Why "Leased" Chiropractic Websites are a BAD Idea

What you don't realize about the leased website and the actual copy that goes onto the blog is that you don't own that blog content. So if you ever leave that leased website, your ranking is very likely going to leave with that company.

Hey everybody, what's going on? Dr. Jeff Langmaid here with Matt Adams from Empirical360. And today we're going to talk about leased websites. It's a big, big problem within chiropractic, but we're going to talk about why that matters to you and also some action steps that you can take to really be more independent and as you grow and scale your practice to do it in a way that actually works. So if we start right there, Matt, what's a leased website?

A leased website is a website that you will never own. So the payment is going to go on and on and on and on and on. So the, the web companies out there, and this is true amongst most of the major players in chiropractic websites as an entry point, I think as a chiropractor, when you come out from chiropractic school, you realize that you have to start your practice and you need to get into the marketplace and you need to have a website you're looking mostly at kind of like a low cost entry point because you don't want to invest so much straight from the jump. And so these companies out there, and it's a good model to get into the space at a low cost. They will give you kind of templated, not really full custom sites at a low monthly payment, but you're essentially getting a templated site, you're getting content, you're getting copy and you're going to have a web presence, but it's not going to cost you a whole lot to get started with.

I mean, I could pick out some challenges that I'm already hearing already, but let's dive into the content aspect of that a little bit because one area with search engine optimization is I have heard and I think that you've experienced, I'm interested to know some of the companies actually kind of lease their blog posts and lease what drives search engine optimization. And you can be held almost captive to that at a certain point in time. What are some things that you've seen.

The challenge with it is this, when you look at a leased website, it's a good entry point, it's a good starting cost to get into the space. But they will sell you these SEO packages where you need to have blog content for a local chiropractor, if you're in Tampa market. They put out blog content like every other week or every month or something like that. That is going to push your local ranking forward. But what you don't realize about the leased website and the actual copy that goes onto the blog is that you don't own that blog content. So if you ever leave that leased website, they retain ownership of all of that blog content. Which means that who really owns your organic ranking? And that's the pitch for them when they start off with, we're going to get you to rank number one and I'll just throw out like Wesley Chapel because it's a local market here in the Tampa area. So we want you to rank number one in local market for Wesley Chapel. We're going to do that by giving you blog content every other week or every month. And you should start to see your ranking climb. However, if you ever decide, hey, this isn't the website vendor for me and I want to change, I want to grow, I'm going to do something a little bit different. I want to scale into some other markets and you decide to leave that company, your ranking is very likely going to leave with that company. And whenever you migrate over to a new web presence, because they own that copy. Now, there are some ways that you can get around it. Truthfully, if you've got a good web company that's coming in and trying to right the ship for you, you can get into analytics and you can see what pages are actually getting traffic. And odds are it's not the blog content. But it becomes exponentially more difficult to get away from it after you've been in that, you know, system for that long.

That, to me is a big challenge because I've seen some, some pitches as far as, which doesn't make any sense to me, but I'll let you be the judge of this. As far as, you know, companies saying, well, we're going to guarantee to get you to the top spot. The way, the only way I know to guarantee to the top spot is to pay to be there.

Right.

You know, outside of that, to my knowledge, there is no way. Now, there are things, blog copy, video, there are things you can do to influence and to get them maybe on the first page or, you know, depending upon competition or. But to get ultimately into those top spots, that's where pay per click advertising comes in, if I'm not mistaken. Is that correct?

Sure. Pay per click is a functional way to get yourself to rank number one in Google organically and through paid advertisement as well. Think about this too, with Google, they realize that they make a ton of money off of pay per click. In fact, that's probably about 90, 95% of their revenue. What they've done is now Google, when you search anything organically, the first four things that you see, the first four responses that show up from that query are going to be paid advertisements. So even if you rank number one organically, guess what? You're still not going to be seen on that frame for your browser window because all those four advertisements are taking up that space. So you almost have to kind of double down. Here's the other thing about pay per click that's nice. When it comes to SEO and search engine optimization, Google favors or grades and ranks favorable conversions much better than than blog content. So if somebody clicks on your advertisement and they complete a form or they make a call and you get a favorable conversion from that, and that shows in analytics, well, Google says, well, hey, I know that the user of Google who put in a search query arrived in an advertisement that got them what they were looking for. And I know that because a form was completed, we need to rank this page higher. And in the meantime, guess what? As a chiropractor, when you got that favorable conversion, very likely that ended up being a new patient for you. So blog content. I don't want to diminish the value of blog content because it is good just from a brand standpoint and having depth to your website, it's probably necessary and it will help you rank over time. However, PPC can get you there quicker and it can help you make money throughout that time as well. I want to go back and hammer this point home. When web development company leases you a website and they say that we're going to get you to rank number one through doing this blog content and doing your SEO over the course of the year, they're not telling you what's actually accurate. They're saying we're going to get us to rank number one for you. That's a huge point because again, if you ever leave that company at that.

Point, if they own the territory of Wesley Chapel, chiropractor in this case, and now you're going to leave the. They can, quite frankly, probably source another chiropractor in Wesley Chappell, insert all of that immediately and that person's magically going to ride on the shoulders of what you've paid for over the course of the X previous number of years.

That's right. If you're a chiropractor in Wesley Chapel, a lot of what these companies do is they'll actually limit what they'll actually produce for you. For geographic SEO, we will only produce blog content for you to rank for Wesley Chapel specifically. But what if you wanted to get surrounding areas like Temple Terrace? What if you wanted to get like Lutz area, Land o' Lakes? Most of the audience out there is not familiar with that, but those are areas that are around Wesley Chapel. And so you would probably want to pull in some new patients from those areas as well. But they don't want you to do that. They want you to rank number one for that particular location, which is valuable.

Yeah, I think that gets back to being a selling point for them. They're able to basically say, and probably rightfully so confidently, that they're going to get good results because they've narrowed the niches down to these markets that are probably smaller than the average chiro regular circle of practice. So they can embed a ton of quote unquote competitors and everybody's having a good time as far as these super niche searches. But they're probably limiting their scope of practice or their circle of radius where they could probably draw a town two towns over or four towns, one to the north, one to the east, one to the west. But they're only getting this really concentrated piece of the puzzle which obviously can throttle a practice if you're not reaching as many people as you could or should. So I guess when we look at that, what are some alternatives? What are some things either docs can keep an eye out for decisions that they can make to kind of help the process. I mean, if there's so many challenges with this model, which I think there are, what are some alternatives?

It's kind of challenging. I look at it from a couple of standpoints. I think financially the appeal for a lease website is, is good because it gets you in. When you get out of chiropractic school, you're like, holy crap, I've got to start a practice now. There's marketing expenses, there's all these different expenses that I'm going to have to have. And so Elise website says I can get in for 200, $300 a month. Most chiropractors, I would assume if you go to school for eight some odd years and you pay the tuitions that you do to become a chiropractor, you're not going to say to yourself, well I'm out of school now, I want to be a chiropractor for about one, maybe two years. You don't lease in that context. When you want to own something, that's the exact reason that you buy a house. You know that your cash outlay is going to be a little bit more over time, but the end of it, you own it all. And if you want to build on an additional wing to your house, and what I mean by that is if you don't want to just have Wesley Chapel and you want to go out to the other surrounding areas, you have to have that flexibility through ownership to do that. So when you're looking at the onset here and getting yourself a website, make sure that you ask questions about what you actually own. Do I own the domain? Do I own the hosting for it? Because if that web company's hosting goes down, guess what? So does your site. And you don't have that flexibility. Do I own the copy? If I'm paying you for SEO, do I own that blog content if I ever decide to leave? And my thought is, if you paid for it, you should own it. If it's on your site, you should own it. So you want to make sure that you ask those kind of questions. Ownership of your web property goes a long way in terms of your scalability long term. Yeah.

And that's a key component. I think it's. Nobody should be held captive to a company, right? Service providers, whether it's a web company, whether it's what we do in the marketing realm, whether it's what you do in the marketing realm, the goal is to produce results and to be a good partner with somebody long term. And ultimately, if you're kind of feeling held captive due to a service provider, it's not a good place to be. If you're just tuning in, Dr. Jeff Langmaid here with Matt Adams of Empirical360. We're chatting about the challenges associated with leased websites. It's probably what, like 90 to 95% of docs out there have?

Pretty much every doc that I've spoke to.

And with that, I guess what are some. What are some alternative places? Platforms? So I think a lot of docs get concerned with a huge bill or like, how do I source a developer? It seems overly complex. Hey, it's not. The easiest route is to do a leased website. There's no question about that. But if you're going to say, as we are, the value is in owning the property, it's going to provide so much more downstream long term for you and your practice. What are some either hosting services, websites, what are some resources you think docs could or should look at?

You know, look into actual Web development agencies, not particularly, that are in the chiropractic space and that have this kind of model. I think that again, it has its place in the world. But asking the relevant questions when you get into a relationship like that. Subscription is a word that really scares the living crap out of me. Because a subscription says that, well, I'm subscribing to your service, but at the end of it all I don't own it. The other thing that I would say as well, don't let an upfront cost deter you from consideration of building out your own custom website. You do want to go with a vendor that has experience in the space. So if you're looking at a web development company, look for somebody that's actually done chiropractic websites before and has some examples that you can talk about. But again, make sure you ask the relevant questions. Who owns the domain, who owns the hosting, who owns the content? Because if you own all those things, then you own your actual web property and you can scale with it. If you don't and there's limitations in it and you hear the word subscription, ask a couple of questions because you're going to do yourself some favors with that.

I think that's a great point. And anybody checking this out, if you've built a custom website and want to drop the the person who built yours down below in the comments, be sure to do so. Other docs can check it out. That might be a fantastic lead for them. The last place I want to go is in reference to building, growing and scaling a practice. So one of the challenges that I've heard is that sometimes these leased websites don't play nice with others. So for instance, somebody decides at a certain point that they say, hey, my practice is doing well. I want to grow and scale this. Maybe I want to go into pay per click, Google AdWords, maybe I want to expand into these territories. And there's just been such challenges in terms of building the landing page. And it's just this don't play nice with others mentality. Is that what you've seen and what are some workarounds for it? That's a great point. This has been all about leased websites. If you have a leased website, ask those questions. Find out who owns the property, who owns the domain, who owns the content, if you decide to change. These are all important things. And the other aspect of that I think Matt just touched on was be sure that the back end is not locked up. There are some security things there. And I think that's where a lot of people lean into. Well, we don't want anybody messing with it. There is some truth to that, but the bottom line is they should be willing and able to work with other professional agencies to push your practice forward.

Because it's all for the benefit of your practice. You're investing the money to this service provider to be able to not have a website, to not have a landing page that people can go to to see what you're all about. You're investing into this because you want to grow your practice. And that's the bottom line. The other things that I would say here as well is again, consider long term costs when you lease a website. Odds are again, you went to chiropractic school to be a chiropractor for a long, long time. So if you consider $200 a year or $200 a month, that never goes away. I don't know what the math on that adds up to.

People.

It's like $2,400 a year and that is over 10 years, 24,000 some odd dollars.

That's a lot.

Yeah, that's a lot. And odds are you intend to be in practice for quite some time. Ideally, just like owning a house, you like to have a payment that you're making that goes away at some point in time or don't even have a payment at all. A lot of agencies out there, and us included, will offer a reduced web fee up front if you pay up front for your website and then you're just free and clear. And if you want to have SEO that's done for the year, you can do that as well. These are the long term considerations that you need to think about when you're getting into owning your or having a website. Leasing versus owning, I think that's a.

Very, very important point. So if you have been leasing a website, be sure to ask your, your vendor, your provider, your service provider some questions. Right, Those three questions. Again, I think the big ones are you know, who owns the domain and ultimately who owns this content. So if you decide to go a different direction and you're able to do so and not lose all of the hard work and all of the money that you've already put into it. So. And also if you are a doc out there looking to get into pay per click advertising, if you're looking to get into really stepping up your game, I'd Recommend Checking out Empirical360. We'll drop a link down below. They build awesome landing pages. They've gotten into website builds because of the challenges that they've seen in the marketplace. So we'll be sure to drop that down below and always at the smart chiropractor, you own that content. So if you're looking for social media content, check out the smartchiropractor.com where we have all the content. But I guess coming to a close. Matt, what are your closing thoughts on leased websites? Maybe an action step that a doc out there can take.

I would call your service provider and I would ask the questions, who really owns my ranking? Who owns this blog content? If you want to go out there and really find out some pretty crazy stuff, take one of your blog posts and drop the whole content into Google to find out what how many different places that exact content exists out there in the interwebs. And I think that you'll be surprised. When we look at any client that we're taking on, we have to recognize that they actually have a problem. And that's how service actually works. That's how actually, you know, agency relationships work. I am coming into doing business with you because you have a problem and I can solve it. If you don't have a problem, then I'm not going to do any business with you because you don't have an issue. But I look at the landscape for what exists in chiropractic and some of the handcuff stories that I've heard just over the last couple of months and it sucks. It's not fun to be in that circumstance. And these are things that when you're just coming out of chiropractic school or you're getting a website, you don't really think about the long term effect of who actually owns my ranking. Does my web vendor own my ranking or do I own my ranking? That's a relevant question to ask.

That is a very, very good point. For Matt Adams of Empirical360, I'm Dr. Jeff Langmaid with the Evidence Based Chirop. Hopefully you got some value out of that. Leave any comments down below. We'll be sure to check them and I hope you guys have a great day. Bye bye.