This article was first published on February 9th, 2022, and was last updated in March 2023.
There are lots of ways to search for a physician, pediatrician, physical therapist, or any doctor’s office in your area. One of the most popular ways has been through searching on search engines such as Google. To help your doctor’s office stand out against your competitors in your local area, we’ve compiled a list of 10 tips to help improve local SEO for doctor’s offices. Let’s get started!
Why is Local SEO for Doctors Beneficial?
Local SEO for doctors is what helps your patients, or potential patients, find your doctor’s office online. Without implementing local SEO into your website or online profiles, patients will have a harder time finding you and your services. A lot of individuals search for businesses online and your doctor’s office should be present and available for them. Someone new could move into your local area and be looking for a doctor’s office for a physical. If you don’t establish an online presence, it gives your patients a reason to choose your competitors over your office.
Search engines are always active in crawling websites, including your doctor’s office website, for new information and updates. Be sure to always update your doctor’s office information to be up-to-date for your patients and search engines. This builds credibility and reliability about your office which your competitors might be lacking in. When you’re able to be there with reliable information for your patients, search engines will reward you over time with local SEO benefits.
Local SEO for Doctors – 10 Best Practices
1) Optimize for Local Search
Unless they have someone in mind, patients tend to search locally for a doctor’s office near them. With this reason in mind, it’s important to have an online presence and be known in your local area. Having and targeting keywords that include your location helps potential patients find your office and schedule an appointment with you. Besides keywords, you can include your location in your copy, meta tags, meta descriptions, and titles to help patients find you. People often prefer to visit a doctor that’s located nearby (especially if something unexpected was to happen). Optimizing your website with local SEO will benefit both your business and your patients.
2) Reliable NAP Information
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. These three pieces of information are what your patients typically look at when finding your business online. It’s important for SEO purposes to keep these pieces of information consistent throughout your website, social profiles, listings and directories, and online profiles. If you were to make a change to these pieces of information, it’s important to update every place that it’s listed or displayed. This helps not only your patients get the right information but helps search engines know what information is trustworthy and real when crawling your website. Most of the time patients will need additional information by calling your doctor’s office. So, be sure to have your NAP available to help them out.
3) Create a Google My Business Listing
Especially for local SEO purposes, having a Google My Business listing is vital in getting recognition within your local areas against your competitors. Having a GMB listing helps patients locate all of their doctor’s office information in one place! You can include your NAP information, website link, hours of operation, reviews, and the engagement your social profiles have had. Having an active, present, up-to-date GMB profile helps set you apart from other doctor’s offices in your area.
Especially if you have a specific field, these profiles can help show your patients your professionalism and expertise in your specialty. It’s important to be specific about the services and products you’re able to offer your patients. Oftentimes people search for specific services. Listing it in your GMB profile can be the best way to reach potential patients directly. Creating a GMB profile is one of the best first steps your doctor’s office can take in improving your online presence and improving your SEO.
4) Generating New Content
One of the best SEO ways to build traffic to your website is by creating new content for your patients or for users. If there are specific articles (especially that relate to your specific specialty) write about them! Find valuable information for your patients that helps answer questions, helps them learn, or could be entertaining to them. Especially in the medical field, there are always different questions that could arise or common issues discussed. Being up-to-date and informative through original content can help benefit your patients and users in their time of need.
Building original content also helps build authority and credibility in search engines’ eyes. The more original and reliable information you post on your site, the more search engines recommend you as a trustworthy source in rankings. You don’t want to bombard your website with loads of articles just to add content to your site. If the articles are beneficial and searched for, then your SEO will see the benefits and help rank your website higher. Having original content can help add value and resources to your website and patients in need.
5) Creating Landing Pages for Services/Products
If your doctor’s office offers multiple types of services and products, it’s important to build dedicated landing pages for each of the services and products you offer. For example, if someone was to search for plastic surgery they could find multiple services that are included in the idea of plastic surgery. When you don’t include specific landing pages for a specific service within the idea of plastic surgery, your patients will give up finding out if your office offers those specific services.
When you create individual landing pages for them, users can find them easier on your website because they are more specific and in one place. They don’t have to go through a long breadcrumb trail or scroll through the entire page to find what they’re looking for. For SEO purposes, make individual landing pages for your services and products to help users and potential patients find what they’re looking for easily.
6) Joining Local Listings and Directories
Here at greatinflux, our goal is to help small businesses be found by patients looking for them. One of the best ways we can help do that for you is by claiming your business in our local listings. Adding your business information to local listings and directories helps your doctor’s office reach out to more potential patients. The best part about it is that most listings are free to add your information to it! You could list your information in places like Wellness, Healthgrades, WebMD, etc. Adding your doctor’s office to specific medical niche directories is a huge step to help specific patients find you. It helps make their search less hassle-free and gets them right where they’re looking.
7) Check on Your Reviews
Reviews have now become one of the most important factors that an individual looks to first when analyzing your dental office’s website. New patient reviews can have a HUGE role in SEO for doctors as well as your patients choosing your business. Especially in the medical field, certain products and services can be scary to individuals. For them, looking at reviews can help ease their nerves about whether or not they want to invest in them. It’s important to never ignore your reviews and take action when needed.
If you happen to have a positive review, be sure to compliment them and thank them for trusting your doctor’s office. If you receive a negative review, never leave it unanswered. You can respond back by asking for more details, apologizing for the negative experience, or answering details that might need more insight. To generate more reviews, you could send a follow-up email or text asking them how their experience was. Reviews are needed now more than ever for SEO purposes. Your doctor’s office should be responsible for regularly checking up on them.
8) Build High-Quality Backlinks
Creating an effective backlink strategy helps build credibility and trustworthiness for your site. Let’s say you were to write an article about the flu. In the article, you appropriately link to a credible source that helps expand or explain what you were linking about. Adding backlinks to sites that search engines already have trust with can help improve the quality of your articles in search engines’ eyes. It shows that you aren’t linking to spammy websites and that your content has good intent. Find ways to include quality backlinks within your content to help your SEO improve over time.
9) Have a Strong Social Media Presence
Social Media is a great way for your doctor’s office to be personable and up-to-date with your patients. You can update patients on certain topics. Such as getting their flu shots, getting a physical done, or services that will help improve their overall wellness. Adding design elements and projecting your doctor’s office goals on social media is extremely aesthetically pleasing to patients and helps grow a connection with them. You can also highlight certain events you may hold at your office or special promotions going on during the holidays. You could even join in on TikTok dance trends and make them your own! Being creative and active with your social media accounts helps improve patient engagement. It also helps bring more traffic back to your website when you link your social profiles to them.
10) Video Marketing
One of the biggest trends in the past 2 years has had to do with video marketing. Platforms such as TikTok have grown exponentially and have made users more interested in videos that explain or entertain them. For your doctor’s office, you can use video marketing to your advantage. As we mentioned earlier, joining audio trends on social media by creating TikTok dances can help gain traffic. You could also create video marketing campaigns that highlight services and products and put them on your website. Showing off your office space could also help draw more patients to your storefront by making them feel welcome. Medical services can sometimes be scary to specific individuals. Showcasing your doctor’s office can be a way to make patients feel more comfortable about coming in.
Get Professional Help Today for Local SEO for Doctors
As you can see, SEO is needed now more than ever for your doctor’s office. There are a lot of different steps and processes that are needed to be taken to help get your office ranking on top. For doctors and offices that work with people all day every day, it can be hard to find the time to get SEO done to succeed over time. greatinflux knows how hard this can be and has the solution for you!
At greatinflux, our goal is to help small businesses grow online through affordable and accessible SEO services. We’re there every step of the way to help you figure out SEO when you’re not able to. Learn more about our affordable small business SEO services. See how we can help your doctor’s office’s digital presence today with a local SEO campaign made just for you.
