When I talk about the perfect patient – I am referring to a patient that stays understands the commitment needed long term to themselves and to your Functional Medicine Practice.
All too often when I speak with new or potential clients they are surprised to learn how poorly they are performing in local search engine results pages (LSERP) after I give them a tour of their very own – Google Search Console results.
Functional Medicine Clinics
Many times these Functional Medicine clinics have already been engaging a so-called “SEO Expert” and are often perplexed at the actual results they see before their eyes. I can say it a million times, but SEO experts are completely and utterly useless unless you are creating your own content, targetted to the audience you want to attract, and done so on a regular basis.
“I can say it a million times, but SEO experts are completely and utterly useless – unless you are creating your own content, targetted to the audience you want to attract, and done so on a regular basis.“
Peter J Ricci
A Look at Sample LSERP Results (Local Search Engine Results Pages)
As an example – without giving away the client’s name, I can show you what people are searching for in Denver, Colorado for functional medicine practitioners. You will first need to understand that Google results are served differently depending on the individual user and the users’ location. So someone searching from the Denver area will get very different results than somebody searching in say Miami.
Table Key
- Keyphrase: Keywords writtten by real users doing a search on Google web or mobile.
- Clicks: How many clicks the client received from those keyphrases.
- Impressions: How many times a user typed in that exact phases into Google Search (either mobile or web)
- CTR: Click Through rate – basically Clicks divided into Impressons
- Position: The average position the client appears in Google Search results (0-10 is first page of Goolge)
| Keyphrase | Clicks | Impressions | CTR | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| functional medicine doctor near me | 1620 | 24200 | 14.93% | 9.62 |
| best functional medicine doctors near me | 1898 | 6210 | 32.27% | 6.59 |
| functional doctor near me | 27 | 4468 | 0.60% | 11.24 |
| integrative and functional medicine doctors near me | 20 | 1927 | 1.04% | 10.99 |
| functional medicine | 18 | 15700 | 0.11% | 30.75 |
You will notice the huge difference when a result for a certain search keyphrase results in the client not being on the first page of Google LSERP results. You will find it near impossible to rank nationally for these keyphrases, but locally with the right guidance and content strategy, you should be confident to improve your results immeasurably.
One thing clients often bring up is the skepticism that people type in ‘near me,’ they are right, they do not, however, Google does this automatically for them.
The Right Content Strategy – for the Perfect Patient
Let us return to one of my original claims earlier in this post. “Creating your own content, targetted to the audience you want to attract, and done so on a regular basis.” This is a winning strategy – it never fails, but there needs to be a commitment from you, the Functional Medicine Clinic, to get yourself in order and your patient team. This includes;
- Your Content: Creating content aligning with your services
- Team Content: Creating content being part of the ‘job description’ for anyone dealing with patients – doctors, nurses, nutritionists etc
- Review Strategies: Your front office should be identifying happy customers and having a system in place for capturing 5 Star reviews from them on Google My Business.
- Marketing Strategy: How to spread the content created on your website to your soical media audience – and them hopefully commneting, liking or sharing that content.
- Newsletter Strategy: Keeping your audience engaged with informative content.
If you have a team of 5 of 6, one post per month will generate enough quality traffic to sustain your whole practice within 12 months. It doesn’t happen immediately but it does happen – it is a strategy that never fails.
Always remember, people, engage with others that they feel a connection with, and digitally – it is all about making it feel as though your content is written directly to them.
