Functional medicine is the future of conventional medicine available today. It is used heavily by Functional Medicine practitioners in modern medicine to identify and correct the root causes of diseases. Practitioners view the body as one integrated whole system instead of independent organs and treat the entire body instead of just symptoms.
The field of functional medicine is becoming more and more widely used today thanks to powerful voices such as Dr. Oz, Dr. Frank Lipman, and Dr. Peter Osborne.
As Functional Medicine continues to grow, you need to optimize your website to inform your potential clients.
In this article, we will discuss some simple methods and actions you can take to prepare your website for growth by reaching more potential clients and providing them with the information they need to become patients.
It’s important to note that SEO does not need to be over complicated. Great SEO results can be achieved simply by posting regular content such as weekly blog posts. Your blog posts should speak to your audience and provide them with information about common health issues. You can identify with that health issue and provide checklists on how to help the patient. Adding simple CTA (Call to Actions) that urge the patient to contact your office for more information or to schedule an appointment can be very effective.
Writing articles about Functional Medicine will also show your audience that you are an expert in your field. This along with testimonials, will boost your trust with your users, prompting them to frequently visit your site to consume information and eventually contact your office.
If you consistently write one 1,500 word article per week for 1 year, you will increase your website traffic and boost conversions by double in that time.
Our team provides content writing services if you do not have time to research and write content each week.
In summary, SEO can be optimized and best utilized by:
· Writing regular content such as weekly blog posts
· Including CTAs (Call to Actions) inside of your blog posts
· Showing testimonials from clients. Both video and written testimonials with images work great.
· Add a scheduling form somewhere above the footer or in a sidebar of your site so that your audience can schedule a phone call or consultation easily
Why should you create a Google My Business page? Google My Business provides you with the ability to list your business location on Google Maps and local search results.
Important information such as business hours, address, phone, and reviews are posted on your page and show up when someone in your business location searches for Functional Medicine.
With Google’s latest algorithms, more and more search results are becoming geographically specific to consider user intent.
This listing is free and is essential for all Functional Medicine practitioners. If you do not currently have a page setup, please contact us and we will help you for at no cost to you.
Google Analytics is a very, very important digital marketing tool, but underused by most Functional Medicine Practitioners.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help you record and analyze your website traffic.
This website traffic can be measured and analyzed to see which pages your users are visiting and which path they are taking along their journey through your site. Understanding your traffic, creating goals, tracking information such as demographics, audience behavior and more through this one system will help you better under your audience.
Google Analytics is easy to install by simply placing several lines of tracking code on your website. If you are utilizing WordPress as your content management system, there are also several plugins that allow you to add google analytics by simply adding your tracking number. We recommend Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin for WordPress. This will add Google Analytics to all pages of your website and also add a dashboard to your site so that you can easily analyze the data.
If you need help setting up Google Analytics, check out our support plan or contact us for more information. This is a must setup for all functional medicine practitioners.
Google’ Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a combination of Google SEO tools and reporting. Search Console gives you direct insight from Google as to how the search engines views your website.
You can check your website for errors, site performance, broken pages, site indexing, Sitemaps and security issues. Important messages about your site regarding indexing or malware will be displayed so that you can take immediate action. Typical messages may be something like a detected hack attack, a manual penalty for bad linking practices, or a malware warning.
In addition to using Google Search Console for error checking and site indexing, the tool can be used for Keyword research. This will give you a better understanding of what word or phrases are being searched for and how many people clicked on those results to visit your Functional Medicine practitioner website.
As you can see, Google Search Console if a very important tool to utilize and it is also free of charge.
Registering your website onto Google Search Console is the also effective way to guarantee that the Google Search indexes visits your website.
This is a simple, effective, essential way to boost your SEO and also the trust of your audience. Google Search now actually flags sites if you don’t have one. Online security is a necessity and Google make it’s users aware of any site that is visited without a SSL certificate by prompting a message to the user stating that the site is not secure. With the Functional Medicine field, this is very important. Your users will immediately leave your site if they do not feel safe.
If you have patient forms, online products or any other sensitive information, this is a MUST for HIPAA compliance.
We provide SSL certificates and installation through our services and would recommend contacting us as soon as possible if you do not currently have one setup.
Newsletters are out of date and are not going to get you any email registrations. Also gone is the day of long form eBooks that are over 20 pages long. Users or potential patients are looking for short, concise information that will help solve their problem.
First, we recommend writing a short checklist. An example would be 10 Necessary Foods to Relieve Inflammation. You don’t need to spend a lot of time on this and can easily create it in Microsoft Word and save as a pdf. To complete that optin, you could add a Call-to-Action inside of a blog post that is related or to the home page of your website, or your website sidebar. The CTA (call-to-action) would include the title – “10 Necessary Foods to Relieve Inflammation” with a button below that reads “Download”. The download button would link to a popup or a page with a form that collects the users first name and email address.
Once they submit their information, they will be taken to a page that thanks them for their interest and provides a link to the pdf for download. In WordPress, you can simply add the pdf by adding media to the post.
This is a very simple way to gain email subscribers, recurring traffic, and prove trust to users.
To further enhance the results, you could connect your sign up form to a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) such as ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft.
Our team can setup simple to advanced email automations. Contact us today to learn more.
The inflammation or detox meetup you hosted 1 year ago was a hit, by why is it still listed under your website events?
You need to regularly review the content of your website to keep it up to date and fresh. Potential patients that notice old content are less likely to take your practice seriously. Also, make sure to post upcoming events so that your audience has enough time to prepare and register.
Successful Functional Medicine Practitioners dedicate a staff member to update their website on a regular basis. Our team also provides these content updates, along with WordPress website support for $79 per month.
Since your website is one of your practice’s top marketing tools, website maintenance should be a regular, daily to weekly task. With the routine maintenance and clean-up, you ensure that your patients are always receiving accurate information, improving their user experience and protecting the integrity of your business.
Our starter WordPress Optimization plan takes the stress out of your regular website maintenance for only $29 per month.
As a Functional Medicine Practitioner, patients most likely ask many of the same questions. Imagine how many other millions of people in the world have that same question. This is a HUGE marketing/SEO opportunity and you can solve answering the same question over and over by directing the patient to your frequently asked questions page.
To boost SEO and to provide many of the answers of the same questions that are asked repeatedly by your patients, you should create a Frequently Asked Questions page.
Simply add a new page and number each question and mark an ‘A’ or ‘Q’ next to each. Questions can be answered using text, links to other articles either on your website or externally. You could also answer questions by creating a short video where you as the doctor takes on and answers the question in a more personal setting. Upload the video to youtube and you just doubled your SEO reach!
Conclusion
In summary, we’ve listed some simple but very effective ways to boost the audience and traffic of your Functional Medicine Practitioner website. To help reach more patients and to ultimately help more people through the practice of Functional Medicine, you need to utilize some basic SEO techniques that we’ve listed in the above article. This will grow your practice as each month progresses and help you reach a larger audience.
If you have any questions, please contact our team!
