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Getting new clients in the door is a constant concern of medical spa owners. When looking for a new treatment or new clinic, potential clients will do a large part of that research online.
That’s why your business can benefit greatly from local SEO for medical spas. The people who Google medical spas are potentially more interested in scheduling an appointment than people from target groups that you serve ads to. They’re also either looking for med spas around them or in a specific area they intend to visit.
What is SEO for Medical Spas?
SEO is the process of optimizing all of your digital assets to maximize organic traffic from search engines, primarily Google. In the case of many eCommerce businesses, this involves optimizing your website to appear high on the Google search results pages (SERP) for keywords related to your business.
Since location matters a lot for med spas, SEO for these businesses also involves working with a Google Business Profile and other location-related assets.
The two major benefits of using SEO to promote your spa are that it can increase the flow of people to your website and that the proper use of SEO results in increased trust in your business.
Google and Google Maps are the most popular ways to research a local business, according to a 2023 BrightLocal report.
If you leverage this right, you can reap the benefits in multiple areas of your business.
Local SEO Strategies For Medical Spas
If your medical spa only has a website and you haven’t done any search optimization yet, here are the best med spa SEO tips to get started.
Google Business Profile, Google Maps, and Reviews as Your First Steps In Local SEO
Arguably the most important aspect of med spa SEO is working with digital assets that aren’t your site — your Google Business Profile and online reviews. The thing is, when a user makes a local search, and broad searches for local businesses are considered local by default by Google, the first thing they’re going to see is a local pack search result like this:
This result will be displayed before the regular organic search results, so it makes sense to put more effort into it.
Google decides what businesses to show in these results based on three major factors:
- Distance to the user device or to the searched area.
- Relevance to the search term.
- Business reputation.
While you can’t influence the first factor, you can influence the other two.
Before all that, we’ll have to start with the basics.
If you don’t have a GBP account, you should go ahead and create it or claim it. Sometimes your location will be added to Google Maps without your involvement, and you can claim it by contacting Google support.
Then, fill out all the elements of the Google Business Profile.
You should add the following to your Google My Business profile:
- Photos of your medical spa center
- Photos of your work
- Photos or a 360 view of the entrance
- Address
- Phone number
- Website
- Services you provide
High-quality photos, especially in the before and after format, let users judge how good your services are on more than just online reviews. Adding the services you provide is especially important, as they will be highlighted on the local pack search results.
This means your company can show up not only for broad keywords like “medical spas near me” but also for more precise ones. In this case, the keyword was “microdermabrasion in Los Angeles.”
Going through these steps puts your GBP on the map for most related queries. But you’ll also have to work on the third part of the local search equation — reputation.
Techniques to get Google reviews for your medspa
There is no hack or trick to come out on top with online reputation. The only way to do so is to gather consistent positive reviews on Google. That’s easier said than done, especially for a medical spa that is only starting out. However, there are a couple of tactics to make this process easier.
- Make leaving a review easy
- – Leave a QR code to reviews on your front desk, and leave a link at the bottom of your emails.
- Explicitly ask for a review
- – Don’t ask for a positive review, though, simply ask the customer to leave an honest review if they have the time. Good customer service typically results in good reviews, even if not every customer leaves one.
- Thank customers for leaving a review on Google
- – This doesn’t just make your customer feel good. It boosts brand trust and encourages more people to leave reviews.
Finally, don’t forget to create or claim your profiles on third party sites like Yelp.
These don’t directly influence your website SEO but are useful for your overall medical spa marketing. People might search for reviews about your business online before making a call. Having a positive brand image on Yelp or other review sites helps convince them to book with your medical spa over the competition.
Now, after having done all this, you’re looking at a few dozen queries that you target with GBP. So, how do you track your performance across the board? The Local Rank Checker by SE Ranking can do it faster and more efficiently than doing it manually.
This tool can track how well your Google Business Profile ranks in your city down to a specific ZIP code and show a breakdown of changes in positions across time.
Keyword Research for your Medspa
The next most important thing you can do for med spa SEO is keyword research. Keywords are the search terms people use to find your business. Understanding what words people use can help you expose both your GBP page and website to more traffic and generate more med spa leads.
You’re primarily interested in finding local intent keywords; those are the keywords that people put into Google to find a physical business. The main keywords of this industry are “medical spa” or “medical spa near me.” You can also discover plenty of other local keywords that are typically names of the services you provide.
Your goal is to find the phrases people use for medical spas in their area, confirm that they have a local intent, and integrate those keywords into your website and GBP. By doing that, you’ll tell Google to display your site to searchers who intend to find and visit a local medical spa.
Start your research process by making a list of words you suspect to be relevant to your business — the name of the industry, the name of your medical spa, and your services. Next, explore them either manually or with SEO tools.
You can do this by exploring the keywords Google suggests as autocomplete, related to the searches section, or to the People Also Ask section. These are typically lower on the search engine results page.
Using a specialized tool, like SE Ranking, gives you the ability to research your whole keyword list faster and get more precise information, such as the estimated search volume of the keyword, keyword difficulty, search intent, ranking dynamics, Google Ads history, etc.
To confirm whether the keyword is local or not, just google it. If it’s informational, the search results will typically show articles, not businesses. These keywords, for instance, are informational in nature.
Don’t reject them just yet; medical spa SEO has a use for them, too.
Content Marketing
Optimizing your site for informational keywords might not bring in any customers at first, but it will bring in people from local communities to read your content and improve brand awareness.
You can find informational keywords by either going through the People Also Ask sections or by using SEO tools. Most of the keywords that you’ll target this way will be local keywords centered around specific services in your area.
Create articles that explain how the service works, and they will attract more people to your website. Even if they don’t book a time slot after reading the article, they will learn about your company and might be more willing to book you in the future.
You can also write content for general medical spa questions, like how to keep skin looking young.
On-Page and Technical SEO
These three SEO strategies for medical spas cover the bulk of what you’ll have to do to improve your search visibility. However, to make your SEO efforts on the website more effective, you have to work on keeping your site up to Google standards.
The most important thing to do is optimize your pages for the keywords you want to target. After doing keyword research, you’ll have a long list of keywords related to medical spas and your location. Group them by page so that a single page can answer several keywords.
For instance, keywords like botox treatment, botox injections, preventative botox, and botox in your location will all fit into a single page dedicated to that procedure.
Take those keywords groups and add them to the most important SEO elements of the page:
- Meta title
- Meta description
- H1 tag
- Alt tags for images
- URL
Link building
In local pack results, Google typically looks at how many positive reviews you have to determine how prominent your business is. In terms of general organic results, it looks at how many backlinks from reputable sites you have. Generally, the more your spa is mentioned online, the higher it may be in the SERP. Think of it like virtual word of mouth that isn’t directly tied to reviews. Google looks at a one site linking to another as a kind of endorsement (this is a very very simplified explanation of backlinks, be warned!)
The first links you can build for your medical spa website are links from local listings, directories, and association websites like Yelp, AmSpa, or Yellow Pages. You can also build links from coupon sites or event platforms.
Once you have built those, you can try contacting major blogs in your industry and writing a blog for them. This will give you both improved brand recognition and a backlink that improves SEO.
If you’re out of ideas, use an SEO competitor analysis tool to see where your competition gets links.
Examples of Good Local SEO for Medical Spas
Businesses that put effort into being on those lists are doing proper SEO because the first couple of search results get the most clicks.
The next two search results show another interesting aspect of medspa SEO.
Both show some elements of structured data to give users more information about their business even before they click, which is a great practice. What’s interesting here is that the website displayed below actually has more backlinks from reputable sources and more traffic overall, as shown by analyzing it in an SEO tool.
Why then is it not higher on the page? Because the search term we used is “best medical spas in NYC,” and this particular page did not have the word “best” mentioned on it.
The page above, even though it is probably a bit less reputable in Google’s eyes, has done some keyword optimization and turned out more relevant for this keyword. The page doesn’t have a lot of text either, the keyword is just mentioned once in the title tag and once in the body of the text.
This means even if you’re up against competition that has been in the business for decades, some basic optimization tactics can help you get ahead.
Summary
Even though social media for med spas can be a good source of leads, SEO remains a classic technique in the marketing arsenal for most med spa owners.
SEO for medical spas can be one of the major marketing channels, as people will be more likely to discover your business when doing research online. Generally, if you already have a professionally made site, you won’t have to invest that much in SEO to get good results.
If you’re looking for a place to start, follow these three steps. Focus on optimizing your Google Business Profile as much as possible, do keyword research to cover the most important keywords, and build links to your business.
It’s best to implement all the tips from this article, but following these three steps will give you the best results with the least amount of effort.
Author Bio: Svitlana Andriishyna is an Outreach Specialist at SE Ranking. When she is not creating content, she enjoys long walks, good coffee, and reading before bed.
