There is a very famous line that goes like this, “If wealth is lost, nothing is lost. If health is lost, something is lost. If character is lost, everything is lost.” What message does this statement convey? This says that health is any day more important than wealth. Yet, we have people slogging throughout their lives to earn that one extra dollar, thereby not paying attention to their health. It is time such people realize the importance of living a healthy life. You can make this possible by creating awareness about alternative therapies that can go a long way in improving the overall health.
Local SEO for Alternative Therapists
Bring more customers by implementing simple SEO steps to your Alternative Therapist Services
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ALTERNATIVE THERAPIST SERVICES
You need alternatives in life
ENHANCE DISCOVERABILITY
Presence in all directories
Any customer searching for an alternative therapist is doing a specific search. This makes it important for you, an alternative therapist to be available to him at all times. The best way to do so is to have a presence in all local directories. Visibility is the key in local SEO. The principles of ‘Out of Sight – Out of Mind’ work here perfectly. It is better to have a listing in some neighboring local directories as well. The key is to enable your customers to find you easily.
Scan Your Business Presence
ACCURATE INFORMATION
Fix your citations
When a person is looking for treatment, would it be prudent to have him link up to the wrong person? It would not. Therefore, ensure that you present accurate information about your business and be consistent with it. You are going to have a listing in numerous directories, social media websites, and so on. Search engine bots have the habit of crawling all around the place to procure genuine information. Being consistent with your citations helps these bots to arrive at your website accurately. This improves your chances of raking high on the SERPs.
Scan Your Business PresenceLOCAL SEO FOR ALTERNATIVE THERAPISTS
Why?
What do you do when you want to search for an alternative therapist in your locality? Do you search for the same in the Yellow pages or look for information on the internet? An overwhelming majority of people (97% of the online population) search for local businesses on the internet. As a therapist, do you expect that Google will listen to your pleas for inclusion on the first page of their search engine results? No, you have to earn this distinction. This is where local SEO comes into the picture.
You have to create the ground where the Google search engine bots choose your website over the hundreds of others. Does this sound like a gargantuan task? It might be so if you are competing at the international or national level. However, you have a smaller field to contend to in the local areas. This makes your task that much easier. You need a combination of on-page and off-page SEO tactics to make your campaign successful. Let us look at these aspects in this article.
Let us look at the off-page SEO tactics first before going into the other details. When we speak of off-page SEO, we refer to the promotional and marketing activities that help in securing a high rank for your website.
Claim your Google My Business (GMB) listing
Promoting your business is of paramount importance. Here cannot be a better way of promoting the business on the internet than having a GMB listing. Let us see what a GMB listing is. We shall also see how to get one.
When you search for alternative therapists, Google is the first search engine that comes to mind. You would naturally type out your search queries like ‘alternative therapists in Virginia’, etc. Google does not take much time to list out half a million such website results. Do you think your patients have the patience (pun intended) to go through the entire list. Naturally, your answer is an emphatic NO.
This is where your GMB listing can come to your rescue. The image you see on the page is the GMB listing. See the wealth of information it provides. We shall now look at how you get your GMB listing.
- Go to the official website of Google My Business
- Fill out the information sought for. It will not take you much time at all.
- Ensure you furnish accurate information. They refer to it as NAP in local SEO circles.
- Google has its unique verification procedure. Follow the same and confirm your listing.
This ensures that you have a presence on the GMB listing pages. Statistics show that around 44% of local businesses in any niche have a GMB presence. That narrows down your competition a lot.
The GMB listing presents a wealth of information to your clients.
- You have a direct link to your website from this listing.
- You can provide accurate directions for your patients to approach you.
- You can list out the timings when you will be available. The GMB listing is an online listing. You can see that it will show when your business is open or closed depending on the timings you provide. The customer gets precise information so that he would not end up knocking on a locked door.
- Adding landmarks and images is also possible to make it easier for your patients to contact you.
- There are options for incorporating customer ratings as well.
This makes it a comprehensive listing. Every business website should have one. This is one of the easiest ways to announce your presence in the market.
Monitor the listing properly
Having a GMB listing is not enough. You should be monitoring the same at regular intervals. This is an online world. It does not take much time for unscrupulous elements to create duplicate listings and attracting web traffic away from your website. Monitoring your GMB listing can help you nip such issues in the bud. It should not happen that someone else should enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Fix up your citations
It is imperative that your customers find you easily among the hundreds of your competitors. This entails that you provide accurate and consistent information across all your listings. The search engine bots crawl all over the internet and match information before listing out the results. Incorrect or inconsistent information can confuse these spiders. They might end up showing the wrong website. Maintaining consistency with the category information is important. A listing in the wrong category can cost you vital business.
Have a presence in all local directories
No one knows your business better than you do. However, it is also important to let people know about your availability to serve them. Having a listing in all local directories can enable you to do that. Remember, there are various kinds of alternative therapies. If you practice more than one of them, have a listing in each category. A cross-listing in an allied directory will also help you tremendously.
Do not ignore traditional advertising methods
This is an online world and people love to do online marketing. However, there is a section of people who are still not online. They need your services as well. Hence, you should never ignore the traditional ways of advertising business. This can be by way of newspaper advertisements, listing out ads on local TV channels, participating in local events, and so on. The primary objective is to let people know that they have a person practicing alternative therapies in their neighborhood.
Final Words
An effective combination of both the on-page and off-page SEO strategies can help you in your efforts to create an effective local SEO strategy. This article can help you a lot in this aspect. This is how you have local SEO for alternative therapies.
List of Directories
It is a multi discipline/modality section that accredits and represents the interests of practitioners in many ways like Counselling, Homoeopathy, and Ayurvedic Medicine.
