Every day, human beings create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, with most of that content living online.1 The competition for your autism treatment center’s clients’ attention has never been greater, and you need to do everything you can to get your content to your patients and their families. Link building for autism treatment centers can help.
While there are many valuable strategies to improve your visibility, none may be more effective than link building. On average, the first result on a Google search engine results page (SERP) will have 3.8 times more backlinks than the remaining results.2 If you asked an SEO professional, they’ll tell you that external links are among the top three most important Google ranking factors.3
But link building, although impactful, is anything but easy. In fact, 41% of large companies believe this is the most challenging SEO practice to execute.4 Building links for your autism treatment center website will be challenging but, like most difficult things in life, will also be well worth the payoff.
You know you need to invest your time and effort into getting backlinks, but how? Establishing a successful strategy takes a lot of patience and a basic understanding of the necessary steps to build backlinks. Here’s a four-step process to create successful link building for autism treatment centers.
Step 1: Get to Know Your Autism Treatment Center’s Clients
Although you’ve probably already taken on this task when you optimized your other digital marketing strategies, you can always learn more about your ideal clients. Your clients and their families are real people who are constantly changing and growing. So periodically reevaluating the characteristics of your target audience is worth the extra effort.
When assessing your autism treatment center clients, dig deeper than the basic demographic information. Aim to learn about their behaviors, preferences, and opinions. Then, combine this information with what you know about their demographics to form robust patient profiles. You’ll probably have several patient profiles to inform the different types of digital marketing campaigns you execute.
Part of learning about what your clients like is finding out what websites they visit. A 14-year-old potential patient probably visits different websites than their caregivers, right? Note these differences in your client profiles and use them to build your backlink strategy.
Step 2: Write Great Content
Most marketers use articles to attract backlinks. Making sure these articles are of the utmost quality is a given—you won’t receive a top spot on the search engine results page otherwise. But you also need to write articles your clients and their families want to read.
Go back to your patient profiles and review their tastes and preferences. Again, an adolescent patient won’t favor the same content their caregiver does. So you need to take those differences into account when planning your content.
In terms of backlinks, the longer the content, the better. Articles longer than 3,000 words get 77.2% more backlinks than shorter content.5
Step 3: Identify Opportunities
Go back to the list of websites your ideal clients and their caregivers typically visit. These are the venues where you need to pursue backlinks. But before reaching out to these websites, make sure they have solid domain authority. Most marketers believe domain authority is the most important indicator of backlink quality—and backlinks aren’t worth getting if they aren’t placed on high-quality websites.6
When you know what websites you’re targeting, reach out! Send a personal message, either via email or social media, and explain why your content is worth posting to their website. Explain the value of your article fully but succinctly. Whatever you do, avoid sounding like a bot wrote your message!
Step 4: Share Your Content
Post every article you write to your autism treatment center’s social media accounts. This will help you reach more clients and help you connect with organizations who can offer valuable backlinks.
Adding your content to your social media pages will have ripple effects that impact your backlink strategy in the future. The need to build backlinks isn’t going anywhere. Ninety-two percent of marketers agree that backlinks will play a significant role in SEO for the next five years.7
Now’s the time to step up your autism care center’s backlink game. Schedule a strategy session by calling 888.307.7304 to get started.
For a list of references, please contact us.