Marketing a chiropractic practice is competitive.
The American Chiropractic Association estimates that there are over 70 thousand licensed chiropractors in the United States, with 2,500 entering the workforce every year. Approximately 35 million adults and children seek chiropractic care each year.
In other words, there is roughly 1 chiropractor for every 500 Americans.
That’s steep competition.
For context, 2018 had a single McDonald’s store for every 23,364 Americans.
While referrals are a staple to get more patients through the door, chiropractic marketing is essential to expand your patient base past existing networks. Here are long-term marketing ideas for chiropractors to implement into any strategy.
- Share on social media
- Get published
- Make your website discoverable
- Create a Google My Business profile
- List your practice on chiropractor directories
- Start a blog on your website
1. Share thought leadership content on social media
Social media is a great platform to reconnect with past or existing patients. It lets you give a gentle nudge every once in a while and say “hey, we’re here when you need us!”. In addition to sharing updates on your clinic’s events, services, and referral promotions, it’s the perfect channel to establish yourself as the go-to chiropractic resource.
Why?
You already have a following that you know is interested in your services, so give them information that you know they’ll find useful.
Either share articles from your blog (more on that later) or find authoritative content around the web to help your patients. Ask yourself if what you’re posting adds value to your patients’ lives and if it’s presented in a way that is easy to digest with clear takeaways.
Here are a few examples of popular content with tons of shares on social media.
“8 Yoga Poses To Help Cervical Spine & Neck Issues” from mindbodygreen.com has been shared 69.4K times on Facebook and 37.3K on Pinterest.
Healthyway.com’s “7 Myths (Almost) Everyone Believes About The Human Body” has had 64K shares on Facebook alone.
If you’re ever stuck on what to share, choosing articles that have already been provenly popular on social media is a safe place to start.
To further boost your chiropractor marketing strategy, also share content you create yourself. If it’s a winning piece that goes viral, you have the opportunity to reach a much larger audience than just your followers.
Don’t forget the #hashtags
Unless social media users are looking for your profile or are already followers, you’ll have very limited visibility to other users unless you use hashtags. Hashtags are search queries or tags that you can target so that people looking up those terms can find your content. Without them, your great posts will be buried in an ocean of other chiropractor social media content.
On Instagram, you can have up to 30 hashtags in a post.
On Twitter, there’s no limit, but you don’t want to look spammy. Limit yourself to 2-3.
Linkedin follows the same guidelines as Twitter.
Here are a few example chiropractor hashtags to get started:
#chiropracticadjustment #backpain #spine #neckpain #chiropracticcare #chiro #physicaltherapy #adjustment #chiropractors #healthylifestyle #physiotherapy #subluxation #rehab #lowbackpain #painrelief #pain #scoliosis #physio #migrainerelief
Read more about how to do hashtag research for Instagram.
2. Get published in local newspapers and blogs
Chances are your neighborhood or community either has a printed or digital newsletter with local events, city updates, and business information.
Reach out to these publications with an informative piece about your chiropractic specialization, and you may be surprised to see how receptive they are to pushing it out! Remember, this is not a sales piece or advertisement. The goal is to share helpful information and to establish yourself as an authority without over-selling yourself.
The benefit of this chiro marketing idea is two-fold.
On the one hand, you have the obvious advantage of getting in front of your local community’s eyes through an authoritative and trusted medium.
The other advantage is with digital mediums. Through digital PR, companies gain external backlinks, brand mentions, and brand awareness online. These backlinks and mentions help build a website’s authority, and ultimately, boost rankings for target keywords.
If you specialize in pediatric chiropractic care, then you can draft an article about common reasons why parents might bring their children into a clinic. Provide value that relates to your field and clinic’s location.
3. Make your website discoverable using search engine optimization (SEO) best practices
There are thousands of people every day looking for chiropractic services on Google.
No, really. “Chiropractor near me” is searched nearly 200,000 times monthly.
However, all the searches in the world mean nothing if your website isn’t appearing on Google. And what’s more, your website may as well not exist if it’s not on the first page of results. You can hide all the dead bodies in the world on page two and beyond, and no one would ever find them.
This graph below illustrates the extreme drop off in clicks once search results hit page two (position 11 through 20).
Source: Backlinko
So, how do you ensure your website is search engine optimized?
There are a few key things you can do:
- Keyword research to optimize each page for the terms people are actually searching
- Technical SEO, which includes maximizing site speed, mobile usability, and other behind-the-scene aspects that help search engines read your site
- Clean up site architecture so that all your pages are internally linked to at least one other page
- Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track and monitor incoming traffic
Google Search Console is also a great tool to use to look at a lot of technical SEO, as well.
4. Create and optimize a Google My Business profile
Google My Business (GMB) is a vital piece to local SEO. Not only is it a great marketing idea for chiropractors, it’s essential to compete in your local area! (It’s also completely free.)
A GMB profile appears both in Google Maps…
…and on the first page of Google Search. Users can either search a query with “near me” or include an explicit location like “scottsdale” for these results to appear.
Considering how difficult it often is to rank on the first page for your website’s keywords in organic results, local SEO is a fantastic workaround for local small businesses!
A profile includes your company’s name, address, phone number, hours, and industry. You can also add photos, reply to reviews, create posts and events, and feature social media accounts.
So if optimized correctly, your Google My Business profile should pop up front and center when Karen down the road searches “chiropractors near me”.
5. List your practice on chiropractor directories
Another simple chiropractic marketing idea with great return is expanding your online presence in all the relevant places, which includes chiropractor directories.
The National Directory of Chiropractic, for example, lets chiropractors add their listings, making it easy for patients to find the specialty and clinic in a location they need.
Additionally, these ‘citations’ on industry directories strengthen your local SEO presence. Including your name, address, and phone number (NAP) in these citations increases your prominence and legitimacy in the eyes of search engines. In other words, you are building a network of business mentions with your contact information that solidifies the authority of your website and Google My Business profile.
How do directories help boost local SEO for chiropractors?
6. Start a blog on your website
How do you get your website to rank for more chiropractic keywords? Create new pages targeting unique topics.
Let’s say your specialty is in sports injury. It makes sense to have your homepage rank for “sports injury chiropractor”, but that may not be the only search query that potential patients are typing in. For instance, “most common sports injuries”, “spine and sports chiropractic”, and “sports injury treatment” are all keywords that target your ideal patient.
Rather than stuffing all these keywords on a single page in the hopes that they’ll work some SEO magic, it’s best to create designated pages for each topic that either outline your services in more detail, or provide valuable information to a reader.
Each one of these pages serves as a brand new landing page with the potential to draw in traffic from a more diverse range of searches. By covering all possible chiropractor blog topics in your specialty, you can dominate your niche on the internet and create a chiropractic marketing hub on your blog.
Partner with a digital marketing agency to execute an expert-level chiropractor marketing strategy
Paid advertising both online and offline can be a costly, constant expense. Digital marketing, on the other hand, has a longer lifespan and focuses on attracting inbound leads from a more targeted audience. With inbound marketing, you’re shaping an online presence so that patients can more easily find you when searching for your services.
If you’re ready to work the kinks out of your marketing plan with these chiro marketing ideas, contact us for more information on next steps.
Markitors is a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO. We help small businesses rank higher on Google to get more traffic to their websites and increase revenue. Explore what’s in our SEO toolbox: audits and keyword research, digital PR, technical SEO, and local SEO.
