There are many staples that make up a community, such as the park, the mom-and-pop restaurants and the downtown area. But a community isn’t complete without a healthcare provider. If you’re a medical professional, then appealing to the potential patients in your surrounding areas should be a priority.
Local search engine optimization, or SEO, is a marketing approach that focuses on drawing in traffic from your community. For medical providers, local SEO allows you to focus on the concerns that are relevant to the surrounding population’s demographics. For example, if you’re located near a big college, then you want to try to appeal to college athletes.
With the right tips and tricks, you can increase your patient load and help people in your area on their health and wellness journey. We’ll talk about five local SEO tips for medical professionals as well as how BURG+CO. can help put them into action.
Tip 1: Optimize your Google Business Profile
When people have a question or concern, Google is likely the first place that they turn to. In fact, there are approximately 70,000 health-related searches every minute. How Google perceives your business plays a role in how highly you’re ranked on those search engine results pages. Your Google Business Profile can give the algorithm the information it needs to determine your relevance and credibility. Its purpose is to manage how your business is shown across the search engine, including Google Maps.
It’s important to claim your Google Business Profile, meaning that you’re the very real medical professional who owns this very real business. After claiming the profile, you want to make sure that it’s as updated as possible. This includes:
- Hours of operation
- Phone number
- Address
- Website link
- High-quality photos
Another way to optimize your Google Business Profile is to use the posts function. It allows you to share timely information about your medical brand to increase engagement. You can create a post to share upcoming deals and events as well as business updates, such as a change in hours.
Tip 2: Enhance your website’s SEO
Once a person clicks on your site from a search engine results page, the quality of your site impacts how much they explore and how likely they are to convert into a patient. Search engines want to prioritize websites that check several boxes:
- Easy-to-use navigation — Menus should be easy to find with an intuitive design that helps them find the information they need as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- Engaging aesthetic — A website that has a low-quality design can be seen as a low-quality business by a user. Your website should have compelling visuals and interactive elements that appeal to your target audience.
- Fast loading time — People are likely to click off a site that doesn’t load in three seconds. Optimize the technical aspects of your site to accelerate the page loading time, like compressing images.
- Mobile-friendly — Effective digital marketing means meeting people where they are: on their phones. Google is likely to prioritize sites that are mobile-friendly to increase accessibility and user experience.
By enhancing these aspects of your website, you’re likely to be seen as a valuable, credible site by the search engine algorithms.
Tip 3: Leverage patient reviews and testimonials
When potential patients are trying to find a medical professional in their local area, they want to know the opinions of other people in the community who can understand the importance of finding the right provider. Having positive patient reviews and testimonials from locals can provide a vote of confidence for potential patients when booking their first appointment. If their neighbor likes you, they likely will, too.
Try to encourage people to leave patient reviews on Google by stressing the impact of their opinion and how their review can help others get the care they need. It’s also important to reply to all feedback that you receive online, whether it’s positive or negative. It not only strengthens your patient-provider relationships, but it also shows how you want to keep improving for the best patient care possible.
Reviews can help local SEO by showcasing your credibility. Recent reviews can also improve your rankings due to their relevance.
Tip 4: Use local keywords strategically
SEO works to help you rank high for relevant keywords. That’s why keyword research is an integral part of all SEO strategies. By determining the keywords that are relevant to your target audience, and which ones are slipping through the cracks of your competitors’ content, you can be sure that your content is relevant and providing value to potential patients.
Broad keywords aren’t as easy to break through the ranks as it is to target long-tail keywords, which are three or more words. This is where the power of local SEO comes in. By using long-tail keywords, you can target niche concerns that are specific to your local demographics. For example, if you live in an area that gets a lot of snow, you can focus on the keyword “safety tips for winter activities.”
You can integrate keywords into multiple aspects of your digital marketing efforts, including:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- URLs
- Image alt text
- Google Business Profile descriptions
Tip 5: Create localized content
The best part about local SEO is that you’re able to cater directly to the people you care about: fellow community members. People who seek medical professionals want to know that their providers truly care and have their best interests at heart. Strong patient-provider relationships are based on a sense of trust and genuineness. By creating localized content, you can show how much pride you take in knowing your target audience.
Along with creating blog posts that use local keywords, you can create patient education resources, such as downloadable infographics and e-books. A benefit of SEO as a medical professional is that you’re able to share information that can let people know when they have a concern that may need treatment. Patient education not only increases engagement but also boosts conversions.
Local SEO also gives you the opportunity to showcase your community involvement by sharing events on Google posts and creating blogs about local issues.
Are you a medical professional who wants to attract new patients to your website using local SEO? BURG+CO. can help
Sometimes your most loyal patients are the ones who are just a few minutes away from your front door, and local SEO can help you get them into your practice. Prioritizing local SEO not only helps you increase your website traffic and engagement, but you’re also able to establish yourself as a trusted authority in your area.
Integrating local SEO into your digital marketing agency is a process that takes plenty of time, resources and strategy. If you’re not sure how to get started, BURG+CO. is here to help. SEO is our bread and butter, and we know what it takes to get the results that you’re looking for from local SEO. Not only will we help you create the strategy, but we’ll also be with you every step of the way, from creating valuable content to tracking analytics.
Our team has years of experience in helping healthcare brands improve their digital presence to attract new patients and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more potential patients to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help.
Contact our team today for more information about digital marketing or to schedule a complimentary consultation.
