Choosing Keywords For Medical Spas & Laser Clinics

We're getting a growing number of full-service website SEO accounts from Medical Spa MD Members and additional do-it-yourself SEO accounts popping in all the time.

Read this review of our SEO software by a Medical Spa MD Member.

Since we've had so many Medical Spa MD Members sign up and begin using our SEO software or outsourcing their SEO to us, I though I'd comment on one of the most common questions that we get from plastic surgeons and medical spas that are just starting; keyword selection.

What are keywords?

Keywords (or key phrases) are what someone who is looking for a laser clinic or medical spa types in to the search engine. For many, selecting the right keywords can be onf of the most important decisions they'll make. If you select the right keywords your marketing efforts should see some pretty significant results after just a short time, but select the wrong keywords and you're going to be banging your head against the wall with little to show for it. So, lwhich keywords are going to be the most useful for Medical Spa MD Members?

Most Medspa MD Members are individual physicians who have a single medical spa, laser clinic, dermatology or plastic surgery practice. As such, they're targeting potential clients based on geographical location; a certain 'radius' around their practice that they typically pull new patients from.

This one single piece of info gives you the ability to be especially effective by using your geography in your SEO efforts. And since 85%+ of your potential clients are now using the web to find local businesses it's more than just a 'nice to have', it's imperative for success if you're looking to grow.

Selecting Your Medical Spa's Or Laser Clinic's Best Keywords

There's some good news here. If you're offering Botox, Dysport, laser hair removal, or photofacials, or you're using technology that clients might be searching for like Fraxel, Thermage, or IPL treatments, you can just stick your area code or location on the end (which is how people commonly search) and you're set; so 'Fraxel' now becomes 'Fraxel Manhattan', 'Thermage' becomes 'Thermage NYC', and 'laser hair removal' is now 'laser hair removal 90210'.

Of course there's a hitch. Just because you're being ranked for 'Fraxel NYC' doesn't mean that you'll rank for anything else. So, you'll need to keep up your marketing efforts on all the keywords that you're targeting at the same time. (This can be pretty difficult if you don't have a system in place.)

If you've got any existing website SEO efforts in place, you'll do better with just adding your local city or zip code to your normal process.

Website SEO: Where to start

OK, here's the plug; if you've got a business web site you should run a free SEO website report and see where you're ranking on the search engines and how you might improve. We offer this service (and it's a valuable one) so that you can see exactly how your site's performing at any given time.

Website SEO Tips From A Frontdesk Client

It's great to get emails on website SEO tips from our clients like those below.

Glow Medical Spa is a Frontdesk client that came through Medical Spa MD and offers cosmetic medical treatments and services like Smartlipo, laser hair removal and Botox in Irving Tx.

Glows been a Outsource SEO client of Frontdesk for only about 30 days, but they're already making great progress and have obviously gained a much greater understanding of what their internet marketing and website SEO needs are.

Of course we just got copied on the email that this physician sent to their website developer, but it's clear that this is one MD who understands that the internet is where the future of his medical spa is.

Here's the email.

As I mentioned to you before I have begun working with a med spa Internet marketing group that specializes in SEO. We are working on such things as blogs, social media, pod casts, and back linking to aggressively increase our Internet presence. Their name is Frontdesk SEO and I am working with Alex and Laurie. I am writing this to you to serve as an introduction to them. Obviously much of what you and they do overlap with respect to Glow and they may need to work with you in some capacity in the future. Their emails are included above.  Certainly most of what we ask you to do will come through me, but I still want you to be aware of them if there is any need for communication between you.

Currently we have come up with a few things that I would like to accomplish as near term goals.

1. It appears that a site map will help a lot with web crawlers and bots in indexing our site. We need to have one created. I see that there are some automatic site map generators. If they are appropriate, they may save some time and effort. Let me know what you think.

2. I have registered for google analytics and we need to install tracking code on each page of our website immediately before the </body> tag to aid with that. Instructions from Google are as follows:

3. Would you please let me know the key words and tags that we are using for each page. I would like to carefully comb over them and refine them for our purposes.

4. I now understand that a static website does not generate as much interest with search engines as one that changes regularly. To that end, I would like to incorporate my med spa blog within the website. From Frontdesk "Jeff suggested that for optimal results, we host the blog on your website. Can you ask your webmaster about her preferred method for doing so. It is pretty straight forward to embed a blog on a website (many ways to do it), so whatever method works best for her is fine with us." Perhaps you can come up with a way for me to upload blogs without having to bother you weekly to do so.

5. We have created a Facebook fan page. I would like to create a link specifically to that. The text for that should emphasize the frequent prizes, give aways, and beauty tips.

6. The following is some text that I am having Alex include with all of our press releases, blogs, etc. Would you please include something like this on the contact us page. Also, I would like to include a map and a link to a map site with our address pre inserted.

Glow Medical Spa and Salon is located in the Las Colinas area of Irving. It's close proximity to Highways 183 and 114 as well as I-635/LBJ and the George Bush Tollway make it very easy to get to from many areas of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. It is just a half hour drive from Fort Worth and less from other surrounding areas such as Grapevine, Coppell, Mid-Cities, Lewisville, Arlington, Grand Prarie, North Richland Hills, Hurst, Euless, Bedford, Southlake, North Dallas, Plano, Frisco, Carrollton, Addison, Farmers Branch, Richardson, and Garland.

7. Under the book a party page would you please add a heading for med spa parties.

These are the things that have come up as most important in my discussions with Frontdesk. If you have any other suggestions, I would welcome them  Thank you so much in advance.

This email has had identifying information removed.

Nice Review Of Frontdesk SEO

There's a really nice review of website SEO and frontdesk over on Medical Spa MD.

We love it when our clients sing our praises!

If you haven't taken the tour or run a free SEO report on your website, now's the time. Your links are getting any younger.

Here's just some of the review... the parts that deal with us of course:

Link building can be very time consuming, but the FrontDesk SEO tool can really help you go out there and find the sites you should be listed on. This saves you a tremendous amount of time.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is changing in it's effectiveness all the time. In social bookmarking websites, users save links publicly (not personally on their own computers) to web pages that they want to store and/or share with others. Usually, these bookmarks are shared within an individual "group" someone may subscribe to (such as "Laser Hair Removal"). You can add descriptions to your bookmarks in the form of metadata, or meta tags, so that other users can understand what the content is of your bookmark without having to download it beforehand. Different types of "descriptions" can include comments or even reader's votes (favorable or not - like on YouTube or Digg). Again, FrontDesk SEO makes this process relatively easy.

Blog Commenting

MedicalSpaMD is a blog and, like most blogs, it is highly susceptible to spammers like we have all seen and Jeff so diligently tries to eliminate on a daily basis as it can be a true nuisance for people like us who use this site as a valuable tool for your practices.

If you want to find blogs to participate in and comment on, try to find quality blogs that are related to what you do as a profession. Again, FrontDesk SEO can help with this. And when you add your comments, try to make them content-relative because not only do your comments add value to the blogpost in general, they also have greater chance of staying on the blogpost with a link back to your website.