SEO for Medical Spas: A Complete Guide

An Example of How SEO for Medical Spas Works

Let’s set the stage for this guide. We want to establish why SEO is so important to medical spas and we’ll establish our credibility as an SEO agency that offers the best SEO services that can help medical spas dominate their market and convert qualified leads.

We’re going to look at the search term: dermaplaning near me. We searched that term in Google and here are the top results as of January 2021:

In the red boxes we highlighted a few important items:

• You can see the keyword “dermaplaning” is bolded in the Google Map Pack in two different ways; an individual’s review and that it is mentioned on another companies website.
• There is also a section called “People also ask” or the Frequently Asked Questions snippet.
• Finally, it’s worth noting that this search term, made in Grand Rapids, MI, does not have any ads on it, so it puts the Google My Business listing at the top of the search engine results page.

The results of any given search are telling if you know what you are looking for.

Google is trying to recommend the most relevant, trustworthy source to anyone that is looking for dermaplaning near their physical location.

Google also cares to send the searcher to a relevant page that is all about dermaplaning and answers a lot of the frequently asked questions about the service.

Take a look at what’s next on the page:

The links on this page are also highlighting the word dermaplaning in the page or meta description. And, most importantly, if you look at the top two results above you’ll notice that the page Google is recommending is a page on the website all about dermaplaning.

It’s not their home page or a general services page.

That’s because Google knows the searcher wants information about dermaplaning first and foremost.

So what does this mean?

If your audience finds you by searching for a particular service or product category, make sure you have a service/product page for that category.

No one looking for “dermaplaning” wants to be sent to a page that also talks about your laser hair removal. Google gets that, so they appreciate a comprehensive service page.

This leads us to one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO; user intent.

What is user intent?

User intent is what a searcher intended or wanted to find online when they typed their search term into a search engine.

Your goal with optimizing your website for search engine visibility for your medical spa needs to be about fulfilling user intentions and giving them everything they could possibly need.

Build your website for your customer, not for you, and you’ll end up building an effective, revenue-generating machine.

Why SEO for Medical Spas?

SEO is like planting a garden, while SEM is going to the grocery store. If you need to eat tonight, you don’t plant a garden, you go to the grocery store. But, you should still plant your garden now so that in time, you won’t have to go to the grocery as often, or spend as much money there. But, if you have to eat today, you don’t only plant a garden. Or, you are going to starve.

Investing in SEO for your medical spa will pay dividends into the future of your business.

Here are the top three reasons why SEO and content marketing are so important for local med spas:

1. There’s a ton of search volume.
   We have compiled a list of 551 keywords that a typical medical spa would want to rank for in the search engines. The total monthly average search volume in the United States for all of those keywords combined is 1,630,050. This means there are a lot of people potentially interested in the services a medical spa provides. Every search is an opportunity for new business.
2. People search locally.
   Of the 551 keywords we tracked, only 45 show the map pack (3 local businesses that show up in Google when you search). But, those 45 make up an average monthly search volume of 431,050.
3. Education is crucial in anything health-related.
   When it comes to anything that could affect your health and your lifestyle, Google takes those search queries very seriously. You need to offer a lot of transparent, educational content on your services, the products used, the pros and cons, etc. With all of this work comes a lot of great opportunities. An educated searcher is more likely to become a new customer.

SEO Strategies and Tactics for Medical Spas

What is SEO for Medical Spas?

SEO or search engine optimization for medical spas is the process of getting quality traffic to your site from search results with the intent of converting that traffic into a lead.

SEO for medical spas is all about thought-leadership and building local trust.

On-Page, Off-Page, & Technical SEO

SEO can be broken down into three general categories; on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO.

On-page SEO is mainly the content on your page. Keywords, titles, headings, meta descriptions are all SEO signals that are on a page of your website. Search engines want to make sure the content is relevant to the search term or keyword. Relevancy plays a big role in on-page SEO for med spas.

Off-page SEO is everything from other web pages that help a particular page on your site rank. There are several factors, but the biggest are backlinks or links from other sites to your site. It’s crucial to have a good volume and good quality or relevant backlinks to validate your trust and authority.

Technical SEO is, for the most part, all under the hood of your website. It’s making sure your website is developed so that it is crawler friendly, has an SSL certificate, loads fast, etc.

Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta titles or page titles are the titles of each individual page or post on your website. These are not necessarily visible on the page, but they are visible to the search engines. You have control over this title and what it says so it is imperative that you optimize these titles to stand out.

Meta descriptions or page descriptions are another HTML attribute that provides a summary of a page or posts content. These can also be optimized for the search engine results page, but Google will often manipulate them for certain search terms.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a crucial part of search engine optimization. A keyword research tool is imperative to identifying quality keywords, identifying user intent, and determining your overall content strategy.

Using a keyword research tool, you can shortlist your keywords. We use SEMRush to do keyword research.

In the screenshot below you’ll see a list of medical spa keywords from SEMRush.

Above is the list of 551 keywords for medical spas filtered by those that show the “Local Pack” or Map Pack. This image shows volume, keyword search trends, cost per click data and more.

Keyword research can and should help your med spa get an idea of how big your market is and plays a crucial role in determining if it’s an investment worth making for your business.

Page Load and Mobile-friendliness

Your page load time is crucial not only to SEO but your potential customer’s experience. Google will promote sites with a faster page load speed if it enhances the user’s experience. This is especially important when loading over mobile devices, which are often being used on 3G and 4G connections with slower download speed.

Keep the size of your images and other large media minimal and work with an experienced web developer to optimize your site for speed.

Learn more about page load speed.

Your website needs to be mobile-friendly. Your target audience is searching for you on mobile devices and with Google’s mobile-first indexing, you can’t ignore the importance of a mobile-friendly website. Mobile-first indexing is essentially Google stating that they are prioritizing mobile-friendly sites when people search on their mobile devices.

Web Design

Your medical spa website is important to the user’s experience. If your potential customer can’t easily find what they are looking for, you may miss out on new business. It’s important to consider internally linking between pages to add context and help the user navigate.

Link Building

Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks or links from other sites to your website. This is really important to build your expertise, authoritativeness, and trust as a provider of medical services.

Social Media

Utilizing your social media channels, you should be promoting the content you publish on your website.

Local SEO

Local SEO helps you optimize your site for a local audience. If your target audience is physically close to your company’s location, it’s important to add some additional tactics to your SEO strategy.

There is a lot to cover with local SEO, but for a quick reference make sure you:

• Create a Google My Business account
• Mention the areas you serve on your website and possibly even create a web page for each location
• Make sure you are listed on other local citations like your local Chamber and other business directories.

Content Marketing for Medical Spas

Why do we bring up content marketing on a guide about SEO? Because an effective SEO strategy is incredibly reliant on great content. SEO and content go together like peanut butter and jelly.

The beginning of any effective content marketing strategy begins on a foundation of a thorough keyword research process, which is also the foundation of great SEO.

Our keyword research process for medical spas is below.

How to Identify Content Marketing Ideas

Talk to Your Customer

While it’s true that you probably understand your products and services really well and can talk about it all day with a bunch of industry jargon, that most likely is not true of your customer.

You probably know less about your customer and don’t know what words they use to describe what they need.

The best way to start to get ideas for content marketing is by asking your ideal customer the right questions. Start by surveying your current customers to get some more information about who they are, what they do, and how they think.

Your goal is to identify quality content that is attractive to your ideal customer that you could create. In the Venn diagram above you’ll see what we’re referring to.

This is how you develop a great content marketing strategy.

Do Keyword Research

By using a keyword research tool you can start to gather great content marketing ideas to attract leads. Start by looking at the questions people ask related to your product or service.

Based on a keyword like “how to get rid of spider veins,” you could write a ton of great, related content like:

• What exactly are spider veins?
• How to prevent spider veins?
• What causes spider veins?

When you write great content that is related to what you sell you are supporting your domains authority online. By focusing on writing quality content on all the questions, topics, and subtopics people search for on your subject matter, you’ll begin to dominate the search engines.

Create a Shortlist

As you use your keyword research tool, add keywords to a shortlist. These can be high-intent, low-intent, short-tail, and long-tail. Add any that seem relevant for now. You can chisel them down later. The point of creating a big list is to get a good overview of your entire potential and you can create a content plan based around all of your keywords.

Look at Content Types in SERPs

Content is not just written copy and your target customer doesn’t want to just read. The medical spa industry is highly visual. It often makes sense to support your content with images and video. But, don’t just take our word for it.

With a tool like SEMRush, you can determine which SERP (search engine results page) features show up on each of your keywords. In the screenshot above, we have filtered our keywords by those that include a video or image in the search engine results page. If we search any of these terms a video or image will show up in Google.

This means that it is crucial to have images and videos on the pages of your site that are related to these keywords.

Our SEO Services: Websites That Increase Traffic & Conversions

We create medical spa websites and do done-for-you local search engine optimization that is evidence-based and ROI-driven.

Attracting website traffic can be a challenging and daunting task. There are a lot of moving parts to your website. It’s a living organism that requires constant attention and maintenance. And then you have to think about quality, fresh content that you can contribute. Writing great, authoritative content takes time.

But, it can be worth the investment to your spa with the right SEO strategy and content marketing strategy.

Evidence-based Medical Spa Marketing

At Avalanche Creative, we create evidence-based, highly executable search engine and content marketing plans. Our process takes the mystery out of the question, “should I invest long term in SEO and content marketing?” and provides a bullet-proof plan for how to execute spa SEO and content strategy that drives more traffic, more qualified leads, and builds your brand’s authority.

We are a digital marketing SEO-focused company that specializes in SEO for medical spas. Our SEO services mitigate the risk of a bad investment in search engine optimization. We do this by researching and planning more thoroughly than anyone else. We make sure your SEO and content marketing plan is truly investable for your medical practice.

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Get a free (and hassle-free) 30-minute consult. We’ll show you exactly what we would do to get your medical spa more traffic and conversions. Get started now.