It’s easier to dabble in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and tank your site, than it is to improve it. However, a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) will help you create sustainable income by turning your site into a vacuum instead of a leaf blower for your desired clients. Some people turn to paid advertising and get stuck in an endless cycle. However, this cycle can and should be broken if it is hurting your business model; let’s go over how and why.
Long Term Solutions Lead to Better Health
I will share with you a medical analogy that describes the differences between SEO and paid advertising. As a physical therapy (PT) practice someone comes to you typically for an acute injury, and it’s a slow recovery. Once most patients realize what having a physical therapist (PT) in their lives can do for them, they come back because they realize physical therapy can help them lead more active and healthy lives. That is what SEO is for your website; it creates a healthy relationship with search engines so people can find you and select you over the competition.
Short Term Solutions are just that; Short Term
Paid advertising is like a pain killer. While it is meant as short term solution to mask the problem, many people use it long term, and that can have very detrimental effects. In addition, you could get addicted. In the same way, paid advertising could give you 20 patients tomorrow, but in order to get those 20, paid advertising had to send 2000 people to your site. That is about a 1% success rate. Search engines look at this, and if you only have a 1% success rate, this can get your site effectively flagged as spam because the people going to your site aren’t converting. What this means is you will likely be hidden from organic search results (IE when they search PT near me, you will be hidden because your site was flagged as spam). Google favors sites with a 70% or more conversion rate – meaning that about 70% of the people on your site stay more than a couple minutes and either sign up for your blog or schedule an appointment.
What Does This Mean For My Business?
If 20 patients were to call or email you all at once, you would only be able to net a few of them and the others will find someone else. This is why I only recommend paid advertising paired with SEO for large companies that can sustain that many leads with multiple phone lines and that have enough content to keep people on the site longer, so the conversion rate doesn’t tank. That is what the large PT company I left used to do when we did both, and we still couldn’t net every lead.
As a small business, paid ads will make your site harder to find, and you will become reliant on paid advertising for more patients. Conveniently, they usually charge more for subsequent advertising. All that said, once you break this cycle, it is possible to recover, but it takes a little longer than someone who hasn’t run paid ads or click funnels, etc.
Do I really need an SEO?
Ask yourself if you really want a healthy website that will generate leads for you, or if you prefer to mask the problem. The idea of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems fairly simple; just make your website easier to find on search engines. However, this requires learning all of the things that Google does to select their top websites (AKA Google algorithms) and just do that… By the time you finish reading their hundreds to thousands of algorithms, they change, and your website must change with it. If it doesn’t, you could be banished to the endless index, or worse, become unindexed.
Conclusion
While you don’t need an SEO, if you want to create a sustainable business one is highly recommended. One to four patients a week for about a quarter was enough for one of the PT companies I currently work with to hire two people to help with the workload. I do not promise instant results, because those are typically too good to be true. I do promise to place you on the right path to optimize your website for your location. In fact, some cities are less competitive than others, and those are the ones you will see results for faster. However, the more competitive results have larger search volumes, so strides need to be made towards those as well if you want to expand your business.
As far as investment goes, if you are looking for fast results, a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) has to put more hours into optimizing your site, then work with you to create an online campaign with blog posts (and possibly social media) to maintain this flow of new information. Results are typically seen after a quarter of working together, and it is a partnership that involves at least occasional back and forth to assess results and make sure we’re on track to achieve your goals. Click the button below to schedule your appointment today.
About Whitney’s Online Wherewithal
COVID-19 has presented many challenges to health care. One of the biggest has been grappling with the increasing dependence on technology, that will continue to increase after the pandemic is long gone. Think about it – once a technology is out of the box, it can’t be reversed. I used to manage the digital marketing for a large corporate physical therapy company in the Greater Seattle Area. Through working for a larger company I found a way to apply those tactics to small businesses so they can compete on an elite level, without the elite price tag. I want to provide you with the means, or wherewithal, to empower you to chose your clients and take control of your success. Click here to learn more about SEO, PPC, and SEM marketing. Click the button below to schedule your appointment today.
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