Click here to download the transcript.

Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek. I am a practicing acupuncturist, a marketing strategist, and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. And today I’m looking forward to talking with you about three very simple search engine optimization tips that you can use to rank higher in a Google search.

And before we get started, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today. Alright, let’s get into the slides.

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Okay, so before we begin, I just want to define search engine optimization or SEO. I know that many of you are already familiar with this, but as always, I like to make sure that we’re all on the same page. SEO is the process of making strategic updates to your website. With the goal of your website ranking higher in search engines, and because most people are using Google, I’m probably just going to refer to it as ranking higher in a Google search.

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Okay? And I like to think of SEO as both art and a science. And today what we are going to focus on are three tips that are more art than science. Meaning you are not gonna be. Using any code on your website, you don’t need to go into the backend of your website. What we’re gonna do today is really about teaching Google what kind of patients to send you, and I think this is more of the art side of SEO and I do think it’s our responsibility as small business owners to use SEO to tell Google what our business is about.

What kind of patients we want it to send us, and really to help Google know when is our business the answer to a question that someone has typed into Google. And there are a lot of different SEO strategies that we can use to do that. But today I just wanted to show you my top three ways to. Help Google know when your business is the answer to a question.

Like when someone types in acupuncture for fertility near me and you’re a fertility specialist, that you want Google to have a little bell go off and say, I know the perfect website to show to this person for this search query. Okay, so the number one, first thing I would love for you to do is to add keywords to the heading in the above the fold section of your website.

So let’s talk about that before we go any further. So what does that mean? This is a screenshot of my clinic website, and this is the above the fold section. So above the fold simply means when someone lands on your website before they have scrolled. That’s it. That’s the above the fold, and you can see that I have two header images and I have a heading here, and I’ve kept it very simple.

Women’s health, cosmetic acupuncture, and pain management in Seneca Falls, New York. And of course we have our booking button. And really your goal here is to incorporate keywords. That are symptoms. So think about what is your specialty or what do you love to treat? Who do you want to treat more of? What are those symptoms or conditions you wanna treat more of?

And this is also about. Location keywords. So think about a combination of the symptoms or conditions you love to treat and make sure you’re including your location in this above the fold section. So an alternate, because this is very straightforward, it’s, it’s just a list. If you wanted to use a full sentence, I’ve seen people have success with that.

You might say, for example, helping women. In the Finger Lakes region, or maybe just the Finger Lakes, helping women in the Finger Lakes balance their hormones and reduce fine lines and wrinkles naturally with acupuncture. So then you’ve, you’ve kind of described your target market and your location and the symptoms that they are struggling with that you can help with.

Okay, so either way is fine, but ask yourself, how can I really incorporate symptom keywords and my location keyword into that above the fold. Headline on your website and this section on most websites. Let me go back one more time, is generally an H one heading is what it’s known as on the inside of your website, and this is helpful to know because Google.

Uh, puts a lot of weight on an H one heading for each page because the H one heading is like the most important heading. Think of when you learn to write an essay in maybe junior high. So you had your, like, your most important thing that you wanted to say, and then under that you had like subsections, and then you might have had sub subsections where you were getting like.

More and more nitty gritty and detailed to make your point. So the layout of a webpage is kind of similar. So you have your H one heading, your H two, your H three, et cetera. And so Google puts a lot of weight on an H one heading because it’s assuming that your H one heading, heading is explaining this is what this page is about.

And so on your homepage in the above the fold section, your H one heading. It’s really important to get it dialed in with your symptom keywords and your location. Okay, let’s talk about tip number two, which is to optimize the images on your website, and there are multiple ways that you can optimize images, but I just wanna focus on two today that are very simple.

So one is to fill in the alt tags for all of the images that are currently loaded into your website. And two is the next time you go to load an image onto your website. Let’s say you wrote a blog post and you’re gonna add an image with that post before you load the image. You want to change the file name for the image to include keywords, and then you upload it, and then you would also fill in the alt tag.

So what the heck am I talking about? Let me show you some screenshots. So first, let’s talk about changing file names of images. Before you load them onto your website. So this is a screenshot from the downloads section or folder on my website, on my, sorry, on my computer. And you can see that I was making multiple images for blog posts.

And I think the most important thing here is that you can see the name of each image below the image itself. So if I were to tap on this, it would. Be highlighted and then I could type in that space and I could change it. And you can see that I named the image with keywords related to the blog posts that I’m loading it.

So these are all about microneedling, and I am really explaining to Google. What is this blog post about? Okay, so this is another place where we are helping Google better understand our website by adding keywords into the file names of images before we load them onto our website. ’cause once you load it on your website, obviously you can’t change the file name.

So this is inside my website in the media section. So it might just be called photos on your website. It depends on what kind of website you have. I have WordPress, so the media bin in WordPress is where I load all of the images. Okay? And so you can see right here it’s got file name, and this one is for a blog post about neck pain.

So it says acupuncture, neck pain, how it works. Okay. You could also add your location or your business name. So I could have said acupuncture, neck pain, Seneca Falls, acupuncture. And what I really wanna emphasize here is you have to add a dash in between each word because Google is reading the file name and the dash acts as a space.

So if I just did acupuncture, neck pain with no dashes, all one word, that’s harder. Or it’s pretty hard for Google to read, right? So acupuncture, dash neck dash pain. Okay. Whenever you are renaming your images. That’s the structure that you want to use. Okay, so while we are in this section, I have this image pulled up.

It’s got its file name with the keywords in it. The alternative text right here is what I was talking about when I mentioned filling in the alt tag on your website. So alt tag is sometimes also called alt text, and it’s short for alternative text right here. What you wanna do is you want to describe the image and strategically add keywords.

Okay? And let’s talk about like what is the alt text? What the heck am I talking about? Alt text or alt tags are used by screen readers for the visually impaired to. To let them know like, oh, there’s an image here. Here’s what it looks like, or Here’s what it’s about. Okay. So it is important when you are filling in the alt text for your images that you don’t just like stuff them with location keywords like acupuncture in Auburn.

Skinny Atlas Waterloo, SCA Falls, et cetera, right? You, you do actually want to put some effort into describing the image, but then you can strategically also add keywords. So for example, this alt text right now, it says acupuncture for neck pain, how it works and what to expect. So I’m describing the text that is on top of this image, and you could also add onto that.

So perhaps you could make. The whole alt tag, say acupuncture for neck pain, how it works, and what to expect at Seneca Falls Acupuncture. Okay, so. The reason that I chose my business name I is that it has the location in it, and it’s good for SEO. If your business is Ageless Acupuncture, then I would also add in Rochester, New York, right?

So then you’ve got your business name added as a keyword and your location as a keyword. In addition to obviously the key words, acupuncture and neck pain. Okay, so you wanna go back through all the images on your website and fill in the alt text if it hasn’t been done already. And it you, if you have a web developer, they may have done this but it never hurts to check.

Okay. And then the last strategy that I wanna share with you today is writing blog posts. Now. Please don’t shoot the messenger. I know whenever I tell people to write blogs for their website, their response is always, that sounds time consuming. So I get it, and here’s why it is worth it. So every time you publish a new blog post on your website, it counts as an entirely new page on your website.

So let’s say that the average acupuncture website is five pages. So homepage about US services, frequently asked questions, and the contact page, and. Okay, so let’s say your website has five pages and your competitor down the street also has five pages, but you decide to write a blog post twice a month for a year.

So that’s 24 new pages on your website, and you are writing those blog posts about things that you really love to treat frequently. Ask questions. Let’s say that you love orthopedic acupuncture. You love treating athletes, you love treating runners, and. Baseball players, like those shoulder injuries that baseball players get are your favorite.

So those 24 blog posts are all about. The injuries that are common for runners and baseball players, and specifically how acupuncture is helping, what people can expect, answering their frequently asked questions, et cetera. So now you’ve got 24 new pages on your website that are full of keywords that your ideal patients are searching for, which brings your total number of pages on your website to 29, and your neighbor down the street didn’t.

Any blog posts, they haven’t added any new pages to their website. They’re still at five. So who do you think Google would prefer to send someone to, especially if they are an athlete? Your website is going to feel so much more relevant and just chock full of keywords. But your website is also being updated twice a month, which Google loves.

Google really prefers when websites are, freshened up, for lack of a better word, on a regular basis because it gives Google a lot of confidence that your business is relevant. It’s still active, you’re still in practice, you’re helping people, et cetera, so you have more pages with more keywords, and your website has been refreshed more often than your neighbor down the road.

For all those reasons, Google would prefer to display your website. Okay, really think about who do you want to treat more of? Who do you love treating? What are the frequently asked questions that you get all the time? So instead of answering questions that are broad, which you can, you can have blog posts like, how many treatments do I need for acupuncture?

Right? So just. Big picture, but I would also recommend answering specific questions about the things you love to treat. How many acupuncture treatments do I need for carpal tunnel? How many acupuncture treatments might I need for osteoarthritis of the knee? Okay. And think about, you know, your, your knee pain patients.

What are they asking you Think about? If you really love to treat runners we’ll use that example again. I feel like one question runners ask all the time is, can I keep running while I’m getting treatment or do I have to, are you gonna tell me to stop and take a break? ’cause runners hate to take a break.

Okay. So really, really think about your target market and what you love to treat, and what are the specific questions those people are asking you and answer them as blog posts. Okay. It makes a big difference. It helps Google choose you. It makes you look like an expert to your potential patients because you’ve got this body of knowledge that you have published on specific topics on your website.

Okay? So please don’t feel like you have to do all of these things at once. I, I like the strategy of choosing one thing to start with and then. Just taking the other two suggestions and putting them on your calendar, maybe like one month out and then another month out. It sort of helps you like remove that mental burden so that you can just focus on the task at hand.

You can focus on your patients, and then next month it will pop up in your calendar. Oh, I am supposed to be filling in the alt tags for my images on my website this month. Okay. And over time you will really see your. Google rank improve, and one thing to keep in mind is that it takes, I think, on average about three months for the changes to have the effect where now you.

Actually are ranking higher and you are seeing patients as a result. So just pick one thing to start with and get started with that today so that in three months you will really thank yourself for making this effort. So of course, if you have questions, you are more than welcome to. Send me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com.

I love talking about marketing. Clearly. I would love to talk about marketing with you. And I recently released a series of. Workshops about ranking higher on Google. So one is about this type of website, SEO strategies, and we get. Into the details of non-tech SEO strategies, other changes, like, just like these strategies that you can make to help your profile, sorry, to help your, uh, website rank higher, and then the sister.

The companion workshop to that one is how to optimize your Google Business profile, because between those two things, your website, search engine optimization, and your Google Business profile, you can have a significant impact on your Google rank. So if you’re interested, you can check those out at michellegrasek.com/google.

And before I go, one more time, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the chance to be here with you and talk about these strategies today. Have a great day

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Okay, so today we’re talking about micro marketing, or you might’ve seen it called micro content, and the subheading here says 10 minutes a day or less.

Click here to download the transcript.

Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek. I am a practicing acupuncturist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast, and today we are going to talk about micro marketing or micro content and how effective that can be. Before we dive in, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you.

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Alright, let’s get into the slides.

Okay, so today we’re talking about micro marketing, or you might’ve seen it called micro content, and the subheading here says 10 minutes a day or less. You don’t even have to do this daily. The reason that I really wanted to talk about this is that I have noticed, I’m sure you have noticed, everyone has noticed that lots of us are.

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Very stressed out. Most people are at max capacity for their to-do list, and stress is simply very high lately. Seems to be across the board. So how can we continue getting visible for our practices consistently in a very low lift way? So that’s really what micro marketing is. And I found that even on a good day, on days where we’re not super stressed, where things in the world are calm and there’s nothing extraneous for us to worry about that we as acupuncturists, we often find it difficult to set aside time for marketing because we would just rather be treating patients.

So this is for you. Whatever the reason that you have a hard time setting aside time for marketing, this will be really useful for you. Okay? And really the big idea here is simply that consistency. Beats perfection or making things that are complex, right? If you are showing up regularly, even in tiny ways in the digital world, in your community, in real life, it aggregates over time, right?

It really. Matters and it makes a difference compared to not showing up at all. Okay? So this is really about those small actions having big results over time. They really build on each other and snowball. So that’s what makes it worth it, even though these actions are going to seem really pretty tiny.

So what is this? Micro marketing or again, sometimes it might be called micro content online. It is really. Simple brief marketing that you can create and then hit publish in less than 10 minutes. Let me skip ahead a slide here. Key features of micro content or micro marketing are that we are not overthinking it.

We are asking ourselves, what’s a frequently asked question I can answer. How can I answer that in three to five sentences? What format would work best for me today? Text, video, a Canva graphic, and what platform am I gonna choose to publish it on? And then just hit publish. Okay, so going with your gut for what you think your audience or your community needs to learn to help remove a barrier between them and making an appointment.

And then just putting that content out there and then it’s over with. It’s done. Okay. You can move on to better, better things for the rest of your day. So some examples of micro content or micromarketing is really anytime that you repurpose anything, I consider this a type of micromarketing because your workload in repurposing something is like 10% compared to the effort.

Required to create it the first time. So for example, if you had an Instagram post that did really well, maybe you take the caption and you repurpose it as an email newsletter, or you had a blog post and you repurpose it as an email newsletter. You can go in any direction with repurposing content. The idea is simply that you are not recreating the wheel.

You are copying and pasting as much as possible, and then just making small tweaks so that it makes sense for the new platform. Okay, so probably changing your call to action if you’re going from Instagram to an email newsletter or vice versa, but it’s really, it requires so little. Thought or decision making and no new content creation, which is the bulk of our effort that I consider this to be micro marketing.

You can also resend an email that you sent in years past. I do this all the time. Okay. I have a couple emails. That tend to do really well especially my knee pain for osteo osteoarthritis, knee pain email that I send to my list of current patients and potential patients. I have been in this location for six years and I believe I’ve sent that email three times, four times.

No one ever complains, oh, I remember this from last year. They don’t remember. And the number of people who saw it you, when you send it again, you’re probably gonna catch new people who never even saw it the first time. So I like this because you are literally just copying, you’re just duplicating a previous email that did well, right?

It got engagement. Hopefully you got some new patients on the schedule from that email, and that’s your motivation for sending it again. Okay, so whether it was a year ago or two years ago, I think that’s a sufficient amount of time to start resending emails. And that way you’re not writing them from scratch.

A really simple video to create if you are looking for a reel or a video for a reel for Facebook or Instagram, is to just do a quick walkthrough tour of your office. It’s nice because it’s pretty self-explanatory. You don’t have to put text or captions on it. Okay? You can also share that to your Google Business profile if it’s under 30 seconds.

And then really any update that you want to do to your Google Business profile, I consider powerful. But miniature, right? So maybe you add a new photo to your Google business profile, or you add an update. You know how you can add, it’s sometimes called a post and sometimes called an update. It’s like a micro blog.

You just share a picture and three or four sentences and then a link. Read more here or book here. Or maybe you just update the description of your Google business profile, or you update your services with keywords, right? So all of these are very small actions, less than 10 minutes that actually have a big impact.

And before we move on, I wanna explain I did a previous video about updating your Google business profile and why that matters and how to do that in ways that really get Google’s attention. But Google. Happy anytime you make an update to your profile, because this helps give Google confidence that your business is active.

Whenever you are posting fresh content on your Google business profile, it’s a strong signal to Google that it. It can have confidence in providing your business as the answer to someone’s search query. Okay? So don’t discount those tiny micro actions that update your Google business profile. Those count and they really matter.

Okay? Why does this work? I’m sure you can guess, but let’s go through these really briefly. This approach to marketing. Even if you’re just doing 10 minutes a week, if you are consistent, it helps put you in front of your audience over and over again. And I mentioned this earlier, but that is so much better than just not showing up at all and saying, oh, I don’t have.

Two hours set aside for my marketing this week. I can’t do a big marketing project. I’m not just gonna do anything instead, do something tiny and count it as a win because it is right. It helps you avoid burnout. So you can do this for the long term and it really does help keep you in front of your audience and in front of Google in terms of search engine optimization.

Okay. And of course it makes the social media algorithms happy when you publish anything, and that makes the algorithms show you to more people. Okay? You get more visibility and the more that you are showing up consistently, even if it’s only in these. Tiny ways each week. It builds trust with your audience because they know that they can visit your Instagram profile, for example, and learn something new or see an update from you.

Even if it’s just that you’re consistent with stories and you’re not putting anything on your Instagram grid, that can still work really well because some Instagram users still primarily. Just focus on Instagram stories. They’re not even looking at people’s grids. So you’re going to catch a subset of the population of your community, even if you are just posting something on an Instagram story each week.

Okay. And then of course, I just talked about how important Google Business profile updates are for search engine optimization and getting Google to pay attention to you and show you as. A search result. So I have two 10 minute formulas. You probably don’t need these formulas, but I just wanna put them out there as concepts for if you sit down at your desk and you’re saying, okay, I wanna do some kind of marketing, something micro, but I don’t know where to begin.

So there’s really two options for you. So the first is to just pick a frequently asked question that you get about your specialty. We’ll take cosmetic acupuncture for an example. That’s my specialty. How many treatments do I need? Or why do I need so many treatments? Or how does cosmetic acupuncture help build collagen?

Or how is it different from microneedling? Any of those would be great, right? And. Answer it in three to five sentences. So one paragraph, very brief. Again, we’re not overthinking it, we’re not writing a 3000 word blog post or a dissertation. This is helpful not just for us, but if we are burnt out, you.

We are having a hard time focusing and dialing in and doing deep work. Probably our patients and the people who are consuming our content are as well. So do them a favor and give them something bite-sized that they can quickly absorb and understand. That doesn’t require them to set aside time to focus on the content and learn an answer.

Okay, so quick wins are great for our audience as well. So then pick a platform where you’re gonna share this. Maybe it’s in your email newsletter. You’re gonna send the email newsletter answering that one question. Maybe you’re just gonna make it into a Facebook post, but hit publish and then you are done.

Okay? So that’s your first option, answer a frequently asked question. So your second option is simply. Repurposing or resharing content that you already created. So we discussed repurposing already where maybe you had a, an Instagram reel that did really well. So then you take the caption and you send that, for example, as an email newsletter.

So it’s the same content but a different platform, sour.

Actually sharing that same reel onto your Instagram account a second time. Okay? And if as long as you sent it a little while ago, it’s totally fine. Remember that not all of your audience saw it the first time. And most of my marketing clients, if they’re gonna do this resharing, they’re picking something that they shared like.

Five, six months or more in the past. So it’s been a while, right? It’s not something that they shared last week that they’re repurposing. It’s also important to, of course, to pick content that did well to begin with. Hopefully something that got good engagement, likes, comments, shares and saves are really important engagement metrics to look at on Instagram.

Click throughs to your website. And if at all possible, if you know that you had an Instagram reel or post or Facebook, if that’s your preference, that actually got new patients to sign up, then obviously, that’s the outcome we all want. That’s the one you wanna share again. Okay? So don’t be afraid to do that.

I know people are always worried. My audience is gonna notice if you shared it a couple months ago. They are not gonna notice, they’re not gonna say anything, especially if it’s six plus months ago. I think it’s a great choice. So I feel like that’s your best butt if you are truly crunched for time or just out of ideas, right?

Re-sharing. A post on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, et cetera, that you shared in the past is the lowest lift possible type of micro marketing that you can do. Okay? So those are your options. You can answer an FAQ and create a tiny piece of content and then just hit publish. Or you can reshare something, or you can repurpose something to a different platform.

Okay? So a few more tools to help you with this. Hopefully you are familiar with the graphic design website, Canva. I use the free version. It’s amazing. You can create templates that match your clinic’s branding, and you can just duplicate the template and you can change the words. And it’s very easy to use that to create carousel posts for Instagram, for example, or graphics for Facebook to make this process really simple so you are not making graphics from scratch every time.

And I really encourage the use of chat, GPT or any Gemini, any other AI that really. We’ll help you with brainstorming or outlining content, especially if you’re feeling stuck. If you’ve got a bit of brain fog or you just really wanna hammer it out and be done with it, ask chat, GPT for help. Okay, we’ll speed up your process and help you refine your final results.

So much compared to doing it by yourself. I really encourage it. Okay. And then of course, using any sort of social media scheduling platform. I like later. It is paid. I think it’s $16 a month for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest. Twitter, the list goes on, but you can also just use the scheduling built Facebook and Instagram.

But this is nice because if you are resharing content that you already created. The meta platforms can make it really easy to just reshare in a couple of clicks. Okay, so Meta Business Suite and the content tab is really your friend here. Okay, so a couple more things. People, when I talk about these micro marketing approaches and.

They’re having a hard time and they don’t wanna do marketing. Here are some of the questions that come up. So one is, I don’t know what to post. So in that case, I recommend going through your FAQs that you get about your specialty, and just pick an FAQ and start there. It usually gets the ideas flowing pretty quickly and then use Chachi PT to help you if you need it.

If lots of people are like, I hate video, I don’t wanna create reels, no problem. Text works well on Instagram. The algorithm is actually still prioritizing. Carousels slightly over reels. So carousels, if you’re not familiar, are still images, but you publish multiple in a single Instagram post instead of just one static image.

So people have to swipe through. I’m sure you’ve seen these, if you have spent any time on Instagram, if you hate video, it’s totally fine. Use Canva to create graphics instead, or focus on a type of content that is mostly about writing, like writing an email newsletter or a very short blog post.

Okay? And then of course, if if people tell me they don’t have time, that is when I refer them to resharing, a post that they created in the past, because as I said earlier, it’s the shortest, the easiest. You sharing content again in just a few clicks. So a action item for you, or some homework, however you’d like to phrase it, would be to set a 10 minute timer, pick an F, a Q, answer it, choose your platform, and hit publish.

And then the little bonus thing that you can do is ask your audience to share it right? If you’re on Instagram, you could tell people you know in the comments. If you know someone who’s struggling with, we’ll say migraines, is what you talked about in the post. Tag them here or in your email newsletter.

I always recommend putting in the footer of your email newsletter. PS like post script. If you know anyone who is struggling with migraines, please forward this to them. We’re accepting new patients. It would be our honor to help your friends and your family feel better. Okay, so try to, if you have the extra brain cells, try to ask people to share it because that increases your reach without you having to do anything.

But if that is too much, too many extra steps, that’s okay too, because at least you published the thing. Okay. To summarize, micro content is really easy, really basic, but consistent and it snowballs over time. Okay? It gets you that visibility and engagement and builds trust with your audience over time.

So as always, thank you so much for being here. If you have questions, you are always welcome to send me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com. I love getting your marketing questions clearly. I love talking about marketing. I also have a low cost marketing membership. Called the Snack Size Marketing Club.

You are welcome to join me inside. It’s a monthly membership where we have suggestions for marketing to do each week. Keep it very simple. And before I go, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the American Acupuncture Council. One more time for the opportunity to be here with you today. Have a good one, and I’ll talk to you next time.

email newsletter.

I always recommend putting in the footer of your email newsletter. PS like post script. If you know anyone who is struggling with migraines, please forward this to them. We’re accepting new patients. It would be our honor to help your friends and your family feel better. Okay, so try to, if you have the extra brain cells, try to ask people to share it because that increases your reach without you having to do anything.

But if that is too much, too many extra steps, that’s okay too, because at least you published the thing. Okay. To summarize, micro content is really easy, really basic, but consistent and it snowballs over time. Okay? It gets you that visibility and engagement and builds trust with your audience over time.

So as always, thank you so much for being here. If you have questions, you are always welcome to send me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com. I love getting your marketing questions clearly. I love talking about marketing. I also have a low cost marketing membership. Called the Snack Size Marketing Club.

You are welcome to join me inside. It’s a monthly membership where we have suggestions for marketing to do each week. Keep it very simple. And before I go, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the American Acupuncture Council. One more time for the opportunity to be here with you today. Have a good one, and I’ll talk to you next time.

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And today we’ll be talking about tips for getting more reviews so that you can get more patients.

Click here to download the transcript.

Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek. I’m an acupuncturist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. And today we’ll be talking about tips for getting more reviews so that you can get more patients. And before we dive in, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today.

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Alright, let’s get into the slides. Okay. I wanted to talk a little bit about why testimonials are so effective, and I know that everyone is aware of why reviews and testimonials work so well, because we’re all using them in our everyday life pretty regularly. But I think that in terms of being motivated to actually request patient reviews on a regular basis.

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Which is what is needed to really build up your review numbers. I think it helps to dig in a little bit into the background and the, shall we say, the psychology of reviews so that we really understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. So I really wanted to call this social proof. Actually works. Get more reviews so you can get more patients.

Okay. Because social proof is incredibly powerful, especially in the digital world where we are buying things without seeing them and without knowing people. Okay, so we are relying really heavily on the people of the internet to give us their buying advice, and these are total strangers whose advice we actually take very seriously.

So what is social proof if you’re not familiar with this concept? Social proof is whenever people look at what others are doing or have done to ensure that we are also doing something appropriate or. Making a good financial decision. Think about, a long time ago when we were let’s start over.

Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek, and I’m an acupuncturist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. And today we’ll be talking about how to get more reviews so that you can get more patients. And before we dive in, I’d like to take a moment to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today.

And let’s jump into the slides. Okay. I wanna talk a little bit about why reviews are so effective from the standpoint of the psychology of social proof. I know that we all really understand why reviews are effective, right? Because we are using reviews ourselves in our everyday life, constantly. I bet it’s pretty rare for you to buy something without first.

Googling it to see if you can find any reviews about it. It depends on what it is, but by and large, we are all aware of the ways that we really rely on reviews for making purchasing decisions. And social proof is this fascinating concept because when we are reading reviews, they’re from total strangers, right?

If we are buying something or signing up for a service. Kind of sight unseen, right? Like we’ve never seen the product in person. We don’t get to try it on before we purchase it like we would in a store. We don’t know the person whose service we’re buying. And so we are relying really heavily on information and advice from the people of the internet to help us make these decisions.

And that is rooted in this psychology concept of social proof, which is this phenomena where if we are making a decision, especially if we’re uncertain about a decision, we look to the experience. Or the activity of other people to confirm that what we are choosing is a good choice, that it’s a sound financial choice, that it is going to be a safe choice.

If you think about way back in the day, let’s say we are cave people and. You notice in a group that people are looking up at the sky, all of a sudden, what is your immediate visceral reaction? You look up at the sky. Why are we doing that? Because this is a, so a form of social proof, right? This is built into us as social animals.

We are looking to see what is everyone looking at in case it is dangerous. And maybe I shouldn’t say it’s a form of social proof, but that’s what social proof is rooted in this really ingrained need as humans, as social animals to check with what? Everybody else is doing in order to stay safe. And of course, now when we’re talking about safety, we’re really talking about making good financial decisions, not making like a big financial mistake and buying a product online or signing up for a service that really turns out to be a dud.

Okay. And I think it’s important to talk about this kind of thing because when we’re doing marketing, I find with my students that the more we understand the background and the psychology behind what we’re being asked to do, the more likely we are to feel motivated to actually do the strategy and do it consistently.

At least I know that when I know why I’m being asked to do something, I’m much more likely to do it. To do it well, and to do it consistently. Okay? So that’s why I like to cover this concept of social proof that reviews are rooted in because they are an enormous decision-making factor. For whether people choose us and our practice or choose someone else, and we just cannot underestimate that, especially because, as I said, it is simply ingrained in us as humans to double check what others are doing for our safety to make good decisions.

Okay? We really can’t escape that as humans. Very difficult. So we have to capitalize on that. We might as well use that natural inclination to our advantage. And collecting reviews in a systematic way is one of the best ways that we can use social proof to our advantage, to build our business and to convince p people to choose us instead of the acupuncturist down the road.

Okay and again, this is obvious, right? Potential patients are more likely to trust us and choose us if they can read about other people’s positive experiences with us, even if those people are strangers, it doesn’t matter. A couple other examples of social proof just in case you’re not familiar with this concept, although you probably are testimonials and reviews, of course, we’re at the top of this list.

But any public endorsements or community awards that you’ve received? Of course, word of mouth and personal recommendations are a type of social proof sharing case studies or success stories. These are clearly very similar to testimonials on social media, the number of people who are following you, or the amount of engagement that you’re getting, the number of likes that you get on your post.

All of that is. Different types of social proof user generated content on social media or even user generated content on your Google business profile where, for example, someone leaves you a review and they also leave a photo with their review. Okay. That’s user generated content. That is a very powerful form of social proof because they’re taking this extra step and making extra effort to share something else.

On top of just their written review, or let’s say that someone visits your office and they take a picture and then they put it on their Instagram story and they tag you, that’s user generated content and that really builds trust in a big way. And remember that something that we are trying to do in marketing always is to build up enough trust.

With the people in our community who are very likely strangers, they don’t know us, we don’t know them. We’re trying to build up enough trust that they feel safe, making an appointment, making a financial investment, sharing their personal health information, having sharp objects put in them. Okay? So a lot of what we’re doing is about building trust, and that is especially true with social proof.

It builds trust rapidly. Okay. You could also think of social proof as, aggregated numbers, things like, 10,000 total patients treated, if you’ve been in business for 10 years or something like that, or trusted by X, Y, Z community members. And that’s not really a metric that a lot of acupuncturists use, but it is one that you will see used in a lot of different types of marketing in different industries.

Okay, so there’s many examples here. And I really just want you to think of reviews as a tool in your toolkit for helping build trust and credibility. And I mentioned this already, but you are, you know how powerful these are because you probably always use review, like read reviews before you decide to buy something, or if you were gonna go to a new massage therapist or pt.

It’s almost a guarantee that you’re gonna look them up online and look for reviews before you make an appointment. Okay. It’s no surprise, however, so the surprise here is that a lot of people, a lot of acupuncturists assume that if they do a good job and their patients are happy, that eventually patients will leave a review for them.

And I have been teaching marketing in our industry for 11 years and. That just is not the case. By and large. Most people are not going to leave a review without being asked, even if they are really happy with the service. It just is not something people think about. They’re not thinking about us in their business.

They’re thinking about how much better they feel and then they go about their life. They’re only going to think about us and our business if we ask them to. Okay, so you must ask if you really want to grow your reviews so that you become the obvious choice when someone is Googling acupuncture near me, and you really wanna stand out.

You have to ask people consistently for reviews. Okay. And once you ask, most people are actually very supportive. They’re very happy to leave you a review. It’s just that we cannot ask them to do our job for us. We cannot expect them to do it without the request. So I think that there is, there’s a variety of ways that you can ask for reviews and they’re all likely effective to some degree.

What I have seen be most effective in the past 11 years is when you send. An individual personal email to the patient asking them for a review. And it comes from you as the provider, as the acupuncturist, and not from, for example, your receptionist or your office manager or another acupuncturist in your practice, like maybe their job is marketing, but.

And they’re sending out these review requests on behalf of the other acupuncturists in the practice. It is so much more effective when you as the patient’s provider, make the request. Okay? And this doesn’t mean that you can’t use a testimonial. It doesn’t have to be a super personalized email, but you just want to ask them, will you leave a review for me?

Okay. Because they have a relationship with you, and that just makes them much more likely. To actually do the thing and give you a review. And then the second thing that makes a request incredibly effective, and I would never leave this out, is to include a direct link to the section of your Google Business profile where it’s on the page where they can leave a review, right?

So if you click around on your Google Business profile, you can click reviews, and then you can click leave a review, and then you can. Click on the URL, the webpage for that and copy and paste. You can also, if you’re signed into your Google Business profile account as the business owner, you can click on, get more reviews, and it will offer you a short code link that goes directly to that page where it has the five stars, and all they have to do is click the number of stars and leave the review.

So why am I harping on this so much? Because a lot of people will ask a patient either verbally or over email and say, will you, would you be willing to leave me a review? And the patient says yes, and then they’re just letting the patient figure it out. It is so unlikely that people are gonna remember to look up your Google business profile ’cause they literally have to Google you and find your profile and then click around and realize oh, this is how I leave a review in the digital world.

We need to give people as many shortcuts as we can. We cannot expect them to look these things up themselves. They are just gonna get lost on the internet. It. It just get distracted. Really. I’m not saying that people aren’t smart and they can’t figure it out. It’s just if you want this to get done, you need to give them the link, the direct link to your review page on your Google Business profile.

Okay? It’s very important to include that. So here’s the strategy that I recommend to my marketing clients and my marketing students. So on your. In your EHR, like actually inside your patient scheduling system, block off time every four to six weeks. Set aside an hour where you are going to look back at the happy patients from the past four to six weeks so that you can select who am I going to send one of these email requests to?

And I encourage you to put this in your patient calendar. And give it the same amount of importance that you would for a patient, right? Don’t bump this so that you can fill it with a patient. Maintain it with the same level of importance as you would for a person who’s coming to your office, because this is the number one thing that I find happens to people is they put a marketing activity on their calendar and then someone says, oh, can I have Mondays at two o’clock?

And they immediately bump the marketing activity and they say I’ll do that another time. And they never put it back on their calendar. Okay, so long story short. Put it on your calendar, give it the same importance and permanence as a patient appointment, and then look back over the past, we’ll say six, even eight weeks, and ask yourself, who are the newer patients that I’ve had who’ve now seen me four to eight times, who are pretty consistently happy with their results?

And you’re gonna know, right? You always know when someone is. Having a great experience. So look for people who you think would give you a five star review naturally, and then email them and you can use the template. So here’s roughly the template that I recommend, hi Jane. I meant to ask you at your last appointment, but I forgot.

Would you mind? Leaving a review for me on the Ageless Acupuncture Google Business page on my Google Business profile. These reviews are really helpful. They help new people find me and trust acupuncture. If you’re comfortable leaving a review, here is the link directly to the review page, and I like to offer people an out ’cause.

Not everyone is comfortable. Making these statements online. So that’s exactly what I tell people to say. So the next part of the email can simply say, if you are not comfortable with it, no worries at all. I understand not everyone is comfortable making public statements online. No pressure. And then, thank you so much.

And then your name. And obviously you’d wanna massage it a little bit. I think I was repetitive in my word usage there, but you get the idea, right? You are helping them understand how helpful this is to you and your business and how it’s gonna help future patients find and trust you. You give them the link and then you give them an out in case they’re not comfortable with it.

So a lot of people will email you back and say, yes, I’d be thrilled to give you a review, and then they won’t do it. They just forget. Okay. So I recommend giving them like two weeks and then following up and saying, there’s two ways to do this. One is if they didn’t respond, you could just send them another message and say, Hey, I don’t know if you got my previous email about leaving a review.

That email is below or you can repeat yourself. And then if they said yes, but they haven’t done it, you could just reach out and say. I just wanted to check in and see if you’re still interested in leaving me a review. You mentioned that you might be interested. Here’s the link.

Okay. So you’re not bothering them if you follow up now, if they don’t do it after you’ve emailed them twice. For me personally in my practice, I tend to leave them alone in case they’re non-answer is a way of saying that they’re not comfortable doing it. But that’s the strategy that I recommend for my students.

And I think it’s perfectly fine if you are just getting started in this process of building up your reviews to go way back in the history of your practice. You can even go a couple years back and think about the patients who are like your star patients. They really stood out for you, even if they’re not actively seeing you anymore.

It is totally fine. Especially if you had a really great rapport, you had a relationship with them. It’s fine to message them and explain what you’re doing. Say, I’m trying to build up my reviews to help more people trust me and to try acupuncture. And if you’re interested, et cetera, you can leave a review.

Here’s the link. Okay? Because really what you wanna do here is make as many requests as you can from people who were really enthusiastic. And if you have to go back in the history of your practice to do that’s okay because. It, this is a numbers game, right? If you ask 10 people, four or five, we’ll probably actually leave the review.

So the more people you can ask, the faster your numbers will build, obviously, right? But think of it as a numbers game where a certain amount of people are just not gonna respond, and that’s okay. The more you ask, the better you’ll do. And I really have seen this work so many times that if you simply start asking people regularly to leave you reviews, you are very quickly going to outpace all of the other acupuncturists near you who are doing nothing.

Okay? They are waiting for their patients to do their job for them and to just think of me in my business and leave me a review. It just. So unlikely. It’s just very uncommon. Okay? If you wanna approach this as a marketing strategy, you have to you have to do the asking, right? You have to bring that young energy and be the first person to take an action and make a request.

And as I said. So many times now, patients are very happy to leave your review. In general, they just have to be asked. So if you are doing this, let’s say every six weeks, you are reviewing the new patients that you’ve had over that timeframe, and you’re sending out, three to five requests, you are gonna consistently grow your numbers.

And again, you’re gonna quickly outpace the people who are doing nothing. Okay, so a few other ideas for how to use reviews once you’ve got them. I recommend copying and pasting reviews onto different pages of your website because there are a lot of great keywords that your patients are using in their reviews that other people might be searching for.

Things like knee pain, neck pain, et cetera. Okay, incorporating reviews on your website can be great for your SEO. You could add a different testimonial. At the bottom of each email newsletter that you send. You could just say something like, feedback from a happy patient, copy and paste. If you are creating your reviews or.

Sorry. If you are creating brochures for your practice, I would recommend putting a couple reviews on there. And you can also say, if you hit a significant number of reviews, you can put on your website, on your brochure, even in your social media bio. You can say. Over 55 star reviews or whatever it is.

Okay? That’s a form of social proof, right? That accumulation of positive feedback from the people of the internet. Okay, so just some. Extra ideas for how to really maximize on the reviews that you get once you’ve put in the effort to ask for them. So a again, just this whole presentation is just a quick reminder to take a look back at your recent happy patients and I encourage you to pick.

10 of them. Send your review request. Include that direct link and follow up with them at least one time and just see what happens. Okay? So of course if you have questions, please feel free to send me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com. You can check out my website for free resources. Free PDAs, marketing checklists, et cetera.

And before I sign off today, I’d like to thank the American Acupuncture Council one more time for the opportunity to be here with you and to talk about these really important concepts for growing your practice.

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek. I am the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast and the instructor for the online class of the same name, acupuncture Marketing School. And today we’ll be talking about five really common marketing mistakes that I see among my. Marketing clients and my marketing students.

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And luckily, most of these have relatively easy fixes, so you can quickly improve your marketing to get more patients. And before we dive in, I’d like to take a moment to thank the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today. All right, let’s get into the slides.

So again if you find that you are doing any of these things, please just know that these mistakes are super common. I think that. Most of us had very little or no marketing education in acupuncture school. So we’re just all learning as we go along. And what I wanna provide you with today really are easy ways to improve your marketing so that you can consistently get more patients.

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So a lot of the things we’re going to be talking about will help you build out marketing and. Really build out a stronger brand so that your marketing is working for you in the background so that you can focus on treating your patients and put less energy and effort into your marketing on an everyday basis.

Okay, so basically we want to use these tips to make your marketing more effective and more efficient. So the very first thing that I see is that people are either not collecting emails at all. Some people are still not collecting emails on their websites, or they’re collecting emails and then they’re not doing anything with them.

They’re not sending them. So let’s talk really briefly about the debate on whether you should put more time and energy into your email list or social media. So something to think about is that. You own your list of email subscribers in a way that you will never own your social media followers. We know that social media algorithms change all the time.

The way that our content shows up in front of our audience or doesn’t show up is in many ways out of our control, right? So we don’t really control the delivery of our message to our social media subscribers And social media has crashed in the past, which. Really terrified. A lot of influencers whose primary way of making money was through their followers, right?

So email in contrast to that, you do own your list of email subscribers and you have a lot more control over. How and whether your message gets delivered to those people. Now, you could argue you can’t control whether they open your email, right? But at least you know that 95% of the time it’s landed in their inbox.

Okay? So I always advocate for people to put just as much energy into collecting emails and. Staying in contact with their email list, but sending an email newsletter as they do with building out content for social media and being engaged on social media. So think about these two. Worlds of digital marketing, email and social media, and just try to divide your time and energy evenly between them.

Because I personally think that building an email list is in some ways a better long-term plan than social media. It also depends on, if you love social media, just keep going. But I really always advocate for acupuncturists to lean more into. Collecting emails purposefully and sending at least one email newsletter a month.

Because this is such a low lift way for us to stay top of mind with our audience. And again, then we have more control over our message and whether it’s delivered to our audience. Plus, with email, you don’t have to dance around like you might on TikTok. Something to consider if you love dancing.

Totally. Cool. So I would recommend if you don’t already have a newsletter, opt-in box on your website, please put one in. A lot of people are doing that, so you could upgrade your email opt-in box instead of it just saying, join our newsletter. You might learn tips about like women’s health.

Or whatever it is that you specialize in, you could create a PDF download. It could even be one page that explains something like solves a problem for your audience, or it just gives them information that they find really valuable that they’d be willing to give you their email in exchange for. So a really popular one page.

Lead magnet I that I have found for many people if you like, treating digestion, is to create a PDF that just says how to reduce belly bloating using traditional Chinese medicine because people are very interested in their appearance, right? And belly bloating is uncomfortable and a lot of people.

Would download that because they’re really curious to know how can they naturally reduce belly bloating. Okay, so just one idea. Think about your target market and the things that they are struggling with, and if you could create a one page PDF that you could deliver to them to help them solve a problem, give them a tip they could do at home, and make sure that you include a call to action on that PDF lead magnet.

Where you say, okay, if this worked for you or you found it helpful, the next step for to really help with your problem is for you to get acupuncture. And here’s the link to make an appointment. Okay? So the call to action’s important and if you are collecting emails. Please email your subscribers. I advocate for two emails a month.

I do not think that’s too much. That is a polite number of emails. It helps you stay top of mind and you really only need one reason to send an email. Okay. Like one topic or one message. So it could be as simple as, think about your specialty and answer a frequently asked question. Or if you have updated office hours for the summer, or if you’re going on vacation and you want people to get on your calendar, all of those could be individual emails, right?

But try to email them consistently, at least once a month to stay top of mind so they remember that they intended to make an appointment with you. So the second mistake that I see is people not sharing their face really anywhere, but especially not on social media. So we’re not introducing yourself on social media.

So think about it this way, at its core, part of what we’re trying to do with marketing is to build up enough trust and potential patients that they feel safe and comfortable making a financial investment with us, telling us their. Very personal health history and their story and letting us put needles in them.

So I always like to say that. Marketing for acupuncture is very different for, than marketing for something like a pizza because people already know and trust pizza, whereas not as many people are familiar with acupuncture or prepared to take the plunge and sign up for a series of treatments, make that financial investment.

So we just have to, we have to build up more trust and we’re putting needles in people right. Someone orders a pizza and they know exactly what they’re getting and they know it’s going to be like a. It’s gonna be pure pleasure, right? It’s, they trust that experience is going to be great very much.

Whereas we’re putting needles in people, we’re asking them to talk about difficult health situations. We need to show up in a way that actually helps them build a connection with us and feel like, okay, I feel safe making an appointment with this person. I think I can tell them my story and I trust them to put needles in me.

So for me, part of that, at least what I have seen as a marketing coach in the past 11 years is that when you are willing to share your face, even just occasionally, it helps build that connection and helps people, really helps improve the return on your investment for your marketing making people. Click the book now button more often.

Okay, so on social media, I recommend reintroducing yourself once a month, you’ll probably have new followers and you’ll not all of your previous followers will have seen your introduction post to begin with. And you can always start this post by saying, for all of our new followers, I wanted to introduce myself, or if we haven’t met before, I wanted to introduce myself.

And you can repurpose content that you have. Created in the past. So you could take a snippet from your about page and repurpose it as the caption for an Instagram post. So there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here. If you’ve already written something similar, like maybe you introduced yourself on your email newsletter years ago, dig back and find it and see if you can repurpose it as an introductory post for social media.

You would just be amazed by the number of social media accounts like Instagram accounts for acupuncturists that I visit on a regular basis where they’re, they don’t have their name in their bio and there’s no photos of them at all. And then when I go to their website. On their about page, still no photos.

So nowhere can I easily find a picture of this person who would potentially be taking care of me. And just remember that we’re such social animals. I wanna put my eyeballs on your eyeballs to help me decide if I trust you. Okay, so I also wanted to provide a really quick and easy introductory reel that you could create.

If you have, you could even have a patient that you really like and have a good relationship with. You could have them take this video, so you just sit at your desk in your office. Or maybe at the reception desk, and you just smile and wave at the camera and count to five and have the other person record.

All you’re doing is smiling and waving, and then your caption can be, you’re introducing yourself. If you are savvy, you can put text on the video. On the reel that just says, introducing the acupuncturist or welcoming new followers so that people know what this entire reel is about, what the caption’s gonna be about.

Okay. But it’s super simple. It takes no time to record. And I think you’d be amazed how good the engagement is because it’s a video and because you are in it, people want to see you. You’d be amazed how cheerful they are. Just to say hello to you on Instagram. Okay. So definitely worth your time. Mistake number three is setting up your Google business profile and then pretty much ignoring it.

Google really appreciates and prioritizes. Business profile accounts that are regularly updated that it considers active. So what I recommend is making monthly updates to your Google Business profile. So there’s a lot of ways that you can do this, but some easy ones are each month you can add a new photo.

You could also add A post, so it’s a little confusing ’cause it sounds like social media or it sounds like a blog post, but it’s not. So if you’re familiar with your Google business profile, if you scroll down, you can add a post. Sometimes it’s also referred to as an update, but you can add an image and not a ton of text.

It’s not meant to be long like a blog post. It’s really most meant to be, sorry. It’s really meant to be an update. So 300 words, 200 words, but you can. Share a blog post that you wrote in the past and you could just summarize it, and then you get a link. You get a call to action, click through to read the entire blog post.

But really the idea here is that Google wants to feel confident whenever it provides. A business as the answer to someone’s query. And the way that you help Google feel confident is by regularly updating your Google business profile and your website. But that’s something different. But the reason is Google has more confidence in profiles where they’re active because it looks like your businesses.

Relevant. It looks like it’s open. It looks like it’s legitimate. Remember that Google’s goal is the user experience and answering a search query in the best way possible. And let’s think of a comparison. Let’s say that there’s your profile that you’re updating once a month, and then there’s an acupuncturist down the street who hasn’t updated their profile in three years, and you both treat fertility and someone types in fertility.

Acupuncture near me. Obviously, Google is going to rank you higher because you are active and it. It just gives it a ton more confidence that your business is the most relevant answer because you keep showing up in that way. Okay? So don’t underestimate how important this is. Most people are finding us, like from a search.

They’re finding us through Google, right? It’s huge. You. You just have to remember that the Google Business profile is owned by Google and Google controls all of the search algorithms related to Google. And if you wanna show up at the top of a search engine results page, your Google Business profile needs to be a, is an important part of that.

Okay? Excuse me. Tip number four is, or I’m sorry. Mistake number four is having a really vague messaging on your website. I am a huge advocate for niching down even just a little bit, even if you wanna be a general practitioner, because when you have a really broad message, it doesn’t. Speak to any particular person or group of people, and so instead the message feels really watered down and vague.

It might leave people with more questions than answers. So the example that I always like to give is, that big list of the conditions that the World Health Organization supports the use of acupuncture for. And I know people don’t do this as often as they used to, but when I graduated acupuncture school about 15 years ago, it was very common to just copy and paste that list onto your website and save.

I treat everything. Here’s what the WHO says, acupuncture is good for. Pick your thing off the list. It’s overwhelming for people to see that. It feels broad and vague, and a lot of people will read that list and even if. Let’s say they’re there for carpal tunnel and they see that carpal tunnel’s on the list, they might still have questions like, okay, that’s good that it’s on there, but does it pertain to me and my particular situation or experience with carpal tunnel?

And so it helps a lot to pick. We’ll say three broad categories that you love to treat and feature those on your website. Imagine imagine your landing page and then if you scroll down a little bit, maybe you could have three columns, right? Or three images next to each other. And they could be like pain management, women’s health and cosmetic acupuncture, or whatever the top three things are.

Sorry, I just banged into my desk. Whatever the top three things are that you really like to treat, because if you are just saying on your website, acupuncture for everybody and every situation and every symptom, it isn’t really going to. Peak the interest or grab the attention of any individual people.

So I recommend, even if you’re a general practitioner, just pick three things that you wanna highlight or feature. And you are still going to get plenty of patients who fall outside of those categories. But it just helps give your website some structure and it gives people who visit some. Some guidelines to help them know if they’re in the right place.

And ultimately, you are gonna end up with more of the patients that you are really aligned with and that you love to treat, which I find generally. Leads to better outcomes for patients. Leads to better patient reviews. Leads to more referrals. It’s a cycle. Okay? So I really hope that you will consider getting specific and niching down on your website, even just a little so that you can build a connection with your visitors so that they feel like, oh yes, this sounds like exactly what I need.

Alright. And then the last mistake that I see is just not repurposing content. I talk a lot about creating content, especially if you have a specialty. You want to talk about the frequently asked questions. Who’s a good fit, what’s your experience like? And you do have to talk about the same concepts over and over again, but that does not mean that you have to keep rewriting the same Instagram post of frequently asked questions.

All the time. You can go back and you can copy and paste a caption from seven months ago and give it a new image or a new video, and you can republish it. Okay? You could make some tweaks if you don’t wanna do something identical, but. The definition of repurposing content is taking something that you wrote or created for one platform, we’ll say Instagram, and repurposing it either for the same platform to publish it a second time or for a totally different platform, for example.

An email newsletter, right? So you are just tweaking the text to have it make sense for this other platform. And of course the idea here is that you, it just cuts down the amount of time that it takes to. Create and publish content, and I believe very strongly that the best way to maintain your sanity in the digital marketing world is to repurpose content.

If you’re not repurposing content, you are working way too hard. I encourage you to take a look at the content you’ve created on your website. So frequently asked questions if you have service pages, if you have a specialty, and you. Have a specialty page, like maybe you do orthopedic acupuncture, and you have a whole big long page where you talk about what are the symptoms?

Who’s it for? How many treatments do I need? Do I take insurance? Et cetera, et cetera. All of that is considered evergreen content, meaning it, it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really get stale or go out of style or become irrelevant. It’s always going to be. True and useful to your audience. That’s core content on your website, and that is always great to repurpose for email newsletters, for social media captions, or post inspiration.

And I really recommend if you’ve written blog posts. Again, no matter how old they are, they’re probably still partially evergreen content. Think about repurposing those as well. I bet you’ve already written or created a lot of content that you could repurpose into something else to allow you to stay visible in front of your audience today.

Okay.

And lastly, I’ll just say that you don’t need to make all of these changes today. I recommend maybe pick one thing per month. I work with a lot of acupuncturists and wellness business owners and I know that, having too many assignments leads to often not doing anything right. It’s a bit of overwhelm.

Everyone has lives. So just pick one thing for this month and make a list for things that you wanna update in the future. Okay? It will make a difference in your marketing effectiveness even if you don’t do it today. So if you have questions, you are always welcome to shoot me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com.

I love getting your questions clearly. I love talking about marketing and I have a brand new membership for wellness professionals that you are welcome to join. It’s called the Snack Size Marketing Club. It is a low cost marketing membership where once a week I pretty much tell you here’s what to do for your marketing this week.

It’s a five minute audio. Keep it very simple. You can visit my website, Michelle Grasek dot thank you fake.com to check that out. All right. Thank you so much for being here, as always, many thanks to the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you today. Have a good one.

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So how is AI changing search engine optimization? There’s really two ways that AI has impacted SEO, and the first is that the way people are able to search for the answer to a question has changed.

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Disclaimer: The following is an actual transcript. We do our best to make sure the transcript is as accurate as possible, however, it may contain spelling or grammatical errors.  Due to the unique language of acupuncture, there will be errors, so we suggest you watch the video while reading the transcript.

Hi there. My name is Michelle Grasek. I’m a practicing acupuncturist and a marketing strategist and the host of the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast. And today we’re talking about how AI is changing search engine optimization and what we can do about it as acupuncturists and local brick and mortar small business owners.

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So before we get into that today, I would love to say thank you to the American Acupuncture Council for the opportunity to be here with you. All right, let’s get into the slides. So how is AI changing search engine optimization? There’s really two ways that AI has impacted SEO, and the first is that the way people are able to search for the answer to a question has changed.

So if you. Recall, and originally we would simply type a couple keywords into the search bar in Google and we’re gonna use Google as our primary example. I know there are other search engines, but really the one that owns everything as and is the most important is Google. So we’ll use Google as an example.

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So we used to just be able to choose a couple keywords like acupuncture, frozen shoulder, or maybe. Frozen shoulder acupuncture near me, just a mishmash of keywords and put them into a Google search. And of course we can still do that, but that used to be the most common way that people would search.

Now people can use their Alexa and ask full sentences, so there are, they’re using a voice search or they can type full sentences into chat GPT. So instead of just saying acupuncture, frozen shoulder, they can say things like. Can you find me at an acupuncturist specializing in frozen shoulder near me, or can acupuncture help my tennis elbow and X, Y, Z?

So these are more conversational, they’re full sentences, and these are called high intent queries because they indicate that a person is really very interested. In what we have to offer, right? They wouldn’t be asking about, natural alternatives for frozen shoulder or acupuncture specifically for frozen shoulder if it was not their intent to pursue that line of treatment.

Okay? We know that the way we are inputting our query has changed. It’s a lot more long tail keywords. So when you’re entering a whole sentence or multiple keywords or big concepts, that’s called the long tail keyword, right? And these long tail keywords are often conversational in tone, right?

They’re phrased as an entire question. And then we also know that AI is changing the output, that social, sorry, that search engines are providing as an answer to a question. So you may have noticed when you search on Google that up at the top, Google will give you an AI summary of the answer it thinks is most relevant and most accurate to your query.

And. Google also has a specific AI search, so let me skip ahead here for you called AI mode where you get a much more comprehensive AI generated response to your query. So as an example, I typed into AI mode in the Google search. I put in. Acupuncture to manage celiac disease symptoms near me. So this is a longer tail keyword, and this is the response that it gave me.

So first it says, yes, acupuncture is likely to be helpful for celiac symptoms, and then it went ahead and it listed the local. Acupuncture clinics. So my practice is very close to my house, so I knew that my practice was gonna come up, but I was curious what the ranking would be. I have a lot of content on my website about digestion and I really just wanted to see are we ranking for these kind of local searches for symptoms that we like to treat?

You can see it’s listing five different clinics and we’re at the top and it provides the most information about my practice. And now why is that? If you take a look at this, it’s summarizing the specific answer to the question about celiac symptoms. At some point in creating content on my website over the past six years, I must have mentioned that I have Celiac and that I have been using acupuncture to help manage those symptoms for a decade, and that contributes to the reason that I love to help patients with a variety of digestive conditions.

I know that I wrote this content, I don’t remember when, I have no idea what page it’s on, but it’s very specific, right? And it is. A direct answer to this question that was put into the search query and Google found it. And there’s a specific reason that I am sharing this with you. So to review the two ways that AI is changing search is, one, it’s changing the way that we ask questions of Google.

So the questions themselves have changed. And two, it’s changing the way that the search engines AKA Google are providing the answer. Okay? So as you can see here, it says results are summarized with relevant points and fewer clickthroughs are necessary because if it’s summarizing your an answer to a question, you don’t actually have to click through to that website that it’s referencing to read the same information.

Okay. So all of this is important to keep in mind when we ask ourselves, okay, those are the changes. What can we do about it as local brick and mortar businesses, as practice owners, and truly high quality, detailed content that talks about your specific experience and mentions local keywords is going to be more important than ever.

This AI models is referring to any, aI that’s built into a search engine. So we just saw, if we skip back here, this is AI mode in Google, but different search engines have different names for it. But AI really prefers content that is detailed, that it feels is going to be authentic because it mentions a real person’s experience or background or expertise, and also incorporates local keywords.

All of this in addition to mentioning the keywords relevant to the symptom that the person mentioned in their query. Okay. And we’re gonna talk about an exact page structure for a new page on your website that you can create, where you can incorporate all of these things. But I think this is really interesting.

We’re emphasizing that. The AI search part of search engines wants to ensure that the content it’s providing as an answer to a question is authentic and relevant, as opposed to providing really basic, vague information that may have been generated solely by ai. AI generated content is not a bad thing.

When I’m creating new pages for my website, I absolutely use chat GPT to help me. The important thing to note is that. If you ask chat GPT to help you write any content, the quality of the output is going to depend on the quality of the prompt that you give it. So you need to tell chat GPT about your target market, your ideal audience, your expertise.

You can tell it the things you want it to include. The things you do not want it to include, you can even tell it that this is going to be content geared towards SEO. So you need it to mention a specific keyword or phrase and your location, et cetera. Okay? So this is not to say that you can’t use AI to help you write these pages, either the content or the outline, but what you wanna avoid is.

Content that sounds very basic and generic that doesn’t reference any particular experience or expertise where the examples are really vague and just not helpful. I think you’ve probably come across that sort of content before. That’s probably AI generated content. Instead, what the AI search is looking for is deeper, right?

It wants more detail, it wants more testimonials about the symptom on the page. It wants more information, okay? Because that’s indicating that it’s authentic and it’s relevant and it’s most likely a good answer to the person’s question. So before we move on, I wanna emphasize that search engine optimization.

And really Google’s goal, everything Google is doing. It is about the user experience and we can maximize that when we are creating pages for our website for SEO. And what do I mean by user experience? Google cares very much that the answers it brings up to a search query are authentic, relevant, and useful answers to the actual question that was asked.

It does not wanna be tricked into putting a website at the top of a search. That actually doesn’t answer the question, right? So it’s become very savvy in that way because it wants to provide the best answer to a question. Do you remember Ask j Eves? It still exists. Lots of people don’t even think it exists anymore, but ask j Eves algorithms.

To answer questions we’re simply not as good as Google’s, and so Google really took off and asked j Eves got left behind. Google does not want that to happen. Okay, so it’s like Google wants to help you. It really does. If you are the answer to a question that someone type in, it wants you, it wants your business, but we have to help Google understand.

When our business is the answer to a question that’s been put in the search, that is our responsibility. And so how do we do that? We build out our website with deep rich content that talks about our experience as practitioners, our expertise that mentions our location and. Can include testimonials, et cetera.

All of the things that help Google feel like the content is authentic and specific to the search query. Okay, so you know, one thing I always ask my marketing clients when they are a little resistant to. Adding more content to their website is, is the content that’s already on your website specific enough that Google would know what kind of patients you want it to send you?

And if the answer is no, then we have to write about those symptoms and conditions. Otherwise, Google will have no idea exactly who to send us and it’s gonna send those people somewhere that is specific. Okay. One way of maximizing the potential of your website for the new way that AI is impacting search engine optimization is to write these long form detailed pages about specific symptoms or conditions that you wanna see more of.

Now, there are lots and lots of SEO strategies that you can use that are very effective. This is just one, and I chose it. For today, because it doesn’t require us to have any technical behind the scenes knowledge of our websites, it doesn’t really even require us to have much SEO knowledge. We are just writing a really good, thorough, detailed webpage and including a couple key elements so that.

Google understands when our website is the answer to a question that someone entered into the search. Okay? And so let’s talk about the detailed format for these symptom pages. I’m actually gonna skip ahead. And just run through an outline of this page and then I’ll show you a real time example. So a really nice format and you can pause and take a screenshot of this, is to have the the title of your page be.

Acupuncture four. And then the symptom will say osteoarthritis of the knee, if that’s something you’d love to treat in Rochester, New York, or whatever your town or neighborhood is. And then each one of these bullet points would be a heading section for the page. So what is osteoarthritis of the knee? How can acupuncture in Rochester.

Help with osteoarthritis of the knees. How many treatments do I need? What to expect for osteoarthritis of the knee for acupuncture? Frequently asked questions about acupuncture and osteoarthritis. Why choose your clinic name? Why choose Ageless Acupuncture? Schedule your first visit today in Rochester, New York at ages acupuncture.

Okay, so keeping all of that in mind, let’s look at. And I apologize. I thought I had this, oops. Pulled up for you.

Okay, so let’s look at a real time example of this. For diverticulitis I mentioned I love to treat digestive conditions, so we try to have these pages for the various digestive conditions that I really enjoy treating and want more of those patients. So you can see acupuncture for diverticulitis relief, and son falls.

I’ve got my keywords, which are acupuncture, the symptom. And my location. Okay, and then I’ve got my headings. What is diverticulitis? I’ve got a call to action button here. Make an appointment. How acupuncture might help with diverticulitis. How many treatments? Another button to make an appointment. What to expect.

Why choose our clinic Is acupuncture right for you and ready to make an appointment with of course, another button. Okay, so if we hop back to the slides. I wanna go back one slide here. So really what you are thinking about is. Answering a long tail question that you think your ideal patient would ask, and you can actually like if you think the question is going to be, can acupuncture help with my frozen shoulder?

That could be one of the headings on your page, and then you answer the question, right? It’s okay to have the question be verbatim as a heading on your page. Okay, and what you wanna do to help Google understand that you are. An authentic business to build trust with Google. So it knows that sending traffic to you is a good choice.

You are a good answer to the query. You can mention your professional experience. You can mention testimonials. For example, you could say 10 years in business treating digestive conditions just like diverticulitis. Or we have been in business for eight years and we have 45, 5 star reviews.

Okay. You can talk about a case study, of course, where you’re scrubbing any patient information, but you can talk about the improvement that you have witnessed in similar patients in the past, giving Google an idea that your real person and you, again, you are just a trustworthy source to send people to for the search query.

Okay. And making sure that over and over again you are including the symptom diverticulitis, for example, and your location. Rochester Seneca Falls in the headings going down your page. Okay? And I pointed out that I had multiple call to action buttons saying book now you wanna have. You don’t want people to have to look around and figure that out.

You wanna have multiple going down the page. I also recommend having internal links. This is very good for SEO and can help improve the rank of this page in particular and the pages that you link to. So on your symptom page, you can link to other relevant pages on your website. For example, if you say, why choose Seneca Falls acupuncture and then say our our acupuncturists have a combined 30 years of experience. You could hyperlink that to the about page on your website. Okay? And this just helps Google understand the structure of your website better. And anytime we’re helping Google understand us, it has a better idea of when we are the answer to a question, and it’s more likely to send people to us.

Okay?

And Oh, I apologize. It looks like I didn’t quite finish this page. So to review, why do these detailed symptom pages work so well? So one, they match people’s new search behavior with the long tail keywords or the full question queries, like full sentence. They also position you as an expert, not only for potential patients, but also for Google.

And they improve your local search rank. So it’s not just about including the symptom, but also about including your location over and over again so that Google knows like within what range are you the answer to this question. So here’s what I would love for you to do. I’d love for you to write two of these pages.

The reason I say two is that it can take three to six months for these pages to really, bring you a return on your investment of your time and your energy for Google to start sending people to these pages. So the more pages you can write now, the like the better results you’ll have later on. Okay?

So if you can only write one page right now, that’s fine. Certainly better than nothing. But if you can, if you have time to write multiple symptom pages. Please do think about your ideal patients and two conditions that you love to treat and want more of. It could be it could be anything, right? It could be carpal tunnel and fertility for women with PCOS.

Okay, and just follow the outline that I provided. Ask chat GPT for help. That’s totally acceptable, and publish them so that you get an enormous benefit down the road. So I really hope this is helpful. As always, if you have questions, you are more than welcome to. Send me an email, michelle@michelleGrasek.com and I would love to invite you to a new marketing membership.

I just launched. It is a low cost membership. It’s called the Snack Size Marketing Club. The idea is about taking. Small bite size. I love puns. Small bite size actions every week, which done consistently really add up to practice growth over time. So you can visit the Snack Size Marketing club@michelleGrasek.thinkific.com.

I’d love to have you as a member. And before I sign off today, I would like to thank the American Acupuncture Council. One more time for the opportunity to be here with you today. Talk to you next time.

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