I am not affiliated with BrightLocal or any other services mentioned in this post.

If you have an osteopathic practice, you may decide you want to do your own SEO. Or you might want to learn some of the theory so you understand what you’re paying for when you hire an SEO to work for you. Whether you want to do it all yourself or hire someone else, understanding how local SEO works will help you immensely in promoting your practice online.

I recommend the BrightLocal Academy to anyone wanting to learn local SEO. BrightLocal is a local SEO tool that covers search grid, citation building and management, rank tracking, reputation management and other local SEO tools. It costs about £40 per month, but the courses are completely free and the platform offers a 14-day free trial, allowing you to use the tools whilst going through their courses.

Each course is about 10-15 hours of video and very easy to digest. BrightLocal are adding more courses all the time. Of the ones I’ve seen, the main course “Level up your local SEO with BrightLocal” is the most useful, a comprehensive guide to how local SEO works that will leave you understanding exactly what you need to do online to promote your local business. I also watched half of “How to land your first local SEO client”, but found the presenter to be very patronising, like a primary school teacher. Fortunately, that’s not a very relevant course to osteopaths (although it will show you why so many local SEOs charge a lot of money to do very little!).

BrightLocal recently added another course about GMB optimisation, which I’m interested to watch as GMB optimisation isn’t difficult and something I always tell business owners they can do themselves. It will be interesting to see if they have just pitched the course really low, or if they have loads of amazing ideas I hadn’t thought of! There’s also a local keyword-finding course coming soon with the patronising lady. This will be interesting but might not be so much use to osteopaths since Google stopped us finding local search volumes for medical queries around the time of the medic update.

I’ve been really impressed with BrightLocal since discovering them last year. The platform itself is really good, the courses are good and their support is also excellent. If you want to know more about local SEO, they’re a great place to start.

You might also like to check out the design rush website.