Local SEO for Doctors: Why It Works

For private practices and independent clinics and hospitals, local SEO for doctors is essential. But why does it work as well as it does? Explore why building your online presence for local patients is essential and how to implement the strategies that work best for doctors.

Local SEO: The Best Way to Find New Patients

In the digital age, the best way to find new patients is to help your new patients find you first—before you even know they exist. These are some of the reasons why the savviest doctors are using local SEO to attract new patients.

Match the Modern Patient Journey

Much like drinking water directly from the garden hose and renting movies from a video store, the days of looking up doctors in the Yellow Pages are long behind us. Instead, your patients are looking for a doctor with Google.

By providing information about the conditions you treat and the services you provide on your website, you can establish your credibility as a medical professional early on. That way, when the people looking you up are ready to take the next steps to become a patient, they’ll be more likely to make you their first choice.

Take a Proactive Approach to Patient Feedback

It’s a tale as old as time, and one that’s frustrated healthcare community relations specialists for decades. Doctors and physicians tend to get more negative reviews than other types of businesses. Patients are often vulnerable when they’re looking for healthcare, so even the slightest perceived misstep can lead to negative reviews on your social media and business pages.

However, by monitoring your reviews, you may begin to notice some patterns in the feedback you receive. For example, if multiple people describe a negative experience with your billing department or a specific nurse, this can give you indications of where you could make adjustments to improve their experience.

Even more, if your patients tell you in the clinic that they had a positive experience—encourage them to talk about it. This can further bolster your practice’s reputation and make it easier for other patients to know what it’s like working with you.

Get More of the Patients You Want

Creating the right content for local patients can help you attract more of the patients you want, especially if you have a specialty you like working with.

For example, suppose you practice both family medicine and sports medicine but want to get more patients who are student-athletes. By creating website content that addresses common injuries and conditions to help them prevent issues later in life, you can show the patient’s parents that you specialize in that field and can set their athlete up for a healthy life, even after a full career in wrestling or cheerleading.

Make Your Marketing Go Further

If you’ve already got a marketing strategy in place for your practice, local SEO can make it even more effective. This is because it adds an inbound angle to your otherwise outbound marketing campaigns. By bolstering your healthcare practice’s local SEO, you’ll be able to get even better brand recognition and overall ROI on every campaign your practice runs.

Top Local SEO Strategies for Doctors

Any type of good, sustainable SEO plan requires multiple strategies to succeed. Here is what we’d prescribe as part of a local SEO plan for doctors and other medical practices.

Use Google Business Profile for Your Practice

Google Business Profiles—previously called Google My Business—allow you to build domain authority for your website while staying engaged with potential patients who are looking for doctors like you. They also allow you to showcase how satisfied patients have felt about the care they’ve received from you.

Although it’s not directly tied to your website, most local healthcare SEO services recommend setting up a Google Business Profile for your practice. This allows people to find you more easily when they’re using Google. It also gives them an easy, effective way to contact you to book an appointment in a matter of minutes, rather than sifting through pages and pages to find out how to do it.

Get Your Name in Local Online Directories

Chances are, you accept most major forms of insurance as part of your clinic’s business model. Chances are, your best patients who are most likely to pay are also using their insurance provider’s directory to look for physicians.

That’s where it can pay dividends to get your practice’s name, phone line, and a link to your website in an insurance company’s directory of local providers.

In addition to getting your name into local medical directories online, it can be helpful to connect with insurance companies so your name is listed in their website’s “Find a Doctor” features. This allows patients to find you more easily when they’re using their insurance provider to find doctors who are accepting new patients.

Add Location-Based Pages to Your Practice’s Website

When people start searching for services in their area, they tend to use phrases like, “family medicine doctor near me.” Google can differentiate that they need services that are specific to their area, so it will provide them with the nearest results and show them how far away each family medicine doctor is from their location.

To leverage this, add location-specific pages to your website to show them where you operate. For example, if you practice family medicine in Grand Rapids, MI, it can be helpful to create pages with unique content talking about the medical services you offer in Grand Rapids.

Similarly, if you also offer a clinic in the suburban city of Grandville, you could also create a page talking about the medical services you offer there, in Kentwood, or any other number of places that are relevant to the communities you serve.

Build Relevant Inbound Links to Your Site

Done right, building inbound links can be an invaluable way to grow your website’s credibility and authority. However, link-building is practically a full-time job in its own right. Some of the common strategies include:

• Developing and executing a strategy for posting guest blog entries on other websites
• Setting up your social media pages to be active and have relevant links back to your website
• Working with insurance provider websites to ensure their website links to yours as a trusted healthcare provider

This can take hours each week and requires some specialized expertise—hence why recruiting a local SEO service for healthcare is essential.

Cultivate Good Reviews

As any hospital’s community relations professional can attest, your online reputation takes a long time to cultivate and can get destroyed in seconds with a few bad reviews. However, putting in the effort to get more good reviews on your site makes it easier to handle the impact of future bad reviews.

Encourage your satisfied patients to leave positive reviews on your Google Business Profile, social media profiles, and other sites. This allows you to bolster your local SEO and your reputation simultaneously.

Work with a Local Healthcare SEO Service

Chances are, everything we’ve listed here so far sounds like more than a full-time job. That’s because it is. Cultivating a doctor’s local SEO isn’t something that an office assistant can do with their spare time (which they likely don’t have to begin with).

Working with a dedicated local SEO service allows you and your staff to focus on what you do best while still growing your brand’s presence. Local SEO services also use expert specialists who know how to implement all these strategies effectively, so you’ll get more for your marketing dollars than if you tried doing it in-house.