Word of mouth referrals are the best form of advertising, but they take time and they can support a medical practice that wants to scale quickly. If you run a successful medical office, you may already have an SEO (search engine optimization) strategy in place.
Over the past several years internet use has increased the importance of adopting SEO for healthcare businesses from pharmaceuticals to doctors’ offices, hospitals and urgent care clinics. However, while many businesses have an SEO strategy, they seem to ignore the value of Local SEO.
Contrary to regular SEO, Local SEO uses your geographical location through your Google My Business listing to target local patients. For instance, if you are a podiatrist in Texas, targeting patients in New York makes no sense since your location is inconvenient to say the least. Local SEO reaches customers in your area who are looking for podiatrist close to where they are searching whether it’s their home or business.
We’ve gathered some Local SEO strategies that can help your medical business rank higher, get more traffic, and book more patient appointments.
Google My Business has become a mainstay for marketing medical practices across the country. Your listing allows you to share their basic, necessary details patients are looking for when they need a professional like you: name, address, phone number and url (known as NAPU) as well as working hours, online reviews, images, videos, and more.
Each time a web user searches for your services on Google, your listing should show up. That means more visual impressions, more clicks, more calls and more appointments.
Your Google My Business listing should be optimized so that it appears among the top search results when a prospective patient searches for your practice area. Part of that is making sure your NAPU is consistent across all directors where you business is listed. If you changed your address or practice name recently, this can be a challenge to do on your own. Also, you should share high-quality content and encourage more Google reviews.
Web users are looking for personalized and relevant content rather than nonsense. Don’t post for the sake of posting—post because you have something relevant about your practice or specialty that’s helpful to potential patients looking for help.
When the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak, many medical practices created content around the virus’ symptoms, sources and treatments. Even facilities that didn’t offer treatment for COVID-19 created relevant content. They did, however, mention that while they weren’t diagnosing or treating COVID-19, they were triaging patients to facilities that were.
Make sure you create content around health trends, the latest research and events so that it’s relevant to your readers. This is a great way to increase engagement and helps your rankings.
Adding value-added content is just part of Local Search. Make sure your listing is optimized so that Google sees that you take your listing seriously.
Google has a sophisticated algorithm that crawls, indexes, and ranks listings. If your competitors are using high-ranking keywords while you aren’t, their pages will rank above yours. But, since many practices ignore their Google listings, this could be an opportunity for yours to rank higher.
Make sure you optimize your webpages—all of them. This includes your service pages, blogs, articles, press releases, video content, etc. Use high-volume keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, canonical tags, and short URLs to rank higher.
Make the most of link building opportunities to increase your reach. This means creating content for third-party websites to post and link to your site as well as link pages from your site to other websites.
Recommended Read: All You Need To Know About Creating Smarter Landing Pages
If your medical practice can use more patients, we can help. As one of the leading marketing agencies in Houston, we provide expert local SEO services to healthcare businesses across the area. Let us leverage our years of experience helping doctors, therapists and hospitals rank higher, generate more traffic, and book more patient appointments. Call us at (832) 321-3196 for branding consultation.
