DIY SEO For Addiction Treatment Centers
In our over 8 years in the business, we have learned a thing or two about SEO for treatment centers. One main takeaway is that outpatient services need SEO, but the ROI simply isn’t there to hire a quality addiction marketing company.
As The Drug Rehab Agency is here to help the addiction space serve more people, I am outlining how a smaller facility or outpatient facility can create their own SEO results, without hiring a firm like ours. This will also work for programs who serve the medicare, medicaid, or people with no insurance. As your revenue per patient is minimal, this is my gift to you.
Tracking and Tools:
Any SEO strategy requires that you track results, and find out where you can easily improve your rankings in Google. Here are the tools that we use:
ahrefs.com - $99+ – ahrefs provides the following information for your website:
Audit capability – You need to know how your website stacks up to the foundation of SEO. Ahrefs.com provides you a detailed audit and how to fix any areas of need.
Keyword Ranking – This is the section that made ahrefs famous. Ahrefs will tell you which keywords rank in the top 100 for all pages of your website. You don’t need to add anything here, it tracks it all on a national scale. The one downside here is that the rankings do not update daily. So you will need another rank tracker for local ranking and daily monitoring, however, this tool will give you a nice month over month growth chart of your keyword rankings/SEO success
Backlinks – Backlinks are the key within our industry and this is where you can see any notable (and sometimes negative) backlinks. Within this system you can see which links were created and which were lost for each website. You can also view your anchor text and broken links here so you can ensure proper anchor text distribution and fix any broken links to aid in your SEO success.
Content – Where are you lacking in content when compared to other facilities? Ahrefs will provide you with a content gap so you know the type of content you need to add to the website and blog. (More on that in a bit).
As an agency, we use ahrefs every day to review clients success, or areas that need attention. We also use this to help us understand that topics we need to blog about for our clients.
2 – Google Analytics and Google Search Console – Free
Google Analytics should already be installed on your website. If not, head here to set it up – analytics.google.com. It shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes. Google analytics and Google Search Console provide marketers with data points such as traffic by channel, conversion rate, impressions in Google Search, and much more. The way this information is used in SEO is to show organic traffic increase or decrease. Keyword rankings are great, but we want to drive traffic to the site. That is how conversions happen.
3 – Pro Rank Tracker (Keyword Ranking Tracker) - $89/month
Pro Rank Tracker is our favorite tool when it comes to tracking the affects of our efforts in SEO. This tool allows you to select a set number of keywords, how you want to track, and will update daily so you can see the progress you are making. Here is what they offer
Local Tracking – If you are focused on your local rankings (how you rank when someone searches “drug rehab” and the map shows up, then this is key for you. Pick your terms, pick your geo and Pro Rank Tracker will show your position in Google and in Maps.
Mobile Tracking – They also provide mobile tracking for keywords. Over 70% of site visitors to our client’s websites come from mobile, so this is important. You want to track how people are seeing you nationally and locally, all from their mobile device.
National Tracking – Track your keywords for people searching broad terms around the country and world. For example, if you offer a “beach front rehab” experience, you want that to rank nationally as people from land locked states will fly to you. This tool allows you to track that.
Keyword Extras – Beyond just tracking your keywords, this tool will also provide you recommended keywords to track as well as search volume on a national and local scale. This is used to identify the top priority keywords.
What good is traffic if you can’t back it out into number of leads and admissions? Call Tracking Metrics provides you a simple way to manage your phone numbers and provides dynamic number insertion for your website. This means that a different phone number is shown based on how the person arrived at the site. For our purposes here, Google Organic will have its own phone number. This is how you can see actual results from your SEO efforts and tie it back to an ROI.
Outsourced Providers
As an agency, this work is done in house, however, it hasn’t always been that way. Over the years we have grown our team but in the early years we needed help with certain areas of SEO, so we would outsource them to providers that provide this service to SEO companies, wholesale. By going direct to these providers you will receive wholesale pricing for on-page SEO, linking building, content development, blog creation and management, reputation management, video content, Press Releases, and more.
Link Building
The core of SEO is link building. Link building is the art (yes art) of having other websites link to you as a resource or authority on a subject matter. This is done, mostly, through Guest Posting. Here are providers that we have tested and vetted through other SEO companies to know that they provide quality work:
Thehoth.com
The hoth is the longest standing whole SEO provider. They service thousands of smaller SEO companies as an outsource provider for link building, content, etc. You will see their name here a lot as they are some of the best we found and their platform is easy to use.
Thehoth.com provides options on guest posts such Domain Authority Ratings or Website Traffic. You choose what you would like, and the quantity and off to the races you go.
Fatjoe.co
Outside of the funny name, Fatjoe.co provides some seriously awesome opportunities. When compared to other link building wholesalers, they have the quickest turnaround of anyone. Sometimes as quick as 6 days. Their pricing is also reasonable.
Blog Management and Creation
Content is still king, and you need to create a lot of it. Sadly, that can be difficult for many small companies. Here are companies that perform quality blogging that we have tested on our own sites. They meet the criteria for quality. In fact, they have created blogs for us that actually rank for some competitive keywords.
Thehoth - $60/blog+
What we liked about their platform was they do the content ideation for you. This is where most people have a problem. “What do I write about?”. Well, the hoth will do it for you and provided you with a monthly recurring number of blogs that are already optimized for SEO with internal links and everything. They even provide you an image that is optimized for the targeted terms. If you have a wordpress website, they will even post the blogs for you. Truly hands off. If you are looking for a one-stop, true outsource partner for Blogs, this is it.
Fatjoe.co - $25/blog
Fatjoe is back again and this time, with content. Fatjoe.co offers a lot of content options for those that already have a topic in mind and have an image ready to go. It is as simple as adding your concept, website, keywords for which you wish to rank with this blog, and a quick project brief. From there, their team of UK and US writers get to work. It is delivered to you, not uploaded to the site. If you know what you are doing, this is a great option.
Local SEO Focused Work
Local and national SEO have many things in common, however, Local SEO has a few more steps that are needed. Steps that can be a bit of a pain. The number one area of local SEO is citation building. Citations are sites like yelp, yellowpages, etc. These pages need to be the same name, address, and phone number as your Google My Business Listing. This shows Google you are who you say you are. As an agency, we do outsource this portion of our services as it is extremely time consuming to do on our own, and these providers have the right software developed to make it quick work for them.
Brighlocal
Bright Local has been providing us with citation building for clients, and ourselves for years now. Not only are they cost effective, but they are also honest and get the job done. Their interface is simple to use and ordering is easy. They also offer updates to current citations that do not match your Google My Business NAP (Name, Address, Phone).
Yext
Probably the largest player in the space, Yext provides similar services to Bright Local, however only offers the top 40+ citation sites. Once you stop paying them, the listings no longer update. So if you change your address or phone number, then you are out of luck.
The Hoth
The hoth does citation building a bit differently. They offer citation cleanup to update any incorrect citations and they do this manually. They also do a citation audit, which outlines what needs to be done. Finally, they offer “local packages” which mix the audit, citation creations, plus sharing of video and photos to improve your local rankings.
Fatjoe
Fatjoe also offers a general location citation building product that creates the purchased amount of citations for your site, with a max of 100. They also provide you with login information for each account, should you need to update in the future.
Of all the providers listed here, our personal favorite is The Hoth. We used them as we grew in the beginning, and frankly, from time to time for reputation management help. They offer a ton of products that provide quality results and if you don’t want to manage is yourself, they even offer a full managed SEO service.
