SEO is a very challenging part of running a business. While the Internet offers limitless opportunities for you to build your brand and reach a wider range of patients, competing with others who have the same goals as you can be a tough task.
However, you can compete with the bigger brands by tailoring your marketing efforts towards your local area where you can increase your local success.
What we find is that bigger medical corporations focus their marketing efforts on a nationwide map which is why we are better able to help multi-location medical practices hyper-focus on their local area and dominate.
People these days simply do not have the time to go out and look for service providers that can fulfill their needs. They all use their devices to find businesses that can give them the products that they need or the services that they are looking for. We can’t really blame them.
The Internet is a great source of information that with just a swipe on your smartphone screen or a couple of clicks with your mouse, you can have or find what you need in an instant.
We have seen multi-location medical practices benefit a lot from using SEO. By providing an online portal for their patients, medical and dental practices will be able to give their patients the important information that they need such as a list of their individual locations, phone numbers, online appointment booking, online reviews for each practice, the list of services that each office provide, and much more.
Managing the SEO aspects of one medical practice is already a daunting task. But, if we are talking about medical practices with multiple locations, it can become even more complicated. With multi-location medical practices, you have to optimize each location so you can promote them in their uniqueness and in their targeted areas for future patients.
Med Rank Interactive in Charlotte helps independent and multi-location medical and dental practices to increase their brand awareness and new patient numbers by providing effective SEO and digital marketing services.
With our 10+ years of knowledge and expertise in Local SEO, we are able to help our long list of medical clients with multi-location practices optimize their website for each individual location.
If you have a multi-location medical practice, we have prepared a Local SEO guide so your business can rank better against local competitors in the search engines. Here are a few tips that you need to consider when setting up your multi-location medical practice for success in Google and on the Internet.
Consider a Single Website for Multiple Locations
Instead of creating an individual website for each location for your medical practice, you can just create a single website and make dedicated pages for each location. This way, you will drive a ton of authority to one website as your practice grows.
It is more challenging to market each location separately on individual websites. Instead of having for example 20 pages for one website with multiple locations that you need to optimize, you have 20 pages per individual website for all of your locations.
If you have 5 locations with 20 pages each, that is 100 pages you need to optimize versus one website with 20 pages. The latter would be time and cost-efficient and more effective for your local marketing strategy.
One website with individual location pages will have a positive benefit from an SEO standpoint. All the traffic that each location page will generate will add up when it comes to the overall traffic on your website thus creating a solid online presence for your overall brand. However, for you to achieve all of this, you should know how to properly optimize the multiple location pages of your website.
One way of optimizing the location pages of your website is to create a consistent name and branding for each location. For example, we created a consistent name for each location for our client Modern Family Dental Care. Through this, search engines and visitors will easily understand that Modern Family Dental Care has three locations in North Carolina and patients will have an easier time navigating those pages.
Google likes consistency as well! Our friends at BrightLocal stated that 90% of SEO experts believe accurate citations are important to local search rankings. As a result, Google likes consistency.
The business name needs to be 45% accurate according to SEO experts who took a survey with BrightLocal. However, as a part of the naming convention for each location and local ranking factors based on what we have seen to work, it needs to be consistent across every online platform, whether that is the website, citations, Google My Business, Ads, etc.
As an example of the correct naming convention, when we started working with Modern Family Dental Care, they had 3 locations. When we evaluated their online naming consistency, we say that each location’s name was Modern Family Dental Care.
Each location had a unique address, phone number, landing page, etc., but they all had the same name “Modern Family Dental Care”.
We made one simple change and it has paid dividends. We updated each location with a location-based naming convention.
For example, Modern Family Dental Care – Concord Mills, Modern Family Dental Care – Davis Lake, and Modern Family Dental Care – Northlake.
This allows users to quickly see where the location is located by their new naming convention. In addition, Google can now see the keywords we are targeting in one of the most important SEO elements, which is the name/title.
Since each location page is unique, you also need to create unique content marketing strategies for each page. This means that you can’t just copy the content off of one location page and paste it to the others and swap out the locations. Location pages should have their own keywords and content such as images and videos.
One way of creating unique and engaging local content is to publish local community involvement for each location as blog posts on the centralized website. Yes, it is important for each location to be involved in their community so we can brag about what they are doing through the blog or press page.
You can also highlight the offices for each location, the staff (i.e. individual doctors) and the unique services and promotions that the locations offer. Aside from the content, each location page should also have unique SEO elements like meta title, meta descriptions and alt texts.
Location pages also serve as contact pages where visitors can see the contact details of your website. Hence, it is necessary for location pages to include important information such as the address, phone number, operating hours, office staff, Google map (embedded for navigation), links (i.e., to review sites and social media channels) and virtual tours if applicable.
We worked with Friendly Dental Group which has 30+ dental practices in the North and South Carolina area.
You can check out their individual location pages to see their uniqueness. Because of this strategy, the majority of their location pages rank on the 1st page of Google. This was a lot of work, but it can be an impactful strategy if implemented correctly.
Optimize GMB Profile for Each Location
A Google My Business (GMB) listing is a free way to increase the online exposure of your local medical practice and is a must if you want to rank in Google for local keywords such as; “orthodontist in charlotte nc”.
If you have claimed and optimized your GMB profile, your business will appear on Google searches as a trusted listing. Yes, it is more complicated than that. If you want us to help, book your free consultation.
GMB profiles show up at the top of the fold in the Google search results, so it is imperative to optimize your GMB profile. Because of this, people are more likely to click on your GMB listing that contains your contact details.
In optimizing your Google My Business listing, you will want to make sure that the business categories for each location is unique to that location. Make sure each individual location page has its own GMB profile, with its own reviews and information. You should avoid linking the listings to the homepage of your website so Google can easily understand that there are multiple locations for your practice.
Local Link Building and Citations
Creating your GMB listing is only the first step. To make sure that you are building authority for your each location, you should dedicate your efforts to long-term and ongoing SEO strategies – link building and citations.
Make sure that you are building local and niche authoritative citations/directory listings for each location. It is imperative that you include all of the most important information on each directory listing such as the name, address, hours, and phone number across all of your citations.
Don’t go out and purchase a list of directory listings or citations once, you need to be doing this every month. We create manual directory listings that are niche and locally specific. We have seen better results for our medical clients by doing this.
To get you started, here is a good list of citations by niche and locality to start with:
Citations by City: https://whitespark.ca/best-citations-by-city/us/
Citations by Category: https://whitespark.ca/best-citations-by-category/us/
Citations and directory listings aren’t enough to rank at the top of Google for your multiple locations. So, what else do you need to do?
Well, what is local link building?
Local link building is an SEO strategy wherein businesses try to get authoritative domains to link back to their websites. Basically, you will want other websites and businesses in your area to link to yours.
It isn’t that simple as your goal should be to build relationships in your local community. You want to add as much value to other local partners as much as you want the backlink to your website.
We can help with local link building in your community! Just ask here.
Why would you want that?
These kinds of links let the search engines know that your website is a trusted one in your location, and you can outrank your competitors once you get enough backlinks. To get more backlinks, make sure that your content is compelling and interesting enough that people will link to it.
You can also reach out to other websites in your niche to create content for theirs. This is called guest posting. When you do content for other websites, you should include a link to your own content. This backlink will help your website to be more valuable for search engines.
Lastly, you sponsor other professionals to do content for you. This way, you will be able to utilize their audiences by discussing topics that are related to your medical practice.
Online Reviews
One way of showing up at the top of Google and building trust with potential new patients is to encourage reviews for each location. The more reviews you have, the higher your chances are in ranking at the top of search engines.
We help increase reviews of local medical and practices by using My Social Practice, an inexpensive way of earning and managing reviews for each location. We help and train our clients on how to use the software so they can build their brand more effectively and attract new patients.
Schema Mark-Up and Aggregated Reviews
Schema mark-ups are special HTML tags used to define pieces of information on a page. By utilizing schema mark-up for reviews in each location page, you will be able to increase your location pages click-through rate in the search results. This will make it easier for searchers to see the reputation of each of your location pages.
This is an advanced local SEO strategy and does take a team like Med Rank Interactive to execute this type of technical code on the website.
We Can Help Grow Your Multi-Location Medical Practice
All of these things might be overwhelming especially for medical and dental practitioners who do not have knowledge in SEO. Med Rank Interactive will help you build your brand online for each location so that you can focus more on providing quality services to your patients.
Our multi-location clients such as Carolina Pharmacy, Hadi Medical Group and Modern Family Dental Care have found online success with the help of our experience in optimizing their website and online assets for the search engines and their targeted patients.
For example, Carolina Pharmacy currently sits at the top of the Google search results for keywords such as “pharmacy charlotte nc, pharmacy lancaster sc, and pharmacy rock hill sc.”
Contact us so we can help you manage your multi-location medical practice website.
