In the first of a two-part series, Danny Hall of FSE Digital explores how dental practices can increase their local search traffic.
Whilst patients might travel from further afield than they used to for the right dental care – especially for those offering specialist or cosmetic treatments – dentistry is still, at its heart, a local service.
Therefore, to futureproof your business, you need to ensure you’re guaranteeing yourself a healthy share of your potential local patients. A big part of this is making sure your website is as visible as possible to people making local searches. Regardless of whether you have a full-service digital agency to hand or are trying to juggle marketing alongside your main operations internally, there are a number of simple, practical ways, to achieve this.
Why is optimising for local search important?
Local SEO, the practise of optimising your web presence to appear higher in the search engines for relevant queries made within your geographic region, can benefit all kinds of industries, but for those who operate locally rather than nationally, it’s crucial.
If 80 per cent of your website’s traffic comes from people who live within a certain radius, then how much traffic you receive (and therefore, largely how many new enquiries you receive), depends on where your business appears within the search results for these people.
It might seem like there’s a lot riding on this, but there’s also huge potential too. Research shows that after searching for a local business on a mobile device, 88 per cent of consumers will either call or visit the business within 24 hours. 72 per cent of consumers who do a local search visit a business located within five miles of them.
Therefore, if you have a site that’s well-optimised for local search, not only do you benefit from more online traffic (92 per cent of local searches pick a listing from the first page of search results), but more phone calls and footfall too; real-world benefits.
It’s also much more achievable. SEO takes hard work and effort, but of course, there is less competition behind local search phrases than national ones. Appearing on page one for ‘Essex cosmetic dentist’ or ‘Chelmsford cosmetic dentist’ is going to be infinitely easier than ranking for the phrase ‘cosmetic dentist’, plus you’ll have the benefit of seeing results sooner.
Despite the importance of local search to those in the dental industry, however, it’s a sector that, on the whole, we find to be slower to make the most of the local search tools and platforms available to them.
Claim your Google My Business listing
If you haven’t already, claim your Google Business Listing. This is the panel that appears to the righthand side of the search results when someone Googles the name of your business.
Setting up a Google My Business (GMB) listing is free, relatively quick, and doesn’t require in-depth technical skills or marketing experience. Google’s own support page for it takes you through step-by-step instructions, but even if you simply go ahead and log in, GMB will walk you through the stages anyway.
Taking ownership of your business listing enables you to provide local searchers with all sorts of valuable information about your company as soon as they land on the search results. A few key areas to concentrate on:
- Business details – It’s all about making it as easy as possible for people to take the next action, so having your address, phone number and contact email readily available on the search results page is a no-brainer. Include a link to your website too, and key service pages for additional traffic. You can also add your current opening hours.
- Images – As well as allowing you to upload your logo and select a cover photo, you have the choice to add a range of additional photos. It’s a good idea to use some external photos of your building and surroundings to help people locate you, as well as team members, to encourage trust and add a personal element. Additional images that showcase the different services and products you offer is also recommended. To fully optimise your GMB listing, take care over the file names you’re using. This is one of hundreds of ranking factors within SEO, and while the impact of each individual one may be small, collectively it can have a big impact, plus it’s such a quick and easy action. Describing the image naturally is most important, and if there’s an opportunity to include a keyword, then incorporate this too.
- Descriptions – You’ll have the space to add a short description about your business. This is your opportunity to convince local searchers why your practice, over any other, is worth their time and money. Give an overview of what you offer and your USPs, and include keywords naturally where you can.
- Reviews – Your business listing will pull through your Google reviews. Reviews have such a huge influence on consumer behaviour and decision-making – especially in the healthcare sector where there’s so much more at stake than an individual’s bank balance– that it’s worth taking the time to encourage happy patients to leave a testimonial. Make it as easy as possible for them; if you’re sending them an email or sharing a social media post, link directly to where they need to leave their review, give them prompts on what areas of your business they could mention, and remember to thank them for doing so.
Google may also pull some of the information you include in your GMB listing through to your map listing. Whilst your map listing will appear whether you have a GMB profile or not, the additional information won’t, so it’s worth setting it up for this alone.
As we’ve touched upon, your Google business listing is a free, accessible, and low-effort way of guaranteeing a presence in the search results, so it really is worth prioritising.
Of course, it’s only one element of your online presence, so in the next part of this series, we’ll be taking a look at how to optimise your website itself; identifying what local people are searching for and exploring how to make adjustments to your site to make it appear higher for these search terms, winning you more traffic and more business.
References available on request.