Top Local SEO Problems for Medical Offices
Cost Ranges for Local SEO Services
- Basic Local SEO Package: $300 - $500 per month. This usually includes basic website optimization, local listings, and Google My Business management.
- Advanced Local SEO Package: $500 - $1,000 per month. This may cover more comprehensive optimizations, review management, and tailored content creation.
- Enterprise Local SEO Package: $1,000 - $2,500+ per month. Includes extensive services like advanced analytics, customized strategies, and competitive analysis.
Local Tips for Effective Medical SEO
- Claim and Optimize Your Google My Business Listing: Ensure all information is accurate and regularly updated to improve local visibility.
- Encourage Patient Reviews: Positive reviews can significantly boost your local SEO and attract more patients.
- Use Local Keywords: Incorporate location-specific keywords in your website content to target nearby patients effectively.
- Create Localized Content: Blogs or articles focusing on local health issues or events can engage the community and improve search rankings.
FAQs about Local SEO for Medical Practices
- Why is local SEO important for medical practices?
- Local SEO helps medical practices become more visible to patients in their geographical area, increasing the likelihood of attracting new patients and growing their practice.
- How long does it take to see results from local SEO?
- Typically, it can take 3-6 months to see significant improvements in local search rankings, but this can vary based on competition and the effectiveness of your SEO strategies.
- Can I do local SEO myself, or should I hire a professional?
- While basic local SEO tasks can be managed independently, hiring a professional can provide expertise and ensure that more advanced strategies are implemented effectively.
- What are the most important factors in local SEO?
- Key factors include a well-optimized Google My Business profile, consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information across all platforms, local content, and quality backlinks.
Local search engine optimization (SEO) continues to change rapidly with the introduction of new technologies, growing competition, and many other factors specifically related to how search engines rank websites. For a medical office that survives and profits from a local target audience, this type of geo-focused optimization is an essential part of their online marketing strategy. That’s why it is important to stay up to date on what is happening in the industry if you want to compete with other doctors in the area.
Approach local SEO with three main goals in mind: rank high in local searches, get found by locals when they search online, and claim a prominent spot on “doctor or medical office near me” when people use GPS-powered search from their smartphones. How do you achieve all these goals? Unfortunately, far too many medical practitioners run into problems when it comes to reaching their target audience.
So many different factors must be taken into account. Once you understand some of the most common mistakes and limitations that doctors and medical offices face when it comes to local SEO, you will be better equipped to avoid them and capture the attention of your local market.
Failure to Create Unique Websites for Specific Locations
Almost doctors focus on a relatively small geographic area within their state or region, people in need of oral health care will drive a considerable distance to get help from the best. This means that you may target patients in different cities, towns, or areas around your office. If the company runs multiple locations, of course it makes sense to optimize specifically for each one.
However, you do not have to create an entirely new website for every single small town and neighborhood in your coverage area. That would create an unnecessary amount of work and really would not benefit potential medical patients. Even “near me” location-related searches done from mobile phones do not narrow down to the smallest area. Choose approximately five locations to target that are larger or closer to the medical office itself.
One of the biggest problems that many ignore when it comes to local SEO is the need for unique sites, pages, and content for each location. Google sees each page as a doorway into the type of content that people search for. If someone is looking for a doctor near Manhattan, it will not help to find information for one near Albany, NY. If this happens, the search engines actually penalize the site itself for providing ineffective or unwanted content to the searcher.
Duplicate Content Penalties from Search Engines
An adjacent problem to having multiple pages for different locations involves duplicate content. From a local SEO perspective, duplicate content is cavities that ruins an otherwise bright smile. Even if your medical office creates multiple geo-specific pages, copying and pasting the same content onto each with only location names changed runs afoul of the Google spiders that seek out quality information for people performing the searches. It takes more than a few word swaps to create unique content that satisfies both searchers and the search engines. Of course, you cannot take content from other medical office websites and use it for your own. Plagiarism and copyright infringement are not only illegal in many places but also extremely poor business practices. Unfortunately, other medical offices may not be as scrupulous as yours and could steal your page content. Search engines have a difficult time judging who was the original creator, so it makes sense to keep on top of duplicate content checks so you can change your text if necessary.
Some matching content is fine from one of your local pages to another. After all, things like the doctor’s name, educational, and licensing information, the businesses name, address, phone number, and driving directions, and even service areas will be the same from one site to the next. Aim for less than 10% duplicate content in order to avoid the penalty. Simply structuring things differently and sharing basic information in different ways is often enough to get around the automatic scan issues while still providing quality data for everyone in need of an excellent medical practitioner.
Low Value Content – Location Specific and General
Poor-quality content on any website affects search engine rankings in general, but it is especially a problem for local SEO for businesses that need specific information to attract attention. This is also called thin content and indicates that there is not enough value in what you share on the pages. A doctor cannot simply post a few photos of beautiful smiles and expect people to call for an appointment. Potential and current patients need to know about the services you provide, the doctors and other specialists on the team, appointment hours, health and safety issues, methods like sedation doctorry, and more.
The problem of low value content has three main parts. First, if you do not have enough content on every page, the search engines have nothing to consider when it comes to ranking your website. A minimum of 1000 words per page makes sense although some pages will not have that much. For example, a contact page with name, address, phone number, email, and a secure content form does not need a whole article about how to call or write.
Second, text with spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage mistakes leads to both optimization problems and a poor experience for people who visit. Edit and proofread everything properly in order to make the best impression possible. Hire a professional freelance writer to help.
Third, lack of valuable information fails to engage the interest of potential patients. Even if you write 2000 words of content, it will not provide any value for local SEO or site visitors if it contains only fluff and general information that does not give the type of information that a person trying to find a doctor needs to make a smart decision. These rules hold true for your medical blog as well. Although some Internet marketers consider blogging to be a bit obsolete, it is still a great way to create high-value content and additional point of entry pages for local people who need care for their teeth and gums.
If a person with a toothache searches for an emergency medical office in their city, clicks on to your website, and finds nothing about whether you offer emergency appointments or if you offer sedation doctorry for difficult cases, they are much more likely to click away and go with a competitor. Providing valuable medical services to patients means little if you do not first provide value on your website so they can accurately judge your professionalism and ability to solve their problem.
Ineffective Page Titles and Meta Data
With different webpages specifically tailored to your service coverage locations filled with high-value content that is both informative and unique, it would seem that you have all the ingredients in place for strong local SEO. However, many businesses forget the technical side of page building and how it affects their ultimate ranking on Google and other search engines. You need unique and location-specific titles and descriptions for each page just as much as you need unique content.
Page titles coded into the website itself show up in results listings on the search engines. Include effective keywords and your brand name in sixty characters or fewer. They not only should include effective localized keywords but also look engaging enough to attract the attention of people scanning for a new doctor. This also holds true for meta descriptions, which are displayed underneath the title. Too many medical offices waste this space with general introductions or non-specific data that fails to get needed attention from both search engines and potential patients.
Problematic Graphics and Photos – Too Big and Too Boring
While an image itself does little for local search engine optimization, each one plays a large role in determining whether your practice’s site ranks high or get lost on a later search engine result pages that no one ever looks at. Boring photos and graphics failed to engage visitors who end up on your site. Have a professionally designed logo that is easily recognizable to boost brand recognition. Bland or non-medical-focused logos will not make a great impression.
When it comes to local SEO, however, you need to avoid problems that happen well before the potential patient gets to the site. One of the worst involves slow page load times. Large images that are not condensed to a smaller file size are some of the worst offenders. Online attention spans are extremely short, and people will click away from a page that does not display immediately. Slow loading or failure to load can be frustrating for your users. Search engines like Google know this and penalize slow load times. Start by optimizing all of your images to the smallest file size possible without compromising clarity or impact.
Image optimization helps to reduce the size of an image file, which in turn saves time and data when loading a webpage. The most popular way to optimize images is through compression, which uses a single algorithm to reduce an image’s file size without compromising quality. Other ways to reduce file sizes include reducing the overall resolution, altering the color depth, or converting images to grayscale. You may be able to make some interesting artistic and design decisions that both make a great impact and help your pages load much more quickly.
Your professional quality portrait of the entire team of doctors and oral hygienists may look great hanging on the wall over the front desk, but if it takes three seconds to load on the website, it destroys your chance of a ranking high in local results pages. Use an online tool or your website development company to explore and rank image file sizes so you know what to change or optimize more effectively. Generally, condensed JPEGs work well to improve page load times. In some cases, it might make more sense to minimize the dimensional size of a graphic. Always keep in mind that everything should display on a small phone screen just as well as on a laptop or desktop computer at home.
Broken Links that Lead Search Engines and Patients Nowhere
This is another optimization problem that aggravates both site visitors and search engines alike. If you have any links on your pages that go to a 404 not-found page or get lost in cyberspace, you will lose attention immediately. If you want your web page to be found on search engines, you need to make sure that all the links on it are functional and they lead to the intended destination. Otherwise, you are left with links that lead nowhere or to pages that contain errors. Broken links happen for a variety of reasons and they can be fixed by checking for broken links and updating them. Google automatically breaks pages with broken links lower than their competitors. They happen if you do not pay close enough attention to your updates or new content additions. They indicate a lack of care and focus on providing effective and high-quality content and experience for visitors.
Broken links can happen if you edit pages, move some of your information from one spot to another, or rename things to boost SEO during of reworking of your medical practice or overall marketing strategy. They can be due to the age of the content, expired URLs, incorrect hyperlinks, or missing 301 redirects. Use an automatic tool to search for these problems on a regular basis and you should not experience a drop in your search engine rankings.
Lack of Effective Off-Site Effort Targeted to Local SEO
Local SEO practices can be divided into on-site and off-site. Off-site activities include link building and the entire realm of Internet marketing. When most medical offices think about achieving the high search engine result positions that leads to more potential patients finding them, they think of the above-mentioned problems and how to overcome them. Things like keyword research and usage, geo-targeted pages, unique content, fast load times, and more are all essential parts of success. However, off-site efforts matter just as much if you want to get a lot of attention to the medical practice.
In today’s competitive marketplace, you cannot simply build a high-quality website and leave it alone. Monthly checks and audits for things like broken links and out of date information help, but they do not go far enough to ensure continuous position at the top of the local searches. You must stay agile and focused in order to build up and maintain a strong patient base.
Even though the first problem associated with off-site SEO is a complete lack of it, more problems arise when you do not create a strong foundation for all marketing. This involves two primary tasks: the creation of a standardized name, address, and phone number (NAP) to use in every business directory, social media post, and other mention of the medical office, and a brand goal or mission. Do you offer primarily cosmetic doctorry for people interested in a model smile or focus on emergency procedures? Are you of family practice or take only adult patients? What impression do you want to give to people searching for a new medical care practitioner that sets you apart from all others in the area?
Doctors and other oral health care and medical offices must avoid these common problems in order to benefit from a local SEO. Google and other search engines value unique content on separate websites that cater specifically to the people searching for a new doctor in an area. Copying and pasting information or getting lazy with functioning links and load times will not serve you well in the quest for success. Search engines want the same thing as consumers for the most part: quick and accessible value that tells them everything necessary to make an informed decision about whether your medical office is the right choice or not.
With more people than ever before searching for service providers near them from their smartphones and in geo-specific search results, failure to solve these issues and optimize effectively instead will result in fewer patients and a struggle for success. The search engines are getting smarter with every day. They know the location of the searcher and if listed businesses are relevant to them, they will rank higher in search results pages. That is your goal as a service provider that works in a specific geographic area. Help your doctorry business shine by focusing on high value for both website visitors and the search engines that bring them to your virtual door.
