By Michael Dorausch, D.C.
Was that a chiropractor you were looking for?
Sometimes I see the strangest advertising results. I am in Santa Clara California for a three-day Internet conference. As I often do while I’m in my hotel room, I’ve been doing research on local chiropractic advertising to see what’s popular in this area. I know that Dr. Gavin Carr is in the Palo Alto area but I’m not too familiar with what chiropractic offices are just outside my hotel room (Hyatt Regency on Great American Avenue), so I decided to do some online searching.
I discovered two or three local chiropractic offices doing some PPC ad campaigns online. One of the interesting results I found was for an advertisement trying to capture people searching for the term chiropractic.
Finding chiropractor offices in the bay area wouldn’t be at all surprising, but this ad mentioned nothing about chiropractic. Instead, the ad was marketing terms such as non-surgical spinal decompression, massage, and physical therapy. I didn’t get a chance to find out if it was a chiropractic office providing decompression services, and other therapy based services such as physical therapy or massage (not tushy massage), as the ads were gone the next time I went through performing a search.
I may be wrong but from a marketing perspective I think it strange that someone would be paying for placement in the search category of chiropractic and then delivering results for non-chiropractic services. Almost seems like false advertising to me. If somebody was seeking tissue massage I would assume that’s what they’d be searching for. Same goes for spinal decompression therapy (by the way search volume is considerably low for such a term nationwide) and physical therapy.
This reminds me of ads I used to see for orthopedic surgeons targeting the term chiropractic in PPC ad campaigns. I am no longer seeing orthopedic surgery type results in chiropractor type targeted keyword searches.
Reminds me to pay closer attention to what industries may being running ad campaigns directed at potential chiropractic patients. See my posts on Chicagoland Chiropractors and West Valley Chiropractic for related local search results.
4 Comments
I’ll bet $10 it was an ad for Front Street Chiropractic. The doc there does a ton of “tagging” in his website and blog, in addition to paying for higher placements in search engines. It is a chiro clinic, but focuses on DRX decompression. FYI the DRX people actually recommend advertising without using the term “chiropractic” because they feel their treatment is so different from “regular chiropractic”. Of course, the doc at FSC doesn’t want to miss any potential clients, so he would include “chiropractic” as a search word for his site. Check him out at backandwristpain.com
“Traction is drawing or stretching the body by a machine; this is orthopedic, or osteopathic; it is not Chiropractic.” BJ Palmer, Volume IV
According to the FDA there is only 1 non-surgical spinal decompression device that is FDA approved. Chiro offices are flying by the seat of their pants with an injury waiting to happen using divices that are manufactured with leaps and bounds and not proved to be effective in any way. Telling patients that this device is a subsistute for invasive surgery and giving false hopes and taking thousands of dollars is an outrage! To top it off some Docs are billling insurance co. when patients cannot pay the costs up front. They are using alternate codes and committing fraud all for the almighty dollar!
Interesting posts.
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