Effective Website Platforms for Medical Spas

Effective Website Platforms for Medical Spas by Ryan Harris, Co-founder of the Medspa Marketing Institute.

Are you unhappy with your website? Is it a good tool to help you generate leads and get new patients in the door?  If not, you may want to consider your medspa website’s “platform”.

The first thing that you need to know is that the platform your medical spa or aesthetic business website runs on is very important to the search engines.  If you just have a few static pages that rarely change, with mostly sales pitches and no real content, the search engines will never rank your website high in the organic search results.

Google and Yahoo understand that these types of websites exist just to sell a product, not to educate the visitor on a particular topic.  It usually ranks these sites low, but with the right platform, the content limitations can be overcome.

On the other hand, if you create a very rich, robust, and in-depth site that educates visitors on numerous topics by having lots of original, great content, then you are much more likely to be ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPS).  However, this is only a general guideline, and not an absolute rule.

We have seen numerous cases where a salesletter website very thin on content outranks a website that has an incredible amount of content, and this is due to the platform that the site is built upon.

The reason is that when search engines spiders “crawl” (analyze) your site, it analyzes not only the content for keywords, but it analyzes the site structure and design to try to determine is function.  It gives a fairly considerable weight to well-organized websites that provide good metadata about the contents of the site.  Metadata is simply “information about information”.

In the last few years, there have been some website platforms known as “content management systems” (CMS) that were created specifically with search engines in mind.  The best of these CMS systems is called Wordpress.

Wordpress actually has two variations, a hosted version at wordpress.com, and a “host it yourself version” found at Wordpress.org.  The self-hosted version is the most robust and flexible CMS ever created, and the search engines really like it, and therefore give Wordpress websites high ranking fairly quickly compared to other platforms.

The real beauty of Wordpress is that the source code is open to anyone and everyone, so a community of tens of thousands of programmers has sprung up to design themes and plugins for it, to enhance Wordpress functionality.

Many of these plugins are related to social networking sites and SEO, so with the right plugins, a Wordpress website can be extremely powerful for search engine ranking and driving traffic from social networks.  They can also look very good without a lot of custom programming or design work.

It is definitely worth investigating whether or not converting your medspa website to the Wordpress platform will help you drive more traffic to your site to make you more money.  Converting your content over isn’t very difficult, and because Wordpress is a content management system and blogging system, your pages can be reorganized to be search engine friendly.

You can “tag” every page with the relevant keywords, add search engine summary excerpts, and many other functions that the search engines value.

Probably the single greatest feature of Wordpress sites is that every time you make a change or update content on the site, when the content is saved, Wordpress will automatically update a long list of blog directories, notifying them that you have added new content.

This contributes significantly to your search engine rankings.  It has been referred to as “post and rank” – as in get better page rankings and SERP listings.

If you do not have a lot of content on your website, that is ok, it is easy and inexpensive to get good spa content written for your site.  The more articles and educational content you have to educate your visitors on your services and treatments, the more Google will like your site, and the more likely it is that other websites link to your site, which is a common and significant SEO tactic.

Getting traffic to a website of course is just Step 1, converting visitors to actual patients is Step 2, and it isn’t difficult if you know what to do.  That will be the subject of the next post on Internet marketing for medical spas.

Happy Marketing!

-Ryan