If you are a nutritional therapist managing your own practice, the number of consultations you get per month is a vital metric.
Basically, as with any business, you need clients to keep the practice running.
Today I’m going to guide you through one of the best strategies you can incorporate in your marketing tactics to get more customers online – for free, and sustainable in the long-term.
New to marketing? Start with our marketing for nutritionists introduction guide. On the other hand, you can check our guide on the best apps for nutritionists for practice management software.
Getting Started
Firstly, you need a website where you can write blogs and articles. If you don’t have one, read this article about creating a free website for nutritionists in 5 minutes.
Secondly, you need to drive relevant traffic to your website. Your audience will be people that are looking for a local (or online) nutritionist for a consultation. You need to get as many of them to find your website in Google.
For example, imagine you have a practice in South Kensington in London (UK). If someone from the borough googles nutritional therapist in South Kensington, you should aim to be the first result in Google.
Just think that people that find you in Google are looking for what you offer, and need it now. This is relevant traffic. A high percentage of this kind of traffic will become your customer – perhaps as high as 10-20% of them.
To give you a sense of perspective, most companies that distribute leaflets advertising their products on the streets get 0.5-1% customers from them. The reason? They are targeting random people, not relevant traffic.
How do you drive people to your website that are looking for what you offer? The answer is SEO.
SEO for nutritionists
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – or how much Google loves your website.
When you search for something in Google (or other search engines) you get a list of results ranked by relevance. Google is constantly analysing websites to keep rankings accurate.
SEO is all about maximising your chances of ranking high for specific keywords. When people type your keywords in Google (i.e. naturopathic nutritionist in Boston), you want them to find your nutrition practice.
The main considerations search engines take into account to rank your website higher are:
- How old is your website? Old domains that have been growing steadily throughout the years have an advantage.
- How many links point to your website from reputable sources. I.e. an article in the BBC with a url link to your site is a great thing!
- The quantity, quality, and relevance of your content.
- Consistency of content, i.e. publishing every day or at least every few days is good.
We are going to focus on content today. Basically, if you write a lot of relevant, high quality, and unique content, you will be rewarded in many ways – one of which will be more customers coming from Google for free.
Targeting long tail keywords with your content
Would you be happy if suddenly you got 10,000 visits to your website within a few hours? Well, it depends.
Imagine you manage a local nutrition practice in California. One day, for some obscure reason, some rich film star in Mongolia decides to tweet about you to his 2 million Twitter followers in his country. You get 10,000 visits to your website in a matter of hours and your server blows up.
That’s a lot of traffic! However, it’s very unlikely any of them will book a consultation with you (unless they recommend you to their american cousin). Traffic needs to be relevant for it to bring customers.
Compare the situation with having merely 20 people per day that find your website online by typing best functional nutritionist in San Francisco in Google. You may get 2 customers per day out of those 20 people. For free!
Here is what you have to do to get this relevant traffic to find your website:
- Write blog posts and articles consistently. The more the better.
- One idea or concept per post.
- Make the title of each article as relevant and specific as possible.
- Keep the content of the article relevant to the title.
- Add a link to your website at the end of the post.
- Write the kind of content your potential customers are looking for.
- Repeat. Write a few times per week if you can. Target one specific keyword per article.
If you write articles consistently following the guidelines above, you will build a great source of relevant traffic over time.
Don’t take me wrong. This process of building content takes time. Think of it as investing some money into a savings account. At first, growth is slow; but over the years the interests will result in exponential growth!
Think that maybe in a year you can have a solid amount of quality traffic coming to your website for free. And it will keep increasing over time!
Start today. Gaining popularity in Google is a bit like losing weight. It can’t be achieved in a day, it requires consistent effort. Yet, I’m sure you know first hand, from the success stories of your clients, that results pay off for the effort in the end.
Avoiding common mistakes
It’s all about writing good content often. Simple but laborious. As a final consideration, please beware about these common pitfalls so that Google doesn’t penalise your site.
- Don’t add duplicate content. I.e. no copy/pasting articles between different websites.
- Include a minimum of 300 words per article. Shorter than that and Google won’t like it.
- Write most of your content in your own domain, not in blogging platforms like Medium or Blogger. You want Google to increase your ranking, not theirs.
- Don’t spam. This includes dodgy things like adding 700 links to your website in the post (1 or 2 is fine) or repeating the same keyword in an unnatural way through your article.
- Give your audience something they want. I.e. provide useful tips and advice, something they will find valuable. Keep self-promotion to a maximum of 10% of the content of your article.
Conclusion
SEO works. It takes time, but it is an investment that pays off handsomely in the long-term.
If you want to get more customers in your nutrition practice in the increasingly competitive online landscape; please consider the long tail SEO strategies outlined in this post.
As a small case study, consider the NutriAdmin blog you are reading right now. We provide a nutritionist software product; hence our target audience are nutritionists and dietitians.
If all we wrote about in our blog was self-promoting, then the only person who would read it would be my mom (if she spoke English).
Instead of self-promotion, we opt to share for free everything we know about productivity, online marketing, and any other skills where we feel can help nutritionists grow their businesses.
Our customers are nutritionists. Their success is our success too. Similarly, your customers are individuals seeking nutritional advice. The more they succeed, the more business you will get via referrals and follow up appointments. Everybody wins.
Start giving your customers the articles and content they are looking for today!
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you want to receive more practical advise for nutritionists in business, consider subscribing to the NutriAdmin blog in the yellow box below. We send the best article of the week via email to subscribers each Friday.
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
