If you are a residential drug rehab facility providing addiction treatment services for your clients you know how daunting it can be to keep your facility always full with heads in beds. I always like to say to the owners of drug treatment centers that, “you have to become as good or better at generating treatment center leads as you are at the actual drug rehab in order to thrive in this business.”
For this short article we will talk mostly about SEO for drug treatment centers and how SEO can generate leads. SEO in my addiction treatment consulting world is content and links. These are two very straightforward activities. However, link building for treatment centers can be daunting. Why? Because there are not a lot of “quality” related web sites that are willing to link to treatment centers because there still is a stigma about drug and alcohol addiction plus you have to worry about the ethical side of addiction treatment marketing.
For example, some of ideal inbound links in my opinion are from other addiction treatment related web sites like: directories, hospitals, funeral homes, pharmaceutical businesses, psychologists, psychiatrists, mortuaries, universities, government entities, paparazzi type web sites (celebrities are always getting busted) and other links from actual treatment centers themselves. Yes a treatment center for women website link would be a welcome link from a site that just does treatment for men, because they are noncompeting entities.
Now if I went out and told an addiction treatment marketing manager to go get 1 link from each of the above entities every month chances are they would fail. Guaranteed, try it. Getting highly coveted .gov and .edu domains is hard work and usually requires an existing relationship. This stuff takes time, a lot of time to build the authority to get links from the types of businesses I mentioned above. It could take years, it could take many many years, and hence most treatment centers don’t bother.
But if you look at the wedding industry you can see how easy it is to get high quality inbound links. There are several different types of businesses that are involved in putting on a wedding like: wedding planners, jewelry stores, resorts and honeymoon locations, limo companies, wedding photographers, florists, wedding invitation printers, catering halls and the list is endless.
Drug treatment centers have to be creative in not only getting inbound links for SEO but use other ways to market their businesses. For the SEO efforts, one way is to use social media for generating inbound links. Generating inbound links with social media is certainly helpful. The links are easy to come by but they too require a lot of work and attention. Google wants to see constant activity almost every day. You can buy links which Google frowns upon. You can also do PPC advertising which we think definitely helps in your organic search results.
Two areas where treatment centers could really use a lot of help is video and PR. So many of the videos published in the drug rehab space are of poor quality in production from the call to action, to the first 7 seconds (the most important part to hook the viewer in) to the video quality, lighting and sound. At the same time is it better to have low quality videos than none at all so I commend many centers for making the video effort. But videos are 50 times more likely to be clicked on if the video thumbnails show up in the search engine results pages. Because addiction treatment is such a personal journey video does a much better job in communicating than text and images. So if you can’t actually be in the addicts’ living room you might as well get as close as you can by being on their computer screens. At the same time videos can be embedded on other people’s websites or they will just link back to your website if you are hosting the video.
With PR it seems like every day drug addiction and DUI’s are in the news especially with celebrities. If it is constantly going to be a topic of conversation in the news why not be the expert in helping discuss the addiction treatment process and give your facility some more local and national exposure plus you can get link value out of it as well for SEO purposes. There is a lot to PR in terms of ROI but at the same you better know what you are doing because if you don’t you won’t be asked back. Call me at 781-990-8844 and I’ll give you 3 hours of recorded PR training for free or visit my addiction treatment marketing web site and fill out the form and make the request there.
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