SEO Strategy for Med Spas
If your med spa can rank well organically on Google, it can drive more revenue and profitability for your business. The good news is its not overly competitive for med spas to rank locally on Google.
The goal of this whitepaper is to help you understand the importance of SEO for your med spa, what to focus on to improve your rank and what benchmarks to measure against to ensure you’re on the right track.
Learn more about our agency’s full suite of services for med spas.
Understanding Intent
When someone searches on Google for “MedSpa Near Me” or “Medspa in Columbus,” they have strong intent, meaning there’s a high probability of conversion. The beauty of SEO is that when you rank well, it’s an earned placement, so you don’t have to pay per click, which leads to higher profitability.
76% of people searching for a local business on their smartphone visit it within 24 hours [source]. The local 3-pack results get 44% of actual clicks on Google’s results page. If your med spa gets local, organic traffic, you have a high chance of converting them into paying customers.
Importance of Service Pages
Think of your business services like a ladder. “Med Spa” sits at the top of the ladder and summarizes what your business does. All of the services are the steps leading up the ladder.
For our clients, we like to prioritize the most important services towards the top of the ladder based on revenue and the least relevant towards the bottom.
Creating service-specific pages on your med spa website is essential, as this will help you rank for the med spa query and each service query. People aren’t just searching for “Med Spa Jacksonville.” They are getting granular and looking for “Microblading Expert in Jacksonville.”
When you have a well-optimized service page for Microblading that makes reference of the local market, you can win a lot of organic traffic.
Local Intent
Med Spas are physical locations in specific cities/suburbs, which makes this a local SEO play. We love local SEO because it’s not as competitive as bidding against national competitors. This means your website needs to be optimized appropriately for local SEO.
In simple terms, potential clients typically search using phrases like “Med spa in [city/suburb],” “med spa near me,” or “service” in [city/suburb]” when looking for services in their area. Your website needs to be optimized accordingly.
This requires strategy and isn’t black and white based on your business’s structure. Below are the questions we ask our med spa clients to solidify this strategy.
- How many locations do you have?
- Are you located in a suburb?
- Are enough people in this one suburb to fill your bookings, or do you need to expand beyond this service?
Med Spa Examples: Single vs. Multi-Location SEO Strategy
Example: Endless Rejuvenation
- This is our client in Jackson, Ohio, a relatively small market.
- This client has only one location.
- We optimized the homepage for “Jackson, Ohio MedSpa” and each service page for the service + city, for example, “Facials in Jackson, Ohio.”
- This is a straightforward strategy: The homepage is optimized for the top-of-the-ladder business summary term “med spa,” and the service pages are optimized for the service + market.
Example: Boss Gal Beauty
- This is our client with 4 locations in Columbus [Easton, Powell, Clintonville, and Grandview Heights]
- We optimized the homepage for “Columbus MedSpa” and each service page for the service + city, for example, “Hydrafacials in Columbus.“
- We also created individual location pages, which help them rank when people search for “Grandview Medspa” or “Hydrafacials in Grandview.”
- This strategy is more complex as we add more locations into the mix.
As you can see, your MedSpa’s SEO strategy depends on your specific situation – your location(s), local market size, and business goals. Solidifying this upfront strategy is one of the most critical aspects of an effective SEO campaign.
Book a free consultation with our team, and we’ll help you develop a plan that matches your unique situation.
Ranking for Med Spa Nationally
When analyzing the medspa industry, while some keywords may seem competitive on a national scale, when you break it down at a local level, it’s much easier to rank. Let me explain.
Looking at national search data gives us valuable insights into what potential clients are searching for. For example, “med spa near me” has a search volume of 33.1k, meaning approximately 33,000 people across the country search for this term monthly.
These national keywords come with high KD (keyword difficulty) scores, which measure how challenging it is to rank for that specific term. For local med spas, ranking for these highly competitive national terms would be extremely difficult.
The real value in examining this national data is understanding popular search patterns that you can then apply to your local strategy. Since your med spa serves a specific geographic area, you’ll want to focus on localizing these high-volume terms rather than competing nationally.
Taking National Data & Leveraging it for Local
Once you start making the searches localized, the volume drops significantly and keyword difficulty reduces. For “Med Spa Columbus” the keyword difficulty is a 22 and there is volume of 1,000. When you drill into suburb specific queries, the volume drops even further with only 100 volume and the keyword difficulty of 14.
Don’t get turned off by low volume queries. These can be goldmines that tools like SEMRush don’t account for. This is why it’s important to optimize your website for local keywords along with the service.
Med spas have a below average keyword difficulty compared to other client verticals we work with. With KD levels ranging from 15-22, with the right SEO optimization, you should be able to achieve page one rankings.
Authority score, or domain authority, is a metric used by softwares like SEMRush and Moz to grade how powerful your site is in the eyes of Google. The more relevant, high-quality links that point back to your site, the more powerful your site is.
If you launch a brand new med spa business, your site will have an authority score of 0 since there are no links pointing back to your brand new site yet.
An established med spa like Boss Gal Beauty has an authority score of 34. If you’re above a 10 authority score, this is actually solid for a local business. Once you get into the 20’s, you can achieve strong visibility and if you’re in the 30’s, you should own a lot of market share in your city.
Backlink Profile
Below is Boss Gal’s backlinks profile. You can see they have links from media outlets such as ABC 6 News and Columbus Underground. They also have a link from Easton, the malls website where they have a location. These are all relevant, local links which is boosting authority and credibility in the eyes of Google.
Local SEO & Reviews
One of the easiest SEO wins your med spa can achieve is claiming your Google Business Profile, optimizing it and getting reviews.
- Have a promotional sticker on the window of your med spa enticing people to leave a review on Google.
- Have your aestheticians ask patients to leave a review
- Have a software such as Gather Up that automatically follows-up with patients asking them about their experience and if they had a good one, prompts them to leave a review
The 3-Pack results get 44% of actual clicks on Google’s results page. When you have placement in the local pack, it can be a game changer for your med spa. In the example below, the three med spas in Tempe are achieving more organic traffic than competitors not listed.
HERE is a Google Business Profile optimization checklist to help you outpace the competition. There’s a lot more that goes into ranking well in the local pack aside from reviews.
Other Tips To Improve SEO for Med Spas
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Expert Content
- Google loves expert content. Your aestheticians and experts should be the one providing insight on lip fillers, chemical peels, microblading and each of your services. You don’t want a freelancer writing generic content. Even if your experts aren’t great writers, have them get interviewed and a proficient writer can take that transcript and turn it into a powerful service pages. This will differentiate your content versus the competition.
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Strong Website & User Experience
- Google is increasingly prioritizing user experience (UX) in its search ranking algorithm. Long gone are the days when you could win with only good content. You want to build a site that will convert visitors into customers. HERE is a list of 13 of the best web design practices to improve user experience.
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Let Your Personality Shine
- Potential customers want to get to know you before walking in the door of your med spa. On your website and Google Business Profile, invest in professional photos and videos. Modern Medical Spa in Dallas does a great job of this.
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Create a Roadmap
- It can be daunting to think about improving 20-30 service pages on your website. SEO doesn’t happen overnight. Create a roadmap of pages you’ll optimize each month and stick to that plan. After 6-12 months, you should start to reap the benefits.
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Don’t Forget to Track
- SEO is a journey you want to document. Be sure to track your keywords versus the competition in a software like SEMRush. Once you optimize a page like hydrofacials, you can see the before and after results, which can justify the investment.
- Below is an example of what SEMRush looks like for Boss Gal Beauty. We can see the current rank, date ranges to diagnose upward and downward movement over time, the keyword difficulty and tracking versus the competition.
In Closing
Hopefully this whitepaper gives you the necessary information to excel in med spa SEO! We’ve been working with med spas for more than a decade to improve their search engine rankings. If you’d like to schedule a consult with our team, contact us today!