We always find it fascinating when treatment centers come to us having burned through an agency or two, who claimed to be vertical specialists in digital marketing for addiction treatment centers that have poorly written and unoptimized titles for their site’s pages. Can you say “SEO 101”?
Believe it or not, the titles of pages still play an incremental role in how search engines such as Google will rank your pages within search results for whatever keywords or phrases you’re targeting. Yes. We said it still plays a role, so why is it more often than not a rehab digital marketing firm or in-house personnel in charge of SEO seem to miss the mark when it comes to writing effective titles for their pages? This is, indeed, a great question and one we intend on addressing in this post.
Now before you go about writing titles based on assumptions, do yourself (and your facility) a favor and make sure you do exhaustive keyword research to glean insights in terms of how people are proactively searching for your treatment services. If your center is OP & IOP focused, you’ll want to isolate your research to the area in which you will get admits at the local level. For other rehab centers that also offer services such as PHP, you’ll definitely want to look at broader, less geo-targeted search behavior.
Now let’s take a look at keyword mapping.
As an example, let’s say you’re operating an OP & IOP facility in South Florida and have a site that is 10 pages in length consisting of the following:
Homepage
Outpatient
Intensive Outpatient
Cocaine Addiction Treatment
Heroin Addiction Treatment
Alcohol Addiction Treatment
DBT Therapy
Equine Therapy
Admissions/Contact Us
About Us
The above pages are pretty straight forward in terms of what they’re about, but be strategic about writing titles for each.
Our philosophy is simple. Let the keyword research drive the process of titling your pages.
Based on the keyword research and associated volume, it’s time to map relevant phrases to those pages for not just writing optimized titles, but for rehab center SEO in general in areas such as meta descriptions, H1’s, and H2’s, content, anchor text, navigation scheme, etc., but these will be covered in future posts.
Let’s start with the home page. You know, based on research, people are searching for “rehab Miami”, “drug rehab Miami”, and “Miami addiction treatment”, and “alcohol treatment center Miami”.
In this example, the ideal way to write the title for the homepage with the above understanding of how people are searching would be to lead off with the main phrase coupled with other targeted phrases like this: “Addiction Treatment in Miami – Drug and Alcohol Rehab Center”. As you can see with this example, we’ve managed to capture all of the main keyword phrase opportunities in a succinct and highly relevant manner for your audience.
Please note the above example is NOT the only way to write an optimized title. It is to say, however, that the above title is a great way to target all of the main keyword phrases and variations based on the phrases you’ve selected for your home page in this case.
Other effective titles we’ve seen for clients also include items such as their phone number, “Insurance Accepted”, “OP & IOP”, etc.
Based on the above example, do the exact same thing for all of your pages throughout the site. Also, please try to keep your titles under 60 characters in length since research has shown that roughly 90% of the time, Google will display your complete titles correctly in search results, depending on the actual search phrase and its relevance to your title, of course.
Parting Note:
Writing titles isn’t exactly rocket science, but it does require some research and finesse. Look at the keyword research, your target audience (think luxury vs. free vs. insurance-driven, etc.), and test different titles to see which performs best in terms of click-throughs and conversions for your site’s pages. Your impressions and click-through rates from search results will tell the tale via Google Search Console data analysis. If you don’t like what you see there, don’t be afraid to switch things up.
Reviewed by:
Matthew Travers
Rehab Marketing Expert
