Checking Chiropractor Site Validity

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

In last week’s chiropractic traffic report I mentioned that we’d be addressing a series of ways chiropractors can do a little bit more research on the chiropractic websites they are doing business with. When a chiropractic directory company calls your office or you get pitched at a chiropractic seminar, you should have ways to check and see if the claims they are making are at all valid.

I’m going to show one screenshot, and talk briefly about very easy ways chiropractors can check up on websites they are thinking about doing business with. The next time you get the call from someone representing the #1 Chiropractic Directory on the Internet, or a salesperson at a chiropractic conference tells you “thousands of people search our chiropractic site every day” you’ll at least be able to get some basic information by visiting a single website.

The above screenshot shows traffic reports for two chiropractic websites, allchiro.com and adiola.com. The results are provided by a company called compete.com. Compete feels making data like this available helps to create a more trusted, transparent, and valuable Internet. I agree.

The service is very simple to use, you can check up on a single domain, or multiple websites at once. I believe you can search up to three if you’re not logged in, and up to five if you set up a free registration. They have paid monthly services, but I really don’t think it’s something the average chiropractor would have much use for. For webmasters and search engine optimization specialists, the Pro versions of Compete look like great tools to have.

Check the link above and visit the compete website. I’d suggest typing in your chiropractic domain to see what kind of results come back on your site. In my experience, none of the traffic checking websites are truly accurate when it comes to measuring information, but they do a pretty darn good job of at least giving us some rough estimates as to what’s going on with a website.

For example, checking the compete profile for planetc1.com I see that the traffic data is off by more than 50%, I know that because I check the traffic statistic logs on a regular basis. Here’s what we showed for April of 2009. This isn’t about visitors to Planet Chiropractic though, it’s about chiropractors not getting scammed when they’re being pitched online marketing hoopla.

If someone claims thousands of people are searching their site each and every day looking for chiropractors, wouldn’t it be at least suspect if a look up on their domain showed traffic at less than 10,000 people per month? Even if that rough estimate was off by 50%, 20,000 people in 30 days does not equal thousands of people per day. With tools like Compete you can view stats for the past year.

When a marketer tells a chiropractor they operate the #1 Chiropractic Directory on the Internet, shouldn’t there be some sort of traffic report to back that up? If someone told me they ran the #1 dentist directory on the Internet I’d expect to find it listed in the top of search results when I searched dentist directory or dental directory on Google, wouldn’t you? I would also expect it would be getting a significant amount of traffic, especially since it was the number one directory. I’d be surprised if it was only created a few months ago, and didn’t have many listings for actual dentists. If that were the case how could they be claiming they were number one? Maybe they ran an ad during the superbowl?

Some of this may seem real ranting like, but I’m getting tired of chiropractors e-mailing me after becoming disillusioned from questionable chiropractic marketing tactics, they’ve been solicited with.

Use the Compete website, and check up on any chiropractic directory or other website claiming to serve thousands of people, getting millions of hits, or anything of that nature. Let’s get this stuff out in the open. There are some great online chiropractic marketers out there, and I hate to see them get a bad rap, from all this other crap that’s being peddled.