A Clinic Owners Guide to Local SEO

No matter the size of your clinic, your location(s) can only gain from a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

With more website traffic comes more patients, so making a name for yourself online is both beneficial and necessary in today’s market.

Getting your company’s website in front of your target audience is the goal, and SEO allows you to achieve it. We know your priority is running your clinic and taking care of your patients, but for your success, it’s imperative that your Local SEO campaign is on point, too.

Today, we’ll give you our tried-and-true take on what you can do quickly and effectively to get your clinic noticed using Local SEO.

Make Local SEO Work for Your Clinic

Local SEO simply means you’re optimizing your website for your clinic to appear in local searches. This strategy makes you more visible in the local search results when someone types in their query for your services.

Because you have a physical location, this is an essential step in your overall SEO campaign. 

Here are ways to get your local SEO on track fast:

• Set up your Google My Business (GMB) profile- this allows you to rank higher on Google Maps, gives you local credibility, and potential patients will love how easy it is to find you and learn about you (you’ll love it, too)
• Ask for reviews and always respond to them
• Add in some local flair with localized content on your pages, using the local vernacular, local keywords, and local events to make users feel like they know you, and you know them, as it contributes to your local SEO campaign
• Create specific webpages for each area you service; location-based pages give more opportunity to get in front of faces in the geographical areas you want to be noticed
• Get your NAP (name, address, phone) in all the local directories that are relevant to your clinic
• Optimize for both mobile and voice search 

Local SEO is a must-do for clinic owners hoping to gain a more substantial online presence, get a higher ranking from Google, and get a more significant patient-base. 

Install Google Analytics  

No matter how busy your business is, installing Google Analytics is a MUST and takes mere moments of your time.

What is the significance of this? This feature allows you to gather information about your visitors and their actions. Understanding your users' behavior gives you greater awareness on your end, allowing you to give them more of what they want, resulting in improved SEO and conversions.

This is a data-driven feature that provides you with a wealth of information about your current and potential patients.

When tracking your website activity, you’ll learn:

• The user’s session duration
• Pages viewed per session
• Bounce rate
• What campaigns are bringing the most traffic and highest conversions
• Sources of your traffic
• User demographics and location
• Your best and worst-performing pages
• Where cart abandoning takes place
• And more

The Get Clear platform make it simple to integrate your website with Google Analytics. Simply set up a Google Analytics Account and then link to your website.

Navigation and User Experience (UX)

Although navigation and the UX are indeed separate entities, they go hand-in-hand. If your navigation isn’t user-friendly or proves difficult, your visitor will leave your page before they have a chance to learn how great your clinic is and how comprehensive your services are.

When users come to your site, they want to easily and quickly find what they’re looking for.

No matter how amazing your clinic’s site looks or how unique and relevant your content, or how entertaining your videos, it will all be for naught if they aren’t easily accessible.

Also, keep your most important and best-ranking pages within a few simple clicks. Getting your user to pivotal pages, such as your booking page, services page, or commonly treated symptoms page, should be a painless journey for them.

However, UX is more than just navigation.

Here are some basic tips to keep your users happy:

• Stick to the basics of website normalcy- keep the navigation bar at the top (you can put it in the footer ALSO, but not ONLY), keep your logo on the upper left side, have a “Contact” tab in the navigation bar, social media links at the bottom of the page, call-to-action (CTA) buttons at top and bottom, etc.
• Use the typography hierarchy system for easy readability of your content- using different sized type for titles, headers, subheaders, etc.; breaking up your content in this way is for more than readability, but it also creates a more visually appealing page and allows the reader to find what they’re looking for quickly   
• Use nice looking and easily readable fonts; feel free to bold or change copy color in flattering ways that make sense to further enhance specific content
• Keep paragraphs short and sweet
• Use bullet points and numerical lists
• Keep the page clean with whitespace / empty space
• Make sure your links, buttons, and CTAs stand out, so the user knows to click them
• Optimize, optimize, optimize- this is so incredibly important because a quick optimization can do so much! It will generate faster page-load times, make images clearer, bring you the right audience, ensure better mobile results (YOU MUST OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE DEVICES), and so much more

Optimize

Yep, we just discussed this, but it needs some further attention. There are several optimization tactics to do. Below you’ll see a list that may seem overwhelming, but we assure you, they are all simple to take care of. Some require keyword research and use, while others just require the click of a couple buttons on the backend.

• Optimize for keywords- one phrase per page
• Optimize your title tags and meta descriptions (these are the title and description found on the search engine results page)  
• Optimize your images and videos
• Optimize for mobile (this means your website is designed for UX on mobile devices with content looking as it should, clear CTAs, quick loading times, etc.)
• Optimize for page speed and load-time
• Optimize for local searches (a must for your clinic’s success, as discussed above)
• Optimize for on-page SEO
• Optimize for off-page SEO 

Create Compelling, Unique Content

Your local SEO strategy relies heavily on your content. It’s important to point out that content isn’t only copy but imagery as well. Adding imagery to your site has become so popular that the technology on the backend to drop visuals into your webpages has become a fast, streamline process that anyone can do.

Adding your how-to videos, pictures of how you work with your patients, and infographics that detail your services will go over well. Doing this is a way to break up copy, add personality, and provide a faster, more accessible story to your user and potential patient. 

Your content should: 

• Match whatever your ideal customer is searching for
• Be relevant, unique, and truthful
• Link to trustworthy websites and within your own website
• Make it easy for trustworthy websites to link to you
• Stay topical (don’t forget about your old content, updating and refreshing content is so fast and simple and can get you a quick boost!)
• House your keywords, but not stuffed in making you sound spammy

Images and videos should all be optimized on the backend with keyword text, so don’t forget to take this step; it’s an easy way to garner more of Google’s trust in the authority of your site.

URL Structure

The URL is the link that appears in the search bar on any given webpage. Creating a nicely structured one is yet another solid SEO win. Google likes it and your prospective patients will, too.

Here are the basics:

• No extra vanity words; your URL should be straight to the point
• Use your keyword or phrase
• Easy to read and understand, short and clean
• Use hyphens for separation
• Keep your URL consistent with your title
• No punctuation unless intended
• Keep it all lowercase unless intended not to be

The structure should look something like this: 

https:www.yourclinic.com/services/example-of-service

Understand that if you don’t create this simple-to-read URL structure, no one else will either, including Google. You may end up with a string of letters and numbers that look messy and no one can remember. Don’t let that happen to you, it comes off as spammy and looks unprofessional. 

Your Local SEO Takeaway

While SEO is an ongoing, breathing strategy with revolving algorithms and constant updates, these tips are consistent. The best way to navigate your SEO plan is to find the areas that are holding you back and fix them. That’s where Google Analytics will help. After you understand how your users are reacting to your site, you can make educated decisions on how to maximize this knowledge and get them in your clinic. 

An above-par user experience combined with above-par content provide a stellar domino effect: your users trust and like you, your website, your company, they then take the action you want them to take, which gives you business, and finally Google takes notice and pushes you up their coveted ladder.

The user + you + Google make an excellent team.

 

About The Author

The blog was written by friend of Clinic Sites, Darcy Sullivan. Darcy leads Propel Marketing & Design. If you’re interested in taking your clinic to the next level, contact Darcy today, and get started.