This guide addressing AdWords for addiction centers began with a simple question:
Has your addiction/rehab center cracked the code on generating highly qualified intakes since the shift in Google AdWords and recent changes in organic?
Since last September, rehab centers have had to re-evaluate marketing strategies to stay competitive in the ever-changing world of digital marketing. One particularly telling insight refers to addiction center lead generation. One channel alone won’t cut it.
A diversified lead generation strategy that ethically drives intakes is necessary. That way, when one lead source underperforms or “dries up”, your intake staff won’t be stuck twiddling its thumbs.
In part 5, we’re talking local SEO, and how it integrates into a holistic addiction center lead generation strategy that sustains itself, even when shakeups occur.
Read on if you want to learn:
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a term you’ve most likely heard before. It’s the practice of increasing both traffic to your website through prominent visibility in the organic or “free” section on a search engine results page, or SERP.
Local SEO applies the same best practices as SEO, except instead of casting a wide net to a highly competitive national audience, is narrowed to focus on obtaining both ranking and visibility with intakes in your local, immediate area. Consider this: data that HubSpot compiled states that 72% of consumers who conducted a local search were within a five-mile radius of the location they were intending on visiting.
Local SEO is an effective way to reach your prospective intake, though the strategy to appear within local search results varies slightly from that of traditional SEO. With local SEO, it’s imperative that rehab centers cite and submit their NAPW, or name, address, phone number, and correct website URL listings to directories and aggregators.
Inconsistent business listings can be a local lead generation killer, as search engines primary objective is to serve the most accurate and relevant information to users. If a search engine has any doubt that it’s serving users the wrong information, it simply won’t list those details online. As a best practice, your drug treatment facility should have a local listings accuracy score of 80% or higher. To see where your treatment center stands, visit Moz.com.
In part 4 of this series, we took a spotlight to the Local-3 Pack and addressed the importance of citing and claiming topline business information to aid addiction center lead generation. To not tread over well-worn ground, we’re providing two additional tactics to enhance your local SEO strategy.
If content is king, then hyperlocal content can be akin to the heir to the throne. Hyperlocal content can help your addiction rehab facility appear above your competition in localized searches, but to maximize the opportunities to connect with the local or regional intake, do the following:
Adjusting your content strategy to reflect your local area will require upfront research, and possibly one-on-one conversations with residents to truly understand the surrounding area. But once your team has accomplished this, it can begin creating content that speaks to your hyperlocal audience with confidence. Here are several addiction center hyperlocal content topic ideas to help get you started:
Once your drug treatment center has created hyperlocal content, your team can share it and promote it on social networks, with the possibility to put a budget behind it to amplify it to a wider, local audience.
Let’s face it. The quality hyperlocal content your rehab center is creating will fall on deaf ears if no one clicks through to your site on the SERP. Structured markup, or schema, can help your local SEO efforts by speaking to search engines in its own language.
Schema was a collaborative effort between Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex back in 2011 to create a global standard for how search engines understand and interpret content online. Essentially, by implementing schema on your addiction center’s site, you’re taking a highlighter to a specific page or piece of content and telling search engines what that material is about. Depending on the nature of the content, you can choose a specific schema markup code.
The reward for taking the time to implement schema? Enhanced relevancy. And often enough, users that land on the SERP but don’t click through to your site will find the information your team markup in schema relevant and valuable. This is helpful for the increasingly mobile world we find ourselves in, where users are typing in queries on the go and are looking for local information quickly. Schema helps your information become discovered, giving your treatment center the edge over local competitors that aren’t using schema to its advantage.
Learn more about schema by visiting Schema.org. Google has created a resource specifically for local businesses, to aid with schema markup and local SEO efforts. Find the official development document here.
Local SEO can be a time-consuming undertaking, but the qualified local intake opportunities it will create will help your drug addiction center lead generation efforts. If your drug treatment center doesn’t have the time necessary to dedicate to local SEO, contact our team of experts. We’ll be happy to help you surpass your intake goals.
In the next installment in the AdWords for Addiction Centers guide, we’re covering marketing automation, and how your team can streamline time and revenue by implementing it into your lead generation strategy. Here’s to your facility gaining a local exposure with intakes that need your programs.
