Cameron Hemphill, host of the Medical Millionaire podcast, discusses the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for medical practices. He emphasizes the need for a strong online presence, recommending WordPress for its SEO capabilities and local SEO focus. Hemphill explains the difference between black hat (unethical) and white hat (ethical) SEO practices, advocating for the latter, which includes unique content, relevant keywords, and proper image labeling. He also highlights the significance of mobile optimization, fast hosting, and SSL security. Additionally, he advises on the importance of hiring industry experts for SEO and maintaining domain auto-renewal to avoid losing online presence.

Transcript

This is medical millionaire the podcast, helping your Med Spa increase in status, visibility and profitability. Join your host as he dispels myths, shares trends and gives you actionable steps today that will take your medical practice to the next level. Here’s your host, expert marketer and founder of growth 99
Cameron Hemphill,
hey everybody. Cameron Hemphill, here your host for medical millionaire. Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to tune into the podcast. Our goal is to give incredible value and insight for practice owners. So if you own a medical practice, this podcast, it’s 100% designed for you. My team and I, we have consulted practice owners all over the country and even outside the United States for years, we travel to events. We have face to face conversations with practice owners. We meet with industry leaders, keynote speakers, and we really consistently hear from practice owners that are having a tremendous amount of success, and other practice owners that are still trying to figure it out. Look, and I get it as a practice owner, you have done a tremendous amount of work when it comes to education, around anatomy, health, wellness, but let’s face it, it’s hard to understand how to run a practice like a business, right? Because there’s a whole other side of being a practice owner, and it is talking about and understanding how to truly run your practice like a business. Because at the end of the day, if your practice takes revenue, if you have money coming in and money going out, this is a revolving door of a business, right? You have revenues and you have expenses. This is a business, and you have to understand everything from a marketing standpoint, a process standpoint, automation standpoint, financials, leadership culture, it’s hard like you’re like, wow, I’ve already gone to school and I’ve already critiqued my craft, and I’m going to continuously critique my craft, which is everything that has to do with what you do in healthcare, right? But there is a whole other side of it. You know, creating a website, posting on social media, keeping up with industry trends, keeping up with marketing trends. What’s the best online booking system? What is CRM? What is EMR? Why do I have to have all these tools, right? I get it. What is SEO? What does that even mean? So what I want to get in today, guys, is something a little bit different. I really want to get technical and granular around SEO, search engine optimization and how important it is for practice owners. Okay, because you have to look at your practice. You have a brick and mortar practice. This is your physical location. You may have one physical location, or two or 10 or whatever, but you have a digital practice as well. So a lot of times I’ll talk about your online practice. I’m talking about your website. Your online practice is your second location by default. It is a as is important as your physical practice. That I can’t it’s hard to even explain how important it is to have that online experience just be incredible. Okay, and search engine optimization is a critical factor to have for your online practice, okay? And I’m gonna say online practice a few times today, but what I’m referring to is your website. Okay? So the first thing that you’re gonna want to do, obviously, is spin up a website. There’s several ways to do it, right? You could build a website yourself. There’s great platforms out there, like Wix, like Squarespace, there’s a couple others out there that you can easily just stand up a website, go buy a domain on GoDaddy, or Google domains or wherever, make sure it’s hosted. And then you can spin up a website. You have to have a website platform to create it on, and you have to have a domain that it’s hosted on, right? So GoDaddy, for example, is where you host and buy a domain, make sure it’s set on auto renew. By the way, you never want to lose your domain. And then the other is you have to have a website platform, right? And so I think for a lot of people starting out, maybe they don’t have the funds to build on the best platform. They just need to get something up right. And that’s what Wix does a great job of, and that’s what Squarespace does a great job of. However, I see 10 out of 10 times when practices start to scale, when practices start to evolve, you migrate to WordPress. WordPress is by far the best open source platform to build a. Physical practice, online practice environment, okay, I want to say that again, if you have a brick and mortar, okay, whether it’s a practice or it’s like a tire shop or a coffee shop or whatever, WordPress is going to be the most powerful, because it focuses on local SEO. Okay, there’s other platforms out there, like Shopify, right? Even, like square is actually a platform nowadays, right? And so Shopify is really best for E commerce, right? E commerce. A lot of times I’ll see people have a Shopify website and they have a WordPress website, and they have their store online and their WordPress and so, and then they get confused, because now you have two websites. So a lot of times, people will consolidate and they’ll build their online store in WooCommerce, which is a plugin that goes into WordPress now you have one domain and your store and your brick and mortar in one location. Okay, that’s a best practice, by the way, unless you just have a complete e commerce business, Shopify would be wonderful for that. Okay? So let’s come back to search engine optimization. Okay? And you have to think as a practice owner, who are you looking to attract? You are looking to attract potential patients that live close by, and you want them to search off of proximity and the services and treatments that you do. Okay, so it’s pretty straightforward. The last thing you want to do is live in, let’s say, Salt Lake City, Utah, and have keywords that are focusing on New York City. Probably not going to get the best SEO. Probably not going to get the the patients coming to your practice, because, right, they’re going to have to jump on a plane or take a very long car ride, right? So you want to focus on localization. So localization, SEO is critical, okay? And you want to analyze every single service and every single treatment that you do, and you want to focus on your location and surrounding locations. So if you want to start driving people from a location into your location, maybe you live in a rural area, like 20 miles outside of a major city. And you know, this is a city that has, you know, great affluence. It’s very affluent, you know, high income producing individuals, whatever it is you want to attract them into your ecosystem, you have to target keywords and area location. In that location, for example, let’s say you are selling Botox. Okay, you’re injecting Botox, and you want to target people 20 miles over in another city. Well, you’re going to have to have keywords in your website that talk about that location, right, and the services and treatments you do. So, for example, Botox in Salt Lake City. Best Botox in Salt Lake City. Okay, those types of things. So it’s a best practice to make sure to create all of your keywords around what you do, who you are, by the way, who you are, like if you’re a med spa, right? So a great keyword is, med spa, near me? Med Spa, this location, med spa, that location best Med Spa, right? And then also Med Spa, these particular other areas and zip codes as well. Okay, so make sure, when you’re conducting your keywords and you’re conducting your search queries, when you’re coming up with keywords, you really just have to think about what is the consumer going to search in order to find me, right? So think about it. I think a lot of times we get really caught up in this SEO, SEO world.
You really just need to make it quite simple, and you need to think about what the consumer would search. What would you search? Okay, let’s just say you’re looking for a coffee shop, right? You go to a new area and you’re like, Oh man, I love coffee, right? We all love coffee in the morning. It’s just going, how are you going to find a coffee shop? You could probably go to Yelp. I actually do use Yelp for, like, restaurants and coffee shops, by the way. Side note, little tip, little trick, Yelp is not the best platform to drive traffic for your medical practice. Yelp will call you all the time and try to sell you on that other stuff. I am a big believer in Google, because that’s where all the search platforms come from. Except for dining and coffee is wonderful for Yelp, that’s where they get most of their search volume. Okay, back to Google. People go to the internet and search best coffee shop near me, coffee shop near me, latte near me, Pumpkin Spice Latte near me. We’re almost to October, right? So, whatever. These query searches are a lot of times you we often search near me, or we will search coffee shop. I’ll use a city, and then I’ll also use a zip code. Okay, so let’s just say coffee shop, Salt Lake City, Utah. Coffee Shop, 84121, okay, that’s a zip code or an area. But Google is getting really, really cool when it comes to near me, because it wants to serve you up with what you are looking for in terms of proximity, okay? And then it’s going to give you the relevant results. That’s why Google, my business, is so powerful, right? So really focus on your near me campaigns, and this is what Google is going to be pushing more and more for relevant search query keyword search matches to the user.
Thank you for listening to medical millionaire. I wanted to take just a few short moments and tell you all about growth. 99 University, naturally, if you’re listening to medical millionaire, the success of your Med Spa is extremely important to you, and as it should be. And if you’re listening to medical millionaire, you are obviously looking for the best, most effective ways to take your Med Spa to the next level in both profit and customer success, enter growth 99 University ranging from online education courses all the way to the full suite of marketing and web services. Growth, 99 has your Med Spa covered. No matter the challenges that you’re facing, we are ready and able to help you achieve your next level in business profit and freedom to inquire about all of our support services and products. Please visit growth 90 nine.com and while you’re there, click the university link and check out the companion course to this very podcast, back to the show.
So what you’re going to want to do is take this to the next level, right? And so let’s just go through some journey really quick. You’re a new practice owner. You set up your website on Squarespace. You’re getting some traffic, maybe not a lot. You have to migrate to WordPress, because you’ve realized that, wow, if I want to have a great SEO I have to be on the SEO platform, which is WordPress. It’s open source, and you can plug in all of these cool SEO tools into your ecosystem, and it basically tells you exactly like what to do right now. That can get complex, and as you start to grow, you probably want to hire an industry expert that also understands exactly what you do and how to use these tools and how to monitor them and how to make adjustments to them, right So, and that’s with any business, right? As you start out, you’re, you’re, you’re wearing all hats, like you’re doing everything, like you’re doing your books. Probably, yeah, and you get to the point to where you’re like, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna hire a bookkeeper, right? Maybe you’re like, filing your taxes on Turbo Tax. You to a point you’re like, you know, I’m gonna actually hire a CPA, because I’m starting to make a lot of money right now, and I want to make sure, like, this guy must know more than me, right? And so I’m gonna hire that guy, like, especially when you start making, you know, great income, you can talk about cost segregation, depreciation of assets, like accelerated depreciation, you know, like some of these big things that you can do in order to offset ordinary income. Okay, now, I’m not a CPA, but I’ve learned a lot about, you know, capital taxes, tax appreciation, stuff. So anyway, different topic, different day. But what I’m trying to say is, you get to a point to where like you outsource activities. And I’m a strong believer that, hey, outsourcing your website and your SEO whenever you feel comfortable is extremely important, especially to an industry expert that, like, understands what you do, the last thing you want to do is be like, Hey, I’m going to go hire a local person because they know my area, but maybe they know nothing about pharmaceuticals. Like, I would rather have this person knowledgeable about pharmaceuticals and the industry’s trends and what tools and technology are used, from like, an EMRs perspective, CRM perspective, what is Allergan doing? What is gal Derwin doing? Like all of these companies, what are they doing, and in keeping up with the trends, right? Like learning local is easy. You just pull up the map, right, and then you can do a query search just based upon distance, proximity, areas of location, those types of things. Okay, all right. So coming back to to WordPress, so eventually you get to a WordPress environment, right? And for those of you that are like, Hey, I’m a new practice owner, I’m gonna dive in just to WordPress. By the way, I’m also a huge believer of doing things right the first time. Because if you do start with a Wix environment, or you start with a Squarespace environment, you’re gonna have, you will spend more money in the long run, but again, at the same time, like, get something up if you absolutely have to, right? But for those of you that have the capital and you’re starting out, start out on WordPress, like, go hire an industry expert on the right platform first, because it will save you in the long run. Okay, so let’s talk about best practice. Practices for SEO, okay, and I’m going to go from the hierarchy here, because there’s bad SEO out there, real bad SEO out there, okay, and I’ll talk about it. So there is two types of SEO. One is called black hat SEO, the other is called white hat SEO, black hat, white hat, okay? And I see this all the time. Think of this as good and evil. Okay? The evil is black. That’s the black hat SEO. This is where people can come in, and they can do what is called this keyword stuffing, like just stuff the back end of the website with tons of keywords like I’ve seen. I saw a site recently, and I looked at their code base, and they were ranking really, really well, really, really fast. And I was like, okay, they must be keyword stuffing. And so I looked in the back end of the site, and I saw that this thing said Med, spa, like 500 times in the back end, with the location, lots of keywords, right? And hey, you’re gonna rank really well for the first 3060, 90, 120 days, but Google will find that they will take control of it. And I have seen, like, worst case scenario, domains just get flagged and shut down. Like, literally, you have to go buy a new domain, and that is a huge issue. Last thing you want to do is go buy a domain. So please don’t take, like, the fast way. I know we all want to be in the first page of Google. I totally get it. It, just do it right? Because I think that the some people think, oh, there’s shortcuts out there. They’re long cuts, right? And on previous podcasts, I’ve talked about, like, short term wins, right for for unsuccessful, long term success, right? And you want to, you want to think, you want to think long term like, are you in Are you trying to be in a be in business for a year? Are you trying to be in business for 10 years? Right? So also with black hat SEO, you have things like link farming, you know, cloaking text or links redirecting to other websites, or pages like blog comment, spam, duplicate content, those types of things. Like, the last thing you want to have is duplicate content too. So if you think like, you can go copy and paste someone else’s website. Like, when it comes to like their exact like they’re about us page or service pages or whatever. It does have to be unique content. Like, obviously it’s hard to keep coming up with unique content. And there’s a tool out there called Grammarly. There’s another one called Word tune that you can plug your content in and like, it will do a plagiarism search for you. And so you want to have, realistically, above 80%
unique related content to your site, right? And so that’s another, like, big reason why you want to work with an industry expert, just so they understand Google’s algorithm, they understand best practices. They understand when it comes to, like, Webmaster Tools, like, they’ve gone through these courses, right? They’ve gone through so make sure to really focus on wonderful you know, white hat keywords, like white hat SEO. Okay, so let’s get back to what is white hat. So white hat has to do with like, fresh, relevant content, new, unique content blogs, new, you look new, unique, updated content blogs, linking to get links from relevant industry sources, right? So let’s say that you have a partner in this space, and you want to have like you’re in the same industry, right? A great one for you know that I would suggest would be, let’s say you’re a member at, I don’t know, some sort of organization in, or you are with Allergan or something like that. Like, there is ways that you can reach out to them and say, hey, you know, can I be featured on your website? Right? That is a wonderful backlink, right? It then Google shows that this URL has authority, it has credibility, and it will start serving you up, okay? And then you’re going to want to look at like, optimize image labels, right? So truly optimize your image labels. So you have your images on your website. Make sure they’re saved as who you are, what you do, and where you do it. A lot of times, I’ll see images on websites when you like right clicks, hit save image, as it’ll say, like Adobe, for example, or some sort of weird image, image file name, you know, make sure to have those, those images Correct. Okay, another thing that’s relevant title pages, pages and tags, so make sure they’re actually relevant to what you do, where you do it, and how you do it. So again, services, treatments, where you are, what you do, and how you do it. And then natural keyword density, right? So you don’t want, again, like, keyword stuffing is the opposite of density. Like, like, natural key. Word density, okay? So make sure you’re focusing on that, and what’s going to happen is, over time, when you’re focusing on, you know, white hat, true SEO, you’re going to start getting ranking right? There’s something out there called SERPs, S, E, R, P, right? Search Engine Results Pages. That’s what it stands for, and that is exactly what you want to focus on in terms of having great SEO serve up relevant keywords to your audience, to get on all the SERPs, right? And I know that I was probably going a little tactical and granular there, but when you’re if you’re conducting due diligence, and you are looking to hire somebody, whether it’s an industry expert or not, say, Well, do you conduct white hat or s or black hat SEO? And if they don’t know the answer to that, like, that’s a red flag, like, they should know. Like, these are, this is, this is 101, stuff when it comes to our industry, if you will, right when it comes to understanding like marketing and SEO. So again, takeaways here. Guys focus on on near me, campaigns near me, near me. Keywords, focus on what you do, why you do it, what services and treatments you provide, and where you service them, okay, make sure to focus on those keywords and continuously build up good, unique content, blog posting, right? And make sure your URL structure is is amazing. When it comes to exactly like your services should say the name, location, what you do, okay. And then also, when you guys are looking at speed performance, right, make sure you have optimal speed performance on mobile, tablet and desktop. Also the in this day and age, I’m actually seeing mobile, mobile sites pick up about 80 to almost, in some cases, 90% of all traffic is coming from the mobile now, like five years ago, it was more 5050. Mobile is starting to just overpower desktop. Okay, so make sure your speed optimization is you know, at least above 75% you can do speed tests out there. There’s various resources for that. But anyway, I don’t talk a ton about, like, the marketing aspect and best tricks of SEO on this podcast, but I think every once in a while it’s just important to talk about, right? And so make sure that you guys are conducting wonderful white hat SEO. You know, look at WordPress as a wonderful long term website platform. Make sure your hosting is very fast, very powerful, reliable. Make sure your domain is on auto renew. I have seen people build up like spend 1000s and 1000s of dollars on their website, their marketing, their advertising, and they forget to have their domain on auto renew, and all of a sudden, everything breaks because your address is now not found online. Okay, make sure to have SSL. One thing I didn’t talk about SSL on your website, secure socket layer. Make sure you have security on your website. I see it all the time where someone will not have SSL because they want to save a few bucks on their hosting, and this is going to kill the overall SEO strategy. So before I chime off here, start with the right infrastructure and platform. So if you want to have the best seo infrastructure platform security is that’s where it starts. So WordPress infrastructure security, SSL, make sure you have a wonderful domain that’s on auto renew. Make sure you’re hosting this great right, if you have those. Okay, cool. Then start building the site. Then start white hat SEO, then start doing Google ads, then start doing like, Facebook, Instagram ads. And that’s another topic for another day, but I’ll leave it at that. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in until next time happy injecting you.