Looking to drive more traffic to your med spa website and book more appointments online? Marketing your med spa online doesn’t have to break the bank, but you will need a solid digital marketing strategy, a sense of what works in 2021, and some hustle. But don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all yourself. We’ve identified the five most high-impact areas where a strategic investment can jumpstart your digital presence and start bringing in new clients.
Local Business Directories
This is the lowest hanging fruit on the digital marketing tree. Listing your business in online business directories helps with search rankings and can drive organic traffic to your website. Making sure all your listings are correct and consistent can be painstaking, but it’s worth the effort.
Google My Business is the most important directory, because it feeds directly into your search ranking on Google. If you haven’t already claimed your Googly My Business profile, stop what you’re doing and do that right now.
Once you’ve claimed your profile you can start enhancing it. The more robust your Google My Business profile, the greater chance you have of appearing in the top three when people search for “med spa near me.” Stand out in search by providing not only your name, address, and phone number (NAP), but a good description and photos of your lovely staff and facilities. Google My Business also allows you to post content, another opportunity to drive organic traffic to your site.
If you haven't already claimed your Googly My Business profile, stop what you're doing and do that right now.
These are the other local citations that should be on your radar:
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- City Pages
- Acxiom
- Localeze
You can also get listed on your local chamber of commerce’s website for a quick SEO boost. Getting your NAP consistent across these directories can be a hassle, but it really helps search engines find you and assign the maximum search rank to your business, instead of splitting that rank with address variants or businesses who share a similar name with yours.
Reputation Management
Reputation management is another relatively low-effort way to entice prospective clients to visit your website. The term “reputation management” is sometimes associated with damage control: someone posts a negative review on Google or an ill-informed rant on Facebook, the business owner responds to smooth things over. That’s an important aspect of reputation management, but proactively bolstering your reputation can be an effective way to bring in new clients, which is what we’re focusing on here.
The more good customer reviews your business has, the more trusted your brand will be. This is so especially important in the digital space, where people are used to scanning for star ratings. Encourage your clients to review you on Google (and Yelp) by offering little perks. Don’t be shy about asking. Clients who appreciate the work you’ve done for them will be happy to leave a good review. You just need to ask them. And don’t forget to respond to customers when they leave a positive review!
Proactively bolstering your reputation can be an effective way to bring in new clients.
Can I Get a Negative Review Taken Down?
Yes, but only if the review violates Google’s terms of usage. Since every review counts, it’s worth investigating a bad review to see if violates any of the following terms.
- Written by a former employee
- Spam or fake content
- Uses inappropriate language
- Wrong business or location (this happens a lot!)
- Fraudulent competitor review
- The review isn’t relevant to the actual experience
If any of these turn out to be the case, flag the review and leave a note explaining which was violated. Yelp’s terms are slightly different, but Yelp reviews aren’t a factor in search results, and are somewhat less relevant to service providers.
Web Design
We don’t have to sell you on the importance of aesthetics in the med spa industry. Like your physical space, your website should project an image of effortless luxury and professionalism. For med spas, clean and bright designs work best. A great website should be easy to navigate, rich in content, and designed to convert visitors into prospective clients with clear calls to action, like “Book an appointment today!” An uncluttered design allows those calls to action to stand out, while a muted color palette gives your photography room to shine.
Speaking of photography, try to mix in real photos of clients with stock photos, which tend to be of young, beautiful models and could read as inauthentic. Hire a photographer to spend a week in your office, taking professional headshots of your staff and documenting treatments (with patient consent, of course). An extensive before-and-after library is a great way to inspire confidence in your work.
We should note that not all visitors to your website will enter through the home page, so make sure you spend some time polishing up individual service pages and specials. With some SEO planning, you can make these landing pages show up in search results, giving you more real estate on Google, and thus more avenues for driving traffic to your site.
Redesigning your website to be more user friendly and project the image you want isn’t as expensive as you might think. Though a custom design can run you $10,000+, a design based on a WordPress template costs between $1,000-$5,000. We talk more about the differences here.
SEO
You have a beautifully designed website. It would be a shame if no one could find it on Google. That’s where a solid SEO strategy comes in. In the early days of SEO, marketers leaned on technical tricks to boost a page’s rank in search, but Google has evolved since then. Technical SEO still plays a role, but today’s SEO specialists are more likely to recommend drawing customers in with engaging content and an easy to navigate website.
We’re still anticipating Google’s algorithm, but the reason behind it has changed. Google wants to points users to content that was written for people, not its algorithm. And it wants to send users to websites with a good user experience (UX), so they can find what they’re looking for as easily as possible.
SEO in 2021 marks a return to fundamentals: Google favors authentic content presented in a easy to digest way.
Page speed is now a factor in search rank, since more than half of all search queries now happen on a mobile device where limited bandwidth is still an issue. So in a sense, SEO in 2021 marks a return to basics: authentic content presented in a easy to navigate way. We’ve summarized have new changes to Google’s algorithm will affect SEO in 2021 here.
For service industries like med spas, local business directory listings and Google reviews are opportunities to improve your rank in search, but content marketing is an even more effective way to bring in prospective clients.
Content Marketing
As we mentioned before, content marketing is critical to ranking in search. Let’s take a moment to explore why that is. In today’s digital culture, people spend a lot of time on the Internet researching a service before they commit to booking an appointment, so the more information and expertise you can share about your business the better.
Blogging began in the era before social media supremacy, but it’s still an effective traffic generator and a tried and true method for establishing yourself as a trusted voice in your area of expertise. Blog articles that answer questions people are asking search engines can show up in search results within a month and, if optimized correctly, continue driving organic traffic to your site for years to come. When it comes to content marketing/blogging WordPress is the best framework out there. We wrote an article with tips on choosing a WordPress theme here.
People are living more of their lives on social media, where posts that do well tend to tell a personal story and make an emotional appeal.
Social media also contributes to the resurgence of content marketing. People are living more of their lives on social media, where posts that do well tend to tell a personal story and make an emotional appeal. Social posts that ring authentic are more likely to be shared on social channels. Give the social platforms what they want, and your content will quickly rise in search rankings, driving more traffic to your website.
Video content, infographics and meme-like posts do well on social media. But remember, each platform has its own rules of decorum, so be sure to adapt your content for different channels. A how to guide on DIY treatments would play well on YouTube. Instagram is an organic fit for aesthetically focused businesses: no amount of text can make the emotional impact of photos of happy clients showing off your excellent work.
Paid Search
We’ve saved paid search for last, because it ties together all of your efforts. Only after you’ve set up your website to drive conversions, loaded that baby with sweet content, listed your business in local business directories, and responded to some customer reviews–only then should you consider launching a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.
Paid ads can give you a less time-intensive, short-term boost in visitors to your website. Google text ads appear at the top of search results based on the keywords you provide. You can also buy ads on Facebook and YouTube and promote your stories on Instagram. Let’s take a look at how each of these work, and where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.
Google AdWords: Setting up a PPC campaign in Google Ads isn’t all that difficult, but understanding how the ever-evolving Google Ads algorithm works and learning how to measure success can take time and practice. That practice won’t come cheap, so make sure you have a game plan to differentiate yourself and drive conversions. Experienced Google Ads specialists can stretch your ad spend with geotargeting, site and callout extensions, and by creating targeted landing pages.
Social Media: Contrary to what Facebook and other platforms say in their sales pitches, social media ads are good for one thing: boosting the visibility of your social media account. This can be crucial in getting a following going or promoting specials, but is less effective than PPC ads in driving traffic to your site, because Facebook doesn’t actually want to send its users away from Facebook.
Retargeting ads: Retargeting is a way of reminding people who visited your website of you, by placing ads on other platforms and websites they frequent. This gives them the option of going back to your site with a single click. Apple’s new privacy policies will make retargeting more difficult in 2021, so it may not make as much sense to retarget if your clientele is mostly composed of iPhone users. If done right, it can be a great way to boost brand visibility and drive traffic. Do some demographic research before considering retargeting.
Need Help With Your Digital Marketing Campaign?
Helping people achieve their aesthetic goals is hard work. You need a med spa marketing agency that works just as hard as you do to bring you qualified, fresh new leads every day. Here at Gator SEM we’ve worked with some of the best med spas in Florida. Our results speak for themselves. Get in touch today to learn how we can help you grow your business.
- Written by: Gator SEM
- Posted on: January 29, 2021
- Tags: blogging, brand reputation management, Google AdWords, Local Citations, medspa marketing, retargeting, social media, web design