Episode 6: Owning Local Search Results with Dr. Derek Baron

Today’s Free Giveaway:

Want to DOMINATE Google search results for your local area?

Download 5 Ways to ROCK Local Search Results by clicking here. Follow the steps and see an improvement in local search and community image.

You’re going to thoroughly enjoy today’s podcast and it will add enormous value to your practice. Enjoy!

<< Episode 5: Becoming A Sports Doctor

We discussed a great article on voice search during the podcast and this can be found here: Voice Search: Is Your Practice Poised to Win or Lose?

Dr. Baron also shared his personal email: derek@thedoctorsmarketingsource.com

Make sure you straight away put your practice’s website here to download your report on what reviews you have online: PracticeReputationReport.com

Dr. Baron has a site where he puts all of his new content: https://contentd4u.com/

And here are the websites that he discussed:
TheDoctorsMarketingSource.com
SportsAndRehabZone.com
FiveStarPractices.com

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Welcome to episode 6 of the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. On today’s episode, we provide you with the best ways to dominate Google listings through reputation marketing and the local SEO search. Our special guest is Dr. Derek Baron from thedoctorsmarketingsource.com. In our podcast, Dr. Baron gave 5 things you can do today to dominate the search results when people in your community search for you. We’ve put these 5 resources and easy to use PDF downloads so you can implement these suggestions and start seeing results today. Download this free resource now at chiropracticepro.com/episode6. Chiropracticepro.com/episode6. These 5 tips are amazing and the rest of this podcast is pure gold. After doing this interview, I am convinced that this is a practice-changing podcast and it starts now with Dr. Derek Baron.

Derek, welcome to the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell us about you, your journey into health services and chiropractic specifically, and then get into what you’re doing now.

Dr. Derek Baron: Hey Josh, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here with you and your listeners. It’s always great to be able to spread a message to chiropractors and other healthcare practitioners. I’ll do the best I can to give you some great value. If you’re listening to this in practice or on the way in or out, hopefully, It’ll give you some good nuggets from here. Back into my journey into chiropractic, you could say is it truly started when I was a junior in high school and I was using chiropractic as a way to get out of football practice in the late fall and when the snow was hitting the ground way up in northern Wisconsin. I would see a great chiropractor, his name was Dr. Lupicas. I loved that when I would get my cervical spine adjusted, as soon as he would put his hand on my neck and I would hear that paper crinkle, I loved it. I would see chiropractors every once in a while. Then I went to school in Wisconsin, smaller state school called the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.

I majored in biology and a minor in chemistry. I decided I had an option of maybe working at a zoo or seeing what else I could do. I went back home and I saw Dr. Lupicas, talked him a little bit more. He said, you know you should consider chiropractic. I looked at a couple of schools. I honestly didn’t visit a single school. I just went to National, applied, got in. That’s where I went. It was a great opportunity for me at National. At that time, it was National College of Chiropractic, now it’s National University of Health Sciences. They’re all great schools, but I’ll throw in a little bit there for the alum of National. When I was there, graduated, enjoyed it, met some great friends, some amazing professors of course. I had some really good opportunities.

My first opportunity out of school was to work with a primary care physician in a medical setting. We were working a lot with cancer patients. We were using some microcurrent therapy to help them with the residual effects of cancer. We use this microcurrent therapy to heal them with prostate cancer, and to heal them with radical mastectomy. When I say heal, I should be careful with that. They have a lot of scarring tissue helping the wounds heal, it was amazing what it did. It just wasn’t my fit, it was less chiropractic than I wanted. My next opportunity was in the city of Chicago with an orthopedic surgeon. It was a great opportunity. I learned a lot, what not to do and a lot of what I should be doing when it comes to healthcare.

It’s not against the medical profession, but for the way I wanted to practice which was a very active care model and give the patients a chance to go through a rehab protocol before they would have to go through surgery, we kind of wanted them in surgery before anything else. So, that didn’t work out well. At that point in time, I’d actually met my eventual wife who was a physical therapist and athletic trainer. We started having some conversations, got to become very good friends. Things developed from that point in time, so we moved back up into Wisconsin from downtown Chicago and started working with a couple other people in a rehab setting.

Then, we decided to open her own practice back where we’re from in a small town in Wisconsin called Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It was called Integrity Sports Medicine. Loved it, I got to be a team physician for the high school and another school there. It was great, I earned my diplomate in chiropractic in sports and had a wonderful time. At that point in time, we had had our son. We wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing and having the right opportunities. We realized that maybe the opportunities were elsewhere. We moved to Florida for a bit and then back here to Illinois. That’s where we reside now.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Great, and what do you do now? What path have you chosen now?

Dr. Derek Baron: The last practice here in Illinois that I worked with was in a work comp PI practice and my emphasis was sports medicine. It didn’t work out as well as I would have wanted to, so during that point in time, I was starting to do some marketing for our practice as well as some other practices building websites, doing some online marketing consisting of maybe pay-per-click ads. That just slowly died away for me, the desire to be in that practice. I just didn’t care to start a whole new practice at that point in time.

I started a digital marketing agency, it’s called the Doctors Marketing Source. I work with different types of physicians, but a lot mainly with chiropractors. We do everything across the board from website design and development to the important parts that everybody wants which is new patient lead generation with Facebook or with Google, and PPC, and content marketing, all the stuff that helps you or the chiropractor bring in their patients.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Right, and one of the things you do is reputation management or as you said marketing. I find it very interesting, tell us about that about the reputation part of what you do and why it’s important and who needs to be doing it.

Dr. Derek Baron: I’ll try and talk slow on this because I think it’s one of the most critical and most important things for any practice to deal with. But most people talk about reputation management. Management is a big portion of it, but I want people to also think about reputation marketing. The difference between the two is reputation management is typically when there’s a fire that’s out there and something needs to be put out. What that means is you have a negative review online, or a patient has said something to you or unfortunately, you’ve had some clients that they’ve had a DUI, so there’s something that’s put online that’s negative about you. That means if there’s a fire, so you’re in the hurry, hurry, what can you do to fix or correct it?

With some of those, it’s very, very difficult. What marketing really brings to the table is instead of worrying about the fire every single day if you’re dripping something into a bucket by getting a new review as often as possible whether it’s written within the practice, whether it’s having a picture taken with your patient, whether it’s a child that you care for or whether it’s a senior or middle-aged people and you put it on your wall of fame in your office, it’s all a great thing to do. Your reputation is what precedes you, especially nowadays online. Every single time you’re getting these reviews, it’s important and it’s critical that you’re doing that for that one day that you may get a negative review and it will come. When we’re in practice, we know you can’t please everybody. If you’re struggling to please everybody as long as you’ve got some testimonials that are out their online reviews, it helps you battle against that.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: This kind of goes off of some of our questions, but I’ve seen online especially a lot of the younger docs, they’d take a lot of pictures with their patients. How does that work legally as far as what steps you as doctors to do to just make sure that they’re keeping hip in mind and that type of security for the patient?

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah, you bet. Great question Josh. Primarily, it’s just to get a release or a waiver form. It’s really important, especially if you’re working with athletes in the high school and/or collegiate and even professional athletes. They need to make sure that that passes the state regulation rights. If they’re a high school athlete and you do a video testimonial, you bring up is or her name and they’re promoting your practice, that can actually get that student athlete in trouble and actually potentially void their ability to participate in their sport.

It’s just simple getting a patient confidentiality when they’re signing your HIPAA forms and right away, you can say we typically like to get a bunch of testimonials from our patients and sometimes it’s an image or a photo, and sometimes it’s a video. We’d like you to fill up this waiver, then it’s just asking their name, a small a little bit of information on there that’s really just going to hold you harmless, but let them understand that they’re ticking the box, yes, I’ll allow you to put this on your website, put it in videos, put it on your Facebook page, share it on Instagram, wherever you’d like. It’s just to cover yourself and more importantly to cover your patients, especially if they’re the athletes.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Gotcha. This reputation management and marketing, how does this affect new patient acquisition?

Dr. Derek Baron: Here’s how I try and tell people a lot to think about what’s happening nowadays. Mobile searches with your mobile device of course, tablets you can say, but your smartphones, 74% of searches for local businesses are done on a mobile device. People are actually trying to find out who they’re going to see or what they’re gonna get themselves into. The reason i s important for a chiropractor to have a good presence online is when somebody is searching for a chiropractor, so let’s just say you hire in the same town, Josh and my friend comes to see you, and you offer them great care, which I’m sure you do. And, I say, “You know what, I wanna go and see Dr. Josh, but I’m gonna do a little bit of research online.”

So they’re gonna pull you up on their phone, they’re gonna pull you up on their computer at home. What are they gonna find? Are they gonna find that you have good placement online? Do you have good reviews online? Not just on Google which I think is the primary place, but Google is extremely important number one. Number two would be Facebook. Then there’s a bunch of other places that kind of follow in suit along with that. They wanna see number one are you able to be found? Number two, do you have good reviews that are out there for you, and are they consistent?

In other words, if you could go to a doctor that you trust from a friend’s referral and you look online and they’ve had 22 reviews, but none for the last two years, it would make you question a little bit if you should actually go in and see them because of how our society is so social media savvy versus somebody that might have three or five reviews compared to the 22, but those are all in the last five consecutive months, or all in the last two months. They’re looking for somebody they can trust because you and I can tell each other whom and why they should come and see us, but they need to understand specifically that they couldn’t trust what somebody else has said that they’ve had good care at your office.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I like that. I think that what you’re getting at is just every little bit matters, so every day we need to be putting some energy towards this.

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah, the hardest part to do is ask for a review. That’s truly the hardest part. But I guarantee you when somebody comes in your office, and they’re so appreciative of the care that you do for them, you have to just do a simple ask and I always tell people, just think that you’ve got a little dinner bell in your head. As soon as somebody says after maybe a week or two weeks in care and they say, “You know what, doc? I can’t believe how great I’m feeling.” And it’s ding, ding, ding, ding ding. Okay, time to ask for a review. You would simply just ask them. “Hey Josh, would you mind if my office sent you an email that would ask for you to leave us a review online. Would that be okay with you?” And if you leave with just that question of would that be okay with you, it’s a very fine ask. You’re helping them, typically reciprocity will work and hopefully they’ll help you. That means you’ve got to ask a bunch of people, but every single patient that comes in that says they love you, you should be asking every single one of them to leave you a review. Now, if I can make one statement about that. Just be very careful of who you ask. You don’t always wanna ask everybody.

You wanna make sure you’re asking the ones that you’re pretty certain would leave a positive review. Because there are sometimes practices just email all of their patients, even the ones that they haven’t seen for six months or six years to try and get a review when they realize that they’re not in the right position. Then that person’s like, “Well, they didn’t call me.” Then leave a review. As soon as that negative review is online, it’s there forever unless it breaks the Terms of Service and you can appeal that with Google or with Facebook, or any other services, but it’s 9 out of 10 times never gonna happen.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Are there any legal issues to giving someone something, asking for a review? If you leave us a– because I know if you go to a restaurant, they might say, hey, if you leave us a 5-star review, we’ll give you 10% off your bill today. Can you say to a patient, “Hey, we’ve got this pillow or we’ve got this bottle of vitamins.” Is that allowed or is that something that’s frowned upon or just straight illegal?

Dr. Derek Baron: It is illegal if you don’t offer it to every single patient. For instance, if you’re sitting in the room and you have a patient that’s in there that you know is gonna potentially leave you a good review. If you ask them and say, “Hey, Derek. If you don’t mind, if you leave a review on us online first, we’ll give you a pillow or we’ll give you a $10 Starbucks card. Then you go to the next room and you don’t offer that to that person, well they could turn you into the board, and the board would say hold on that’s not really following proper etiquette. If you wish of doing it, to put it in a polite way.

The simple thing to do is you can put a fishbowl up in the front and say, please enter this month in for a drawing to get a TV, a gift card, whatever it may be. I honestly think that reviews are as important as buying a $300 television, and every month giving that away if you would get at least 10 people to leave you a review. That way, everybody has the opportunity. Now again, you could have somebody that has a negative situation that may leave that review. We’ve always heard that when you provide a great service, one person is going to give a review.

When you provide poor service, 10 people will do that. Think of yourself in a restaurant, that’s unfortunately possible. You have to be very, very careful that you are selective in what you’re doing, but you can’t eliminate certain people and give it to others. They’re you’d have to consider are there certain softwares that can help online and generate some reviews for you.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Right, and I know this was going away from the practice, but with my book on Amazon, Because She’s Worth It: A Nutritional Guide for Parents with Daughters, one of the things that we did was we offered whoever wanted to leave a review. We said if you really like the book, leave a 5-star review. If you thought it was horrible, then leave a 1-star review, but then we’ll send you a– it was a special gift. We put all the forms from the book in a PDF, or maybe we did a special video presentation just for them like a discussion on what we did. We had a lot of people leave reviews because there was a good gift, but they all enjoyed the book and left honest reviews. It’s kind of neat that there are ways that you can generate reviews and you can do it honestly, and also offer them something really great just to take an extra minute out of their time.

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah. That’s a great marketing avenue you went down with, Josh to do that for the book. It’s great. I’ve heard other people say if you leave us a review just like you did, giving them a gift away or you’ll be put on our special VIP list when the next item comes out, we’ll offer this for you. If you are offering tremendous value with the book and the video that you gave, or within practice. If you offer tremendous value of being the best chiropractic physician you can be, and offering the best services and when needed, refer out or having other ancillary services there, they can’t refuse that. They know you’re trying to help. You can’t fix everybody, maybe some great chiropractors out there that can, but it’s tough to make sure everybody is 100%, but you offer the best you can for them and they’ll follow suit and they’ll help you as well.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: All right. Any other positive ways that you can manage your reputation?

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah, I think the most important way is about getting video testimonials. It’s kind of hard, not a lot of people like to get on camera, but it’s really important that you do that. You could actually just ask your patients just to do it themselves and post it online, or you can literally, what I would tell you to do is take a selfie stick, put your phone on the end, have your patient sitting next to you. I know you can’t quite see what you’re doing, but you take that selfie stick and you kind of hold it up in the air. When they first see that coming across on YouTube or on your website or on Facebook, it’s one of those pattern interrupt they call it. As they look, it’s different from a high interview.

You bring it from there, you kind of wave at the camera if you wish and then you bring it down and you just go through a couple of questions and say, “I just wanted to share with you another great patient testimonial from Jane here. She came in a few weeks ago. You know what, let me have you tell her the story.” And you just turn the camera a little bit so Jane could tell it. Then again, here’s what’s the best part is. When a patient comes in, I was just talking with a chiropractor that has a diplomate in pediatrics today. We all know as chiropractors, we believe we can help everybody. I believe that in our hearts, we can. We should be able to do the best we can.

I can tell any patient that I can help you, but they know I’m in a sense trying to sell medicine on them. But when you have somebody giving you a video testimonial and somebody can read that and connect with them and say, I have that same problem. My husband, my wife, my son, my daughter, my mother has that problem, they know that it’s now– the fences are down, the border’s easier to get into it. It’s a lot easier for you to feel comfortable with that doctor. It’s building that know, like, trust factor. I think that’s one of the most important things you can do. Getting reviews online, but making sure you’re getting video testimonials.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: All right, that’s great. Now, how do we mess up our reputation management online or reputation marketing? How are some ways that we can mess it up, and things that we should really be staying away from?

Dr. Derek Baron: First and foremost is if you’re not analyzing your online reputation, you’re gonna hurt yourself. Whether somebody leaves you a positive review or God forbid a negative review, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. From a Google perspective, when somebody leaves review and it’s a 5-star review, and it’s great and it’s glowing. You see it and you read it, you give yourself a thumbs up like that and pat yourself on the back, you did a great job, but you don’t respond to that, you lose out on Google love, essentially. Google wants to give you some love and respect for responding to that.

Now that also tells the patient that left you a review, it pats them on the back and knows that you appreciated what you did. Then tertiary what comes in is the people that are going through your Google feed or your Facebook feed and they see that you replied to that, they see that you take time, they see that you care, and they see that you’re interactive. That’s the type of doctor that they wanna see. You have to start interacting with your reviews, especially negative reviews.

Everybody’s definitely afraid to respond to a negative review. The thing I tell people to do all the time is as soon as you can, in a sense, even if it wasn’t your fault because we never tend to think it’s our fault, you just accept it a little bit and do your best to take that response offline. What I mean by that is say, “Josh, I’m sorry that we didn’t meet or exceed the expectations like we have with others. If you don’t mind, give our office a call and make sure they put you through directly to me as soon as possible. I’d love to help rectify this situation. I hope to see you or talk to you soon.”

So again, that comes back and says that you know that there was an issue, you’re trying to resolve it, you’re not arguing the point, you’re not pointing fingers that it was his or her fault. You’re maybe accepting some of the blame, but you wanna fix it. So it doesn’t get in this back-and-forth. Again, the most important is people are gonna come and read that negative review, they’re gonna see the reply and they’re gonna see you replied within a day or two, so you’re super active in it. It sees that you tried to fix the problem versus if you ignore it.

If you haven’t yet when you’re at practice, go and check your practice on Yelp. Look at the negative reviews compared to the positive reviews. You’ll see people can give it a thumbs up, they can like it, think it’s cool, or think it’s funny. That’s what people lose out is that there are people reading those reviews, making a judgment upon if they’re going into your practice or not upon what somebody else said. Whether it was right or wrong, that’s what’s gonna happen.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Now, you have an office that hasn’t been managing their reputation and they’ve kind of let things go, and they’ve got 1 or 2 stars on Google or Yelp, and they’re just really struggling. What can they do to get out of the gutter and get back into the game with Google? Because we know they’re gonna be hurting at 1 or 2 stars. How do we get them back to where they need to be?

Dr. Derek Baron: It’s just to start asking. You start working yourself out of that hole. The only way you do it is by getting behind that terror barrier if you wish, and don’t be afraid to ask, and your staff has to ask, and your staff has to follow up. You don’t wanna be a pest about it, but you’ve got to start taking proactive action. The reason I say that is you have a limited amount of time in practice. Social media can be such a blessing or a curse nowadays for practice. If you remember a little over a year ago, there was a dentist in Minneapolis that was a big game hunter. People found out that he had killed a lion. People that were out of state, out of country went to his Yelp page and destroyed him. Now, animal rights or not, it had nothing to do with his practice, but it hurt him tremendously.

Hopefully, there isn’t something that’s going to be there. But the only way you can do it is by starting to ask people to leave a review. At that point in time, when the doors are closed, you just ask, “You know Josh, we’re starting to build our online reputation. Would you mind if you could help us out?” And at that point in time, you could offer them something, or you offer everybody, I would just leave it at we’re starting to build and grow our online reputation. We haven’t done it for a while, we know it’s important. If we’ve helped you and you think that you could do us a favor, please feel free to leave a review online. If you leave a review on Google and you feel like copying and paste it over to Facebook, we’d love that too. Those are the things that you have to do.

One thing I’ll mention about Yelp as well, Josh, is that most people say, “I’ve got 10 reviews on Yelp, but only one of them is showing.” Well, there’s something that’s called the power Yelper. In other words, you could put a sign up in your office that says are you a power Yelper? If you are, please come and talk to me. That means they’ve at least have 5 or more friends and they have left five or more reviews. Those are the reviews that will tend to stick and not get filtered in what’s called the sandbag. That’s a way in which if Yelp is an issue because unfortunately in their algorithm that they’ve been sued many times in one and says there’s no way that they don’t filter it for negative only, you’ll see negative reviews show up and you see the positive reviews hidden.

Even the negative reviews that don’t have a bunch of friends or a bunch of other reviews. It’s a bad algorithm that’s out there and there’s class-action lawsuits. I don’t wanna get in trouble with Yelp myself, but there’s just too often that negative reviews show and positive reviews don’t. The best way to do that is either find power Yelpers, or if you have a great relationship with that patient, ask them to go and review McDonald’s, to review Burger King, to review their church, to review 5 or more places on Yelp, and then come back and review your office. That way, they’re starting to see that that’s somebody that Yelp says, hey there’s somebody that their value is important and we wanna reward them for this practice.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: I mentioned Amazon, you mentioned Google and Yelp. Where are the places that people need to be? Where is the most likely place that someone’s gonna find something about their reputation?

Dr. Derek Baron: In the medical profession, Health Grade is the one that’s pretty big. You can ask people to leave a review on Health Grade. But most people don’t have the time to really look. The ones that are doing that may actually not be the patient you want in your office anyways, because they’re being so specific and peculiar that maybe that’s okay if they don’t come in. But number one is Google. If you’ve got a product like you number one of course Amazon. If it’s on eBay, you want reviews on eBay. But for a medical practice, number one, in my opinion, is Google because that’s what people have in their hand. It’s easiest to search that. Number two nowadays is Facebook.

You need to increase your Facebook reviews that are there, and then it kind of goes down the line. Yelp is important. Again, most people don’t like to do it. If you don’t, that’s okay. But there are a bunch of places in which you can find out where you can leave them. I’ll kind of hit it too the way in which people can actually analyze their practice a little bit later here as we cover some of the 5 things that I think are important for people. I’ll show them where they can go and actually get a reputation report on their practice. In there, it’ll show them there are some of the locations where they can find out if they have reviews, they’ve got a listing or not.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: All right, fantastic. Now all of this I think, to me falls under a big heading of search engine optimization. So, SEO as well. A lot of people kind of think of it as, or the way it’s referred to in internet marketing. But can you explain what SEO is and can you explain in particular, local SEO, how that works?

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah, absolutely. The easiest way is to go to your computer or your mobile device and you can say find a chiropractor, or you type chiropractor near me, or depending on where you live. I live in Naperville, Illinois. You’d say chiropractor in Naperville, Illinois. The first thing from a local search perspective that pops up on a desktop computer is going to be a few ads. The same thing on a mobile device, you’re gonna get some Google ads that show up. The next thing is what’s called the map listing. For search engine optimization, SEO, local SEO shows up first. That’s the map that’s there on the top. If you’re in that pin drop section, meaning the A, B or C pin drop, you’re in a good place. Even Google is now starting to release where people can do Google pay-per-click ads and actually get their practice to show on top of the three listings that are there, so it’s actually four listings.

You’re actually getting a little bit of a bonus if you’re doing Google PPC to get yourself in the map sections. The old-school SEO is what shows up underneath the maps. That’s in the organic search and that’s where your videos pop up. That’s where your blog posts pop up. That’s where if you’ve had newsletter articles or anything like that, that’s where it shows up. SEO is whatever you’re doing to get your practice found for chiropractor in Naperville. Back pain specialist Naperville, neck specialist Naperville, pediatric chiropractor Naperville. Whatever you’re doing that’s search engine optimization and how your website ties in. But it’s all about local search in the maps. That’s one of the most critical things, and that’s really where you wanna be found is when somebody is searching with their mobile device or their computer at home is when they search for chiropractor in Naperville, do you pull up in the maps.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: And that ties back into the reputation marketing because then you’re gonna see the stars and the reviews once they click on that pin drop, is that correct there or no?

Dr. Derek Baron: Absolutely. It is one of the key factors, if not the top four key factors of helping your practice get found in the maps listings. It really starts with what’s called the NAP of the listing. So the name, the address, and the phone number. Your name of Integrity Sports Medicine should be written out the same way in Google as it is in Facebook as it is in Yelp and Bing and Yahoo and Citysearch and Insider Pages in Health Grades. Some people would say, they’ll list it on Google as Integrity Sports Medicine, then they’ll go to Yelp and list it as Integrity Sports Medicine, LLC. That takes Google and throws them into a hissy fit because they don’t really know what to understand that you say that you’re this practice here, but you’re calling yourself something different. So, the name, address, phone number is important.

When it comes to address, if you’re ABC street, suite number 2, you want it say ABC street, suite number 2 whether it’s hashtag for the pound sign number 2 or ste or suite, you want it to be the same every single place. Then if you have the phone number, if you’ve changed phone numbers, you wanna go back into the directories and make sure they all match up. And then reputation is critical. The more reviews, because Google wants to do something good for you, believe it or not. Even though they sometimes have hurt practices in how SEO has changed. When somebody’s at home searching, they wanna provide the most relevant and the most up-to-date provider that’s there. The doctor that is located close to them, that has more reviews potentially, has a better name, address, phone number spread across the web, they wanna put them first before the ones that don’t have that.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: That makes a lot of sense. That’s good information. I know too, Google likes a site. The site that you’re pointing back to likes a site that has pertinent information about what you do and chiropractic and that people go and look at it and read it and spend a little time on your pages as well.

Dr. Derek Baron: Exactly. Your website’s critical as an important part of it. Your Google my business page which is the page that allows you to see a review is to get your map listing there. You wanna open that up. If you don’t have it, just type Google my business, go on there and they’ll start you through a process of entering your practice in. As many photos as they let you add, put photos there. Make sure your hours of operations are filled in. Make sure that your services are put in there. Your number one service should be chiropractic or chiropractor. Then you wanna make sure you link your website. Your website has to have keywords that are linked there in the description, it’s called the meta description.

The meta title, meta keywords. It’s not again as important of a factor as it used to be because content is more important, what’s on your website. So blogging is important, vlogging is important, all of that stuff. When somebody goes from Google to your website, you want them to stick. The best way to do that to get rewarded by Google is putting a video on your homepage of a hey welcome to our practice video. It’s the best way for them to– when Google says they clicked Integrity Sports Medicine, they went across to the website, they stuck on the page and they stayed there for more than 60 seconds and the best way to get them to stay there is if they watch a video. You’re playing into the game of Google.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: I like that. That’s great advice. One of the most common ways that people are searching now for offices and services like mediums, devices, voice, how are people looking for chiropractors or any provider?

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah, you bet. Most people, if they’re sitting at home, they’re watching television, so they’re gonna have their mobile device. Maybe they have their laptop or their tablet, but what’s really interesting, and Josh I’ll ask you, do you have an Amazon Alexa device, or you have a Google home device?

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: I have the Alexa hooked up to my TV.

Dr. Derek Baron: Okay, so you have it. What’s interesting, I just read an article out of TechCrunch site. I wrote a LinkedIn and a blogpost article specifically on this because it said Google has come out and said since October 19th of 2017, they have sold one Google home device every second, unbelievable. If you have one of those devices, you can ask Google on your home device different from your phone or you can ask Alexa. What was interesting is that when I asked Alexa three months ago, if she said I don’t have that information, but I’ll get it for you. So three months later when I saw that article, I asked and she pulled up four offices that were within a three-mile radius of me. That’s how fast voice is coming in.

That’s why it’s important that people are using their mobile devices to make sure they are found online when they do a search in their office for it. They’re still searching on a computer. On their computer, they might be searching more for certain keywords like back pain or knee pain, shoulder pain, sports chiropractor, anything like that. They might be doing more keyword search. On the mobile device, it’s something they’re searching for it now. They wanna know where it is right now. We’re gonna link to that article too because I read it all the way through, and that was fantastic. I enjoyed that article.

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah, thank you TechCrunch is a great article. It was a great article and how I put some of the tips with a video in there how to improve it for yourself is good too.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Right and something to ask too, your patients that come in, as doctors, we tend to attract a certain type of patient. Those are the patients that we see and you’d probably be surprised how many use Google or one of my coworkers, he uses Bing. That’s all he uses for sure.

Dr. Derek Baron: Really?

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: That’s exactly what I said. But I’ve also heard that some businesses, they’ll actually concentrate on Bing because they see a lot of good results from it. Just something to think about too, maybe just ask your patients. If they’re an older group, they may not be using Google as much, but if they’re a younger group, they’re gonna be using– they may not be on Google or Bing or any web site, they may just be straight at Facebook or Instagram.

Dr. Derek Baron: Right, it’s a great point. Bing is hidden. There’s a lot of people that will do pay-per-click ads on Google and some will sign up on Yelp, and they hit one of the hidden tricks is to be on Bing because it’s not as expensive as the others, not as many people use it so you don’t have to pay for as many clicks. But there are a lot of people that are hidden in it.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: And it might be just some good traffic, but something to ask your patients.

Dr. Derek Baron: It’s always good to have a broad reach across the board. One thing that’s important with reputation is we said a lot about Google and Facebook, but you actually do wanna get to reviews put on multiple different directory sites. Google will reward you more if you have a hundred reviews on Google, it likes it. But if you don’t have any and you have a competitor that is 50 on Google, and 50 on Bing, and 50 and Yelp, and 50 on Facebook, they’re going to favor them more than just all them loaded on one platform.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Now, let’s go through a practical exercise. What I was hoping you could do is take us through 5 practical steps that a doctor could do today to increase their standing in SEO and maybe even with the reputation management.

Dr. Derek Baron: Thanks for the question, Josh. I think the number one thing you can do is if you’re driving, please be careful listening to this podcast. But if you’re in the office or when you get back to the office, the number one thing you can do is sit either in one of your treatment rooms or in the very front reception office and pull out your iPhone and ask Siri, or pull out your Android device and ask Google the question, find a chiropractor near me. It’s the most important search you can do. Because what that’s gonna tell you is if somebody is close to your office, can you be found?

When you talked about we attract certain patients that come to our office, if you are a lower back specialist, and you have decompression device, you do a lot of rehab, or if you work on extremities and you’ve got somebody that’s a runner, and they’ve got an ankle injury and they’re sitting two blocks away from your office but they’re new to the community. They do a search and they don’t find you, you just lost not only that patient, but every single patient they would have referred to you and those patients that would have been referred to you as well.

The number one thing is grab your phone and ask Siri or Google, find a chiropractor near me. When you scroll through that, you’re gonna look at the maps listings. If you’re there, it’s important. If you’re not, that’s called a local SEO problem and we’ll address that in a second. So again, where do you compare? Are you in the maps? Are you one of those three people in the maps? Then the next thing you want to do is compare the number of reviews you have. So you asked, find a chiropractor near me. Your office pulls up, you’re in position C, so on the bottom of it. That could be from geographic reasons or the name, address, phone number across the directories may not all be correct.

If you’re in position C and you’ve got three reviews, the office that’s across the street is in position B and they’ve got 10 reviews, and the office across a mile away has 27 reviews. I want you to think of what chiropractor would you go and see if you were new to the community? 27, 10 or 3? And some people will say, well I don’t think that’s a factor. I want you to think of it this way. If you have children, I want you to think of searching for a daycare center in your community. Would you send your child to a daycare center that had 3 reviews, 10 reviews, or 27 reviews? It makes it pretty simple. People are looking to see what others are saying about you, your staff and your care.

It’s important that you have more reviews than your competitors. Number three on that was, I talked about this is a way for people to find out if they have name, address, phone numbers. If you go to a site, we can link up to this if that’s okay with you, Josh. It would be www.practicereputationreport.com. When you go there, all you have to do is you’ll start typing in the name of your practice. We use the Google API, so it should automatically pull up your practice.

I would start typing Integrity Sports, and it knows locally where I’m at. And you can do it on a mobile device as well. You put that in, it’ll automatically pull up your phone number. Now, if it doesn’t pull up for you, that means that there’s a bit of local SEO confusion. Sometimes, you have Integrity Sports Medicine listed, and also you have Derek Baron DC listed. Google isn’t sure which one to pull up. It doesn’t mean that you’re not there, feel free to reach out to me or feel free to reach out to Josh and ask some questions about how you can find that out.

But you literally just put in your name, address and that’s gonna go through about a minute of trying to search. It’s gonna pull up a form for you. It’ll tell you how your name is listed. It’ll tell you if you have the directories that are matching. It will go through the name, the address, and the phone number. And it will show you in red if any of them are not matching. If it’s Integrity Sports Medicine in Google, but in Bing it’s Integrity Sports Medicine, LLC, you can see right there, you need to go into Bing and change it to match Google. Number four would be simply to start asking for reviews.

In the algorithm, Google wants again to reward the searcher with the best reviews that are out there. That’s done by you simply starting. Whether you’ve had a bunch of reviews in the past, you’ve had some negative experience, moving forward, there’s no better day than today to start asking. You can do contests like we talked about by putting in a drawing, whether it’s just a simple $10 gift card or a dinner for two out, something like that, or in the summertime, do a snow blower that’ll shock people like why are you giving a snow blower away in summer, that’s gonna bring all their attention to your practice, and other people are gonna wanna come in.

There’s many different ways to do it, but you just have to start asking. Not only you, put your chiropractic assistant when he or she hears your patients say, gosh, I can’t believe how good I’m feeling. Like I said before, ding-ding-ding, that dinner bell goes off. You need to just start to ask them, and ask for the polite response. Then number 5, I talked a little bit about videos. But you’ve got to start asking your patients for reviews, but you need to start getting your phone out and make sure you are asking for video testimonials. Hand them the waiver form, and then you can even ask as you start getting those video testimonials, you wanna put them across all of your platforms.

Now, real quick about shooting a video testimonial. I talked about putting in a selfie stick and taking it, that’s a great way. Make sure, you’re taking your phone if you’re gonna use that and put it in the horizontal position, not in the vertical up and down. You want it horizontal because that gives you full HD mode, and instead of having the black bars on the side, it may sound like it’s petty, but it’s really important for viewership. People like to see something and literally if they’re on a smart TV, they can watch your videos if they’re going through Facebook and they can do that. You would wanna upload that video natively.

Natively means not putting it up on to YouTube and then taking the youtube link and posting it to Facebook. You wanna post that video to your YouTube channel. You wanna post that video to your Facebook page. You wanna post that video to your Instagram account. You wanna post that video to your LinkedIn page, and you wanna take that and then put it into hopefully you do a blog, or you do a monthly newsletter. I would load your newsletter with patient testimonials. Let’s say I came to your office, Josh, I brought my daughter for gymnastics, and she had an ankle injury and my wife who doesn’t like the chiropractor, she’s suffering from these symptoms in her hand and she doesn’t know why. And all sudden, I see that there’s a video testimonial of a 35-year-old woman that is suffering from arm discomfort and she says how she got results from you.

The other mothers like okay, I thought he just worked with gymnasts, or I thought he only worked with this kind, so it’s a great way to bring people in by always being in front of them. And again, you hate to think about selling in chiropractic, but we really are. To take the selling off of our shoulders, we put it on our patients. If they’re happy, they’ll do a video testimonial for us.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: Yeah. I like that point too, and you get into the selling thing. I know there’s so many docs out there that just detest some of the ways that chiropractors get out there and try to manipulate patients. But this isn’t manipulating. You’re just putting out there the great stuff that you’re doing and people love to talk about it. They think it’s cool especially when you get a patient that gets to be on your YouTube channel that has 800,000 views, they go and brag to their friends and say, hey, I was on the YouTube channel that had almost a million views and they get excited about it. That’s something that I think is really cool. You’re really helping people out. At the same time, you’re getting some great promotions, it’s easy.

Dr. Derek Baron: Yeah, it’s great. You have to think about if somebody’s in the grocery store and they’re in the freezer aisle and they’re gonna grab a pizza, and they run into their friend, and their friend is rubbing their neck. Oh, you’ve got to go and see Dr. Baron. He’s a great chiropractor. Here’s why you have to see him. So that person is already selling for you right there and then. You have to say okay, if they’re doing it for me on the street per se, why wouldn’t they do it for me now in a video? Then you feel uncomfortable, but if you don’t ask, you don’t know.

A real quick thing about it, if you take one of a patient and you upload it to YouTube, you wanna make sure you send that patient a personalized email with a link to that video and ask them to watch it, like it, comment on it and share it. Google will reward you and so will YouTube of course, because Google owns YouTube. That will actually potentially get brought up on page one of Google of chiropractor Naperville. There’s a bunch of SEO factors that go with it. But the more people that look at it within the first three days that like it, share it, comment it, the better love Google gives to you.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: I know what you just said. A lot of it has to do with SEO factors, but sometimes if you just get it out there, Google will reward you and especially like you said when people like it. I have videos that I never thought– I think my page has has 700,000 views. I never thought I’d hit that. I just put on videos to help kids land properly. I didn’t think that it would ever turn into something like that. That’s just something that I just stuck it out there, and I didn’t know anything about SEO when I started, but people still go and watch some of those ones that I made 6 years ago.

Dr. Derek Baron: It’s the value of what was there. That’s the critical part of this. You thought hey I’m just putting a video out, but the people that are watching it, it’s tremendous value and they may have shared it, liked it, commented. When you give something, we’re such a sedentary lifestyle now, unfortunately. People are looking for something that’s entertaining and they come across something for gymnastics and they see that, they’ll sit and watch it and you got rewarded for putting a great value out there, that’s fantastic.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: For sure, you’ve given amazing content to us and some gems for the chiropractors out there. Thank you so much for coming on the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. What are the services you provide and how can people get in touch with you because if I had an office right now, I’d be calling you tomorrow after this.

Dr. Derek Baron: Thanks Josh, you’re a kind man. I appreciate it. Well, they can simply reach out to me via email, derek@thedoctorsmarketingsource and we can link that up so that will reach out to me specifically, my website thedoctorsmarketingsource. They can learn on it. If you are in the sports arena, I am putting together a podcast called the Sports and Rehab Zone. That’s the way people can reach out to me. Some of the things that we do, if you don’t know how to get Google reviews or Facebook reviews, we offer services and we have a system called 5-star practices. We have a system that can help automate the process, depending on what your software or platform is similar to yours. We’re trying to figure out a way to get the API’s to work together. Or if they’re using your software, it’s automatic.

What I mean by that is right now, if we don’t have an API integration, not to get too technical, but the front office staff has to when they hear that dinner-bell go off, they have to enter the patient’s name, first name, last name, email address and cell phone number if you want, and it automatically goes into a system where we’re gonna email your patients and send out a text message. Then that link it’s gonna ask them for review. There’s a lot more, you can go to fivestarpractices.com to learn more about that system, so that’s important. Most doctors are into more new patients and rightfully so. We kind of take you through a step-by-step process. As you said before, finding your niche. If you really love seeing low back pain patients, why not market specifically to those using Facebook ads or Google PPC ads. We do lead generation for practices. We do some social content posting where we create social posts for your practice. It’s important that you’re consistently updating your Facebook page. The Facebook page algorithm has changed.

They’re not going to reward people by showing that as much, but again, when they go to search for your practice and they find you on Google, they’re gonna go to Facebook, what do they find? If you haven’t made a post for the last 7 days or the last 7 months, they’re gonna question it. We help docs post twice a day, 7 days a week. We’re doing newsletters for practices and blog posting for practices and videos are really important too. It’s whatever we can do to help a practice number one, show up on Google, number two get reviews, and number three, bring more patients in.

There are too many times I speak with chiropractors that struggle and it’s not a fun place to be in a practice that’s struggling. Whether you’re in California or Kalamazoo, Michigan, or Miami, Florida. Everybody should have the same ability to succeed. So much of this is transferred to the online world. If you’re not in the local SEO Google Maps section, you’re in a lot of trouble. Whatever we can do to help them get there. If anybody has questions and doesn’t want any of our services, please don’t hesitate to just reach out. I’m all about educational marketing. I’ll have this kind of a conversation with you and if I can show you a way to improve it, I’ll do my very best.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: All right, Derek. Thank you so much. Again, you’ve given us so much great information and I truly appreciate you coming on, so thank you.

Dr. Derek Baron: You bet, Josh. Thank you so much, you have a wonderful day.

Dr. Joshua Eldridge: All right, you too.

Wow, that was an action-packed podcast, but the suggestions Dr. Derek Baron gave were so easy to follow and they’ll yield results today. Head over to chiropracticepro.com/episode6 right now and download the PDF that has 5 things you can do today to dominate the search results in your area. You can also find all the resources that Ddr. Baron listed throughout the podcast. Thank you for joining us on the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. Your assignment today is to start getting one new review each day. This will change how people see you in your community. My name is Dr. Joshua Eldridge and I have been your host on the ChiroPractice Pro podcast. Have a great day and keep doing all the little things that add up to big success. Thanks for joining us right here at chiropracticepro.com.

 

2018-04-13T21:12:57+00:00