Google provides a massive amount of online traffic to most healthcare firms. To book a doctor’s appointment, more than 60% of patients start the process by searching for the best doctors online.
If you look at the large healthcare firms in the United States, you will notice that more than 80% of their online traffic comes from Google. However, unlike creating a website, ranking it higher on Google search engine results is not simple. Due to the strong competition, you need to take extra steps to ensure your success.
This is the primary reason why local SEO strategies have become an essential part of both medical and dental practices that want to leverage the benefits of the internet and boost their profits.
The local SEO is one of the most famous parts of search engine optimization techniques that will help your website rank higher in the search engine results as per the location-specific searches.
With the help of local SEO, you will be able to capture the attention of the local patients to your healthcare firms. This is because sometimes patients search with location-specific keywords such as "doctors or dentists near me". In such cases, the search engine algorithm will use the IP address of the searcher to connect them with relevant healthcare firms near them.
When you contact an SEO company, they will implement effective local SEO strategies that will help you grow your healthcare firm. Here are the effective Local SEO strategies for dentists and doctors.
Google My Business, now known as Google Business Profile, is one of the important sources of boosting online visibility. Google My Business is extremely capable of helping small businesses boost online exposure while also showcasing the offerings of the business to relevant and potential customers. Google My Business will provide you with different types of tools that will allow you to create an accurate, optimized, and informative listing that will allow your patients to know important pieces of information about your healthcare firm.
If you want to leverage the proper benefits of the local SEO strategies, you need to ensure your healthcare firm is listed on Google Business Profile. Keep in mind that sometimes Google will automatically create a profile of your healthcare firm on Google My Business. In such cases, you need to claim the listing, take proper steps for verification, and check the accuracy to ensure the listing is not showcasing irrelevant information that would drive away your potential patients.
Keyword research is probably the most important part of local SEO as it will allow you to know the perfect keywords that you need to optimize so that Google and other search engines will be able to link appropriate and high-quality queries to your listing and capture the attention of the potential patients.
Local keywords are different from the regular keywords as they come with more location-specific phrases. If you want to use local keywords as a part of your SEO tactics, you need to determine the requirements of the patients.
What is their requirement when finding dentists and doctors? What terms do they use while finding healthcare firms? You need to come up with a couple of phrases and create a proper list. Once you create a list, you will be able to find relevant keywords that have low competition and high search volume. As the search volume of the local keywords is generally lower than the regular keywords, you’re encouraged to use smaller SV keywords too for effective results.
While using local SEO, many business owners fail to determine whether they should include CTA on the home page of their website or create different landing pages for different types of keywords.
The best option for your healthcare firm is to link the CTA on the Google My Business listing to the keyword-relevant local landing page of the website. You will be able to use this landing page as your next communication step with different types of relevant clients and share some great pieces of information about your business with the help of keywords.
You need to consider the health problems of the users and try to address them specifically on the landing page of your website. Instead of talking about your offerings, you need to talk about the benefits of different healthcare treatments.
Do you know what backlinks are? They are the URLs of your website that can be placed within the content or blog post of other websites. The process of acquiring these URLs is known as link building.
If your website has a higher volume of backlinks, Google will favor your website over the potential competitors as it sees these websites as authoritative, informative, and trustworthy. People prefer using backlinks are high-authority and relevant websites for general SEO. However, things change a little in the case of the local SEO. While using local SEO, you need to focus on receiving the links from local websites so that Google can ensure your online presence is trusted in that specific locality. You will also be able to rank the search engine results of your website higher.
This is another effective local SEO strategy dentists and doctors should use. Patients always search for doctors who can help them solve their health issues. Most importantly, they always search for doctors who have a good reputation so that they can achieve peace of mind while going through the treatment. This is why more than 97% of online users read reviews.
Therefore, most healthcare firms need to pay close attention to the online reviews of the company to influence the decision of the patients while choosing the best healthcare firm.
You also need to ensure that the GBP listing of your healthcare firms features enough positive reviews as they will make your firm look professional and trustworthy. As per Forbes, online reviews are extremely important.
But keep in mind that most people leave negative reviews instead of positive ones. Apart from providing high-quality services and treatments, you also need to encourage the patients to leave positive reviews.
These are some local SEO strategies for doctors and dentists. If you want to leverage the benefits of local SEO for your healthcare firm, make sure you contact us.
