Hey what’s up everybody, this is Dr. Nick with LVRG media. And today I want to talk about the difference between SEO and paid ads. AND why chiropractic SEO is such a great investment.
So SEO is one of these things that I don’t know if chiropractors always quite understand the importance of, or really what they should be doing, or best practices. So just to give you an idea of a little bit of the difference between SEO and paid ads, I think of it as a marathon and a sprint.
Chiropractic Social Media Ads
So with paid ads, you’re going to pay Facebook, you’re going to pay Google, you’re going to pay Tiktok an amount of money to show the ad. Whether it’s when somebody’s doing a search or whether it’s just showing up in their feed. You’re giving them money to put whatever creative you want in front of them. So that can be content, that could be an invitation to a workshop, it could be a new patient special, whatever creative that you have. You can spend money to get that in front of people.
Now with paid ads, the minute you stop spending money with the platform, they stop showing those ads. You might be able to get some free Impressions through organic posting. But eventually those things are gonna get kind of buried in the timeline. And with the social media channels, they’re really giving very minimal amounts of free organic reach when you post anything.
SEO is free organic reach, but it’s a little bit different than a newsfeed in that it can last for a long time and it’s easy for people to find once they’re on the website.
So the reason I think of paid ads as a sprint, and an SEO as a marathon is because there is a time element to SEO. You do have to put in the work. It’s a lot harder and more time consuming than say just running up $49 new patients special on Facebook. But the value of it is that it can pay off years after you’ve done the work. So I think that you should be doing both at the same time. I think that you should be working on the marathon all the time, you should always be creating content. You should always be building out more and more pages on your website focusing on different angles or conditions or types of patients like whatever it is that you want to be found.
The more that you can create your expertise around, the better it’s going to be for your brand long term. With paid ads, those are things that can be impactful right away. You know, I think that there should be paid ads on pretty much any platform that someone is spending time on. That is your ideal patient that you should be spending money on to put your offers or your content in front of them.
If you just wait for people to come find you, you’re gonna be talking about a very small sliver of the local population at any given time. With social media ads, with paid ads, you can get in front of more people without them having to ask for it.
Chiropractic SEO Optimization
But getting back to SEO. The way that I think will help some of you think about SEO is if everybody in your town was looking for a chiropractor that didn’t have a referral source. They didn’t have their sister or their co-workers that could just refer them to the chiropractor that they liked.
Somebody who’s out there and who’s actively shopping for a chiropractor. If there was one person like an actual human being in your town, that every single one of those people tend to or let’s say 95% of those people came to and ask their advice on who they should go see. And then that person kind of doled out where the new patients should go. They’d maybe give them an order like this is who I recommend the most. Here’s who I would maybe go to next, and if you can’t get those two, and maybe check out this third one. And a lot of times that guy wouldn’t even or that woman wouldn’t even give out more than three because most people will have decided within those three options.
Well, Google is like that person. And Google is the place to search your local community when they have decided that they need a chiropractor, they have a chiropractic problem. They need to find someone, hopefully it can be near them or near work or wherever it’s going to be the most convenient for them. That is when they’re gonna go to Google.
And so if you think of SEO as networking with the most important person in your town, the person who would control 90-95% of the pool of available patients on any given moment in time. That is Google, that is where the vast, vast, vast majority of your new patients are going to find you out if they’re doing a search.
There are other browsers or search engines that people can use. The problem is when you go into those browsers, the results that tend to come back are a lot of times muddled. People have just gotten really used to the way Google results look, how they feel. They’re so relevant to the things that you’re looking for that when you use Bing or some of these smaller search engines or browsers, that a lot of the results that come back are not always the best.
So to Google is going to be again 95% of the people that are looking for a chiropractor, actively are going to be utilizing that. So that’s where you want to do all the things that are going to be necessary to Google finding you relevant.
Chiropractic Websites
The other thing that’s really nice about SEO versus paid advertising, is that there is no ad spend when it comes to SEO. So once you’ve put in the effort, or if you’ve paid someone to create content, or build out a page or optimize something for you, that’s really where the cost stops. So you can focus your attention on building out a bigger and bigger base of information. So that you can rank for more and more keywords.
And then the third thing that really helps I mentioned earlier is that you can do the work now. And that work can pay off years from now decades from now potentially. So as long as you were still the most relevant result in the search engine, then you’re gonna continue to show up even if you did the work, say a year ago, three years ago, five years ago.
So just make sure that you are obviously doing the paid ads, that’s important. You want to find those people that are looking for a chiropractor right now, whether it’s with Google ads, whether you catch them before they go do that search by running a Facebook ad or TikTok ad. But what you really want to do is be investing in both not only just the short term, but also in the long term as well.
And that’s going to be the thing that allows you to really start to dominate your area is if you show up everywhere where they’re looking, and anywhere where they’re spending time you’re also showing up there. So, if you’re not focused on your chiropractic SEO right now, be sure to start. Segmenting some of your time, some of your money, some of your energy towards starting to build those things long term, and we’ll see on the next one.
