4 Top Reasons Your Healthcare Practice Needs Local SEO

The public is becoming more discerning when choosing medical practices, doctors, dentists, and other providers in the healthcare field. The days of families seeing the same doctor generation after generation are not as common. As a healthcare professional, your duty is to ensure that your patients are healthy and you are probably quite good at it. But what if your client base isn’t growing?

SEO, or search engine optimization, solves that problem. Millions of people now use the internet to find what they need, and this includes a doctor. But how does your practice get the attention of all these people?

When your website is search engine optimized, your business will appear higher on the search results for people to choose from. Some of these people–hopefully many of them–will then visit your website and make an appointment. Your practice will grow as many of them become paying clients/patients.

Here are some specific reasons that your practice will benefit from local SEO services, a more focused form of SEO. And, by the way, you don’t have to be the expert in SEO yourself; expert marketing agencies (like My KPI) can do the work for you, turning a minimal investment in SEO into a much-improved return on that investment.

What Local SEO Will Do For Your Practice:

Raises Visibility and Increases Accessibility

Your goal on the internet is to be highly visible and you want potential clients to notice your practice quickly and easily. Say, for example, if a homeowner cuts his arm sawing tree limbs in his yard, he wants an ER clinic that is close by. And he wants one that is at the top of the internet search he (or his partner!) does for “an ER clinic near me.” He doesn’t have time to sort through the search results to find the one closest to his house.

Having your practice’s site optimized for these types of searches will raise your visibility. Google recognizes keywords that those searching on the internet use consistently when trying to find a specific kind of doctor, dentist, or other practitioners. It then matches that search with local results. Over time, if your site is optimized properly, this moves your business up in the search results. Your goal should be to dominate the list by appearing first (or in the top three, a placement called the local “3 Pack”) on the results.

That bleeding homeowner doesn’t have time to sit down and view pages and pages of results from his search for “an ER clinic near me.” In fact, it’s been found that most people view only the first page of results. When you are consistently showing at the top of those search results, you have achieved brand dominance.

That’s what local SEO for healthcare providers can do for your practice: know what keywords are critical for any search of your type of business and make sure those words appear in meaningful ways on your website, allowing you to be found for those keywords.

Boosts Credibility and Patient

Boosts Credibility and Patient Confidence

Let’s face it: The public trusts the internet to make credible recommendations. That’s the case because those searching have followed up by becoming customers of the top-ranked businesses. If all goes well once they get there, the business will continue to hold its top ranking and even more customers will flock there.

If your patients are unhappy, though, after their first visit to your dental office (for example), that top ranking will be lost once negative coverage begins to appear online. This is why online reviews have become so important. It is a direct way for customers to express either positives or negatives about their interaction in your office. Potential customers seek out those reviews and make their decisions based on the experiences of others.

So, it’s not enough to be credible through a top ranking. Your dental practice has to provide quality experiences for patients to keep their confidence.

Great reviews are gold because they are built on credibility and confidence. The more good local reviews you have, the higher your ranking in the Google search results will be.

Targets the Local Client Base

Local SEO services for your practice can take this process an important step further. An SEO expert can be proactive and target potential patients in your service area who are more likely to really need what you have to sell.

A parent in the local Pennsylvania area who needs an orthodontist for their children doesn’t need to be shown internet results for general dentists in Detroit. They need a specialist in their own geographic area. With good, local SEO on your website, parents who contact the orthodontist’s office in Glen Mills, for example, are more likely to be converted to paying customers.

The game plan that local SEO uses is to reach more potential local clients and then increase the size of your patient base. The key to doing this is ensuring your website pushes the right message to the right group of people: those who have more likelihood of turning into paying customers. It is a purposeful way to use your resources.

Offers an Affordable Solution

Offers an Affordable Solution

This purposeful targeting of potential new clients for your healthcare practice is not only effective, but it’s also affordable. Any cost of hiring a marketing agency for local SEO will be far outweighed by the return on new patients. It is a cheaper alternative in today’s digital world than paying for ad space in traditional media. It is also cheaper in the long run than other forms of digital advertising, like PPC.

It’s a strategy that is Low Risk-High Reward. Your upfront cost is low compared to what the bill would be for other kinds of advertising. Patients who are already looking for what you have to offer are much easier to attract and keep than using a scattershot method that is hit and miss. That method is simply money wasted.

Resources are limited in any business. It’s to your benefit as a business owner to use those resources wisely and with the highest possible return for the investment. In the case of building your client base, it’s being laser-focused on local SEO.

The Essential Tool in the Toolbox

As you can see, local SEO is critical for healthcare practices in today’s digital world. To help grow your business, it is an essential tool that should be in your toolbox of strategies to be successful.

My KPI is the resource you need in your marketing toolbox. We specialize in local SEO strategies specifically for healthcare providers. We know what works and how to bring more targeted prospective patients through the doors of your practice.

Contact us today to get started!

 

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