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Website Development Hurts Rehab Marketing

Website development and design are drastically effecting addiction treatment centers and industry sales/service organizations. Understanding the many components needed including; design, SEO and branding are critical for successful web Marketing. These are all paramount to generate rehab leads and customers for sales/service organization in our industry. However, it requires an ongoing, in depth knowledge of the crucial role website structure plays in SEO and drug and alcohol addiction treatment center web marketing.

Top 3 Reasons Website Development Hurts Rehab Marketing

Addiction treatment centers are facing their most difficult challenges ever in 2018. Generating enough clients to sustain their business has become a daunting necessity. The insurance companies are now paying for shorter lengths of stay, and less reimbursement for drug testing. This combined with new laws in Florida on patient brokering, Google PPC restrictions and algorithm changes, have many centers frustrated and struggling to gain clients. We are seeing many centers close their doors, merge, or get bought out by wall street investors.

As a treatment center owner, you most likely started your center because you have a passion to help, and extensive knowledge on addiction. That most likely shows with the clinical aspect of your center. However, many centers fall because they do not respect, or understand marketing.

The current landscape requires that centers learn better addiction treatment marketing practices including the status of the website development. Relying solely on outreach, and buying rehab leads to maintain an acceptable census puts them at great risk.  When the money was flowing, there was no reason to have a healthy marketing mix. Centers threw a ton of money at PPC, bought some VOB calls (no longer legal in Florida), relied on Outreach and that was the extent of their marketing. They demanded immediate results which has caused industry wide thought process concerning marketing. Concentrating on short term solutions, to their long-term problem of generating clients, puts them are great risk of not surviving in the red ocean.

Web marketing is complicated, competitive, and requires knowledge beyond addiction treatment. Web marketing outperforms all other marketing combined when set-up correctly and executed properly. Speaking with many treatment center CEO’s and Executives, many say web marketing does not work. Our immediate response is let’s look at your electronic assets and how they are set-up.

Proper Website Structure = Poor Website Development

Let’s first look at the website. Website structure is the critical starting point for SEO performance. The aesthetics of treatment centers websites are often beautiful, showing pictures of the beach, and amenities. The aesthetics of a website are only a fraction of what is needed for web marketing. When a house is being built, the foundation is the most important aspect. Without a strong foundation your house will fall. With web marketing, proper structure is the original building block.

We recently spoke with Brian Frye, CEO, of Magna Technologies, a highly respected industry website design company and attendee favorite panelist at BHNR’s Ethical Marketing Practices Conferences, about the status of treatment centers websites. Here is what he had to say, “The biggest problem is poor website structure. Centers do not understand how damaging this is to their marketing.”

Website Structure 1st Step in Addiction Treatment Marketing SEO

Proper website structure is a critical aspect of a websites SEO. It will be a one of the main factors on generating revenue or wasting marketing dollars. Poor website structure causes Google (and other search engines) to do one of two things. They will either not read and rank your site or penalize your site for structural errors. If you have an efficient website structure in Googles eyes, you get rewarded in many ways (Google juice) with higher rankings. Poor structure is one of the main reasons why many treatment centers say web marketing does not work. SEO is also a huge factor for many addiction treatment centers.

Get Website Designed and Developed by an Experienced Professional with In-depth Knowledge

The “big boys in the sandbox” understand better website structure equals higher rankings in search engines, and more click troughs. These big players use professional and experienced web masters with experience beyond the addiction treatment industry. Their sites use an efficient, clean, and trimmed hierarchy. The small to medium players usually use unskilled individuals with limited knowledge of proper structure. Their hierarchy is generally disorganized, jumbled and not optimized for Google. This is an area that the small to medium size treatment centers can gain ground against the competition (big and small) on the web.

Pay Attention to These Areas of Website Structure

While this article cannot cover all that is involved with proper website development and structure, here are some areas that must be addressed.

Schema.org (Schema) Advanced Search Tactic

Schema is a syntactic vocabulary that is added to HTML that improves how spiders read and present a web page in SERP’s

Google can read every language, however it’s native tongue is schema. It allows search engines to more clearly understand and read sites more quickly. It is becoming paramount for all websites to correctly incorporate schema where ever possible on their website for several reasons. It gives the ability for search engines to pull better rich snippets, and rich data that makes a website link stand out and gain real estate in SERP’s, increasing clicks.

Voice Search Get Ahead of other Rehabs

Secondly, it is becoming necessity in the new age of voice search. As we pointed out in an earlier article, treatment centers and sales/service organizations in the addiction treatment industry are suffering from digital Darwinism. Organizations in the addiction treatment industry do not have a firm understanding of the many aspects of SEO, and now comes along voice search.

Digital voice search is one of the newest technological advances in the ways consumers get information. It is rapidly becoming a crucial part of the way our potential clients will get information they are seeking at home (Google Home, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazons Alexa,) and on mobile devices (Android, and Apple.) ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches.

Implementing Schema on a website, is like placing a direction post on a highway. It quickly gets the spiders to the information that correctly answers a voice query. This is important because voice queries depend on implied content. Proper schema helps provide the content rather than the spiders using an ambiguous page of text.

Implementing Schema and Asking the Right Questions

One of the biggest issues with schema is many do not know how to properly place it on a website.  According to schema.org there are only 10 million websites using schema.org markup. While this may seem like a lot, only 1% of websites have implemented it. This can give a treatment center an edge over their competition. Some of the areas where you should incorporate schema are;

  • Site Navigation Element
  • About Page
  • GMB Map (Google Maps)
  • WP Footer
  • WP Header
  • WP Side Bar

Proper Website Structure gets more Google real-estate with Site-links

Sitelinks are links and descriptions of the different parts of your website that show up in SERP’s. This is a Google golden nugget that improves click through rates, however there are several pieces that need to be in place to achieve this golden award.  They also are huge in SEO by making navigation easier, dominating SERP’s, brand reputations, and building trust with Google and the user. One of those important pieces is good website structure (trust and brand reputation are also factors.) If you have poor website structure, it is highly unlikely that you will achieve a sitemap in Google listings. This causes a reduction in targeted traffic, and lower click throughs of your target audience.

Here is an example of a search that achieves a site link. Try typing into Google search your center and see if your organization shows a site link. If it does not, you either have no site-link, or it is incorrectly implemented.

A quote from Google Webmaster clearly showing the importance of proper website development; We only show site links for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good site links, or we don’t think that the site links for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

While Google doesn’t provide a step by step website development procedure there are certain things that should be in place to achieve sitelinks.

  • Unique website name
  • Clear website structure and navigation
  • #1 rank organically for search term
  • Implementation of sitemap.xml to your Google search counsel account
  • Build internal links
  • Cross check page titles
  • Brand Awareness on social media
  • Better Website Development and Structure Means Better Website Crawling

Google spiders search billions of pages on the web and compiles a massive index. Their algorithm has over 200 factors. According to Google it is a must that they can crawl and index your site correctly. If you have poor website structure, chances are extremely slim in achieving a coveted sitelink in Google search.

Good Website Structure Equals a Better User Experience

Google heavily uses the users experience to rank any given site. Google’s algorithm considers many factors including loading speed (after 2 seconds you lose 50% of the audience), click through rates, time on site and frequency of visits to name a few.

Addiction Executive Ethical Marketing Practices Conferences

You can learn more about website structure, SEO, social media marketing, how your billing company can help generate revenue and more at Behavioral Health Network Resources EMP (Ethical Marketing Practices) conference on 3/30/18. CLICK HERE for more details.

For CEO’s, Executives, and Directors

  • Legal insight on the future of ethical marketing practices
  • Why proper website structure is extremely important (Your losing Google Juice)
  • Education on SEO
  • Proven SEO Strategies
  • How to brand (hint, it’s not advertising your services)
  • Getting your entire organization involved in marketing
  • How to organically increase targeted traffic to your website
  • How to utilize Google analytics
  • Why call tracking is important to your marketing

For Outreach Professionals

  • Proven strategies on increasing new targeted referral relationships
  • How to use properly use social media in their daily job
  • How to stop wasting time on social media
  • Using company’s current blogs to increase website traffic
  • How to maximize LinkedIn and Facebook
  • For industry sales and service organizations
  • How to use social media to get appointments and sales
  • How to drive targeted traffic to your website
  • How to brand your company (hint, it’s not advertising your services)
  • How to maximize LinkedIn and Facebook to get sales

The post Website Development Hurts Rehab Marketing appeared first on Behavioral Health Network Resources.



This post first appeared on Drug Rehab SEO Marketing, please read the originial post: here

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Website Development Hurts Rehab Marketing

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