Drug Rehab SEO: Your Complete Guide

A Step-by-Step Guide to Rehab Center SEO

Search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is a traffic driver. You may already know that alcohol and drug rehab SEO can drive sustainable traffic at a lower cost than many other methods of promoting your addiction treatment facility.

You may already know the benefits of ranking on the first page of Google results, with more than 10x the clicks going to the #1 spot over the 2^nd page sites. But how can you make this a reality for your rehab center website?

We’ll explain how it’s done and what’s really happening behind the scenes and help provide a guide for proper SEO implementation that can have a dramatic impact on your company’s success!

Keep reading to find out more about addiction treatment SEO from our pros at Ads Up Marketing, and how to make your website shine in the eyes of both Google and potential clients!

Search Engine Optimization for Rehab Centers: The Basics

Everyone will tell you that increasing your organic search traffic is one of the best methods to drive people through your doors when you open a drug rehab clinic or addiction treatment center – and this is true.

The question then becomes, “How can I improve my drug rehab SEO?” After all, sites that create the most organic traffic are likely to do the most business.

Many businesses nowadays, including those in the addiction treatment sector, are fixated on increasing their SEO (we already know this means search engine optimization, or performance on Google and its competitors). This is because the site visitors attracted ‘organically’ are not prompted by paid ads and represent the culmination of successful SEO efforts.

Let’s review how search engines work and how your rehabilitation center or addiction treatment facility might benefit from it to boost business.

What Exactly Is SEO for Drug Treatment Facilities?

First, let’s define drug rehab SEO and talk a little bit about why investing in it might pay off in the long run. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of boosting the volume and quality of visitors to a website through unpaid search engine results.

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint; it gets better over time if done right. You can’t expect to get from the third page of Google to the first page of Google overnight. It’s a series of steps that, taken in order, will increase your traffic, leads, and return on investment for your rehab center.

 There’s also the question of why your drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic would wish to enhance its SEO. People’s lives may be (and often are) altered by the help you provide. The real question is whether you’re making it simple for them to locate you.

SEO for My Drug Rehab Center: Why Bother?

Consider the following information regarding Google search results:

• The top three results on Google have a CTR and share of clicks of about 75% of the total of any given keyword.
• The jump in CTR by just going from #6 to #5 is a whopping 53%.
• The reach for each spot after that increases by 30% per spot.                                                                                              

There’s no denying that increasing your website’s search engine optimization will bring in more targeted traffic. Using digital marketing services is extremely effective but also costly. Certain processes you should be able to take on in-house.

Numerous studies have demonstrated the significance of being inside the first three results on page one of search engine results, as 75.1% of all clicks on organic listings go to those three top ranking spots.

Creating Content that Search Engines Love

Boosting your rehab’s SEO will allow you to serve more clients. When executed properly, drug rehab SEO will increase your website’s visibility in search results, making your program more accessible to those in need of addiction treatment.

Suppose someone is battling addiction and decides to ask for assistance finally. The person will initially turn to online search engines like Google to find a treatment center in their area.

If your addiction treatment website SEO is up to par, the person searching for a treatment center will see your facility as the top result and contact you immediately. That is the goal.

Let’s go over how the right approach to digital marketing applies to promoting organic traffic: in other words, visitors to your site that you do not arrive through paid efforts.

Check Where You Stand Before Your Drug Rehab SEO Campaign

Google your local rehabilitation services now to see what comes up. Use common keyword phrases that people search for, like ‘alcohol rehab near me.’

It could very well be the case that a Google search for ‘alcohol rehab near me’ turns up zero results, even though you run the best addiction treatment facility in your area.

Don’t worry, it’s not uncommon for this to be the case, and there is a plan of action to remedy this situation!

Next, we will provide a list of drug rehab SEO specifics that should be reviewed to support your website and to attract the attention of Google for its local listings.

You may be asking yourself: how do I even start? Our guide will walk you through the crucial assessment process and investigate how you can set up a firm SEO foundation for your facility.

The Function of Drug Rehab SEO

The speed with which you obtain results is highly dependent on the authority of your website and the place you are targeting. If you launch a website today that specifically targets New York City addiction treatment centers, you probably won’t see any returns for at least a year.

If you want to know how rapidly your site will rise in the search engine results, you can do so by comparing the authority level of your site to that of the top-ranking sites in your region using a tool like Moz, Ahrefs, or SEMRush.

If you follow these instructions, you will be successful, and begin to see organic results.

The First Three Stages of Drug Rehab SEO

You’ll need to figure out these first three things first:

• Which city do you hope to attract customers from?
• Which of your offerings do you consider to be the most valuable, and why?
• Is there any credibility behind your site?

Let’s dissect these three components in the next section of our step by step guide.

 Stage 1: Regional and Long Tail Keywords

The name of the city you’re aiming for will serve as a key phrase for your online presence. Let’s take Phoenix as an illustration. Let’s say we’re discussing a service you provide, and we want to utilize the Phoenix location as an example.

One of your most useful services is undoubtedly drug rehabilitation or drug detoxification. If you want to reach people in Phoenix, you should focus on terms like “Phoenix drug rehab” and “Phoenix drug detox.”

Stage 2: The Importance of Accurate Keyword Research

However, even these geo-specific keywords could be a bit out of reach initially, and if you have struggled to rank even among other search engines like Bing, it may make sense to get even more specific.

Do you offer ‘detox in Phoenix for men only,’ or ‘treatment centers for first responders in Phoenix,’ or other very specific audiences? These can be a core way of establishing your site as a topical authority on smaller but related matters before trying to tackle more competitive keyword phrases.

Your domain’s authority is the most important determinant in whether or not your website will appear in a search for a certain keyword. It’s a measure of your site’s popularity and authority in your field that’s employed by SEOs.

However, determining exactly how Google feels about your site may be more important. This can be done through Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Both of these tools offer ways of looking at trends and keyword research that can help you find your hidden ‘value propositions’ that even larger sites will not match.

Not to mention these long tail keywords can still help quite a bit with Google Maps!

Stage 3: Who Has the Last Word on Your Domain’s Status?

Domain authority described briefly, is a popularity and trustworthiness rivalry amongst websites. Your domain authority will rise in proportion to the number and quality of websites that connect to it.

We won’t dive too far into technical SEO, which largely uses off page SEO links to help bolsters a website’s authority, but it will be covered in later guides more fully.

For now, you can take a look at these top 3 SEO resources for determining your domain authority.

• Ahrefs
• SEMRush
• Moz

 Let’s imagine you verified your website’s domain authority and discovered that it’s a 14. You must now check the keyword competition in the search engine results.

Do a quick scan of the market. This can also help with looking at the quality links pointing to competitors’ sites and give you helpful list when you look for inbound links of your own!

Check the authority of the websites that come up in a Google search for the keyword you wish to rank for.

Now you can check how your domain authority stacks up against the rest of the industry. You now have a chance to rank for a set of drug rehab keywords if you come close to or surpass the performance of your rivals. Before we dive into site layout and staying relevant, let’s give a short primer on the importance of backlinks for treatment center websites.

Link-Building and Off-Page SEO Strategy for Rehabs

Your drug rehabilitation SEO strategy can’t be successful without focusing on link development. When it comes to search engine rankings, link development is one of the two most crucial factors.

This implies that you need to put a lot of work into creating high-quality content and linking properly, either through internal links or by forging external connections from authoritative sites.

Link building takes more time and effort than the on-site SEO methods described above, so be prepared to put in more than a day or two of work to start seeing results.

How Can I Attract Links to my Addiction Treatment Website?

Getting fresh connections is crucial to your rating, but it’s not simple. Any time another website mentions yours and creates a link to your site, it’s like having a vote cast in your favor.

In this respect, your blog will become important. It’s the simplest and most natural approach to start networking. Good quality content attracts links, which in turn increases your domain authority.

Just like before, this is not a simple task. Earning links from users, visitors, and future clients is the goal of link building, also known as relationship marketing.

Don’t be shy about requesting links from prominent blogs.

You should focus on both content creation and link building, as they are interdependent. If your material is exceptional, others will want to share it by linking to it. You’ll find success if you’re patient, persistent, and open to making connections (even if doing so can result in rejection).

What to Do and What Not to Do When Building Links

• DO Focus on getting connections organically instead of creating or linking to spammy article directories,
• DO Create a unique link to or from your blog and one of your Web 2.0 sites.
• DO Offer and ask for guest blogging spots.
• DO collect references
• DO focus on getting connections from local and specialized sites.

• DO NOT pay for links (not only is this unprofessional, but Google penalizes sites that do this).
• DO NOT participate in closed blog networks, also known as private blog networks or PBNs     

What You Need for Effective Link Building: A Brief Checklist

Now that you know the ins and outs of link building, it’s time to examine your site using this quick checklist.

• Is my site professional and trustworthy?
• Have I made well-prepared, relevant content?
• Do visitors to my site find what they’re looking for?
• Are the contents of my site useful to visitors?

If you’ve got everything covered, you’re ready to launch your link-building campaign, but there’s one more thing to remember: it’s going to take a lot of time and work, but if you do it right, you’ll have more clients than you’ve ever had previously.

Site Layout and Structure for Drug Rehab SEO Strategy

It’s shocking how often the form of a website is disregarded. While it stands to reason that a clean and organized layout would enhance a site’s usability, many online resources today fail to meet this basic standard. The attempt to become too sophisticated ends up making matters worse.

If your website is well organized, visitors (potential clients) will be able to quickly discover the information they need with no effort on their part. Because of the improved user experience and more time spent on your rehab’s website, you will see a boost in your search engine rankings.

User experience is a huge part of rehab centers’ online success, and those of any business trying to succeed with online marketing.

There is an underlying assumption that if your website is disorganized and hard to navigate, then perhaps your facilities are just as chaotic.

As an added bonus, search engines will be able to index your site more effectively if you have a well-organized URL structure.

A surprising amount of success may come from this.

Google My Business: A Foundation for Local SEO

It is imperative for local SEO that you join Google My Business (now known as Google Business Profile) if you want to be included in the Google maps ‘3-pack’. For branded searches like this one, you may use Google’s local pack by optimizing your pages for specific keywords and phrases.

You must verify your storefront’s location when you initially create a Google Business Profile. They’ll send you a verification number on a card in the mail; after you enter it, you’ll be able to create your Google My Business page.

Include your NAP (name, address, phone number) and photos of the building’s inside and exterior. Further, inspire both current and former clients to share their experiences through reviews. Google will be more likely to feature you in local search results if you encourage feedback from customers by soliciting more reviews.

Putting the Final Pieces in Place for a Rehab GMB Profile

After you’ve completed your profile, you can start adding references. A Yelp review is a good illustration of a citation. Filling up citations is OK, but only on reputable databases. Substandard or unrelated websites are not worth risking your rankings for.

Consequently, think about utilizing a service like BrightLocal to quickly discover quality directories (and, more significantly, directories your rivals are using). When you do this, you’ll get a list of all the citations your rivals have that you don’t.

After you’ve nailed down drug rehab SEO, you can go on to writing actual drug rehab content. Let’s get started with what to look for as you craft your first set of SEO web copy or blog post.

Drug Rehab SEO: On-Page Optimization

Paying close attention to detail is the core of on-page optimization for drug rehab SEO. So, where should you focus your efforts?

Don’t be overwhelmed, as on-page SEO optimization makes up a pretty significant list:

• Keyword Approach
• H2s, H3s, etc.
• Meta Descriptions
• Meta Tags for Headers
• Site Architecture
• Videos
• Imagery
• Contact Information
• Mobile optimization
• Schema
• Secure Certificate (SSL)

But take a deep breath now, not all of these considerations need to be perfect out of the gate. Rather these are considerations to optimize your site as you create content, the articles and posts that will make your site shine!

A Robust Technical Base for Your Rehab Services

In order to build an effective SEO strategy for a drug rehabilitation center, you must first have a solid technological basis. Installing Google Search Console and Google Analytics will help you avoid major problems by providing early warnings of potential issues and essential data about your site’s visitors.

Thankfully, you can set up both of these resources without spending any money.

The most important processes that these two applications focus on are:

Crawling

To begin, check to see if Google can successfully scan your entire site. Google won’t be able to index your website if it can’t crawl its pages. So, it’s safe to say that you can forget about ever finding that page in Google’s display of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

So, go to “coverage” in Google Search Console’s Indexing section to see a list of broken links.

You can examine the detailed error messages it is displaying by scrolling down to them. When an issue occurs, clicking on the error notice will provide a list of the affected URLs, giving you an opportunity to fix the issue.

Mobile Usability

Next, you should make your site mobile-friendly. This is significant as Google increasingly prioritizes mobile versions of webpages over desktop versions when determining rankings.

Determining whether or not a website is mobile-friendly requires taking a look at a number of factors.

Start by looking for serious issues in the “mobile” area of Google Search Console. Hopefully, there won’t be any, but if there are, this will let you know which pages are affected and what to do about it.

Search Console will alert you to serious problems, but it won’t flag pages with bad UX. Since Google’s top priority is happy customers, it’s essential that they provide a satisfying user experience.

So, access your site from a mobile device and manually check off the items on this list:

• Are there pop-ups? Usually, pop-ups are not wanted during a mobile experience as they can cause a page to lag or load improperly.
• Is the menu simple to use? You should be able to access every page.
• Does it like a balanced design?
• Is it possible to read everything, or did some of it get cut off?
• Is the text properly spaced so that it reads smoothly and not like one huge block?

Make any necessary changes to your mobile version immediately. Waiting until after you’ve implemented additional changes makes it more complicated.

Site Security as a Component of Your SEO Plan

You might have seen that the address bar of certain websites starts with HTTP or HTTPS.

This seemingly insignificant change can have a major impact on your search engine results. Your website will be safer from hackers if you switch to HTTPS. Google doesn’t want to compromise its mission of providing excellent user experiences by directing them to sites that might put them at risk.

Google has stated that HTTPS support will be taken into account in rankings going forward. Furthermore, if your website isn’t safe, Google makes it extremely evident to consumers, which is likely to prevent them from spending time on your website.

If your website now only uses HTTP, what steps can you take to switch to HTTPS? First, you’ll need to spring for an SSL certificate.

The next step is to send all visitors to the secure HTTPS pages. Google, however, treats them as two separate websites, even if they look identical to human visitors.

Site Loading Times Can Improve Rankings

The next technological hurdle is maintaining a respectable website load time.

Infuriatingly sluggish website loading times are a common complaint from users. As a result, Google can punish your site’s rating if it believes it takes too long to load. Their corporate policies related to search performance have confirmed that site speed is now a consideration in search engine rankings.

Use a tool like PageSpeed Insights to measure the load times of your website.

Once your pages are loading rapidly (within 2 seconds), further optimization may not be necessary.

For Google, if a website loads in under two or three seconds, then it’s already providing a fantastic user experience, and shaving off a few milliseconds won’t make much of a difference. So, once you eclipse the 2-second mark, additional optimization is unlikely to increase your results.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

In spite of its seeming simplicity, writing your own title tags and meta descriptions is crucial. While it might not have an effect on the site’s underlying architecture, it can have a major bearing on metrics like clickthrough rate and bounce rate, both of which are taken into account by search engines.

This is why it’s important to follow these rules when crafting your titles and meta descriptions:

• Limit titles to 60 characters or fewer.
• The optimum length for a meta description is 160 characters.
• When writing the title (ideally at the beginning) and meta description, always include your relevant, main keyword or keyword phrase.
• You should focus on getting clicks, but you should also follow through with what you promise. If your page’s bounce rate increases, it will send a negative signal to search engines.
• Fix or remove any damaged items.

Finally, make use of the built-in grader available in services like Ahrefs and SEMrush. They can provide you with a comprehensive breakdown of all the places on your site where technical issues have been spotted. They’ll be able to provide a detailed breakdown of the mistakes that were made.

Keyword-Rich Content for Addiction Treatment Facilities

Without a doubt, the content on your site and the quality of the links leading to it are the two most essential factors Google considers when determining where to place your site in search results.

Building closer ties with users and potential clients may be facilitated by archiving valuable, interesting, and actionable information in a blog. You should always keep this in mind when you write content, or in assigning unique content projects for your writers.

Content strategy based on what people want to know, that actually delivers answers, will always rank higher and give your site more visibility.

Never Forget About Your Blog!

If you’re in charge of coming up with content, keep these pointers in mind:

• Not every piece of content is worthy of your time
• It’s true that not all content is created equal
• The adage “more the merrier” is not always true, especially with word count and keywords where they don’t belong (adding SERPs here for example : )
• Never use phrases like “just in case” or “wouldn’t it be nice if…”

Making content that others will want to link to is an important part of any strategy for gaining backlinks leading to your addiction treatment center, which we’ll get to later.

The Impact of Content on User Experience

Your site’s content will interact with the visitor at several points throughout their experience, so it has a drastic impact on search engine results pages where your content is displayed. There are three possible stages that a person in need of treatment may be in:

1. Questioning Whether Rehab Is Necessary

2. Considering Alternatives

‘I recognize my need for help, but do I really think your rehabilitation center is the best choice?’ or ‘This is the right rehab center for me; how much will it cost?’

Research-focused content should strive to create trust in your brand’s identity and reputation.

We will pretend the person is already subscribed to your newsletter or blog or has already visited your site (this should be a second chance at turning the reader into an admission).

3. Use subtle persuasion to move the reader on to stage two or three.

At this point, the user has done their research and is making a decision about where to get treatment; therefore, it is important that the information encourages them to give your institution a call (in an encouraging, not salesy way). The goals of this material are to:

1. Reaffirm your facility’s status as a respected organization in the field of substance abuse treatment.
2. Get the reader to the third and final level.
3. Turn them into a lead.

If your material has been well-designed and your reader has reached Stage 3, then you can celebrate: they are well on their way to becoming a client. All content at this point should be geared toward proving that your facility is the greatest option for people in need of recovery.

As this is the final opportunity to win them over, it is also the moment when they should feel most at ease getting to know you and the rest of your team.

Assign someone the task of making a content calendar in order to keep track of when things need to be published.

Long-Tail Keywords and an Important Reminder

Long tail optimization expands on local SEO by targeting increasingly specialized keyword phrases that are relevant to a certain location. We touched on this earlier, but the importance of long tail keywords is worth restating. While it’s true that “drug rehab” is a highly sought-after term, it should be evident that users are quite detailed in their search queries.

Furthermore, long-tail terms now account for 70% of all searches, so it’s not simply a rare occurrence. As a result, it’s possible that “signs someone is addicted to heroin” may replace the more general term “heroin addiction” in online searches.

If you consider your own search habits, you’ll immediately see the value of long-tail SEO.

Plant the Seeds for Your Organic Search Success!

Remember, as we said earlier, SEO for drug rehab facilities is not a sprint – it’s a marathon. Don’t get too alarmed if you notice some dips in traffic, it’s often only temporary. Stay consistent with your strategy and continuously create good content, and the rest should fall into place.

If your marketing team or your ownership would like a complimentary audit of your website SEO and overall performance, reach out now to our team of experts and schedule a call.

Our team never seeks to replace an existing marketing effort, rather to augment what you are already doing well and truly take your efforts to the next level. Isn’t that worth a few moments of your day?