How to Use Google Trends to Attract More Patients | Podcast Ep. 393

Foreign hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. This week we are back with research in a really cool, really interesting study that's around Google trend analyses for scoliosis. So this is a really interesting article. I've never seen anything like it. We're going to dive into it and there's a lot of application not only in the land of scoliosis, but also in the land of how you can and should be presenting yourself online. I love the fact that research has gone Internet, so to speak, that makes me sound really old. But this gives a great opportunity to highlight where is the intersection between what people are doing, where the literature is going and how technology can play a role in that. We're going to dive into all of it on today's show before we get started. If you have an email list of people that you are not consistently communicating with, you are missing opportunity every single day, single month to drive reactivations. It's that simple. At the Smart chiropractor and specifically Patient Pilot by the Smart chiropractor, we do that for over 300 chiropractors around the world. We send nearly 2 million emails a month. And I can tell you straight up, if you have a list of about 1000 people, you can and should be expecting 26 plus click to call and click to schedule reactivation actions each and every month. So learn how we do that in in accordance with our 3x ROI guarantee, head over and schedule a demo atthe smart chiropractor.com Again, that is the smart chiropract. But as I said at the top of today's episode, we're talking research. This study came out just last month, so it is hot off the press. And it is titled Alternative and Adjunct Treatments for Scoliosis A Google Trends Analysis of Public Popularity Compared with Scientific Literature. I'll drop a link down in the show notes. If you want to check it out yourself, you are more than welcome to do so. But let's dive in. Get this. 97% of parents use the Internet for searches relative to their children's orthopedic conditions before scheduling their first appointment. If you're not showing up, you're not getting picked. That's very clear. 97% of parents use the Internet for their children's orthopedic conditions prior to their first appointment. So pretty much every single one of them. And 6% of those searches pertain specifically to scoliosis. So that's a lot of people searching all the time. For care treatment options. Now also, 90% of patients believe their Internet sources to be a reliable source of information. However, there is a previous study that Showcased only about 15% of sources out there have high quality information. So there is a big delta, a big gap between that. Right. 90% of patients believe what they see on the Internet and according to the researchers, only about 15% of that is really accurate. So that's not great news. We'd love to have great information available. And I think we see the fact with people making, quite frankly poor decisions about their health all the time, that they are being inundated. This is not where this research study goes, but I'll take the liberty here. They're inundated with pharmaceuticals, with advanced intervention, intervention super, super early on. I'm sure that's not the way they're thinking about it through this study, but that is the way I think about it because that is the reality of what's happening. So it is super important. If you are interested in attracting the attention of here's the take home message in my opinion with those first few stats. If you are interested in adolescent children care, however you want to define that and specifically orthopedic conditions. So this really extends. If you are a sports chiropractor and you're thinking of taking care of kids on teams in high school and college and middle school or before, and orthopedic conditions is pretty much Sports Chiropractic Care, 97% of parents are searching. So the question is like literally I would go on Google. After you listen to this podcast, type in your town, insert condition here of what you hope to be attracting into your practice and see if you show up. If you're not showing up, you're missing the opportunity because literally 97%, every single one of them is searching online. And if you show up, you have great information, you make it easy for people to say yes, well, they're going to show up in your practice more often, which gives you at least the opportunity to see if you can take care of them. So really, really important Google Trends is used to. If you're not familiar with Google Trends, Google Trends is used to track the popularity of search inquiries over time. So Google Trends identify whether things are becoming more popular, less popular in rel in relation to search terms. So it's a really important indic. And given that scoliosis screening is so prevalent specifically here in North America at schools. Right. That screening takes place. I don't know exactly what grade, but this screening takes place at a certain time by the school nurse. And, well, child exams are all over the place throughout the United States. This is a big deal because people are hearing about scoliosis, therefore they have questions about scoliosis. Now, what you might be saying, well, what's the prevalence of scoliosis? And I have the answer for you. It's about half a percent to 5%. So somewhere between 1 out of every 200, 5 out of every 100 adolescents will have some form of scoliosis. So providing really great information, and I'm gonna say beyond what this study says, providing actionable information to build trust, to build rapport is really, really a great thing for your practice if you're interested in taking care of those cases. And by the way, as you can probably already see, this applies to things well beyond scoliosis. So almost no matter what you're interested in, search Google in your town, see if you're showing up in relation to scoliosis. The five most popular alternative or adjunct treatment search terms were. Drumroll please. Chiropractic manipulation number one, scroth exercises number two, physical therapy number three, Pilates number four, and yoga number five. So when people are searching for scoliosis care and treatment, they are searching chiropractic quite often. But it's also nice to be aware of the competitors and the competitors in this case are for the attention. What is going to show up when people are searching scroth exercises? Might it be a good idea to write a blog on your chiropractic website about scroth exercises, about physical therapy, about Pilates and about yoga if you want to show up when people search for it? I'd say the answer to that is a resounding yes. I love this kind of strategy stuff because I think about it like this gives you the opportunity to get traffic from other places. So writing about your feedback, your take, so to speak, on our scroth exercises, good or bad? Is physical therapy a good choice or a bad choice? Is Pilates a great choice or a not so good choice? Is yoga a fantastic choice or where are the shortcomings? Putting out content around that will help you not only track for chiropractic and chiropractic related search terms, but it'll also help you track. You'll gobble up all the traffic. It'll. It'll help you track and rank for the terms that are competitive to yours, which is a really, really great way to go about it. It's how I have built multitudes of businesses, generating hundreds of thousands of visits each and every month. To multiple different websites is a lot of that type of strategy. So if you have any questions on that, you can of course hit me up on the side. So Google trend data was aggregated in this study for the last 17 years because that's as long as Google trend data has been around. So 2004 to 2021 and this was relative to searches in the United States specifically. So here's some interesting aspects of what they found. Chiropractic and yoga were more popular to be searched in the summer and winter months. Interesting. I'm not sure how much you can action off of that information, but maybe there's a topic of tying the word summer or winter or the activities of summer or winter or now is a great time now that it's summer to address scoliosis, maybe you're on winter break. There are an abundance of opportunities to strategize around the seasonality of search in order to maximize your availability to show up. Now one thing that they do highlight in this study is they say, quote, many health related search queries yielded advertisements and information possibly biased by financial gain. That's the quote, unquote. I maybe I'm a little biased when I say this, but I take that as almost this negative connotation. It's like, yeah dude, that's how Google works. You pay and, and there's nothing wrong with that by the way. And by the way, when you're looking at this from a surgical perspective, golly, I hope chiropractors are spending an abundance of money because the alternative care options, what I say alternative, I mean rods and screws, I mean advanced surgical intervention, I mean those types of things, medication use is just, it should never be done in my opinion, beyond red flags and rare exceptions before conservative care is exhausted. Specifically movement based care. And I'm saying specifically chiropractic. Now do I think chiropractic adjustments cure scoliosis? No. But I do think segmental motion, regional motion and whole body motion are critical. If you have somebody that is developing and has scoliosis to maintaining the best trajectory possible, then you layer on active care exercises and you start to really put together a potent combination to take care of the body naturally, which I think is what we're all after for sure. So certain treatments as they kind of outline here, including chiropractic, PT scroth exercises have risen in popularity, interestingly, while yoga has declined in interest over time. So not that many people searching for yoga and scoliosis compared to in the past. But there's a rise in chiropractic, PT and scroth exercises as well. So for example, chiropractic with scoliosis has gained linear growth in terms of Internet popularity. It continues to grow AKA you want to show up for that term if it is something you are interested in attracting into your practice. They kind of highlight here. I have a bone to pick with this line here, but they say the current literature on chiropractic manipulation for patients with scoliosis is limited to case reports and small observational studies with no controls and some reported serious adverse effects. I have seen such limited serious adverse effects across pretty much all studies related to chiropractic. It just seems unnecessary. Especially when a few lines down in this text they highlight Google Trends can provide insight to orthopedic surgeons as to which specific treatment options are gaining popularity and guide their literature search to provide the most accurate and up to date information for to their patients. That is just. That's. That's rich right? You're highlighting serious adverse events related to chiropractic a few lines before and then you're talking a few lines later about how orthopedic surgeons can use this to communicate when we know that most of them most of the time are completely guideline discordant with how they go about recommendations. And that's just my two cents. So physical therapy, yoga and Pilates have shown similar beneficial outcomes as adjunct of treatment, although literature on the latter two yoga and Pilates is less robust. I think in terms of straightening spines, there's no question that Harrington rods, rods and screws can straighten a spine. Now if we're talking about functional outcomes, and I get it when there are extreme cases, when you are going to be looking at cardiovascular issues down the road, please believe me, I am all for doing what is necessary. But but when you see mild, mild, moderate cases with no organic issues on the horizon, no necessarily, there's not as much of a curve to cause cardiac issues or pulmonary issues long term, which isn't real concern with significant curves. Why are advanced interventions being offered, especially when conservative care has not been exhausted? And to be super clear, when I say that I always view conservative care being exhausted, meaning you've exhausted all conservative care. You did not take an NSAID for six weeks, which is often as far as insurance reimbursement is quite often what happens to check the box is you did x amount of pt visits over x amount of weeks one time you did NSAIDS for 6 weeks or something to this effect. It is not a checklist of actually exhausting conservative care so that's really my gripe with things, is understanding that exhausting conservative care should mean really exhausting all of the available options because different things work for different people. And there's no question based upon the individual, based upon their commitment, based upon their spine, based upon the dynamics of the human body, some things will work better. Some people will do better with more relief, maybe even with correction to a certain degree with chiropractic care. Others might perform better with physical therapy, some with scroth exercises. There's a whole host of ways people can find relief naturally. And I believe it's incumbent upon all of us as doctors in our communities to ensure that we're telling that story so people clearly understand that the only option is not with advanced intervention. So they highlight here as well later on in the text, which I'm just like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this. Spinal fusion surgeries tend to be more popular in the summer months as well as in December. Okay, what do I take away from that and what should I think you should take away from that? If you're going to run some paid advertising you or if you're going to write some blog posts around why spinal fusion surgery might not be the best option most of the time, might be a good idea to launch those just around the summer months or in December, which is I don't believe the goal of what these researchers put why they put this in the study. But that's take home message I think we can use as conservative care providers. So they highlight in conclusion studies showing that as little as 25% of current orthopedic information online is accurate. But the gist of it is chiropractic manipulation tends to be or chiropractic tends to be a hot search term in regards to scoliosis care. And pretty much everybody that's seeking out, whether it's scoliosis care for their child or any orthopedic complaint. Wow, talk about opportunity. 97% of parents are searching online before making that first visit. So that is my big take home message from this study is to understand those statistics, start to think about the strategy of how you can use those in your business, in your practice, in your communication online. That is the power of this study. That's why I'm glad they put it out and why I believe there's some really great take home messages. Now before we wrap up, I want to say a few words about about power Step. Power step orthotics are awesome. They're what I use and they are willing to hook you up. If you have not heard me say this before, with a free sample pair. They support this podcast. You should support them. You can check them all out@pro.powerstep.com sample use the code EBC for evidence based Chiropractor to pick up a free sample pair. I cannot recommend it enough. Additionally, if you have not checked out Chiro Spring, Chirospring is the best solution for chiropractors by chiropractors and they have AI. This is an EHR with AI built in with billing. I mean this is cool. And they believe in their products so much that they not only support this podcast, which is great, but they're willing to hook you up with a hundred dollar Amazon gift card for completing your demo. You can do that@chirospring.com offer chirospring.com offer I'll drop that link down in the show notes and if you have not left us a rating or review for this podcast, I'd love to hear from you. It helps more docs find out about it. So please take a moment of your time. Tap how many stars. If you write a line or two. That would be so so helpful and I appreciate you. Thank you for being a chiropractor. Have a fantastic week in practice and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit theevidencebasedchiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.