Episode #75 of Acupuncture Marketing School: Boost Your Acupuncture Practice's Local SEO and Your Google Business Profile with Darcy Sullivan

Join me and Darcy Sullivan of the digital marketing firm, Propel Marketing and Design, as we discuss search engine optimization for local service-based businesses.

In this episode, Darcy and I talk about: 

  • Why SEO is just like an Oreo cookie
  • Why target market matters SO MUCH for great SEO
  • How to choose keywords for your website
  • An easy tip for quickly improving location keyword density on your website
  • Lots of specific tips for optimizing your Google Business Profile
  • Unique ideas for repurposing content and using Chat GPT to make marketing simpler and faster
  • How SEO is about appeasing Google and learning to play its game
  • And much more

Hope you enjoy this episode. It’s jam-packed with useful tips you can put into your practice right away!

Show Notes:

🎙️ Listen to Episode #75: Boost Your Local SEO and Your Google Business Profile with Darcy Sullivan

This episode is sponsored by AcuHub.

AcuHub provides remote receptionists specifically for acupuncture practices. I use AcuHub in my practice and I love it! 💙

With AcuHub, you can rely on a dedicated one or two US-based, highly trained receptionists to answer incoming calls and inquiries, schedule appointments on your  EHR software, onboard new patients, and answer questions specific to your practice.

AcuHub offers month-to-month services with no contracts or termination fees, with rates between just $5-$8 per hour depending on the size of your practice.

Save time and money with your own dedicated Acuhub receptionist.

Visit Acu-hub.com to learn more.

Subscribe to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

 💖 Love the podcast? Help other acupuncturists find the podcast by leaving a review here.

Transcript:

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (00:05):

Welcome to the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Grasek, and I’m here to help you get visible in your community, take marketing action with confidence and get more patients in your practice and more money in your pocket every week. We both know you’re a talented, passionate acupuncturist and that acupuncture has the power to change lives. So let’s dive right into this episode and talk about how you can reach more patients.

(00:28):

Welcome back. Join me and Darcy Sullivan of the digital marketing firm, Propel Marketing and Design, as we discuss search engine optimization for local service-based businesses. In this episode, Darcy and I talk about why SEO is just like an Oreo cookie, love me a food analogy, why target market matters so much for great SEO, how to choose keywords for your website, an easy tip for quickly improving location keyword density on your website, lots of specific tips for optimizing your Google Business profile, some unique ideas for repurposing content and using chatGPT to make your marketing simpler and faster, how SEO is really about appeasing Google and simply learning to play its game and much more. I really hope you enjoy this episode. It is jam-packed with useful tips that you can put into practice right away.

[ACUHUB] (01:33):

This episode is sponsored by AcuHub, your personal remote reception team. I use AcuHub at my practice and I absolutely love it. AcuHub works with acupuncture and chiropractic clinics across the US and Canada, so whether you have a solo practice or multiple practitioners, AcuHub can be your only receptionist if you’d like, or they can work in conjunction with your on-the-ground front desk team to offer additional support, for example, freeing up valuable time for your in-person office staff to complete other tasks with fewer interruptions. When working with AcuHub, you can rely on a dedicated one or two US-based, highly trained receptionists to answer incoming calls and inquiries, schedule appointments in your EHR, onboard new patients and answer questions specific to your practice. AcuHub offers month to month services with no contracts or termination fees with rates between just $5 and $8 per hour, depending on the size of your practice. Save time and money with your own dedicated Acuhub receptionist. Visit acuhub.com to learn more. And I will put the link in the show notes to make it easy for you.

[MICHELLE] (02:52):

All right, let’s dive into this episode with Darcy. Hi, Darcy. Welcome. How are you?

[DARCY SULLIVAN] (02:59):

I’m good. I’m so excited to be here.

[MICHELLE] (03:01):

I am so excited to have you here. I love talking about search engine optimization. It’s been such a popular topic on the podcast and I think that it can make a huge difference in the success of people’s business, so we really can’t talk about it enough. Before we dive in, I would love for you to introduce yourself.

[DARCY] (03:22):

Absolutely. So my name is Darcy Sullivan. I work for Propel Marketing and Design, and we help acupuncturists physical therapists, chiropractors, and other clinic owners improve their website rankings and online presence through SEO.

[MICHELLE] (03:41):

Let’s start with the basics. I guess if you bumped into a total newbie beginner with search engine optimization, someone who’s just opening their practice and just building a website, like how would you explain search engine optimization to them?

[DARCY] (03:55):

Great question. So I like simple.

[MICHELLE] (03:57):

Yeah, me too.

[DARCY] (03:59):

You like simple? So this one day, this is going to sound so dorky, but this one day I was eating an Oreo cookie and I’m like, oh my gosh, this is the best way to explain SEO

[MICHELLE] (04:12):

I love it.

[DARCY] (04:13):

So an Oreo cookie, you have the two chocolate wafers, the top chocolate wafer, the bottom chocolate wafer, and then you have this stuff with one F in the middle that holds it together. So just like there are three critical parts to an Oreo cookie, there are three critical parts to SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and we’ll talk about both of those, and then the sweet stuff in the middle that holds it all together. So we have on-page SEO, which are actions you take on your website to help Google showcase your website when somebody’s searching for terms related to your business, we have off-page SEO those are actions you take outside of your website to help improve your online presence and your website ranking and then we have the sweet stuff in the middle and that’s identifying your target patients using the keywords that your target audience is using and knowing your place in the market.

[MICHELLE] (05:26):

First of all, I am always thrilled by a food analogy, so thank you. I’m an extremely food motivated person and I have Celiac, but there are gluten-free Oreos and they are just as good as the regular Oreos. So thank you for that reminder. So what would you recommend that people start with out of those three pieces? Does it matter where they begin as long as they’re including all of them, or?

[DARCY] (05:56):

Well, it always starts with the sweet stuff in the middle because That’s what’s going to hold together, not only your SEO campaign, but your overall marketing campaign. Sometimes we call it a buyer persona or your ideal patient, but clearly identifying who your target audience is should shape your overall marketing efforts. Because we would talk differently to somebody that is coming in potentially for prenatal acupuncture versus somebody that was coming in for a sports injury.

[MICHELLE] (06:31):

Absolutely.

[DARCY] (06:33):

And so the words that they’re using to search, which we, in the SEO world call keyword phrases or keywords, those would vary along with our tone and where we would want to meet them in the marketplace.

[MICHELLE] (06:49):

Gotcha. And when you say meet them in the marketplace, does that mean like where they’re being referred from to arrive on your website?

[DARCY] (06:59):

That from a partnership standpoint or like inbound links coming into your website and also social media. Are they avidly on Instagram or are they more of a facebooker or do they go to YouTube to search videos? How are they searching for their information? And that’s going to be dependent on who they are?

[MICHELLE] (07:21):

Well, I’m very happy to hear you say this. I’m always telling my audience that the first step in really good marketing is knowing their ideal patient and their target market, like you just said. And I think what happens if people don’t do that first is then they could build out this seemingly beautiful marketing plan, but not have it targeted at any particular person or group of people. And then it is sort of a watered-down message, or it just doesn’t hit the mark. It doesn’t grab the attention of any particular person, let alone the one that they’re searching for. And so I’m always asking them not to skip that step.

[DARCY] (08:00):

And I think it’s not only don’t skip that step, but be sure to revisit it. And I can give a couple examples there where when we get somebody to your website, the whole goal is for them to make an appointment with you, for them to have a good experience and make an appointment with you. But let’s just say that your target audience suffers from headaches. If they come to your website and you’ve got crazy colors or you’ve got too much movement going on, all of a sudden when your whole goal is to make them feel better, you’ve already made them feel worse. So we want to keep that in mind and do the images match with that ideal patient that we’re trying to connect with? Or are they just some random stock photos that everybody else is using?

[MICHELLE] (08:58):

I’m so curious about your thoughts on photos, not just on websites, but I suppose in marketing in general. Do you feel like it’s more helpful to showcase photos of the outcome, like the happy people doing stuff they love? Or is it more helpful to show like people with back pain or people with a headache?

[DARCY] (09:21):

I personally like a combination along with things that show the technique. I feel like certain images should be on certain pages. For example, if you’ve got a page on back pain, then you should have a couple back pain related images along with the treatment. I think that sometimes we skip when we jump to the happy people being crazy and active but I’m a person that just ended up on your website because I want to overcome the pain stage. I want to make sure that I’m related, that I can relate to you. And I also, we had, we did a podcast episode specifically on preparing for a photo shoot and people aren’t expecting, with the digital age and with the cameras, people really want to see real people. They don’t want to see the stock photos. But there are just some minor things that you can do to help improve those photos by doing like the water bottle check where you make sure like random water bottles aren’t sitting out or that people don’t have their phones in their pockets, that maybe somebody that you’re giving the treatment to is dressed appropriately or, you know some of those small details really do make a difference. But I think it’s important for people to see what it is that they’re going to experience when they come to see you.

[MICHELLE] (10:55):

Yes, absolutely. It really helps the potential patient, like imagine themself there. And so they take that step towards saying, okay, I can totally do this.

[DARCY] (11:07):

Absolutely. So it’s interesting because I think sometimes people think of SEO and it’s just they only think about getting to the top of Google. They don’t think about the user experience and making sure when somebody does get to your website that they take the action that you want them to take, which is to book an appointment.

[MICHELLE] (11:29):

Yeah, I mean that’s a really good point. It’s not enough to be at the top of Google if your conversion rate or the people who actually make an appointment is pretty low. Because then you have to have so many more people visit your website in order to get one of them to transition into a real-life patient.

[DARCY] (11:47):

Absolutely. And that’s one thing about organic SEO versus some of the paid advertisements is we see that a lot of times paid advertisements lead to that lower conversion rate versus the organic when somebody’s actually searching for you and they’re doing the research and they’re looking for your specific service. And what we want to do is when they get to your website, we want to avoid what I call conversion confusion, which is when you have too many calls to actions like book now, but then also free consultation or download this or a popup of just like sign up for email list where you’re like, but why?

[MICHELLE] (12:28):

I’m always asking people to create a lead magnet instead of just having sign up for my newsletter. Because the Y is a really good question. Everybody’s already inundated with emails and if they are going to give you the currency of their email, it’s like it has a dollar value almost. It has to be for a specific reason, not just like sign up to our website for seasonal health tips and updates. And that is, I mean, that’s just everybody’s acupuncture and wellness website, but to make it unique, like what makes you stand out? What specifically are they going to read? What are you sending them that is worth the currency of their email?

[DARCY] (13:12):

But yeah, exactly. Like you just don’t want the conversion confusion, when your goal is to just get them to book an appointment.

[MICHELLE] (13:21):

So do you feel like, because I do have some acupuncture clients who have on their website a free consultation option and then also book an appointment? I think it is confusing unless it’s very specific, because the question for people sort of becomes, what do I do first? Like, should I do a free consult? Is that required or can I just make an appointment?

[DARCY] (13:47):

And honestly, if you even take a step back, it can be even more confusing if, for instance, they have all of their social media icons at the top of their website. We just want to say book now. Ideally, if we could have that be a button that is when you’re on your laptop or on a desktop all the way to the right at the top of the menu, like that’s the main call-to-action, that’s great. But I think that people get confused when they see the social media and all of a sudden, they’re off on Instagram and never coming back to your website. Or they are like, “Oh, well if I have the opportunity to book a consultation, then maybe I’ll do that instead.” I’m not the biggest fan of that because I’d rather them just book the appointment and just keep the call-to-action clear and simple. What do you think about that?

[MICHELLE] (14:42):

Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like if there’s only one call-to-action, you’re pretty much telling someone this is the next step, because it is the only step, it’s the only thing you can do.

[DARCY] (14:57):

Yes.

[MICHELLE] (14:58):

So how do you recommend that people choose keywords for their website?

[DARCY] (15:03):

Obviously, we have the basics. You have acupuncture, acupuncturist, but then we have what we call long-tail keywords. These are longer in length, so they could be, again, like prenatal acupuncture, sports rehabilitation acupuncture. This also goes back to that, have you clearly identified your target audience? And sometimes what we do is this exercise of who is your target audience, write it out. What are the words they’re using? So what are the pains that they’re suffering from? Those are keywords. What are the specific services or solutions that you offer? Those are keywords. And then while locations are part of keywords, nobody is going to go to Google, type in the word Boston and expect for an acupuncturist website to come up. So we do want to use the location-based words, but we do want to use them in a way that associates them with the services that you offer. And we’re not just building out a page that is a city page for instance that would be something that maybe a travel agent would build out versus an acupuncturist.

[MICHELLE] (16:25):

So then would that look like trying to rank for keywords like fertility acupuncture in Boston, like that makes sense?

[DARCY] (16:33):

Yeah, absolutely. So there are various ways and various things that you should do to your website to help optimize it. One simple thing is that everybody listening is hopefully focusing on gathering testimonials, right?

[MICHELLE] (16:52):

I hope so.

[DARCY] (16:52):

They should be.

[MICHELLE] (16:53):

Please do. If you’re not already, please do.

[DARCY] (16:57):

So if you take your testimonials and not do the embed of like, oh, here are the Google reviews, but actually take the text of them, so exactly what you’re saying, like let’s say you’ve got an amazing fertility acupuncture review. Well, that should go on a page about fertility acupuncture. And then add the location attributes. So if it was Jane Doe, you’ve got her gorgeous review that is using keywords, because she’s talking about her experience, and then we could do Jane D, and then like I do line line or you could do dash and then where is she? Was it Nashville, Tennessee? Was it a surrounding suburb? Where did she come from? So then let’s say you’ve got five or 10 reviews, you are working in those location-based keywords and you can’t even add an attribute of Jane D fertility, acupuncture, and then the name of the location in a way that Google isn’t looking at that like that’s you trying to cram things in. It’s literally you didn’t have to write anything for it, which we love. I mean, I’d probably give each of them maybe like a nice header, like a bold, because people will say, people don’t always read testimonials, but if you grab out something like, I got pregnant and then like had her testimonial and then like said it was from Jane D and then it gave her those attributes, all of a sudden you’re starting to build out this content that is keyword rich in a very natural way.

[MICHELLE] (18:45):

Ooh, I love that. And on my website, I am obsessed with copy and pasting testimonials from Google reviews. And I always wonder, is anybody truly reading these? Google’s reading them regardless.

[DARCY] (19:01):

Yes, but I would give them like each of them a header, “got rid of this pain or headache is gone, or got pregnant.” Give them a cute header. That’s what people read. Then also the location. And something else that’s really important to remember is the moment somebody lands on your website, which usually if they’re searching, they might land on your homepage, your homepage needs to at the top define not only what you offer but where you offer it. So again, what city, where are you offering these services? Because if people are coming to your website, but they’re on the other side of the country and they don’t travel to your area, doesn’t matter. Let’s make sure that from a local standpoint, we’re really standing out and making sure that people know that you serve the areas that you serve.

[MICHELLE] (20:01):

Yes, because I know that a lot of people have their location in the footer of their website, for example. But you shouldn’t make visitors have to scroll to look for the location. And I also see this all the time on people’s Instagram accounts. If it’s not set to a business account, it doesn’t automatically show your address and so you’ll land on this person’s brilliant account and be like, ooh, I like this person, and then realize you don’t know where they’re located. And then when you finally figure it out, they, I mean, I’ve had people be literally hundreds of miles away from me or in a different state. So it’s just so important to share that basic info. And we don’t think of it as business owners, we sort of feel like it’s out there. It should be easy for them to figure it out, but people’s attention span is so short you can’t afford to ask them to figure out that information because they will end up watching cat videos on YouTube for 30 minutes on accident and they’ll never return.

[DARCY] (21:02):

Absolutely. You mentioned something about the short attention span, and we’ve talked a little bit about website stuff, but before people even get to your website, most of the time when they’re searching, they will see your Google Business profile listing, which is what controls your listing in Google Maps. And oftentimes, they won’t even make it to your website, but if they find the right information in that listing, they will either call you or book an appointment or that could also lead them to your website. But we’re going past even clicking through on Google to what we call like a zero click search where they find the information without even clicking.

[MICHELLE] (21:50):

Which brings up such a good point, because I think all of a sudden, I feel like there’s so many wonderful conversations about how to optimize your Google Business profile, because it is free. And there’s a lot that you can do to help your Google Business profile sort of point to your website and feature your website. And as you said if you have your “book now” link, you may not even need people to go to the website if they can make an appointment from your Google Business profile. So how do you recommend optimizing the Google Business profile for SEO?

[DARCY] (22:27):

So I like to break it down into three steps, things you should do immediately, things that take a little bit more time and maybe give it like a week or so and plot some time out to do it, and then ongoing efforts. So the first thing you need to do is claim your listing. Very important. That gives you access to data points, it gives you access to more information and allows you to change and make any edits. Once you’ve done that, you need to make sure that your name, your address, and your phone number are correct. And then we also need to make sure that the name is the real name of your business because you don’t want Google, you don’t want to get in trouble with Google. You don’t want to just shove dash acupuncture and city or anything like that in the name because we want the name to match your actual business name.

(23:25):

Then we move into the things that take a little longer. This includes the description, your description, right now they give you 750 characters. You should make sure that you use those. So you’re talking about the services that you offer, who you offer them to. Again, this all goes back to that sweet stuff in the middle, your target audience and where you offer them, what cities and areas you offer the services. Now we have categories and then we have specific services that are associated with categories. In most cases, your primary category is going to be acupuncture, but if you offer other services like PT, physical therapy or something else, or you’re with a group that offers other things, you want to add those as secondary categories because it’s going to improve your searchability.

[MICHELLE] (24:25):

Gotcha. Okay.

[DARCY] (24:28):

Now after you’ve added a category, you want to add a service associated with that category. So for acupuncture, this could be fertility acupuncture, this could be, if you just do general acupuncture, this is still, you’re adding acupuncture associated with that category and then giving that service a description. And why are we doing this? We’re giving Google all the information it wants and needs. Because you got to love the hand that feeds you and give it like, play its games. So we’ve got the category, we’ve got the description, we’ve got the services. We’re going to look at the attributes. So Google will think, hey, we think you have a restroom that’s we wheelchair accessible, or hey, we think your entrance is wheelchair accessible. Is it really? We want to make sure that those are correct and whatever attributes are associated with, with the listing. You’re not going to get any extra points if you say that you’re a woman-owned business. If there’s anything you’re not going to get extra points for them is just accurate information. We then have your hours of operation. And this is what’s really interesting. Around December we noticed that openness is now a ranking factor.

[MICHELLE] (25:51):

Interesting.

[DARCY] (25:51):

If I were standing near two locations that matched my search and one was open at the time and one was closed at the time, Google would favor the one that was open.

[MICHELLE] (26:08):

That makes so much sense.

[DARCY] (26:10):

It does. And it’s so hard as a business owner to think about why won’t Google show my business? But then you think about it, if you’re at the side of the road and you need a tire repair place, like you want one that’s open for sure. So that is absolutely something to consider if you’re like, why is my competition outranking me? Well, maybe take a look at all the factors. Have you optimized your listing? Do you have your description? Do you have your hours? Are their hours completely expanded upon? Like are you looking at a Saturday when you’re closed and they’re open? These are all things you have to keep in mind.

(26:47):

We also want to make sure there’s Q&A and this Q&A section, you can ask questions as a business and you can answer them as the business. So we can go ahead and ask some of the most common questions. We’re not asking questions that relate to general, like what’s involved in being qualified to be an acupuncturist. We’re asking specific questions like, for example, if we want to make it as easy for somebody to find you as possible, if they need to park in a specific parking lot when they come to your location, if your location is hard to find, that stuff. We ask and we answer, where should I park when I’m visiting? Name a location. When you’re visiting, name a location, please park, blah blah blah, blah, blah, if that pertains to you. It doesn’t pertain to everybody. But the happier we can make somebody when they come through the door, the more likely they’re going to be to leave a positive review, which leads to a couple other things.

(27:47):

You want Photos. We found that if you have two to three photos of the outside of your building, if you have issues with Google in your Google listing, it’s going to be easier for you to file a report with them because of having those pictures of the outside of the building and the legitimacy. So we want photos of the outside of the building, photos of the inside of the building, some of those photos of either staged or doing a demonstration of the services that you offer, your friendly staff, those kinds of things. That’s all help because if I’m doing a search and I see two listings, your competition might be slightly above you, but if they aren’t providing this information and there you are providing this great experience, I’m going to choose you. Let’s be honest.

[MICHELLE] (28:38):

I’m really curious. I learned recently that it can be useful to load short videos into the photo section of the Google Business profile. So I have like a little office tour. Do you feel like it is helpful to have a little video of the practitioners introducing themselves? Or is that going to be too long, people aren’t going to watch it?

[DARCY] (29:03):

I’d keep it short, but again, what we want to do is we want, the whole name of the game is repurposing. So if I were you, what I would do is I would do a long one for YouTube, then crop it into little pieces. So you’ve got stuff for your social media feeds, you’ve got something longer for your website, you’ve got some bites for your Google Business profile whether you’re showcasing them through that section or through the post section so that you can really use it in multiple ways.

[MICHELLE] (29:37):

Gotcha.

[DARCY] (29:39):

And then once you’ve got those basics, obviously we want testimonials. Of course, we want testimonials. We also need to respond to those testimonials and we want to continue to collect those testimonials. Those are all things to keep in mind and those are part of your ongoing efforts, the posts, the testimonials, the looking at your listing and making sure, has Google tried to make any suggestions or attributes or anything else that it wants to change and modify that you need to correct or verify?

[MICHELLE] (30:12):

And when you say posts, you’re referring to the Google updates on the business profile?

[DARCY] (30:19):

Yes.

[MICHELLE] (30:19):

Okay, so how often should we be posting on our Google Business profile?

[DARCY] (30:25):

I like to think of a Google Business profile listing post differently than you think of other social media. I almost like to think about these as like little ads. And honestly, what I suggest with those is that you come up with a list and you want to make sure that you’re including a call-to-action. So maybe you have one or two promos. Maybe they’re promos for specific occasions, maybe, maybe you don’t, maybe there’s some events that you’re participating in, but then there’s also just showcasing a specific service that you offer, a specific audience that you’re trying to target, a specific technique or again, like a specific condition that you’re trying to help somebody overcome. So let’s say you just make 10, let’s just say 10 posts, fertility, you do a little one about fertility and you link it to the fertility page on your website. You do one on back pain, link it to back pain. You do one on a specific technique, whatever. Let’s just say you’ve got 10. Just rotate those.

[MICHELLE] (31:35):

I love it.

[DARCY] (31:36):

Do one a week and just keep them on rotation because, again, it’s different than Facebook, it’s different than Instagram, but at the same time we want to appease Google, but we want to do it in a way that makes it easy for us. So the same thing goes like the testimonials. Remember how I said we want to respond to the testimonials? We don’t want to just say thank you. Well, what are these people leaving testimonials about? If it’s like, if we can come up with three common conditions that they have. And if we go to chatGPT and we say, “Hey ,chatGPT, I’m an acupuncturist who focuses on prenatal or fertility acupuncture, can you give me 10 or 15 responses to reviews people have left me?”

[MICHELLE] (32:26):

Oh my gosh, chatGPT really blows my mind. Like there’s literally no end to the things you can ask it to do for you.

[DARCY] (32:36):

Yes, but here’s the thing though. We’re not asking it for one because that’s where we get faulty and we’re not just asking it for a general response. We’re giving it very specific direction. We’ve identified who we are, who our target audience is and the goal and we’ve asked it for 10. So then you open up a Google doc and you paste in all of these responses. Maybe you also take your Google posts, your 10 Google posts and you ask it to re-word them.

[MICHELLE] (33:06):

That was going to be my next question is can we copy and paste the same text or will Google flag that and not pay as much attention if we posted it before on our update?

[DARCY] (33:18):

I would consider using it modified, but again, you’re not going to get dinged for it and at least you’re participating. But again, one of the keys is to make sure that you include the call-to-action, the button that drives traffic to your website so that that way people are actually going to your website.

[MICHELLE] (33:40):

And I love that you keep saying like these are steps we’re taking to appease Google to play the game. Because I think that it really helps people to remember why they’re making all these efforts. Google wants to be able to find you, but you have to participate and you have to tell it how you are relevant over and over again in order for it to say, “Oh, okay, Michelle’s playing the game, Seneca Falls. Acupuncture is in the game and I know that they want cosmetic patients and menstrual cycle patients because they keep participating with the same keywords over and over again.”

[DARCY] (34:22):

And it’s important to note that on your website, we don’t want to just do like a PDF or a JPEG or an image that has this text because Google isn’t going to read the text on an image. It needs to be the actual text sitting on the website.

[MICHELLE] (34:42):

So earlier you mentioned copying and pasting testimonials and you made a point of saying that we aren’t just taking a screenshot of the testimonial and then displaying the screenshot on the website. We actually want the text the words. That’s very important.

[DARCY] (34:59):

Yes, yes. And we talked about chatGPT, which is an amazing asset, but we don’t want to just say, hey, chatGPT, write some, write a blog post for me about this key word because all chatGPT is doing is taking stuff that already exists and spinning it. So it’s good if you’re like, hey, I’m stuck. I need an outline for this. Hey, can you help me with a specific section? Hey, I have this content, can you help me build it out? But we can’t just say, hey, write something for me and expect something amazing

[MICHELLE] (35:42):

And I think it’s always helpful to be reminded, although I’m sure everyone thinks of this every time they use chatGPT, I hope that they want to finesse whatever it spits out to make it sound like themselves and not like a, I always think of chatGPT as like a robot in a top hat. Sometimes it will give you text that’s like delightfully formal and it’s like, okay, well unfortunately I’ve never sounded like that in my life. I’m enjoying it, but it’s not particularly it. It doesn’t fit with the rest of my brand.

[DARCY] (36:23):

Right. Now, what you can do is take a piece of content that has your writing style or the way you want your brand represented and say, “Hey chatGPT, I’m going to paste below copy that represents my brand. Please define the writing style.”

[MICHELLE] (36:42):

Oh, I love this.

[DARCY] (36:44):

And then it’s got something to go off of. And then when you go back to it and you say, “Hey, here’s my target audience, here’s my goals of whatever I’m trying to put together, my brand, the brand writing style should match, and then take that,” also ask it, do you need any additional information to complete this task. Let’s make sure that we’re giving it everything. It can be very top hatty where it’s like, dear ma’am or dear sir, you are cordially invited to attend and you’re like, no, no, no, no, no.

[MICHELLE] (37:20):

I do feel like part of that is my own fault because I do forget initially to tell chatGPT the tone of voice I would like and then it gives me something and I’m like, all right, I need to tell it. I would like this to be conversational or professional, but no one has ever suggested putting in a chunk of your own writing and then asking chatGPT to define what that is so that you can use that phrase later. I love that. I think that’s so helpful.

[DARCY] (37:47):

It’s also good. We call it like a brand style guide. If you just do like a Google Drive or a Google Doc, these are key elements that we feel like represent our brand. Again, we’re talking about the stuff in the middle of the SEO and cookie, that Oreo cookie that holds it all together, your branding, your messaging, have that document. This is our target audience, these are the keywords they use, this is our style and our tone. These are our colors. These are some of our best performing videos or social media posts and email blasts. Then you’ve got it, as you grow to expand or bring on a VA or somebody to assist, you’ve got everything documented.

[MICHELLE] (38:30):

Yes, oh, I love that too. That consistency across your brand is so important and helpful.

[DARCY] (38:36):

Absolutely.

[MICHELLE] (38:37):

So do you feel like there are particular pages that acupuncturists must have on their websites for really good search engine optimization?

[DARCY] (38:47):

Yes. When it comes to websites, every single page or blog posts that you have on your site gives you the opportunity to rank on Google. When we look at websites that are built out, so not like the website that only has four pages, but like a website that’s established and they’re active online, it’s usually the 80/20 rule where 20% of the web pages drive 80% of the traffic. If we can take that and say this well established clinic has these pages that are the main drivers, then if you were just getting started, it would make the most sense to focus on the pages that are already proven to be the highest drivers.

[MICHELLE] (39:37):

Gotcha.

[DARCY] (39:37):

Those are your homepage, your about page, your what we call a general services page. So it’s got your services, but then we also have specific services, so menstrual acupuncture or prenatal acupuncture. If anything, that’s of a specific service. We’ve got conditions, which are the conditions you treat. We have specific conditions which would be maybe like migraine or anything that’s very specific that you’re servicing. We have, usually there’s some specific blog posts that do drive content, do drive directive, but we want to focus on the core website before we get distracted with blogging. From a legal standpoint you want to have terms of use and a privacy policy, which nobody likes. I mean, nobody likes, nobody thinks those are fun pages, but you should have them

[MICHELLE] (40:35):

Should live there.

[DARCY] (40:35):

They should live there. I also, even though you have a contact us page, if you’re booking, depending on how you take appointments, we have people that book through Jane app or other systems, but we also have people that require a phone call for booking or they have to fill out a form and then they call you back for booking or they’re using calendar, it just, it really all depends. I like for the “book now” to be different than the “contact us” because people will go to your contact us that want to sell you something

[MICHELLE] (41:15):

Interesting.

[DARCY] (41:16):

I mean, people are going to go to your “contact us” page if they want to contact you to try to sell you marketing services or to try to sell you supplies or to try to sell you anything versus the “book now,” which then you can say, okay, which pages drove people to end up on the “book now” page, which is what drives the conversion.

[MICHELLE] (41:37):

Gotcha. So are you saying we should have a “book now” page and a contact page separately?

[DARCY] (41:45):

Yes. Unless your “book now” should go to let’s say like Jane app or a different system that’s a booking agent that’s outside of your website.

[MICHELLE] (41:56):

Gotcha. Okay, I’m trying to remember what’s on my contact page. I set it up more for people to be able to find my location, which I always think is odd, but when I click on someone’s contact page, it’s usually because I want to see a map and I don’t know where else to look. But I don’t really know if that’s the ideal setup for that.

[DARCY] (42:18):

Ideally, we want the map on your homepage along with your address, which hopefully would be clickable. On your “contact us” page if it’s not on your homepage. We like a picture of the outside of your building, especially like, I gave the example, I live about an hour away from Miami and I had to go down to Miami to go see a neurologist. I already was not feeling good. They did not include a picture of the outside of their building in their Google Business profile listing or on their website. It was a drive around, drive around, drive around situation. Whereas on the “contact us” or on the homepage, it should have a picture of the outside of your building for easy to find you. If you should park in a specific parking garage or need walking directions if you are in a metropolitan area and you need to include bus stops or subway stops. Those are the things that are important. Now for the “contact us” page also, is your billing department different? Should people contact you for specific things? Do you need information about insurance, which you probably don’t, but some people might? Or do you need specific information than it makes sense to be on that “contact us” page that’s a little bit different versus the “book now” is just like, don’t distract me with anything else. Let’s make an appointment to see each other.

[MICHELLE] (43:53):

Okay. I do not have a picture of the outside of my office building on my contact page and it just occurred to me that I probably should have a picture of like the front door to my office inside the larger space because there’s about 15 businesses in that building and it’s very easy to get to, but it would be like nice for people to recognize it instantly once they’re inside the building. If I have a new patient and they’re a few minutes late, I will wander the building looking for them. I’m like, you’re lost. I know it. I’m coming to get you.

[DARCY] (44:30):

See we just want to avoid that so that everybody comes in. Again, your whole goal is to make somebody feel better and we make it easy. Make it easy. So same with the barriers to conversion, meaning how easy is it for them to book an appointment with you? Do they have to fill out a form and then you email them and call them and then you play 25 rounds of phone tags to realize that you’re not available, that the days and the times that they’re interested in, but yes, having something so simple as having like a photo of this is the outside of our building, this is the front door, especially if it’s a bigger building, like we’re on the east side, use elevator L or number two or whatever. Just get them there super easy. They’re going to be in a better mood, more likely to leave a positive review.

[MICHELLE] (45:22):

So true. Do you feel like there is anything else that you would tell people they must have on their website to be noticed by Google? I know we’ve covered a lot of ground already.

[DARCY] (45:35):

When it comes to content. We’re not just putting together a page that has a sentence on it that says I offer prenatal acupuncture. That’s not a page we want stuff actually built out. And then we need to do the techie stuff that I know some people don’t love, but that’s your meta title tags and your page descriptions and including alt text and linking, linking one page of your website to another, because that’s what helps Google understand. So if I’m on a back pain page and I mention that acupuncture is one of the services that helps with back pain, that should link to the acupuncture page. And again, you think of it like a web, that’s how Google crawls and understands how content’s connected together. We did put together a download, which I think we sent you the link too, which goes into some of the techie talk, which you can include in the show notes because it’s, I know we’ve covered so much that it’s, there’s still just so much more, but we don’t want to overcomplicate things like by getting too techy, you know what I mean?

[MICHELLE] (46:52):

I will definitely include that in the show notes. I would encourage everyone, if it feels scary to hear things like update your meta tags and your meta titles and you’re like, what is that, wow do I do that, if you have Weebly, for example, watch the free training and then you can Google, how do I update a post description on Weebly? And Weebly will show you a video of their most recent updates. So it can be very easy. It just takes a little bit of time set aside, but that backend SEO makes such a huge difference.

[DARCY] (47:27):

It does, it really does. And again, it’s not, well, we’re not trying to trick the system. I’ve been doing SEO for 20 years, which just sounds crazy, oh, but back then it was like you tried to trick the system in the backend and you could do all these like secret things. And really, it’s so much less technical now than it used to be. Taking small steps leads to big results.

[MICHELLE] (47:57):

I just have a couple more questions for you, and one is how long, this is such a hard question to answer, I know, how long before SEO starts working? I’ve heard that there’s like no timeframe, you can’t know, but is it like three months? Is it a year?

[DARCY] (48:15):

It depends on how aggressive you’re being, if you’re using a company to do it for you, if you’re doing it on your own, if it was a technical glitch that was holding you up, for instance. We’ve had issues where we’ve worked with clients who their practice wasn’t showing up anywhere on Google because the person that put together their website marked it to not index on Google or because you just put up a website in your brand-new company. So there’s ways to help boost it and boost it quickly. And then it’s what keyword terms are we talking about? Just because you’re seeing results, fixing indexing issues like I mentioned, or helping somebody that’s brand spanking new, we can see results, not always, and it has to be an aggressive approach quickly, like within, sometimes it’s within a couple weeks and sometimes it’s within a couple months, but then it depends.

(49:10):

If you’re like, this is great, I watched this video, I’m going to go in and change one meta description, that’s not going to reap you the rewards that adding fresh content, really targeting your, identifying your audience, targeting that audience with the right content is going to do you. So it depends. It can be as quick as a couple weeks. It can obviously take longer. Everybody usually likes to say three to six months. But it depends on where you’re at, how crazy of a key word you’re trying to tackle. If it’s something with lower search volume, meaning less people are searching for it, but it’s your target audience, then it’s going to be easier than a general term of acupuncture. Think of how many people are trying to rank for that term.

[MICHELLE] (50:03):

Yes. And I think sometimes it’s helpful to remind people that it’s normal for SEO to be a long-term game. If you’re, if you want your practice to be around for 30 years, then plan on creating content and optimizing your website over time. Once you’ve been doing it for a few years, everything snowballs. It really matters and it adds up over time. But I think as long as you’re comfortable with the idea that like, okay, this might never end and it’s just going to keep getting better and better, then it’s maybe a lower, it’s like a low-pressure way for people to approach it.

[DARCY] (50:42):

Something, too, that we’ve we’re seeing a lot more of is that people are either entering in and they’re just starting their company for the first time, or they’re starting to look five, 10 years ahead and planning to exit. And really you have to think about SEO. And again, like when we talked about some of these core foundational elements coming up with your brand styling guide, all of those are elements that when you go to sell your company, if you were going to sell your company, help increase the value of the company. Your social media presence, your searchability online, your amazing testimonials, all of those, again, they really add to your bottom line now, but in the future, they’re also going to be hopefully pay you back if you decide to sell your business.

[MICHELLE] (51:32):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I have one more question for you, and that is, what is your definition of success?

[DARCY] (51:42):

I would say my definition of success is really being able to help somebody get to the next level. I mean, I know we all stumble, fall. Sometimes things don’t turn out the way that we want them to, but I would say helping, it always involves helping others. I can’t think of success as an individual task, that was just one person.

[MICHELLE] (52:08):

Well, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time. Where can we find you online? Where can people connect with you?

[DARCY] (52:16):

Absolutely. So our website is propelyourcompany.com. You can find us on Instagram at Propel Your Company and the name of our podcast is Propel Your Practice.

[MICHELLE] (52:32):

And we will include a link to the video where they can walk through their SEO in the show notes. Thank you again.

[DARCY] (52:41):

Absolutely.

[MICHELLE] (52:47):

As always, thank you for being here. A quick announcement, next week is the scholarship competition for Acupuncture Marketing School, the online course. We’ll be accepting scholarship applications from Monday, May 13th through Thursday, May 16th at midnight. Two winners will be selected, one acupuncturist and one acupuncture student who will receive free seats inside Acupuncture Marketing School, the online course, which is worth 15 N-C-C-A-O-M-P-D-A credits. They’ll also win a free one-on-one marketing strategy session with me over Zoom to discuss their marketing together. I’ll put a link in the show notes with more information on how to apply for the scholarship.

(53:27):

And as always, you are welcome to email me with questions at michelle@michellegrasek.com. Have a great week.