Local SEO for healthcare professionals puts you, a healthcare professional, on the radar of patients looking for your services. If you own a medical practice, you need local SEO to become visible to your ideal clients. This article will show you how optimizing local SEO for health care organizations will help you in the quest of getting discovered by more patients.
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Role of Local SEO in Healthcare Marketing
Did you know that 46% of the people doing an online search are looking for a product or service near their location? Hence, optimizing your local SEO is crucial for healthcare marketing and if you intend to market your healthcare organization to the people in your immediate proximity. General SEO strategies can set up a marketing rocket for your health care business, but your local SEO is the fuel you require for the rocket to take off.
Are you wondering why local SEO is so mighty? Optimizing for local SEO means your healthcare business will be listed at the top when your ideal customer searches for “primary care provider near me” or “dermatologist near me.” It also means that more potential customers in your city will keep coming across your business. More people will also arrive at your landing page. Once they are impressed by your well-designed, local SEO-optimized, and interactive website, they will begin to interact with you online and get to know you and your brand. Finally, your informative content optimized for local SEO for healthcare will bring in more traffic. It will do so because you used keywords closely aligning with your customer’s search intent.
How Digital Marketing for Healthcare Improves Local SEO
In recent times, marketers across all industries have realized the enormous power of digital marketing in elevating their business. The very same digital marketing tactics can help improve local SEO for healthcare. Let’s look at the steps involved in digital marketing for healthcare which also improves your local SEO.
Flesh Out a Content Strategy
Producing consistent and valuable content in the form of medical tips, good hygiene practices, and other helpful resources on your website increases your credibility. But you must add keywords related to your geographical location across all pages on your website. Geotags on all pages are sure to improve your local SEO. Then, the patients in your vicinity will get impressed by all the helpful content on your website and decide that you have good authority on the subject you are explaining. Therefore, in their eyes, you will look like someone who knows what they are doing.
Harness Your Social Media
Your social media profiles help in giving your healthcare practice a brand voice. Social media is a useful tool for showing how much you care about your patients in your city. Social media allows you to humanize your organization and show the faces behind your brand name.
Use Your Email List
Using emails, you can casually drop into your patients’ phones and start speaking directly to them. The advantages of emails over all other digital marketing channels are that:
- You can personalize the messages. You can ensure that the emails you send out begin with addressing your contacts by their names. Sending out such emails can be automated using several email marketing services.
- You can segment your contact list based on their individual problems and send out separate emails containing solutions for different segment groups in your contact list. In this way, you can cater to your patients’ exact needs instead of overloading them with unwanted information.
- You can automate the process of sending out newsletters. The newsletters you send out can be to welcome and onboard new patients, birthday wishes, updates about your healthcare organization, or educational and informative content. Always ensure that your patients’ privacy reigns supreme, and in no way do you divulge the name or mannerisms identifying a patient.
Make Your Website Your Launch Pad
First, you should make your website responsive across all devices. Research shows that 90% of people who land on a page leave immediately if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So ensure you optimally compress your interactive visuals, pleasant graphics, and other media to allow your website pages to load faster. Also, see to it that the website is intelligible on all devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
You’ll also want to include keywords related to your city or locality across all your web pages. These keywords will inform search engines like Google regarding your location. One place to use these keywords is on a blog. There, you can write articles regarding local events you conducted, like local blood donation drives you ran for a charity or a free flu-shot event you conducted for the community. Also, add content about a new professional joining your practice, a unique state-of-art treatment you offer that nobody in your region does, or videos on how to stay safe during allergy seasons in your area.
Of course, it goes without saying that you should include your address, working hours, and phone number in the footer of all pages. This makes it extremely easy for potential clients to contact you.
Tips to Improve Your Overall Healthcare SEO
Create a Google Business Profile
When you have a Google My Business profile, your healthcare practice will be listed on top of the search results along with two other practices, sometimes even above the paid ads. So, a Google Business Profile listing helps you appear immediately in front of your prospect’s eyes. Creating a Google Business profile is easy as Google guides you through every step, and it is free to get a listing. Essentially, you get more benefits for less effort. Who wouldn’t want that?
All you have to do while creating your business profile is provide some pieces of information. The data will be regarding the name of your practice, your phone and email ID, your address and working hours, interior and exterior photos of your practice, and a short description of your services. When someone near you searches for a service similar to the one you provide, your practice with its location on the map will appear. Without a doubt, proximity plays an essential role in a patient’s decision-making process.
Get Listed in Local Directories
Even though you might have a Google My Business profile, it is still important to get listed in the local directories where your potential patients will inevitably search for a service similar to yours. Some of the best local directories where you can list your healthcare practice are Yellowpages, Citysearch, bbb.org, Google Mapmaker, AMA Doctor Finder, etc. Some of the above directories need you to call them and provide information about your practice to set up a listing.
Always ensure that your information, such as your address, phone number, and the order in which they are listed, are consistent in all directory listings. Consistency in information helps crawlers like Google to recognize and index your healthcare practice and display it at the top of a google search result page. Local patients can also find you in any directory they search for a service similar to yours. This will improve your local SEO and, therefore, your overall healthcare SEO.
Encourage Your Patients to Leave Reviews
Did you know that 84% of patients decide to consult a healthcare professional based on online reviews? Online reviews have become as important as word-of-mouth recommendations to build your reputation. Google also prioritizes a site with more reviews and ranks them higher.
So how can you go about collecting reviews from your patients? Consider giving out printed flyers with instructions on where to leave a review to your patients at the front desk when they leave after treatment. You could also create straightforward navigation to your reviews page on your website. In addition, ask your staff to encourage the patients to leave a review after a treatment. Once you get these reviews, you should always respond patiently to them, good and bad. Doing so helps you to make a good impression on prospects who’ll read your reviews.
SEO Design Chicago and Healthcare SEO
After reading this article, you know why local SEO is essential and how to optimize local SEO for healthcare. If you’re still unsure how you can begin incorporating these techniques into your marketing strategy, reach out to SEO Design Chicago. We have helped healthcare professionals around the US and Canada improve their local SEO presence. Over time, this improves their business as a whole.
FAQ:
- Why is local SEO important to health care marketing?
- What are the steps in digital marketing?
- Why is a fast website important?
- Why should I create a Google My Business profile?
- What are common local directories for health care professionals?
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