7 Surefire Ways to Improve Your Chiropractic Website

Websites these days should be thought of as living, breathing things. They need to be nurtured and cared for to perform at their optimum level of effectiveness. Sadly, many sites are neglected and just sit there collecting dust or worse, turning away potential customers for good. This is especially important for your chiropractic website as it is the front door to your practice.

Want to improve your website, but don’t know where to start?

Many website service providers – likely even some of our competitors – may recommend advice that is generic and doesn’t lead to action.

Things such as:

• Get More Traffic
• Increase Conversion Rates
• Improve Your Site Design
• Optimize SEO

That’s all well and good but how exactly do you go about doing that? Most people have a basic grasp of these concepts in theory at a big picture level. The trouble is, you got into business to be a chiropractor, not a web developer. That said, a basic understanding of concepts do not improve a website but executing these concepts in a practical, real-world manner using specific, deliberate and actionable ideas will.

Many “experts” may be able to help you with a couple of the areas below and if you only focused on a couple of these items on your site you would start to see some progress. If you are able to do all 7 of these items you will definitely improve your website in a dramatic manner.

We’ll explore each of these tips and you’ll learn how you can implement them as actionable to-do’s on your own website (or you can always have us help you!). Here is the list, in no particular order.

1. Ensure You Have a Conversion-focused Chiropractic Website

A website that is up-to-date and is designed specifically for conversion is imperative in today’s online world. In other words, your website should be turning site visitors into patients.

Here are some simple tips that will help your website become a converting machine.

1. 1. Your site must be responsive and mobile-friendly to ensure that it displays correctly on all devices.
   2. Utilize compelling calls-to-action throughout the website to lead users to visit the office or schedule an appointment.
   3. Be sure to have a clear value proposition on your homepage. What makes your practice unique? Why should someone choose your practice over any other in town?
   4. Give visitors a good idea of your office through professional photography of your office, your staff and of course, you.
   5. Invest in site content that is professionally written by a copywriter to appeal directly to your patients.

Your website is your face to the online world and is likely the first thing potential patients see about you and your practice. A poorly designed or old website could put a poor taste in your visitors mouth and drive them away and as we mentioned before, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

2. Behold the Power of a Blog

Websites that have informative, unique, relevant content that is updated regularly are not only good for your patients but they are also good for your site as Google rewards sites that are current and relevant.

Blogging is known to elevate your site rankings with Google and positions you as an authority in the chiropractic field not too mention it’s the best way to inform and educate your patients about their health and your services.

3. Clean Up Typos and Bad Grammar on Your Site

It’s surprising to know how big of an impact little things like typos and misspellings have on your website.

These little errors can actually damage your website’s credibility and ultimately impact your bottom line and cost you money in the long run.

It’s pretty simple to fix these simple oversights that are holding back your website. By making these changes you will improve your website, your bottom line and generally improve the perception your users have about you. So get your hands dirty and edit your content yourself or hire a freelancer or us to proof and edit your site and fix these things that could be killing your credibility.

4. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

If your site is already designed to be mobile-friendly then you are good to go. But, you probably want to run your site through Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool just to be sure.

We’ve encountered websites for clients where they have thought their website was mobile optimized only to find out that it wasn’t.

You probably know by know that it’s imperative that your website is mobile-friendly. This is even one of the factors that Google uses to grade your website and you can, in fact, be penalized if your site is not up to snuff from a mobile standpoint. Not good.

If your site is not mobile-friendly, there are several things you can do:

1. 1. 1. The old way of mobile, you can have a separate mobile version of your site (e.g. mobile.mywebsite.com)
      2. If you use a platform like WordPress to power your site, you could possibly use a mobile plugin
      3. We strongly recommend that you convert your site to Responsive Web Design, or RWD so that it works well across any device

We assume that you understand how important it is to have a mobile website, but just to bring the point home we wanted to share a couple stats.

According to Google, who controls 75% of the search engine market, the number of searches coming from a mobile device now outnumber searches from desktop (with mobile accounting for over 60% of this traffic).

This number is only going to increase as it is estimated that 77% of adults in the U.S. now own a smartphone, which is up from 35% in 2011.

5. Optimize Your Site for Search

If you want to be found online, then you likely know that your site needs to be optimized for search engines, or more specifically, for Google. As a chiropractor, it’s all the more important for your site to rank well by Google since search is the primary source of new patients for practices.

Knowing how important search is, it’s important to establish a smart SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy and to implement effective search tactics.

At a minimum, here are a handful of SEO tips to implement on your website:

1. 1. • Create and publish high-quality, sharable content to encourage sharing
      • Utilize properly optimized site title tags and meta descriptions
      • Don’t stuff your content with keywords, rather use them naturally and with moderation
      • Find a good balance of high-quality, natural links from external sites
      • Be sure to link to relevant pages throughout your website

Whatever you do, don’t fall for “get traffic quick” schemes that many so-called SEO experts are selling. If your website is providing a superior user experience and you are implementing sound SEO tactics you will achieve higher search engine rankings and ultimately more traffic leading to more visitors. And if you are properly setting your site up for conversions, those visitors will become patients.

6. Implement a site-wide, Call-to-Action

Do users know what the most important thing is on your chiropractic website? Are you making it easy for them? Do you want them to fill out a lead generation form? Maybe you’d like them to download a lead magnet or buy a product? Very likely, as a chiropractor, you probably want them to setup an appointment.

No matter what action you want them to take, you need to make it abundantly clear and obvious for your site visitors. Therefore, to get specific, you need to place your CTA (call-to-action) in a prime space of your website, preferably in the header.

When implemented correctly, your CTA:

1. 1. • Is featured prominently on the site (above the fold as we used to say)
      • Is accessible on every page of your website
      • Clearly indicates what the user is clicking on

7. Do a Thorough Review of your SEO on Authority Pages

Did you know that you can drastically improve the SEO of your website in as little as 30 minutes. With a keen eye, some review of your data and a dose of strong copywriting you can see some marked improvement.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Use a powerful tool such as OpenSiteExplorer.com which is free for your top 5 results. Enter your website and run the tool.

Step 2: Take a look at the Meta Titles and Descriptions to be sure that they do not wrap.

Step 3: Edit your Meta Titles to only be 50 – 65 characters in length. Your Meta Descriptions should be less than 155 characters.

If you properly execute these simple steps on the top pages of your website you will improve your on-page search engine optimization and may even lead more patients to click to visit your website.

Start Improving Your Chiropractic Website Today!

Hopefully this list doesn’t overwhelm you. Start with one item, make the suggested change, and move onto the next task. Oftentimes, website improvement is first of all, about making incremental changes and then measuring the effect it has and adjusting accordingly. Don’t have the skills or time to make these changes? We’d be glad to help, just let us know.