Local SEO Got You Down? There’s Still Hope to Save Your Ranking!
“Google it.” We all say those words so often that Googling has become a verb.
As your patient base gets younger and younger, more of your target audience is using the internet to find local goods, products, and services. If it isn’t already, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) needs to be a significant part of your dental marketing strategy.
For dentists specifically, your Local SEO strategy now will ultimately determine the success of your business in the upcoming years. Local SEO for dentists is the practice of improving your practice’s ranking within Google Maps for keywords related to the service you provide.
Google reported in 2011 that 40% of all searches performed are local searches, and that number has grown every year. In a recent study, Moz reported that 44% of clicks went to the Map Pack (top 3 map listings under the ad section on page 1), and another 8% clicked on ‘More Places’ to continue their business search on Google Maps.
This means that if you aren’t in the Map Pack or on the first page of the Google Maps search results, you’re missing out on 52% of all potential New Patients that are looking for your business online. If that number scares you, it should!
So how can you get ahead of this trend now? Luckily Local SEO is considerably easier than Organic SEO, in that it is easier to rank higher in Google Maps than it is in Organic search listings. This is because you're not up against national websites like Yelp and ZocDoc.
However, it’s not always easy for every practice. We work with many dental practices that are located in an area far from the town center, even though their address indicates they are in that particular town. This will make it much more challenging to rank higher than the dental practices that are located in the center of town. It becomes even more difficult when the practice is targeting a patient base in towns other than that of their practice’s address.
For these cases, we have to take a few extra steps and employ a more aggressive Local SEO strategy so we can improve your rankings in these areas.
Case in Point: Ridgeview Dental
Ridgeview Dental was struggling to increase their local rankings in Google Maps. One of the major reasons that this practice was having issues was that their location was relatively far from the town center of Centennial, CO where they were located.
Google Maps’ local search algorithm is weighted heavily on the searcher’s location. If your searching for a local business, say, ‘dentist in Centennial CO’, Google will use your location to serve up listings of the businesses that are closest to you first. They do this because they know people prefer convenience and are more likely to interact with a business that is close to them. Don’t believe me? Google ‘dentist in (your town)’ from where your located, and then do the same from the other side of town. I guarantee you will see two very different search engine results in Google Maps.
Part #1: The Standard Local SEO Process for Dentists
As standard practice for all dental offices, our Local SEO strategy for Ridgeview Dental consisted of:
1. Building 160 manual citations from Tier 1 and Tier 2 directories along with an additional 60 hyper-niche medical and dental directory websites. Manual is the key word here - we don’t use listing aggregators because while they can produce a large number of listings relatively quickly, they only produce subpar results. Our process involves real people building listings, adding keywords, categories, descriptions, geotagged photos, and everything else to make that listing truly customized to the practice. This matters to Google.
2. Writing and optimizing all of the website content around numerous high-value and high-traffic service related keywords, particularly ‘dentist near Centennial CO’.
3. Rebuilding the website is standard, and optimizing the site architecture is top priority during the redesign process.
Unfortunately, despite all of these efforts, this still only resulted in a minimal increase in the ranking of Ridgeview Dental. Competition is high in Ridgeview, and his location on the edge of town made it impossible to gain visibility in the center of town which had over 30 competitor practices.
Phase #2: Kickin’ it Up a Notch - Local SEO Blitz
We needed to become more creative. After assessing Q1 results, we realized that our Local strategy needed a little more juice. We formulated the following aggressive Local SEO campaign:
1. Search, find and build listings on hyper-local business directories near Centennial, CO.
2. Find and create specific linking opportunities that may be unique to Ridgeview Dental.
3. Optimized the homepage for high-value keywords, add our exact match keyword ‘dentist in Centennial CO’ several more times on the homepage.
4. Added geotagged images throughout the website and GMB listing.
5. Added "areas served” pages for Parker, CO and Aurora, CO, since the practice's location is nearer to their town centers. This means the practice would probably be able to rank similarly as they do in Centennial. By having content on the site supporting these additional locations, the rank in those areas should improve.
Our Local SEO team was able to find this dental practice several great listings on some hyper-local websites specific to Centennial, most of which allowed us to submit the listings for free. We also found through our research that the doctor is an alumnus of Ohio State University and that they would give him a profile page on their website with a link to his dental practice. This is a very powerful backlink from a prestigious .edu site (Ohio State University’s official website).
These added links and directory listings, combined with the added optimized content on the website, provided a powerful one-two combination that ultimately increased their ranking, traffic and New Patient conversions across the board. But why does it work?
One word: trust. Building a presence on these various directories and sites validates to Google that our dental practice is real, the address is real, the people are real, and the reviews are real. Google’s sole interest is to provide high-quality, relevant search results to their users. They are much more willing to send one of their users to a website and a dental practice they trust, versus a practice that has conflicting information online with little evidence to back up their claim of being a business.
Increasing the number of trust signals to Google regarding the location of the practice means Google will trust Ridgeview Dental enough to show their website to people searching for a dentist in their area.
WRAP-UP & LESSONS LEARNED
Once all of these backlinks were in place and the website was optimized around high-value keywords, we finally started to see some results.
There was a dramatic increase in “Impressions,” from 45K Organic Impressions to 71.3K Organic Impressions, comparing the last 3 months to the previous 3 months.
Google was now showing Ridgeview Dental’s website to almost 2X as many people searching for a dentist in the area!
We’ve all heard that proper dental SEO can increase a business's visibility on Google and drive potential customers to your practice. The example of our success with Ridgeview Dental is proof that it is within your control, and even under challenging circumstances, you can still remain competitive with the right strategy in place.
Google revealed last year that searches that include the query ‘near me’ increased 200% over a two year period. That’s a drastic shift in how people are looking up businesses, and it’s without any doubt that the smartphone and 4G changed the game. For local business owners, that means they have to focus on Local Search as a marketing initiative, and those that do it best will enjoy a steady flow of new patients for years to come.