Looking to grow your podiatry practice?
The best way to do so is by taking advantage of digital marketing.
In 2024, most patients look up clinics or medical information online, and so digital marketing is the best way to reach them.
By using channels like Google Ads, SEO, and others, you can start driving new patients to your podiatry clinic within weeks!
And no, none of these channels are too technical; you can make them work even with no prior experience in online marketing.
Learn how to simplify your practice workflow and free up more time for patients with Medesk.
Open the detailed description >>In this guide, we’re going to teach you all you need to know to make your podiatry clinic marketing work, including:
- How to Pop Up #1 When People Google “Podiatry Clinic” in Your Area
- Tips for Optimizing Your Website and Improving Conversions
- Guide to Driving Patients Immediately with Google Ads
And more! So, let’s dive right in!
Podiatry Marketing - 9 Most Effective Tactics
#1. Start With Your Website
First things first - before you can begin marketing your podiatry clinic, you need a rock-solid website.
These days, simply having a website is no longer enough.
Rather, the website should be fast, user-friendly, well-designed, and easy to navigate all at once.
If it takes your website 10+ seconds to load, chances are potential patients are simply going to drop off and go to your competition instead.
So, what can you really do to make your website as strong as possible? Here are our top tips:
- Use WordPress. Creating a website via WordPress is significantly cheaper, faster, and easier than coding it from scratch. Plus, WordPress comes with hundreds of plugins that can help make your podiatry marketing more effective. When comparing WordPress vs Hostinger, WordPress offers hundreds of plugins that can help make your marketing more effective.
- Make your website easy to navigate. When a potential patient lands on your website, they should be able to find all essential information about your clinic within a single click.
- Build service pages. In your navigation bar, create a drop-down menu called “services” and include all the services you offer as separate pages.
- Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Mobile traffic accounts for more than 55% of all internet traffic. As such, it’s important that your website is mobile-optimized.
#2. Have a Clear Call to Action on Your Website
A call to action is a prompt on your website that urges visitors to take a specific kind of action, such as:
- A button with a sign saying “Book Appointment” in your navigation bar.
- A form at the top and bottom parts of your web pages which the user can fill in to request a callback.
- A highlighted phone number mentioned in your page header, which mobile site visitors can click and call in order to book an appointment.
A solid call to action is essential for any podiatry website, as it makes it much easier for potential patients to book consultations.
If a website visitor has to actively look for your clinic’s phone number on your website, chances are, they’ll drop off your site and visit your competitors.
Medesk helps automate scheduling and record-keeping, allowing you to recreate an individual approach to each patient, providing them with maximum attention.
Learn more >>#3. Optimize Your Podiatry Website for Google
SEO is one of the most effective podiatry marketing tactics out there.
More often than not, when a potential patient is looking for podiatry services, they’re going to simply go on Google and look up “Podiatry clinic location.”
So, how can you make sure that your website pops up #1 when people make such a query on Google?
Here’s what you can do:
- If you have a WordPress website, install RankMath. It’s going to walk you through the process of optimizing each of your web pages. If you don’t, here’s a simple checklist on on-page optimization.
- Optimize your homepage for the keyword “podiatry clinic location.” This includes mentioning the keyword in the H1 header, H2, and several times throughout the text.
- Include your Google My Business profile at the bottom of your homepage.
- Create individual pages for each service that you offer and link to them under the “Services” drop-down in your navigation bar. E.g. you can create service pages for:
- Chiropody
- Toenail surgery
- Verruca treatment
- Etc.
- Optimize these pages for the respective keywords (e.g. “chiropody London”) the same way you optimized the homepage.
- Get PR mentions for your website. Whenever another website links to yours, Google views this as a “vote of confidence.” The more quality links you get, the better you’re going to rank.
#4. List Your Podiatry Clinic in Local Search Directories
Submitting your podiatry clinic to local directories has 2 main benefits:
- Patients might use these directories to discover your clinic.
- You can include a link to your website on these directories, which can help with the previous tactic we mentioned - ranking your website on Google.
Some directories you can get listed on are:
- Google My Business
- Yahoo! Local
- Yelp
- City-Data
- Apple Maps
- Bing
- Private Health UK
#5. Drive New Traffic via Google Ads
Another must-try podiatry marketing tactic is running Google Ads.
As seen below, when someone Google’s “podiatry clinic London,” in addition to organic results, they also get to see the ads.
…Which is something you can also take advantage of.
While SEO is a more long-term process (6 months to a year to see results), Google Ads are instant. All you have to do is sign up, set up the ads, hit launch, and you’ll be driving new traffic that same day.
So, here’s how you can set up Google Ads for your podiatry clinic marketing:
- First things first, create an account for Google Ads.
- Head over to “Keyword Planner” and make a list of keywords relevant for your clinic. This is, for the most part, going to be variations of the “podiatry clinic” keyword.
- Create an ad campaign to house all the ads you’re going to create.
- Create an ad set and add all the keywords you want to target here. Set target location to your city.
- Under the ad set, create several ad variations. These are the ads that are going to pop up when people Google your target keywords. Generally, it’s a good practice to test 2-3 different ads and see which ones perform better.
- Hit launch and you’re good to go! From here on out, you should track the performance of your ad campaign, keywords, and ads, and make changes when needed.
#6. Maintain Your Reputation Online
No one’s going to visit your clinic if you have almost no reviews on the internet. Or, even worse, if you have negative reviews.
As such, it’s important to maintain your online reputation and keep track of what people say about your podiatry clinic.
For starters, make sure you have a registered profile on all the websites where people can leave a review. Think, Google My Business, Facebook company page, etc.
Then, encourage your healthcare professionals to nudge patients into leaving reviews online. Some ways this can be done are:
- At the end of each appointment, the clinician reminds their patients that they can leave a review of your clinic online.
- You put up stickers with QR codes linked to your online profiles at the front desk.
- If you’re using medical CRM (more on this a bit down the line), you can automatically send an SMS to your patients after an appointment, reminding them to leave a review.
Now, you shouldn’t forget to also keep track of negative reviews and offer an apology or a means to fix the patient’s issue.
#7. Provide Superior Patient Experience via an Online Patient Platform
Providing an excellent patient experience is a guaranteed way to make sure that the patients come back to your clinic in the future.
One way to make sure that patients have a stellar experience is by adopting an online patient platform.
Such software comes with dozens of patient-friendly features, including:
- Book, reschedule, or cancel appointments online.
- Option to pre-pay appointments online.
- Option for telemedicine. If a patient can’t physically visit your clinic, they can schedule an online consultation.
- Keep track of payments made or payments due online.
- Check or renew prescriptions online.
Discover more about the essential features of Medesk and claim your free access today!
Explore now >>#8. Personalize Marketing Efforts via Medical CRM
A medical CRM software can help upgrade your podiatry marketing efforts in 3 main ways:
- Uncover patient trends. By using a CRM, you’re consolidating all your marketing data in one place, which allows you to come across some interesting insights. For example, you can see which of your services is most popular with a certain demographic, or what age groups visit your podiatry clinic most often.
- Personalize marketing outreach. You can use medical CRM to reach certain patients with a specific message. For example, you can target patients who haven’t visited your clinic in a while and offer a discount on a consultation.
- Automate parts of your marketing. You can send email or SMS appointment reminders to your patients, driving down no-show rates.
Learn how to simplify your practice workflow and free up more time for patients with Medesk.
Open the detailed description >>#9. Track the Right Metrics
Unless you track the right KPIs, you won’t know how well your podiatry marketing efforts are performing.
The metrics you should track are:
- Patient acquisition cost, or, how much it costs you to acquire a single new patient via digital marketing. You can calculate this for your marketing efforts overall (total money spent on marketing for a single month divided by new patients acquired) or for each given channel (money spent on Google ads divided by patients acquired from Google ads, for example).
- Conversion rate. What % of your website visitors end up visiting your podiatry clinic? What % of people who fill in an appointment form actually show up? What % of people who clicked your ad actually fill in an appointment form?
- Google rankings. How well is your website ranking for the keyword “podiatry clinic [location]?”
Key Takeaways
And that sums up the most important podiatry marketing tactics out there! Apply them right and you’ll be driving new appointments in no time.
Before you go, though, let’s do a quick recap of the most important points we covered:
- Make sure your website is functional, modern, and fast.
- Optimize your homepage for the “podiatry clinic [location]” keyword. Do the same for each of your service pages.
- Take advantage of software like medical CRM and an online patient platform to upgrade your marketing efforts.
- Keep track of the right KPIs to make sure your marketing efforts are yielding results.