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What Are the Top 3 Reasons Drug Rehab Website Development Hurts Drug Rehab Marketing?
Drug rehab Website development and design are drastically affecting drug rehab marketing for addiction treatment centers, opiate detox centers, inpatient rehab, and IOP treatment programs. Understanding the many components needed including; design, drug rehab SEO, and branding are critical for successful web marketing. These are all paramount to generate drug 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. Drug rehab SEO website development is complex for drug and alcohol addiction treatment center web marketing.
Understanding How Drug Rehab Website Development Effects Treatment Calls Lead Generation
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 of addiction. That most likely shows with the clinical aspect of your center. However, many centers fall because they do not respect, or understand drug rehab SEO marketing.
Understanding the Value of Proper Website Development
The current behavioral health industry landscape requires that recovery centers learn better addiction treatment marketing practices including the status of the drug rehab SEO website development. Website development is the major building block for their drug rehab marketing. Relying solely on outreach, and buying rehab leads to maintain an acceptable census puts them at great risk. Addiction treatment lead generation and producing treatment calls is difficult on the web. Drug rehabilitation owners often use short-term solutions to their long-term problem.
Drug Rehab Web Marketing Outperforms All Other Marketing Combined
When the money was flowing, there was no reason to have drug rehab SEO website development or a healthy marketing mix. Addiction treatment centers and opiate detox centers threw a ton of money at their rehab marketing with PPC, bought some VOB treatment calls (no longer legal in Florida,) relied on Outreach and that was the extent of their marketing plan. They demanded immediate results which have caused industry-wide thought process concerning marketing. Concentrating on short-term solutions, to their long-term problem of generating clients, puts them at great risk of not surviving in the red ocean.
Website structure the #1 Ingredient for Drug Rehab SEO
Drug Rehab SEO website development needs proper website structure. Many drug rehabilitation centers think web marketing does not work. The main reason is when they implemented it into their substance abuse marketing their website lacked proper structure. They were investing money in drug rehab SEO that could not perform. Without proper structure, Google spiders will not rank or penalize the website.
Substance abuse web marketing is complicated, competitive, and requires knowledge beyond addiction treatment. Drug rehab SEO website development needs to have the proper foundation to produce treatment calls. It must be the start of your drug rehab marketing and lead generation.
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.
1. Proper Website Structure = Poor Web Marketing Results
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 Center Marketing
Proper website structure is a critical aspect of a websites SEO and critical for drug rehab marketing. It will be one of the main factors in generating revenue or wasting marketing dollars. Poor drug rehab website development 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 a Website Designed and Developed by an Experienced Drug Rehab Professional with In-depth Knowledge Beyond the Addiction Treatment Industry
The “big boys in the sandbox” understand better drug rehab website development equals higher rankings in search engines and more clicks. These big players use professional and experienced webmasters 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 if they include it in their drug rehab marketing plan.
2. Pay Attention to These Areas of Drug Rehab 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. This is an absolute must in your drug rehab website development.
Google can read every language, however, it’s native tongue is the schema. This is the key to drug rehab SEO. 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 Rehabilitation Centers
Getting ahead of the competition is easy if you know what’s coming. Secondly, it is becoming a necessity in the new age of voice search. As we pointed out in an earlier article, treatment centers and ancillary 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.com 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 with marketing. This should be included in their drug rehab marketing strategy. 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
3. Proper Website Structure gets more Google real-estate with Site-links
Site-links are links and descriptions of the different parts of your website that show up in SERP’s. This is a Google’s SEO 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 a good website structure (trust and brand reputation are also factors.) If you have a 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 clicks 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.
Top 8 Mistakes with Drug Rehab Website Development
While Google doesn’t provide a step by step drug rehab website development procedure there are certain things that should be in place to achieve site links.
- Unique website name
- Clear website structure and navigation
- #1 rank organically for the 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 compile 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 drug rehab website development, chances are extremely slim in achieving a coveted site-link in Google search.
Learn From the Top 3 Reasons Drug Rehab SEO Website Development Hurts Drug Rehab Marketing
Poor drug rehab website development structure is the #1 reason why addiction treatment lead generation fails. Google heavily uses the user’s experience to rank any given site. Google’s algorithm considers many factors. In addition, it looks at 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. This article pinpoints these 3 key areas for recovery centers to look for and understand in their marketing.
- Proper Website Structure = Poor Web Marketing Results. Get your website built by an industry professional
- Pay Attention to Schema and Voice Search
- Proper Website Structure gets more Google real-estate with Site-links
If recovery centers can’t get to page one of Google they can’t generate addiction treatment calls. This article outlines the most common mistakes made with drug rehab website development in the recovery industry. Give us a call, we are drug rehab marketing specialists and we will quickly evaluate your SEO. We also provide SEO training. If you would like us to evaluate your organization’s website contact Charles Davis at CEO@BehavioralHealthNetworkResources.com, or give him a call at 561-235-6195.
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