“Local Inbound Marketing Agency Learns How to Be a Medical Spa in Record Time”

Recently, Go Time Marketing successfully completed a total website makeover for a client in the medical spa industry.

Medical spas specialize in non-surgical procedures such as facials, botox injections, non-surgical liposuction etc.

It was a difficult project because the medical spa industry is specialized and technical. Frankly, you need a medical background to create quality content in the medical spa industry.

But I’m a Marketer Jim…not a Doctor! (Let us know if you get that reference)

So how does a inbound marketing writer like me, get up to speed quickly?

Here are five tips on how I got up to speed and became a medical spa “expert” in no time flat. 

1. Research Your Target Market’s Needs

Before we did any work on the content, we needed to find out who our target market was.

We dove into the research and identified our client’s typical customers as 30+ year old, affluent women who have an interest in beauty, a history of proactively managing their looks and who live near Milwaukee WI.  

We also knew through other research that women use blogs and social media to seek advice, get product information and make purchasing decisions.

We also discovered that women have a lot of questions about medical spa treatments.

• Will my face look burned after a chemical peel?
• How much weight will I lose with a AquaLipo procedure?
• How much does a AquaLipo cost?
• What can I do about acne acars?
• Does the HCG Diet actually work?

Now that we understood what people wanted to know, creating content became easier. Researching on the web goes much more smoothly when you know which questions to ask Google.

2. Create A Content Matrix

Now that we understood more about what the medical spa’s customers were looking for, we could organize their website from a user’s perspective. We organized all the medical spa’s services around what was relevant to the customer. Not the other way around as you often see.

This is known as user-centered design. And it’s easier said than done.

One tool that helped was what we called Content Matrix. Sounds complex, but it was just a spreadsheet that allowed us to arrange the spa’s services in ways that made sense to people. Our solution was to create a top menu that identified the problem (ex: Acne) and led the visitor to a page that clearly identified all of the different medical spa treatments someone could use to fix their problem.

After looking at a ton of medical spa websites, I realized this very few spas were using user-centered design. It was our chance to differeniate the client.

This method of problem-based organization is a great way to capitalize on good search keywords. People are searching on ways to solve their problems. So it just makes sense to create content that focuses on their problems. Why make Google guess what your web page is about? Speaking of Google…

3. Ask Doctor Google

For each medical spa-related ailment or treatment that I wrote about, I must have made 50 queries in Google.   I read forums, other medical spa websites, blogs and online publications.

I also learned how to search better. Here is a great tutorial on advanced Google search techniques.

After I learned about the subject matter, I sat down to write the content in my own words. This was educational in and of itself. When you write, you learn. 

4. Keep In Constant Communication

Learning the medical spa business was a team effort and one of the biggest saviors during this process was communication. We’re always plugged into Skype and Podio and Go To Meeting.  With these tools, we could ask quick questions, post interesting content or vet new ideas without disturbing co-workers.

5. Interview The Experts

Our client is a medical doctor. She’s an expert in her field. So we asked her a lot of questions over the course of 2 months. All the interviews were recorded. I think we reviewed these interview 4-5 times before we understood everthing. This led to follow up questions that we asked in later interviews.

Have you been in this situation? What techniques have you used to become an “expert” in an industry? Leave something in the comments, we’d love to hear back from you!

You’re an expert on your topic, probably the smartest person you know and funny to boot. So why isn’t everyone hanging out with you and your blog?

As someone who recently transitioned from copywriting with a rock and chisel to SEO copywriting, I’m a little overwhelmed by all of the expert “advice” about why the universe hates my blog.

Everyone can agree that content is King (ahem, or Queen!) but you could have pages of useful content that just falls by the wayside.

One of the biggest problems content creators face is how to transform their marketing masterpieces into customer action. Those of us in the ‘biz call that a conversion. So what does SEO have to do with any of it?

In short, SEO helps search engines find, decipher and rank your page based on how helpful the information is to the typical searcher in your niche. Better rankings raise your visitor count and increase your chances of conversion (and superstardom).

If you’re struggling with SEO setbacks, have no fear because I’ve compiled a list of five errors that sabotage your content marketing. And for those of you that love multi-tasking, half of these tips can also be applied to your dating life.

SEO Error #1: Cheating With Link Spam

Look out link-spammers! Although inbound link building is a great way to increase your SEO off-page, it’s also a common outlet for those looking to game the system. Google is cracking down on paid link brokers who back sites to help companies boost their search engine ranks. Sites that opted into link building instead of creating quality content are now being penalized with de-indexing and no longer hold any SEO value.  Your goal should be to obtain as many natural links as possible, and realize that these might take time. Keep in mind an engine-friendly website has links that are easy to navigate. This will be a lot more efficient and result in higher quality pages than dumping a bunch of energy and money into a quick fix.

SEO Error #2: Being Lazy

The graph below says it all—right after an article is published, it has a high ‘freshness score’ that declines over time.

In a nutshell, fresh content appears higher in search engine rankings. Your goal should be to publish more often because a blog post written this morning has a much higher ranking than some ancient web page.

SEO Error #3: Using Key Words As A Crutch

As an avid reader, this is a huge pet peeve of mine. Your content should have a natural flow and feel to it, so don’t force in a bunch of key words and phrases if they aren’t working. You can always break content into several pages or blog posts in order to capture a larger audience. After all, if reading and navigating your site isn’t easy for a visitor, they’ll probably just move on to one that is. Also, in an effort to offer more security to Google searchers, marketers are being given less access to keyword data. In layman’s terms, its getting harder for marketing gurus to figure what words brought people to their sites. One of the best ways to alleviate this issue is by increasing your content footprint; just one 500-word post per day can get you 182,500 words indexed by the end of the year. I’ll totally drink to that in 2013!

SEO Error #4: Being Boring

Sometimes, reading a blog post can feel like reading the back of a shampoo bottle. Think about everything you love in a blog post: useful information that’s well written, entertaining and presented in an organized, reliable way. Google recognized this when they rolled out Google Panda and filtered out websites with poor content. Pages with content that testers found valuable were rewarded with higher rankings and more traffic.

Sparking The Social Flame

Search engines are a useful tool, but they don’t retweet you, buy stuff from you, or share comments with you. When producing content, your first priority is your audience because the more people like you, the more search engines will too.

SEO Error #5: Don’t Make Search Engines Guess

Search engine spiders are not that smart. They’re actually kind of stupid. The point of SEO is to spell everything out so the search engine can pick up on the relevance of your page. Your article titles, title tags (H1, H2, H3), meta-descriptions and meta-keyowrds should be in alignment with the topic to make sure your page has crystal clear communication with search engines. When people interact with your site, this data is collected and used to rank you.