In today’s instantaneous result, one-day delivery, Insta-fame society, waiting has become synonymous with suffering. Every treatment center CEO dreams of immediate results when it comes to spending marketing budget to drive admits. But the refusal to build over time costs the center in the long term.

Building an efficient, stable marketing plan takes time and patience. The willingness to invest in long-term strategies is what separates the successful rehab centers from the ones we liken to a shooting star: bright and very short-lived.

A cost per acquisition (CPA) below $1,000 is possible when you change your mindset about how to market your facility. Below, we’ll illustrate using a national brand, American Addiction Centers, and two of our clients who own smaller centers to show you how to level the playing field of marketing no matter the size of your facility or your budget.

The lowest cost marketing tool for any treatment center, excluding referrals, is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is how some of the largest brands in this country have built and retained countless successful properties at high census.

The number one complaint we hear when we talk about SEO in the rehab industry is that it takes time to see the results. We tell our agency clients they can expect to see results from SEO in three to six months, depending on their monthly budgets. However, the beauty of SEO is that once you reach your ranking goals, your investment can decrease by half for maintenance.

Real Life Results

Let’s use two of our current clients to illustrate. The CMO of a midwest treatment center signed up in February for our second tier pricing, which costs $2,500 monthly. She paid this for six months for a total investment of $15,000 to rank for drug rehab center-based keywords. Now she simply pays $1,250 per month to maintain, and she has been able to reduce her pay-per-click spend by nearly $27,500 with comparable census numbers. Wouldn’t you pay $15,000 to save $27,500 per month?

Below is a screenshot of another client’s Google Analytics organic search traffic. We started our second tier SEO for this client in June of 2020. He knew that starting SEO at the beginning of the slow season would set him up for better results in Q4 of this year and especially Q1 of 2021. 

You can see that the website had roughly 500 visitors a week when we started. The monthly investment for this client is $2,500 and in just three months, we were able to double the site traffic.

What’s most important is that we doubled their traffic with visitors who didn’t bounce and who took action. This is a critical distinction. Some rehab center owners have misgivings about SEO, because they have been burned by SEO “experts” who only focus on the increased traffic, paying no attention to the quality of that traffic or the leads generated. We are the first to point out that it doesn't matter if your traffic increases by 20 percent or 200 percent if people have searched “what is addiction” and landed on your site as these types of search terms are information-based rather than action-based. An action-based term would be ‘what are treatment options for opioids?” 

The risk of hiring agencies or individuals who haven’t worked in the drug treatment space is you can pay for “results” that don’t tie into your bottom line. An example of this would be the target keywords used for your center’s blog. In our space, it is important to know the Consumer Journey to recovery. Although it is important to build a pipeline of people who are in early stages, investing heavily in those terms doesn’t make sense for the bottom line; you will spend to reach too many people who are only just beginning to consider treatment. 

The keywords we focused on for this client were national keywords that drive a person searching for their specific addiction services to their site. This included insurance carrier brand keywords, modality keywords, and specific substance keywords. These would then guide the prospect to a page specific to what they are looking for and frame the facility as the best option based on their offering.

Because of the specificity and strategy of our keywords, our client experiences a low bounce rate and a longer time spent by website visitors. Check your Google Analytics and compare to the screenshot below. If your bounce rate is higher, reach out. We would love to help you solve this problem.

Unfortunately I am unable to show screenshots of conversion data due to our NDA, however, this client had 1,043 conversions during this time frame, not including chat sessions. This gives his center a conversion rate of just about 13 percent. Could the conversion rate of your organic traffic be better?

Lower Your Cost Per Acquisition

Search Engine Optimization is the lowest cost element of your marketing strategy. The most you’ll pay for it is in patience, not dollars. By investing in your brand and business for six months, you can bring down your CPA, grow your name recognition and build a pipeline of people who are ready for help or who are nearly ready to seek treatment. 

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best is today. What would your center’s census and CPA be if you had invested in SEO six months ago? Why wait one more day? 

We all know that Q1 is the quarter for admits. You now have three and a half months to build your SEO and rank for the keywords in your region before the busy season. Early 2021, you can either be congratulating or kicking yourself.

For a free audit of your current SEO and a conversation about what growth you could see within four months, click here. If you want to see exponential growth, while lowering your cost per acquisition, the time is now. We look forward to building with you!