Hey what’s up everybody? This is Dr. Nick with LVRG media and today I want to talk to you about whether you should be renting or buying your chiropractic website.
So what I mean by renting or buying is, since chiropractic started really doing more in terms of websites, about 15 years ago, websites were much more complicated and more difficult to create than they are today. And for whatever reason, as a profession we started renting websites from companies. So there were maybe three to five companies that really started out in the time that I was really starting out in practice.
Chiropractic Website Companies
And they just dominated that market structure at the time. The sites they built were more modern and clean and looked good, lots of information was on there. But over time, websites have become less expensive to build from the ground up, to own as a practice. But for whatever reason, as you know, as chiropractors, we’ve kind of gotten stuck into that model in the past where we pay a low fee, sometimes $0 to get started, maybe a couple hundred bucks to build up a website. And then we pay anywhere from $100 to probably up to about $500 a month just to maintain the website.
That’s not even if you’re doing the advanced SEO package, or the Google My Business optimization, or adding Google ads or Facebook ads into it. Then they start tacking on, it can get into the thousands at that point. But just for websites, the prices that I’ve seen for these cookie cutter website companies is between $100 and $500 to basically manage your website. That might include some basic SEO that gets done on a regular basis, but not a lot. So if you do that, what you’re signing up for is basically a lifetime of monthly fees.
And the problem is that you don’t own the website. The company that built the website is the one that owns it. And if you ever stopped paying that monthly fee, now all of a sudden you don’t have a website and you’re starting back from zero. You might own the URL, but the design, the pages content, a lot of times that is exclusively with the company that built it.
Chiropractic Websites 2022
Now I think that when you get started in practice, if you are really doing it by a shoestring, then you have to have a website. It needs to look professional, it needs some minimum bar of the public’s expectations. So sometimes renting can work for somebody who’s just getting started out. The problem is when I see people that are collecting over $100,000 a month, and still spending only $300 a month for really what is the most important of online assets.
So all of your other stuff, your Facebook page, your channel, your Instagram and Tiktok, all those things are owned by those platforms. You don’t own any of them, You can get kicked off the platform at a moment’s notice. With your website, it’s the one thing you have, and it’s really the center of your online presence. So renting that from someone else, and existing under the whims of another company really puts you in a precarious place.
So I always say that once you get to that 20, $30,000 in collections, you should absolutely be transitioning from a rented website into a site that you own. The longer that you stay on a rented website, the more stuck you get. And so you can treat it as maybe like a you know, a bridge to a better website down the road.
Chiropractic Websites
You know, when you’re first getting started, then I’m all on board with it. When you’re at the point where you are profitable in practice, now is the time to start to move your website from something as long as transition is done properly. You should be able to get back to where you are right now in terms of your SEO and hopefully be able to even go beyond. What I see with people that rent is that they kind of get lulled into a sense of security because there’s lots of content on the page or on the website so they just kind of forget about it.
With a site that you own, you should be constantly building that site, creating more content, adding more pages, so that Google sees you as the most relevant person. So if you are currently renting, I strongly recommend moving towards something that you own. I am a story brand certified guide. So I take people through the story brand process, and I help them create custom websites that really tell the uniqueness of the practice and that practice’s story to its community. So if you’re looking for help, let me know.
