Frustrated With Health Care

Do you have a presence on the net? 

Even though I was perhaps one of the first chiropractors in my area with an office website, up until recently I didn’t really believe, nor did I notice that we ever got any new patients from the internet.  I always thought of my website as providing information for my patients and the community, if they happened to stumble upon it.  My website is also part of a service that provided a monthly e-Newsletter that is distributed to my email list.  It happens to be a great service, but that’s another story altogether.  The point I am trying to make is that even though I have had an internet presence for many years it wasn’t until about 2 years ago that I started to notice an increase in my referrals from the internet, and it has been increasing ever since.

What do you get when you Google your name?  Are you within the top ten?  Are you on the first page, the second page?  Do you show up at all?  Obviously the higher up you are on the list, the better your presence.  You know I always thought, “this thing is called the www, which stands for the World-Wide Web”.  What good is that to me when most of my business comes from within a 15 mile radius of my office?  However, there are more people going on the net every day and they ARE within your sphere of influence, and they can, and do, search for local business.  So . . . what do you get when you Google your profession and your town together, say, “Dentist Poughkeepsie New York”?  Again, are you in the top 10?    Also, did you know there are “Geo-specific” searches so that in many cases you do not even have to include your location; you can just Goggle “Dentist”.  The results will by different from zip code to zip code. 

Increasing your presence on the net is a great, and often times free, way to advirtise.  All it takes is a little creativity and the know how, and before long your name will appear at the top of the list.  The first step, however, is determining how you want to “Brand” yourself.  So here’s what I want you to start doing.  Think about how you want to be branded, how do you think people will look for you?  By your name?  This is always a good start, but how else do you want to be found?  By your business name?  How about by your profession?  How about by what conditions you typically treat?  Once you have all the searches in which you want to be found try doing the searches to see what comes up.  Vary your searches.  For example, search for your profession with and without your town, with and without your State.  Also, using quotes provides a more specific search so try searching with and without quotes.  For example, “Your Name” and Your Name.  What you want to do is take notes on the total number of hits with each search, as well as whether you come up in the results and if so, where you come up.