By DoctorLogic

With more than 5,000 medical spas working all over the United States, the competition for patients is becoming more and more fierce every year. Since many of these businesses use expert search engine optimization (SEO) services, common SEO strategies are no longer enough to keep you ahead of the competition.

It’s imperative to dig deeper into cutting-edge SEO techniques and tools. Combining traditional and advanced strategies can help steal market share and boost your medical spa’s revenue.

What is medical spa SEO?

Regardless of the sales funnel stage, a medical spa’s potential audience is doing research online. From simple chemical peels to botulinum toxin injections, your SEO strategy kicks in as soon as patients start typing queries.

Medical spa SEO focuses on bringing your website to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) and making it visible to your target audience. Since around 70% of search engine users click the top results on the first SERP, a robust SEO strategy is key to generating organic traffic.

Successful medical spa SEO starts with a high-quality website that:

• Offers high-quality content;
• Has a responsive design;
• Is optimized for mobile (today, Google focuses on mobile-first indexing);
• Provides an excellent user experience; and
• Has useful and valid internal and external links.

A robust website coupled with excellent SEO techniques can attract leads, convert them into patients, increase your medical spa’s credibility and improve patient satisfaction.

What are some common SEO strategies for medical spas?

When you begin your journey through medical spa SEO, you must start with the standard strategies. They are the backbone of your marketing efforts, yielding results throughout your campaign.

Keyword research

Keyword research involves making a list of terms your potential patients are likely to search for. Since Google’s algorithms are becoming more sophisticated, you no longer need to provide exact keyword matches. The search engine can determine the searcher’s intent and list websites that match it; marketers need to do the same.

For example, if skin resurfacing is one of your services, you need to list it as a keyword. However, you should also use keywords such as “old skin layer removal” or “how to make skin younger.” Focus on what patients want instead of hoping they can develop a comprehensive query.

When it comes to medical spa keyword research, you need to use concise short-tail keywords, such as “med spa treatments,” and long-tail keywords, such as “is body contouring right for me?”

Your goal is to find high-volume keywords (terms that many patients search for) with low difficulty (how easy it is for content optimized for this keyword to rank high on Google).

Page title and meta description optimization

Page titles, meta descriptions and other metadata let both the user and the search engine know what your website content is all about. Optimizing this information is imperative to making your website more appealing to search engine crawlers and easier to use for visitors.

This description is the first thing a patient sees when looking at the SERP, and it becomes the calling card of your medical spa.

The more work you put into metadata, the more likely you will improve your click-through rates.

Local SEO

Since medical spas mainly cater to local audiences, they need to pay more attention to local SEO. Local search engine optimization focuses on attracting local visitors to your website and, eventually, your doorstep.

The most critical elements of local SEO for medical spas include:

• Google Business Profile: Filling out and updating this profile helps patients find you online, leave and read reviews, learn about available services and much more.
• Google Maps: More than 72% of people who do a local search visit a business within five miles of their location. That’s why it’s imperative to put your medical spa on Google Maps—so it becomes visible to local internet users when they search for “skin tightening near me” or “medical day spa in Seattle.”

Besides the above Google services, you can create profiles on directories and review sites such as Yellowpages, WebMD and Doctors.com.

You must also pay attention to other search engines, such as Bing. To optimize your medical spa for local Bing searches, claim your profile on Bing Places.

Link building

Both internal and external links contribute to the success of your medical spa’s SEO strategy.

• Internal links: Linking one page of your website to another helps with navigation and improves user experience, and it also shows the search engine how well organized your website is. Review your existing pages to find opportunities for internal linking, and always keep them in mind when adding new content.
• Backlinks: When reputable websites link to your web pages, they become more trustworthy in the “eyes” of the search engine. Websites with more high-quality backlinks generally rank higher than others.

To gain backlinks, you need to work on the quality of your content to ensure it’s worth linking to. You can also write guest posts on authoritative websites, and some allow inserting a link to your website at the bottom of the post.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a significant part of any marketing campaign. Content plays a leading role in SEO since it:

• Implements keywords;
• Builds authoritativeness and trustworthiness;
• Creates backlinks; and
• Keeps your website up to date.

A strong content marketing strategy also complements your SEO efforts by keeping visitors on your website longer and guiding them to take action.

What are some advanced SEO strategies for medical spas?

Once you implement all the traditional SEO strategies into your marketing campaign, you may want to focus on advanced tactics.

Reputation management

When it comes to medical spa services, reputation is everything. While you are working to build your reputation offline, your marketing team should be honing it online. The central part of reputation management for SEO is online reviews.

Reviews in the Google Business Profile are one of your website's top five ranking factors. That’s why it’s imperative to encourage reviews and reply to them in a timely manner.

Another way to collect positive reviews is to create, manage and update your social media profiles. Since social media marketing is integral to local medical spa campaigns, asking for reviews in your profile is a simple yet effective strategy.

With the right tools, you can encourage, collect and display Google-friendly reviews on your website and social media.

Phrase-based indexing

Phrase-based indexing is the way Google tries to react to the user’s intent. Instead of matching the exact query “do I need extensive body contouring” with the content on your website, it considers the sentence structure. It looks for websites with information on “body contouring,” “weight loss,” and “med spa treatment.”

The algorithm matches only the essential words in the query to your web content. It also checks if the keywords on your website appear in a close semantic context to the search phrases.

Marketers need to keep this indexing in mind when creating content around keywords. The more relevant content you produce, the more likely you rank higher.

A.I.-driven SEO

Traditional SEO agencies conduct standard keyword research that produces only a handful of relevant local keywords.

Modern patient acquisition platforms use artificial intelligence to generate tens of thousands of relevant keywords automatically. They can also help create content with keywords placed in an SEO-friendly manner.

A.I.-enabled SEO tools can help you increase visibility on the SERPs and steal market share from the competition.

A case study in advanced SEO for medical spas

Sonterra Dermatology is a San Antonio medical spa that struggled to outdo the high competition in the Texas market. After partnering with DoctorLogic and leveraging A.I.-powered SEO tools, the website’s visibility increased dramatically, leading to a 48% increase in conversions and a 60-times increase in reviews.

It can be nearly impossible to survive the fierce medical spa competition by implementing traditional SEO tactics that most agencies already use. To gain a competitive edge, you need to be a step ahead. One of the ways to do it is to partner with a comprehensive marketing agency that offers A.I.-driven SEO tools.

DoctorLogic is an all-in-one digital marketing platform for doctors that is currently used by more than 5,000 health care providers. It makes it easy for you to market your practice effectively online to attract and retain patients. With its review and gallery software, editing tools, analytics and leading tracking capabilities, its platform creates up to 10 times the amount of content of any website platform. Get found more often online and receive more leads.

DoctorLogic offers a free market analysis tool for AmSpa Members. Analyze your local market and build your free revenue report by visiting https://doctorlogic.com/amspa. Click here to learn how to join AmSpa today.