Get More Patients with Local SEO for Doctors

Local SEO for Doctors: Explained Step-by-Step

When people are in need of a doctor, they usually turn to Google to find one close by. 316,800 people search for “doctor near me” monthly (Source: Semrush Keyword Research Tool). You want to ensure that your doctor’s office is among the top search results. This is where local SEO comes into the picture. This guide explains the basics of local SEO that are essential to making your doctor’s office stand out among local searches.

• Step 1: Set Up and Optimize Your Google Business Profile
• Step 2: Find Local Keywords for Your Doctor’s Office
• Step 3: Build Trust with Patient-Centered Content
• Step 4: Get Listed in Online Directories and Ensure NAP Consistency
• Step 5: Encourage and Engage with Patient Reviews
• Step 6: Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
• Step 7: Regularly Measure Your Results

See how we already help doctors around the world attracting more patients!

Step 1: Set Up and Optimize Your Google Business Profile

If you have a physical location (or you are active in a specific service area), your Google Business Profile (GBP) serves as a digital front desk. It displays all your important information, such as opening hours, address, phone number, website link, services, and patient reviews. When a prospective patient in your geographic area searches for a doctor, you want to make sure that he or she has all the necessary information at first glance to make an informed decision about their healthcare provider. If your information is incomplete, you risk losing the patient to a competitor. To maximize the effectiveness of your GBP, follow these steps:

• Complete All Information: Make sure that all information is filled in correctly, such as name, address, phone number, opening hours, and services. Select the right category (e.g., general practitioner, dermatologist, etc.). If you are offering house visits, make sure you also select the right service areas (the areas to which you are willing to travel).
• Add Attributes: Add as many relevant attributes as possible. Attributes include, for example, wheelchair accessibility or parking options. You should also indicate attributes for options or services that you don’t offer (e.g., if there is no free parking available, you should still indicate it). If attributes are not applicable or irrelevant, you don’t have to select them.
• Add Images: Show your waiting rooms, treatment rooms, your staff, or the outside area of your doctor’s office.
• Add a Description: Add a compelling description that conveys the essence and unique selling points of your practice. Make sure to include relevant local keywords. You will learn how to find relevant keywords in the next section.
• Add Q&A’s: Your front desk probably gets many repetitive questions from patients. Use these questions in the Q&A section and provide an answer. With this, prospective patients get an immediate answer to their questions before even visiting your doctor’s office.

You don’t have a GBP yet? No problem! Learn how to create a GBP and the steps to take to successfully verify the profile.

Step 2: Find Local Keywords for Your Doctor’s Office

Keywords are specific search phrases that patients enter into the Google search bar to find a doctor. Think of phrases like “family doctor near me” or “urgent care in [City].” These are the terms patients use, and by adding them to your site, you’re making it easier for patients to find you. To find out what your target audience is searching for and which keywords have high potential, use a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner (free).

How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Doctor’s Office?

• Seed Keywords: Write down a list of themes that correspond to your services. One by one, research their potential in the keyword research tool.
• Local Terms: Include your city, neighborhood, or nearby landmarks. Check each seed keyword together with the local terms. You need to find the best localized keywords to rank in your specific area. It is pointless to rank in another state if you want to attract patients from your immediate area.
• Keyword Volume and Difficulty: Check the keyword volume and the keyword difficulty. For your website content, focus on keywords with low keyword difficulty. High difficulty keywords will be very competitive. For your Google Business Profile, you can also use keywords with higher difficulty. However, make sure you follow all the steps in this guide to have the best chance of increasing your online visibility. Local SEO is like a puzzle!

Step 3: Build Trust with Patient-Centered Content

You need to create local content centered around the interests and needs of your prospective patients. They want to know that your doctor’s office is credible and that you are either a knowledgeable and professional doctor or that you have a team of the aforementioned. Write a quick post about flu season, explain a procedure, or offer tips for managing seasonal allergies. By including relevant content on your website and your GBP, you are not only giving Google a better idea of what services you provide but also showing that you are an active and engaged doctor (or practice).

Website Content

Create interesting blog posts or FAQ sections on your website that feature content your prospective patients are interested in. There is no need to post something daily, as your main business is, of course, not having a blog website. However, having a number of good articles and an FAQ section on the homepage can significantly improve your rankings and showcase your expertise to prospective clients. Make sure that you include the keywords you previously researched in your content (build your content based on the keywords).

Google Posts

Google Posts are a great tool that allows you to show updates on your Google Business Profile. They are similar to Instagram posts, with the option to include a call to action (e.g., learn more, book an appointment). You should schedule one Google Post for each day to keep your patients interested and increase the chance of engagement (e.g., patients clicking through to your website or giving you a call to book an appointment). It also shows Google that your doctor’s office is engaged and active. If you create a blog post or FAQ on your website, you can link to it with a Google Post. Learn more about how to automate Google Posts, so you never have to worry about posting on time!

Content Ideas to Improve Your Doctor’s Office SEO

• Seasonal health tips (e.g., flu prevention)
• Commonly asked questions (e.g., “What does a physical check-up involve?”)
• Local healthcare insights (e.g., managing allergies in your area)

Our tip: On Google Search, you have the feature “People also ask,” which shows frequently searched questions. You can not only use these for content inspiration, but by actually creating content for these questions, you can try to rank for them! This means that if people want to know more, they will click through to your website. It's important to know that you can only rank with your website content and not with Google Posts for this section.

Step 4: Get Listed in Online Directories and Ensure NAP Consistency

Online directories are digital “Yellow Pages.” Patients use sites like Healthgrades or Zocdoc to find nearby doctors. Listing your practice on these sites boosts your visibility and lets potential patients know you’re nearby and open. The more relevant directories you are listed on, the better. A listing creates a citation (a mention of your business information), which signals to Google that your doctor’s office is an active and legitimate business. This can sustainably increase your online visibility and attract more patients.

• Collect Citations: Create a listing on all relevant directories and fill in the required information (basically the same steps as the GBP optimization).
• Add Consistent Information: Ensure your name, address, and phone number (NAP) match on every listing to avoid confusing patients and Google. If your business details (yes, also opening hours and website link!) are inconsistent, Google will not know whether your doctor’s office is legitimate. You need to check and update this information because users can suggest edits to your information. These user edits can cause irregularities in your NAP!

Learn more on how to automatically claim all relevant listings and keep your NAP consistent at all times across the web!

Step 5: Encourage and Engage with Patient Reviews

Reviews from former patients are an incredibly important ranking factor for local SEO, and managing reviews properly can significantly improve your online visibility. Proper review management consists of review velocity (a steady stream of incoming reviews) and responding to reviews within 24 hours (even better if responded to within the hour). This is not surprising, as many patients see reviews as word-of-mouth referrals. They need to check first if the doctor’s office actually performs the promised services in a good manner.

How to Get More Reviews for Your Doctor’s Office?

• Offline: Incentivize your front desk staff to encourage reviews when patients make a follow-up appointment. Furthermore, you can create a QR code with the link to your GBP and print it on receipts, signs for the door and waiting rooms, or brochures and flyers at your front desk or waiting room table.
• Online: Create an email campaign that sends follow-up emails after a patient has visited your doctor’s office. Kindly ask them to leave a review, and make sure you emphasize that their opinion matters.

Our Tip: With Obenan, you have the option to redirect negative feedback to a private survey. This means that whenever someone wants to leave a negative review, it will land in your internal inbox rather than directly on Google. This way, you can still learn from the feedback and improve your service while maintaining control over your online reputation.

Learn more about how to encourage reviews and automatically respond to them for a hassle-free reputation management!

Step 6: Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

While your website may not be the main focus of your local SEO strategy, it is still highly important that you keep if SEO-friendly and focus on mobile-friendliness. Many patients will click from your GBP to your website to gather more information about your doctor’s office. Greet them with a great user-experience by ensuring the following:

• Responsive Design: Your website should look good and work well on both desktop and mobile. Quick Load Times: Slow sites frustrate patients. Use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test your site speed.
• Easy Navigation: Make sure you have a good site menu that leads to all important pages with one click. Never hide important pages more than three clicks away. It works best if you have all essential pages linked on your homepage and easily accessible through a menu.
• Readable Text: The text on your website should be easy to read and adapt to different screen sizes. Ensure that words are not unnaturally split.
• Correct Header Structure: Help Google correctly understand the content of your page by having the correct header structure. This includes an overall title of your page (H1) and further division into sub-headings (H2, H3, H4).

Our Tip: To increase the click-through rate from Google to your website, make sure you have a good SEO title and meta description. These two components will be visible on the Google Search Results pages (SERPs) and need to convince people to click through. Make sure the title is no longer than 60 characters and the meta description is no longer than 160 characters.

Step 7: Regularly Measure Your Results

Keeping track of local SEO metrics helps you see what’s driving patients to your practice. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console show how many people visited your site, how long they stayed, and which pages they viewed. This helps you figure out what’s working and where you can improve.

• Google Analytics: Get insights into the traffic you generate to your website. You can see where the traffic comes from (direct search, organic search, paid search, referral), which pages get the most traffic, how long visitors stay on each page, and even the different pathways they take on your website.

• Google Search Console: With this free tool, you can gain insights into the organic performance of your website content. You can see which keywords are generating the most impressions for your web pages, how many impressions the page got overall, and how many people clicked through to the page. If you have many impressions but not many clicks, you may need to improve the SEO title and meta description to be more engaging.

• Google Business Profile: Your main focus should be on the insights you get from your GBP. You can measure map impressions (mobile and desktop), user actions (website visits, direction requests), and (if you are using Obenan) also the keywords that are performing best for your doctor’s office.

• Keyword Research: Monitor the volume of your keywords to spot potential trends. For example, the search for “flu shot” is probably higher during a certain season. Thus, you can focus your content strategy specifically on this theme during peak seasons.
• Obenan: If you are using Obenan, you have access to thorough insights about your GBP performance (with better historical insights, as GBP only keeps data for six months, which prevents you from comparing the current year with the last year). Furthermore, you get insights into the sentiment of your customers, which is highly important to improve your service and understand how to improve your online reputation.

Key Metrics to Monitor

• Traffic from Local Searches: How many people found you through local keywords?
• Conversions: Are website visitors scheduling appointments? Are you getting appointments from your GBP?
• Popular Pages: Which content do patients read the most? Where do they exit the page? Are they booking an appointment or exiting the website without doing so?
• Keywords: Which keywords perform best? Do you need to improve your content and update your keyword sheet?

Wrapping Up - Bringing More Patients Through Local SEO

Local SEO is a powerful and cost-effective marketing strategy. While it has the potential to help your doctor’s office become more visible in local searches and increase the number of patients, it requires constant updating and regular monitoring. Local SEO is not a one-time effort but rather shows its effectiveness when maintained continuously. Luckily, you do not have to do all these tasks by yourself! Obenan can help you streamline and automate all essential local SEO tasks, presenting itself as a self-sustaining software specifically designed to meet the unique needs of a doctor’s office.

What does this mean? Obenan automatically claims all listings and keeps your NAP details consistent at all times. We ensure that all your Google reviews are answered automatically, and we assist you in collecting more reviews. Furthermore, we automate scheduling your Google Posts, so you never have to worry about them anymore! Lastly, monitoring your progress and gaining insights into customer sentiment has never been easier! Curious how we can help your doctor’s office with our local SEO tools and increase your online visibility?