If you own or work for a clinic, understanding how to boost local brand awareness is vital for accessing a wider pool of potential patients in the local area.
Different types of clinics, such as dental, beauty or even a general healthcare facility, will all inevitably require different strategies, keywords and focus areas. In this article, we’ll cover five local SEO strategies to help clinics boost their revenue.
What is Local SEO?
Most clinics are already implementing different SEO tools, such as paid ads, content creation or email marketing to reach a global audience.
However, local SEO - essentially, a subset of SEO - is crucial for businesses with physical locations, or those that serve specific localities and regions.
Local SEO focuses on optimising online web presence to rank for location-specific queries, such as ‘beauty clinic near me’. Furthermore, it usually includes building relevant backlinks and managing local business listings on various platforms such as Google My Business, Yelp and more.
The main difference between SEO and local SEO is in their scope and target audience.
SEO aims to improve a website's visibility and ranking on a global or national level, while local SEO focuses on improving a website's visibility and ranking for specific locations or regions. Local SEO is more targeted, and it helps businesses reach a more localised audience, improve local reputation, and drive more foot traffic to physical locations.
There are many different strategies you can employ when executing your SEO strategy, such as the following:
Optimised & Location-Specific Landing Pages
Put simply, optimised location-specific landing pages are web pages that are specifically designed to rank well in search engine results for a particular geographic area or location.
These pages are typically used to attract visitors to a clinic’s website when they search for a product or service in a particular city or region. By optimising landing pages for specific locations, healthcare organisations can improve their local SEO efforts and attract more local customers to their website and physical locations.
The main goal of an optimised location-specific landing page is to provide visitors with highly relevant and personalised content, based on their location and search intent.
This is done by incorporating location-specific keywords, phrases, and information on the landing page, such as the business location, the services offered, and local contact information. This helps the page to appear higher in search engine results when a user searches for a related query in that location.
Optimised location-specific landing pages should also have a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) that encourages visitors to take a desired step, such as filling out a contact form, calling the clinic, or making a purchase. This can help to increase the conversion rate of the page and improve the overall effectiveness of the website's local SEO strategy.
Because these pages are designed to provide a more personalised experience for visitors from a specific location, this can increase the likelihood that they will engage with your organisation, take action, and ultimately convert into customers.
Enhance User Experience With Mobile-Friendly Accessibility
Improving mobile usability and overall user experience should be a key factor when optimising your local SEO strategy.
Around 60% of all organic searches are done on a mobile device, so ensuring your website is mobile-friendly can actually lead to higher engagement rate for users, a lower bounce rate and possibly even better conversion rates.
Improve Local Visibility by Targeting Location-Specific Keywords
One of the most important things you can do is target specific keywords that people might use when searching for your products or services online. Using location-specific keywords can help you reach a wider audience and improve your chances of being found by people who are searching for clinical services like yours.
For example, if you were looking for a healthcare clinic nearby, you might search Google for “health clinic near me” or “nearest health clinic to me,” illustrating the importance of optimising your keywords specifically around SEO healthcare.
When searching for a medical practice in this way, potential patients and customers are most likely to search for your location, rather than anything else (such as a specific doctor’s name).
Google My Business
Google My Business (GMB) is an essential part of any business’s SEO strategy. It helps to boost your online visibility, local search rankings and customer engagement.
GMB is an extremely valuable tool for customers when it comes time to make a decision. Whether you’re a small business or an multi-location clinical organisation, Google My Business can help your customers find and connect with you online, whether through Google Search or directly through Maps.
Furthermore, it helps your overall brand if implemented correctly.
Users are more likely to visit a site that looks reliable and professional, as opposed to a clinic that doesn’t have reviews or any clear information about it. Ensure your GMB profile is optimised to include contact information, a logo, reviews, directions and links to your social media pages.
Ask for Reviews
Getting positive feedback from customers is always rewarding, but you could go one step further and ask your clients directly to leave you Google reviews. According to Invespcro, 88% of people trust reviews at the same level they trust personal, word-of-mouth recommendations.
Good Google reviews can not only generally build your brand reputation, but can also build trust within your local community - which is where your target audience is most likely to be.
The same study from Invespcro shows that 90% of people usually browse reviews first before clicking through to a website, and around 72% of people say that they are more likely to trust a local business if it has positive customer reviews.
Clearly, reviews are important, and that includes the negative ones - don’t try to hide or ignore them. The best way to deal with negative reviews is head on - respond to the review and leave further contact information so you can follow up and resolve the issue. This shows that your clinic is interactive, customer-focused and trustworthy.
Clinics: Optimise Locally for Big SEO Wins
As we’ve seen, there’s a huge range of SEO tools that can boost revenue and visibility for clinics - but that doesn’t mean you need to try and do it all alone.
Specialist agencies and SEO experts can help get you started, by finding ways to shine a light on your business in your local community, and generating new leads in your neighbourhood.
