What Strategy Should Been Used for My Wellness Clinic

[Kayla Adam]

I run a naturopathic/functional medicine clinic and we are in the process of moving into a brand new space and plan on bringing on 6 new practitioners in the new year.

We already rank well for naturopath and functional medicine key terms and have a healthy deal flow but have decided not to bring on any more naturopaths at the moment because we don't think we would be able to fill 6 naturopaths schedules. We are planning to bring on 2 chiros, 2 massage therapists, 1 acupuncturist and 1 osteopath.

The issue I am running into is how to get all of these different specialties to rank well organically. For massage or osteopath, I am confident that I will be able to get a service page on our website to rank but for chiros, I do not think I will be able to rank our naturopathic clinic's website for it since it is competitive.

I have come up with a few different options of what to do so far. I would love to hear your options on what you think would work best or if there is something I am missing.

1. Create service pages on our website for each specialty and create practitioner GMB's for each practitioner. Link the GMB to the corresponding service page and work to get the service pages to rank for our target key terms.

2. Follow the plan I laid out above but instead of trying to get a service page on our website to rank create a stand-alone website for each specialty that isn't linking to any GMB. Get the stand-alone website to rank organically.

3. We position the space we are moving into as a wellness facility with a generic name that is not ours that has several businesses operating from it. We create stand-alone websites and corresponding GMB's for each specialty with a unique business name for each. We do not put any information about the other services or practitioner profiles on our naturopathic website. We then rank each website for their target key terms.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to reading what you think.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Kayla Adam, #1 by a country mile, with two suggested modifications:

1. Focus a practitioner's bio page on the website on his or her specialty, and point his or her GMB page to that landing page URL. Not only can the bio pages rank organically for certain specialized terms and for "practitioner-name" searches, but the pages also are relevant to the practitioner and niche the GMB pages are for.

2. Make sure the homepage has a plump section on each chiro specialty and naturopathic specialty (other words, any service you care about). The homepage is at least as likely as other pages to rank for those terms, and probably more so. Your homepage may even rank for your more-competitive chiro terms without too much huffing and puffing on your part, though that depends mainly on your link juice and on how many strong local competitors are chiropractic specialists.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

That's a tall order.

It depends on where you're located. If you're in a highly populated area, I would tell you you're probably only going to rank well for one of those terms.

It's all about your competition.

Your competition will have their homepage dedicated to the core term and their GMB page with primary category. That's what you're looking at and that would be difficult to overcome with any service where you use a service page and don't have the primary category as a GMB page.

1. This is actually really creative and I had not thought of this. That could work on the GMB side but I don't think it will work on the organic side. But the GMB is better than nothing.

2. Could actually work but why not link it to the GMB page? Also, that's a lot of trouble to rank well but if you can execute this and keep up with it from an SEO perspective, it can be done. But you're talking backlinks for each site, content for each site so the site isn't thin. That's a lot of work. Which is fine, but as a business owner with tons of responsibilities. Would you be able to execute this? And as for hiring an agency, an agency that's worth its salt I would imagine would charge your per website. We would. But maybe others wouldn't. It's just a lot.

3. Could work, but again, a lot of work. You would also need to make sure you have legal paperwork (business license, etc.) for each business you create. And even then, it may not be GMB eligible. Others on the forum are better at diagnosing that than me in these complicated situations.

If you really can dedicate the time, 2/3 would be the option. If you know you can't, I'd go with 1.

 

[Kayla Adam]

@Phil Rozek

Thanks for the suggestions! Plumping up the homepage isn't something I had thought of.

I had thought about ranking the practitioner bio but the problem you run into is if they leave the clinic you have to rank another practitioner page when they are gone. We've already run into that problem and it was a pain to have to go and rank another page, plus our leads dropped.

 

[Kayla Adam]

@JoshuaMackens

I'm located in Calgary, AB so for some like osteopath it isn't very competitive but for chiro, it is more competitive.

I've gone back and forth on this a lot. I could test the first option but we are only doing 6 months contracts with the practitioner. As much as I really want to do option one because it is less work I also don't want 6 practitioner churning in 6 months because they weren't getting enough leads.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

@JoshuaMackens

I'm located in Calgary, AB so for some like osteopath it isn't very competitive but for chiro, it is more competitive.

I've gone back and forth on this a lot. I could test the first option but we are only doing 6 months contracts with the practitioner. As much as I really want to do option one because it is less work I also don't want 6 practitioner churning in 6 months because they weren't getting enough leads.

Sounds like #3 is your option but there will be a lot of hoops to jump through.

I don't really recommend tailoring your brand to your SEO strategy. More your SEO strategy to your brand. With #3 you're making all these brands just for SEO. What does/doesn't work with SEO could change tomorrow and all the work you've done might be for nothing.

Honestly, I would just roll with #1 or #2.