When it comes to finding new business and improving discoverability, many chiropractors with a website turn to SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of improving the visibility of your website through search engines like Google. In this post, we’re going to talk about some of the key ways that chiropractors can improve the visibility of their site, both locally for new clients, as well as nationally and even globally to elevate the authority of their brand.

If you’re just interested in ranking locally for now, skip to the How to appear in local search results section below.

Domain Rating

To kick things off, we’ll discuss the core of SEO. The hidden score that makes or breaks almost every SEO effort: Domain Rating. Domain Rating is a curation of tons of signals from your website and its authority across the web that are boiled down into one score between 0 and 100.

This score is made up of indicators like Backlinks, Internal Links, site speed, site structure, content relevance and content volume. The higher your Domain Rating, the more likely you are to beat out other contenders for a given search result when your content is just as relevant as theirs.

Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, although they can be overwhelming at first, are great resources for monitoring and evaluating your website’s SEO ranking. We at Boxhouse have personally used Ahrefs, but have heard great things about SEMrush.

Backlinks

Backlinks are the heart and soul of Domain Rating, and one of the best indicators to search engines that your site is worth visiting and your content is worth reading. A backlink is recorded for your site when another website links to your domain. The higher the Domain Rating of the site that links to your site, the higher the weight of the backlink.

As you might imagine, backlinks can be hard to acquire. They’re often a much more organically developed site quality indicator, reflecting real relationships established outside of the SEO grind. Maybe a peer or an industry professional that you have a good relationship with has a website and a blog of their own. Getting them to link to your site from their blog can pay dividends for your business.

There are services out there to buy backlinks, or acquire them through other less honest means. But Google and other search engines are aware of this, and they crack down hard on people that try to procure backlinks dishonestly. So be sure to consider those options with a large amount of discretion if at all.

Internal Links

In addition to backlinks, internal links can be a great signal to search engines that your content is of worthwhile quality. Internal links are links throughout your site from page to page. Maybe this is a blog post where you reference another, older blog post of yours. Or a landing page linking to various subpages.

By creating a high quality network of links throughout your site, you improve the discoverability of content and information about you, your business, and your expertise. This indicates to search engines that you’re worth checking out because your content is well organized, making it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

If you’re looking to start improving your internal linking, a great place to start is adding a sitemap. A sitemap, such as www.Boxhouseconsulting.com/sitemap.xml, is a central place where all of your site links are located. Often found in your website footer. This file can ensure crawlers can find all of your pages, and also help ensure that visitors are never more than two clicks away from the page they’re looking for.

Pillar Content

When it comes to creating high-quality content with strong internal linking, 'pillar content' is a term you'll frequently encounter in the SEO world. Pillar content refers to a comprehensive, general post that acts as the central hub for a broader topic.

For example, in this post, we touch on several elements that contribute to SEO. From here, we can create dedicated sub-posts that dive deeper into each of those elements.

This structure not only improves internal linking but also builds topical authority which helps both users and search engines better understand your content. Most importantly, it allows readers to explore the topics most relevant to them at their own pace.

Short Tail Vs Long Tail Keywords And Searchability

When users hop into Google, some of them are trying to solve a very specific problem. They might search “How do I fix back pain from home on a budget?” Or “Good fixes for elbow pain while golfing.” Other times, however, they may search very vague terms like “Fix back pain” or “Elbow pain causes.”

The nuance here is what’s known as short tail vs long tail keywords. Short tail keywords typically have extremely high volume. And while this may sound like the most appealing, short tail keywords are also the least likely to result in customer action like a purchase or booked appointment. This is because when users are making short-tail searches, they’re still in the exploratory phase, trying to learn more about a subject before making more specific searches. Short tail keywords can be extremely hard to rank for. Since, due to their volume, they’re usually dominated by extremely high domain rating incumbents, like large corporations.

On the other hand are long tail keywords. Higher specificity terms that users, although less likely to search, are more likely to take action when they do. This is because at this phase the user is already educated and likely more confident in what they’re looking for. Long tail keywords are a great place to focus initial SEO efforts since they have much lower competition and higher conversion potential.

When evaluating which keywords to target, tools like Ahrefs keywords explorer can be pivotal to making educated decisions that produce results. That said, it’s important to remember that while keywords are important, they should never come at the expense of content quality. Targeting fewer keywords in favor of writing more natural sounding content that actually helps meet the user’s needs will ensure that your content base is high quality and reflects the quality of your skillset.

How To Appear In Local Search Results

When a user searches “Chiropractor near me” or “Chiropractors in Cleveland Ohio” the search engine uses a slightly different algorithm for producing results than it does with otherwise globally relevant content. We’ll speak specifically to Google for the sake of this post as that’s what most people are concerned about. Your mileage may vary for other search engines.

When it comes to local content, Google makes strong use of your Google Business Profile. It’s looking to find results that are closest to the user, but also trying to show them the highest quality results. So, it’s still possible to rank above a clinic that is 5 miles from the user even if you are 20 miles away with good SEO.

Keeping your Google business profile up to date with current address, name, hours, social media links, website, and more, will help Google feel confident recommending you. Beyond these are Google reviews. Reviews are the bread and butter for Google to know that you’re worth recommending in a local context.

Beyond your Google business profile and reviews, backlinks from other local establishments also help your local SEO. Networking with other local businesses to create referral networks can be a great way to improve your visibility. And lastly, keeping your business information up to date on other platforms like yellow pages, yelp, Facebook, and more, can increase your website’s authority in the eyes of Google.

Site Speed

Next up to discuss is the speed of your website. Site speed plays a key role in SEO ranking because users generally don’t like waiting for slow sites, particularly on mobile networks.

Tools like Google lighthouse can help you understand some key metrics for site speed. Major browsers like Chrome and Edge have lighthouse built into them and can be accessed by right clicking a page, clicking “Inspect”, and then navigating to the lighthouse tool at the top of the menu. Otherwise, you can enter your website at the official Google tool to get your report.

Site speed can be determined by three main factors

1. Locale to the datacenter that the website is being served from
2. The website's architecture
3. The optimization of images and scripts on the webpage.

By building websites on modern architecture methodologies like SSG (static site generation), deploying on high redundancy content delivery networks, minimizing unnecessary or bloated scripts, and optimizing image sizes so they’re not too large without compromising the user experience, you can create a lightning fast website that Google and other search engines love to recommend to your users.

Meta Tags, Image Alt Text, And HTML Structure

The last element of SEO also lands on the more technical side. Meta tags are information not explicitly visible to users but help describe your site. Meta data like a page’s title and description help populate areas like your browser tab details, Google search results, social media links, and more. It’s worth calling out here that while there is a meta attribute “keywords” Google has stated that they don’t use this as a relevant indicator for page content, so don’t spend too much time over optimizing that.

Beyond meta tags, it’s important to include image alt text for any images on your page that are not exclusively stylistic (like a background pattern, for example). Alt text not only helps disabled users better navigate and consume your website content, it also helps search engines know what an image is meant to describe. Remember, a picture is worth 1,000 words.

Lastly when it comes to wrapping up technical SEO we have HTML structure. This is more of the technical jargon, but writing semantic HTML with proper headers, sections, and navigation elements, helps search engines understand your site structure more explicitly.

Conclusion

Remember, SEO is all about the long game. It’s sort of like a wheel that is very hard to get turning. The benefit, however, is that it’s also very hard to slow down once it’s moving, making SEO a highly rigid avenue for traffic for your business if you’re willing to put in the work. Getting started with SEO can feel overwhelming, so it’s important to take it one step at a time, and prioritize consistency over intensity (We’re working on practicing what we preach with this one).

That’s it for SEO 101, if you have any questions please do email us at contact@BoxhouseConsulting.com or if you’d like to sit down and have a more in depth conversation about your website’s SEO performance you can schedule a free consultation below. Lastly, if you just want us to audit your website for its general performance, you can request a free website audit from us here at Boxhouse. Keep cracking and good luck with your SEO journey!