While alternative healthcare practitioners provide invaluable services to their patients, they’re currently denied many of the benefits afforded to conventional healthcare providers.  Examples include the inability to accept insurance for most or all of their treatments and lack of network referrals that traditional doctors enjoy. These two examples alone account for a significant reduction of new patients in comparison to what a conventional doctor would see. So the question becomes, how to gain more patients/clients? 

It’s crucial that natural health practitioners utilize strategies that can significantly boost their visibility and position their services to potential patients/clients in a compelling way. Since we live in a world where technology is deeply integrated into our daily lives, it makes sense to utilize this technology as lack of doing so will result in numerous missed patient/client opportunities and potentially failure of a practice.

The Holistic Health Practitioner Digital Footprint

As a natural healthcare practitioner, you must have a widespread and consistent online presence.  This means your practice should be easily visible online, where your potential patients are.  Here’s what you need to succeed.

• Maintain Consistency- Your practice name, address, phone number, website link, tag line and logo image (where applicable) should be the same on all digital assets you have (websites, social profiles, directory listings and review sites).
• The “Must Have” Resources- The following is a list of digital resources EVERY alternative healthcare practitioner should take advantage of as each plays an important role in providing more exposure for your practice. You many not fully use each of these, but you should create a completed profile on each
• A website designed to generate new patients.
• Google business listing
• LinkedIn Profile
• LinkedIn Practice Page
• Facebook Practice/Business Page
• Yelp Profile
• Twitter Profile
• YouTube Channel
• Alignable Profile
• Site Jabber
• Directory Profile Listings relevant to your profession or specialty areas

Patients are Searching Online More Than Ever

Most of your potential patients and clients today turn to the internet when they need answers.  They will perform internet searches such as “chiropractor near me”, “homeopathic doctor near me”, “local natural doctors”.  Do you know that first search phrase is used on average 246,000 times every month in the United States? (statistic pulled from the Verified Health Index When people in your area search for your type of practitioner, where do you show up in Google?  Some of the digital assets mentioned above are fairly simple to rank on the first page of Google search.  When you properly combine them all you end up with a powerful online presence that can help you out rank local competing practitioners in your area.

Getting Set Up For Success

Let’s face it, while there are many search engines out there, most people today use Google as Google continues to dominate the search industry. “Google it” has literally become a household term. With that said, here’s an important SEO tip.  Take advantage of every Google digital asset available to you. Let’s start with the most important one for your practice, the Google Business Listing.  Google obviously gives preference to its own digital assets such as their Business Listings and YouTube listings.  Next, Google appears to rank specific review and rating websites like Yelp and SiteJabber very high so it makes perfect sense to grab free listings there. 

The Alternative Pain Treatment Directory is an internet resource that might be of special interest to alternative healthcare practitioners. It is becoming the "go-to" website for chronic pain patients looking for safe, effective care. There are more people living with chronic pain than have cancer, diabetes and heart disease combined. Listing your practice on the Alternative Pain Treatment Directory enhances your ability to rank your practice/business name high in Google search results, receive online reviews, provide additional SEO value to your own website by linking to it from the directory, and receive new patient/client leads directly by people searching the directory for local providers. 

To learn more about listing your services on the Alternative Pain Treatment Directory, CLICK HERE