Alex Membrillo, CEO of Cardinal Digital Marketing
Take control of your local SEO strategy.
Quotes From the Webinar:
“[Conversations] come from your location and your service pages. They don’t come from your blog. Your blog is top of the funnel traffic. It helps get people aware of your brand, but that’s what it is, brand awareness. It doesn’t drive patients directly, but I need you to focus on both.”
“Anything you can do to tailor your content for each one of your location pages is very important.”
“Implementing [a local business schema] on your website on each one of your location pages helps Google understand where you are, who you are, what services you provide, the hours etc., so it can help you in the rankings.”
Read The Transcript:
Alex Membrillo: Hello everybody. Hello. We have a number of people in here, good. Give everybody a second to join in. It’s hump day today. We’re going to have a lot of fun. Everybody, I’ve got- the polls are open. Everybody is sick of the polls, the polls are open. Hit the poll over there if you don’t mind, I want to know how to cater my presentation to you all great people. I want to see how many locations you guys have. If a lot of us at one location, it’s not going to make a lot of sense some of the things I’m going to say. Feel free to go over there. I’m going to end the poll in about 30 seconds. We are going to have a lot of fun today everybody. I like to make this enjoyable and high energy. That’s actually just my natural state, Diet Coke calms me down. [laughs]
All right, so we’re going to talk multi-location SEO. I try to mix in a blend of basic and advanced strategies. A number of you guys have followed our content for a number of years, and so I like to mix in some new things. You guys are going to learn some new things, some things we’ve recently discovered, and hopefully, you’ll come away with this with at least one actionable thing you can implement today, and go make a bunch more money, have a lot more patients.
All right, I’m going to go ahead and close the poll. It looks like majority, we have about 16% of us are in the 100 plus locations, vast majority 20 and under. That works, okay. 20 and under, I like that. Listen, I like to have fun, so what I want you guys to do is make some money right now, make some money. The first person to ask me a question, there in the chat, and let’s use the chat a lot, and I’ll break this thing up by answering your question. The first person to ask me a question, $15 Amazon card coming to you from my colleague Katherine. We’ll email it out to you. No mail, no touching anything. COVID-friendly gift. First-person to ask a question in the chat, I’m going to send it out to you.
All right, let’s get going. A little background on Cardinal if you’re not familiar with us. We are based out of Atlanta. We do not call it Hotlanta, please stop with that. Hey, Samantha. Please stop with that. It’s just Atlanta and it is Coldlanta most of the time. I started this thing about 12 years ago. 12 years, well, this needs to be updated. 12 years helping medical groups. The second client ever was a medical practice, helped them scale up. I found a real passion in helping patients find the right providers, not the right now provider. We were very careful on the provider groups that we bring on.
The thing I’m most proud of at Cardinal is that we won Best Places to Work last year. Through a pandemic, through everything, grew from 12 to nearly 40 people here next month. Very excited, and there’s been some really great growth. All right, let’s see, polls close. Good. Reset, bam. Hey, Frederick, glad you’re in Atlanta. The first person to ask to a question, $15 Amazon card. Ask me a question anytime in there.
Capabilities. We are a performance shop or multi-location medical group’s. Performance shot. We only concern ourselves with things that drive patients, drive new leads, SEO, PPC, paid social. Top things we do, and we do it for clients ranging from 2 to 300 locations, hospitals, orthopedic, orthodontic, cardiologists, dermatologists, biggest behavioral group in the country is our client and proud of all of them. I’ll be calling some of them out today. That’ll be fun in a good way. We’ve got a lot of clients on here, which I’m excited about.
All right, let’s get a– Yes, Frederick $15 coming your way. Why did we win the best place to work? I don’t know, because we did not lay anybody off. No furloughs, no pay reductions, none of that stuff. We tried to take care of our people. Our flock is number one, and they help our provider groups grow. All right, what are we going to talk about today Local SEO? When I’m talking about local SEO, there’s two big things to concern yourself with. How do you rank in the maps? How do you rank below it in the organic results? Maps, organic. Maps, organic. Those are the two big components to dominating your local search.
Some of you focus on one or the other or just paid search. It doesn’t make sense to me because all of the click-throughs, all of the impressions that happened and people searching for a provider, some people prefer the ads, some people prefer maps, because there’s reviews there. Some people go beneath all of it to find the incumbents that have been entrenched in the organic search results. You want to show up with all three. One plus one equals three in this case. You want to show up in all three different areas, search maps, organic, so that you can dominate, It helps give you credibility to your provider group when you show up everywhere.
We’re going to talk about the difference between single and multi-location. This is mostly geared towards multi-location. You’ll still learn a lot, and it’ll help you if you’re single location but our focus is multi-location, and some of these things won’t apply to the smaller groups. I hear sometimes when we’re talking to specialist groups, “We are reliant on provider referral still, and we feel like that’s still the majority of the way people will find us.” No, incorrect. Look over there on the right. Finding a specialist where 40%, nearly 40% of people are finding recommendation from a provider, but 22%, one quarter plus are doing their own research. They’re finding you online.
Subspecialty groups, you’re missing out on a quarter of your patient volume at least, is not going to come from a provider referral. PCPs and some of the lower acuity things like dentists, this is going nearly to 50%. My dental groups, a lot of that, obviously, you’re not getting provider referrals there. That’s mama going and finding a new dental group when she moves in town for her kids, for her family. A lot of those low acuity provider groups, you need to be found online. I think you guys all know that, and the pandemic accelerated all this stuff. Near me, near you, that’s the majority of the search volume that is happening. You’re not going to put near me all over your content, so how do we show up? I’ll show you later. Google can figure out a lot of different things.
Single versus multi-location. How do strategies differ? Well, if you’re single location, you’re not going to need a lot of the technology that I’m going to talk about throughout this process. You don’t need Yext and Birdeye and Podium and anything complicated on citations or on views. You may not even need call-tracking, things like that for your campaign. A lot of things can be really simplified if you’re a single location, but we’re going to talk about multi-location. You need to do things at scale if you’re multi-location.
All right, keyword strategy. Too often we look at the keywords and we think, “What keywords should we be posting on our website? What do we need to write about?” That’s done almost in a silo. Take a step back and think about the business imperative. Which locations that you have, have the most market demand? Which locations have the highest household income by average? Which locations need the most love? Where are we going to open new locations? Think about all of those your leadership team, you and your leadership team need to think about all of those parameters and then that helps you decide where you need to focus your SEO efforts. You’d love to help all your locations, but for some of my 101 plus groups, it’s just not going to be feasible. You’re going to have to focus on certain areas first, while you roll things out to all of them.
When you are doing your SEO research for what to write about, it’s too often we are going and just thinking we need to spam the keywords throughout the website. We’re going to put tons of keywords, we’re going to say the same thing, dentist, dental group a hundred times on a page. Google’s finding that that is very unnatural, and they are seeing that you’re just trying to keyword spam. It’s not about that anymore. The algorithm’s gotten really intelligent. It’s more so about answering the queries that a user would have.
Okay, how do you figure out the queries? There are tons of tools like Screaming Frog and SEMrush, Google Keyword analyzer, that you can look at and type in different stuff. I like Ubersuggests as well from Neil Patel. You can go in there and type in different keywords like dentist, dental group, orthodontist, and it’ll tell you these are the questions that generally come to Google. 15% of searches have never happened. There’s only so much you can guess.
What I’d love for you guys to do is do research on your competitors. This is where you can find out a lot of the best topics. If you’re in Atlanta, and you’re an orthopedic group, go type in Chicago orthopedic surgeon. New York, Manhattan, LA, Dallas, the big markets. Those that rank in the number one in organic are typically the groups that have the most advanced SEO, and they’re going to have tons of content on there that you can mimic for your own purposes in your city. You want to tailor that to be in Atlanta.
There are all kinds of questions you need to answer throughout your website. Where do you put that content? Service pages. I’ll show you that. Location pages with FAQ schema. We’re going to show you all that fun stuff and of course, your blog. You won’t hear me talk about your blog a lot, because too many people focus on it. That’s not where conversions come from. They come from your location and your service pages. They don’t come from your blog. Your blog is top of the funnel, traffic. It’s great. It’s informational. It helps get people aware of your brand, but that’s what it is, brand awareness. It doesn’t drive patients directly. I need you to focus on both, but we’re going to mostly talk about locations and service pages because that’s where most of you guys are at right now.
Anything you can do to tailor your content to your city helps Google see that you are in Atlanta because you know about Waffle House and how damn good an all-star special is. Anything you can do to tailor your content for each one of your location page is very important. I love what Sage Dental did here. They’re putting in variations of different keywords on their service pages for dental cleaning. I love this. You want to write naturally and not just repeat dental cleanings over and over. They’re using different words that Google would address as synonyms and not antonyms. Of course, synonyms and they’re putting that throughout the content, so that when someone’s typing in professional cleaning near me, dental cleanup, any of that kind of stuff, they’re going to help show up. Google’s going to recognize that they’re in Florida, they’re in Orlando, and they’re going to help show up.
The next level to this is building out a page for every one of these keywords. Building out a page for a routine dental exam, routine dental maintenance. What do I need to do for my dental checkups? Preventative dental care, routine dental cleaning, professional dental cleaning, whitening, Invisalign, everything. You want to build out a page for every kind of keyword set that has any kind of search volume. I want tons of content on you alls website. Because when someone around any of your locations is asking a question about anything related to your group, that page will show up near them, because Google knows where you are if you’ve set up your website correctly. We’ll talk about local schema here in just a moment.
We’re going to pivot here to building the perfect location page. I’m going to open a new poll. This one’s going to matter to all of you. I want to know, we just did our state of health care survey, go over the polls. I’m going to publish this. State of health care marketing survey, I want to know which marketing channel you all find to be the most effective in driving new patients. Feel free to go over to the polls. Go over there and answer that as I go through things. Oh, SEO so far for the win. I like it. Go over there and type in whatever, choose from one or three.
Let’s talk location pages. Everybody knows you need great location pages. Just as important as having a great individual location page, I need all of your location pages housed on a master list. Why do we do that? Well obviously, for the user, it’s easy for the user. They probably just want to get to their individual location, they need to find it there, but this is where I would drive all of my link juice to. This is where I would drive all my links to. Because it’s going to then trickle down into my individual location pages, and that’s going to help them rank over time.
This main location page. I’ll say it again. This is where I would drive all of my links to. Not my home page, not my blogs, not my service pages even. The main location page, I would drive a ton of different links to. Really important. That’ll trickle down into your location pages. When you are on your location page, really easy to use these. You want to make them really easy to use by having all of your call-to-actions really easily and accessible. Up top above the fold. Pull out your phone and look at your website’s mobile experience. Is your phone number up there? Is the email form up there? Easy to click that. Can I schedule online? Are my hours there? Is my map there? Easy access to reviews and social profiles. Is all of that accessible on mobile? Something to remember guys, Google’s moving to mobile-first indexing and ranking, July of 2021. I’m going to end the poll. SEO for the win. Thank you. Let’s see how everybody loves this here.
Very important, Google’s going to move to mobile-first ranking and indexing. Two things there, your website needs to be super fast. We’re going to talk about page speed in a little bit, and the experience has to be awesome. How is Google going to know if the experience is awesome? If someone lands on your website, on this CareSpot urgent care page here, and any time– Oh we must have frozen out that thing, is our client. In any town USA, and they bounce right back to Google, Google knows that page experience was not that great, and you’re going to get dinged in your rankings on Google.
Very important, your mobile experience is top-notch. If I had one tip for you this year, it’s to make sure your mobile experience is fast and efficient, drives you leads and the users are getting exactly what they want. Bounce time’s low, dwell time’s high. Very important that this looks great, easy to schedule. Please everybody get onto online scheduling. Now with COVID, I think we’re going to be coming out of COVID here in the next few months. Let’s cross our fingers on that one. It’s looking good. Come on, J&J got approved today.
This is going to update, and this says an on-demand webinar, and if I’m wrong I won’t look like an idiot if someone watches this in a few months. I think COVID’s almost over. It’s almost March 2021.
Very important that everybody is able to schedule in the way they want to schedule. Some people want to use an email form and be returned an email through there, through the office manager or whatnot. Some people want to call, I don’t. My generation doesn’t, and most of us want to schedule online. Please make sure the online schedule is connected to your practice management system. So frustrating when I schedule an appointment for 2:00 PM on Tuesday, only to have the office manager call me back and say, “Actually, the provider is not available at that time. Is 3:00 PM, okay?” No, 3:00 PM is not okay. I have to go pick up my kids from school. There’s a reason I chose 2:00 PM. Please make sure it’s connected. I see a lot of provider groups are just putting it up there and saying, “We’ll call them back within an hour, that’s around that.” That’s not okay, and it’s deceptive, so I don’t like it. Please make sure we’ve got that.
When you’re creating your location page, 500 plus words. Guys, look at your competitors. They’ve got a thousand words on their location or service pages. You need a thousand and one. You need a thousand and one. Quantity does matter in SEO. Google wants to rank the authorities on any given topic. They have a thousand words, you need to have a thousand and one. I don’t care what anybody says about quality over quantity, it needs to be quality and there has to be more quantity. It’s not either-or, and most things in life are great.
I want you on your location page to have- these dropdowns are beautiful. CareSpot, obviously a client, so they’re advised to do things really well. These drop-downs enable you to pack in lots of content that’s indexable by Google, answers lots of questions. You not only can have your location page have a bunch of service information, but you can also do FAQs in this manner. You can do FAQs in this manner. You can answer a lot of questions on each one of your location pages about how do I get seen really quickly and [unintelligible 00:16:17] springs, and that can be tied in if you use the FAQ schema which I advise you to do. That’s a bit more technical. Go to upwork.com and you can find an SEO wiz that’s able to code that or your agency can, same thing with page speed type stuff.
On each one of your locations, mention points of interest. That’s how Google can tell that you’re actually in that location, not saying the same things as everybody in Orange Park. Mention some specific things that nobody else is mentioning. Providers, I want your providers. Urgent care, this doesn’t apply. Dental, sometimes. I want the providers to be listed with their reviews, their health grades, vitals, whatnot, RateMDs, Google, whatever you want. I want reviews on there, I want the providers on there, I want location. I want big beautiful images and videos. Your location page needs to be able to convert in one go. It needs to be its own website on one page basically, and you’ll be able to convert, right there.
It’s not all about location pages up. Oh, this is a beautiful example. Someone, when they’re looking for an orthopedic surgeon, they’re going to type in orthopedic surgeon near me, or they’re going to type in, “I just tore my damn ACL, what do I do about it?” Sometimes your location page is going to show, but if you’re not multi-location but your multi-specialty like some hospitals, this is what we’d recommend doing.
Focus on your service pages, and everyone should be doing this regardless, but especially if you’re not big on location but big on specialties. Focus on your service pages. I want, once again, 500 to 1000 words on there, and I don’t just want lots of content. I want the content to be structured in a way that it would convert. I want you guys to run your own conversion rate optimization programs, and find out where things should be moved. If you don’t want to run your own CRO program, just think about things as a user. Do you want the providers up top and the map up top to make it accessible? Do you want all the questions answered in a certain way? Is there enough content on there? Think about it from the patient’s perspective, and that will help you build these things out.
Once again, if you want this example loaded now, just email me and I’ll send you, look– Actually just Google Cameron Memorial Hospital, one of our favorite clients. You can go to their orthopedic page, and you’re going to see the after. That was the before. Sorry, Kelly, I don’t mean to call you out, but we made it beautiful and that’s great, and that’s what counts now. Great example of service pages that look good. I want tons of content. I want them to be like your location pages and have everything you need in there.
Some little things to be doing on your location pages, local business schema very important, and this is one of those things I want you guys to go get. What did I hear yesterday? SEO nerd herd. I consider myself one of those, so it’s not offensive. Local business schema. Implementing that on your website in each one of your location pages helps Google understand where you are ,who you are, what services you provide, the hours et cetera, so it can help you in the rankings. It’s not enough to just put all that information on a location page and hope Google figures it out when it’s trying to show people in maps and organic. They are going to want to see that the schema was implemented. It’s a next-level thing. If you want to beat some of your more advanced competitors, very important that you do all of these things.
If you are in a non-competitive market, in a non-competitive field, you don’t need to do local business schema. Most of your competitors are not doing it, so it’s not going to be huge if you don’t, but it definitely helps Google figure things out. Highly advise and find someone to help out with that. Samantha’s asking, which makes a bigger– Feel free to go to the chat and ask me a question. It’ll help break this thing up. Go ask the questions over there. We’re going to leave some time for Q&A, but I like breaking things up.
Samantha asked, which makes a bigger impact onsite or offsite SEO? I assume Samantha’s asking about your onsite content location service pages or link building. It’s not either-or. Once again, there’s gray area. I would say for my larger multi-location groups, your onsite is more important because most people don’t get that right. If you do it right across the board, you’re going to rank for more stuff and beat your competitors. You don’t really go into heavy link building until your location pages, all of your onsite content, your service pages have tons of content, looks good, Google’s indexing and the pages are working fast. I want you all focused on your website before we’re going into link building, but you’ll find that you’re not going to be number one for everything after you do everything on your website, in which case you need to get into link building. This is not a linkbuilding seminar, but I’m happy to provide some tips there.
Page speed, super important. Remember what we talked about? July 2021, Google’s going to mobile-first. Needs to be fast, needs to be responsive, needs to be great for the patient. This is what I use. PageSpeed Insights, go type in your website. You’re welcome, Samantha. Go type in your website and you’re going to get a score. I like to see scores of 80 plus, anything in the green mobile. Your mobile score is going to be more important than your desktop score. I imagine some of you are going and doing that right now. Mobile score more important than the desktop score in July of this year. They moved it back from May, but I really think the update’s actually going to happen in July, and I think they’re going to stick to it. Very fast. That is quick.
These are some of the things that you need to do to make sure your page and your websites load fast. Not going to get into each one. A lot are semi or somewhat obvious. I would recommend going to Upwork and you type in page speed optimization for a contractor, your SEO companies. Usually, we have one on staff. It’s so important to our clients, but a lot of SEO companies don’t, so they may outsource it. You could find someone on your own. Any way you do it, I don’t care. Just do it. WordPress is the best content management system. Make sure you’re on WordPress, it moves much faster. Your page speed optimizer will get rid of a lot of plugins, and a lot of different things that you don’t even know are loading, but are loading every single time you start your website.
Your home page speed is less important to me and Google than your location pages. Your location pages must be loading very quickly. Those are the ones that rank. Those are the ones that drive patients. All right. Any questions there guys, feel free to pump them in as we get over here. Let me make sure we are tracking our time. We are. We’re going to have plenty of time here for Q&A.
All right, guys. Citations so important. I’m going to keep the chat up. Rosa asks, how many keywords should I use per page? There is no hard and fast rule. I really want you guys to focus, not on keyword optimization, but on topic optimization. I want you to answer questions on your location and service pages. I do not want your keyword stuffing. The only places the keywords are very important is in your meta title and your H1 tag. After that, I want to answer your questions. Urgent care, Atlanta, meta title, the description also needs to say that. H1, urgent care, Atlanta, Georgia. Outside of that, you need to be answering questions. It’s going to be much more important to be natural and fluid, and your patients are going to prefer that.
Citations, why are they important? Google knows that people are coming to visit you. At least they used to, and I think in a couple of months they will again. Assuming you’re not a service-oriented service area-based business. Unless you’re provider groups, people are actually coming in to get care. That’s at least understanding I’m going to communicate through on this one. With that understanding, everything needs to look right for Google to trust you. Name, address, phone number, correct across all of the different directory listings. It wants to see those correct. You can do it manually, but there’s a bunch of them. There’s a bunch of them.
There are directory listing services like Yext, they’re our partner. Now I know they’ll charge you 100, 150 off the street per location per month. Or you can go to an agency. You might really get a break or you’re big enough to get a break. If you want to do it manually, I’ll tell you these two things, the most important thing is to just Google your search terms in your area to see which directories are showing up. Sometimes it will be Google My Business and Yelp, and Healthgrades, and BetterDoctor, Vitals. I’ve never heard of BetterDoctor honestly. Vitals, RateMDs, they’re not even going to show up. They’re not going to show up.
You don’t need to optimize those. You don’t necessarily need to optimize those. Those will only show up when someone goes and looks for provider reviews. In that case, your provider profiles need to look really good, and Healthgrades is always a big one and all that stuff. For Google purposes, optimize the listings that are showing up when people are searching for you. Google My Business is phenomenal. It’s the number one because so many people are typing that in. Yes, Gina, you will get a recording of this seminar, and you’re going to get the deck and everything out like that. No need to take notes. It’s all going to be coming to you guys.
Google My Business, very important. There’s things you can do in there that are going to change. One of the reasons I want you guys in the tool, especially if you have a number of locations, one of the reasons I want you in a tool is because your addresses are going to change. You’re going to move locations. You’re going to add providers. You’re going to change 800 to local numbers. Some schmucks going to put their cell phone number when they updated it, yada, yada, yada, your SEO coming updates it throws away the lock and key. Doesn’t tell you your password when you fire them. There are all kinds of reasons that you don’t want this to be a manual process. Well for efficiency and just accessibility if things go south with any of your vendors in the future.
Highly recommend you get your own Yext profile, you get it through the agency to where you can control it. Then a lot of these things will be updated automatically. Yext will also remove duplicates. They call it duplicate suppression, which is important because when patients go around your group, if they can’t find you, they’ll add a location. Boom, you have two of them. One of them has the wrong information, bad news.
There are different things you can do in Google My Business. I should have used a GMB listing here. Yext will update your Google My Business listing for you, but it doesn’t do all of the things in Google My Business that you can do. I want you guys to do a couple of different things, and you have to manually go into your GMB listings to do some of them. The first one, you can change the name of your business. Be careful with this, but you can add keywords. Let’s call it Atlanta Brain and Spine Care is my client. If they were just brain and spine care, we could add Atlanta in there. Google is not going to penalize them, and it’s going to help them show up in all the Atlanta results. Let me give you some other examples: if you are home care, whatever your business is, home care and home health, Orange County.
There are things that you can do and get away with, it’s a little gray. Google has a problem with it, they’ll just auto-correct it or a user will auto-correct it. Generally, I want you to put in a couple of keywords, at least your locations can help you show up more in Google My Business. Another big thing that Yext and all the other automated tools don’t do on Google, they won’t go in and add a bunch of categories for you. They don’t add all texts to the photos. They won’t answer reviews. There are all kinds of things. You’re never going to get out of manually updating your Google My Business listing, because it is so important, and even the Yext is great. We could have had them on here because I’ve been selling it for them, but even the great Yext doesn’t update everything individually. You need to go into Google My Business and do a lot of that stuff.
Let’s talk about some of these things. I want to actually show you guys some of the naming conventions that you guys can use. I love this. I often get asked, “We want to show up and get patients in a neighboring city.” “Do you actually have an address there?” “No, but we’re close, and we think patients will come visit us because we already have a couple that come from that area.” You can set up a page on your website with that location, and say that you are now Orlando, even though you’re in Tampa, Orlando Orthopedic Surgeon. That’s fine. Google may believe that, probably not.
To set up a Google My Business and really get authority in your local area, you have to go get a USPS-approved address, and it will not work- Google’s gotten smart at that. It will not work unless you have a suite number that’s not shared, and you have signage that is unique to you. When we go through the verification processes here, they will, if they have any doubts, they will ask for signage at your location and make sure that you are not sharing suite numbers. Phone number, address, signage, individual to you for each one of your GMB locations.
Your description can have different things. You see how Thomas Eye Group, they did the thing, they put Atlanta in there. I love it. One of the leading optometry groups here in town, consistent categories that represent the business. You can link to schedule an appointment, and you can link to individual location pages. You don’t have to link to the home page in every one of these. I want your providers to have their own GMB listing, and you need to claim them. The providers will very often, because they’re coming from another practice sometimes, they’re going to have it be antiquated. It’s going to show the wrong group, and you’re going to be advertising for a different provider group. That’s not fun. Let’s not do that.
Make sure you’re claiming your providers also. Would I throw all of my providers and Yext? Some of our clients have, even some of them with 3000 providers have. That can get expensive but it’s very tough to update unless you are in one of these tools. However if you have 8, 10 providers, definitely put them in Google My Business and update them individually.
So much more you can do in Google My Business. Highly recommend, Google wants to see activity here. They are going to rank you. The rankings for your GMB go like this. Proximity to city center, quantity and quality of reviews. Proximity to city center, quantity and quality reviews. They’re looking for those. When there’s a close tie, they’re going to start looking at activity. How filled out is this profile? Do we have pictures there? Are they doing Q&A on the answers? Are they answering reviews? When you get reviews from your patients, and I hope you’re using an active review solicitation program to get lots of positive Pollies to leave your a review and not wait for the negative Nancys. I want you guys to have a proactive campaign there.
When you get reviews, obviously you’re going to answer them good or bad. However, that’s also an opportunity to put in keywords. So glad, Linda, that you had a phenomenal time at our orthopedic surgery group. If anything ever happens in the future and you would like to visit Dr. Robinson again please do not hesitate to reach out. You cannot imply condition, don’t say that Linda had her ACL repaired. However, you do want to put keywords like orthopedic surgery answered, and anything like that in there. Answer your reviews, put in keywords, help you show up more. I want you guys make sure you’re getting lots of active reviews.
Lots of photography you can do, lots of great stuff, it’s going to be HIPAA compliant, you’re going to get sign-outs from your patients if any of them are in the pictures. You’re going to do 3D walk-throughs, very fun. Google wants to see this. They want people to stay on their platform, which is Google, so the more interactive stuff you can provide the better and happier they will be. If you like this, it’s from a song. There’s an interactive panorama, you can actually use Google. You’ll put in the pictures, and then they create this whole thing.
Look at Google My Business as your own little website that’s going to convert patients for you. You have your website, it’s going to help you get ranked in organic. Google My Business is its own website basically. I want you to pay that much attention to it. It is that important. Don’t just get on Yext, “Oh, we’re on Yext. We’re good.” No, you can add. You can change the content in there, you can answer reviews, you can add pictures, you can do a lot of fun stuff.
We got a question from Rebecca. Rebecca, we got a $15 gift card coming to you from Amazon. Everybody can still use Amazon stuff today. Thank you. She’s asking can you clarify saying I’m GMB? Do I need to create a GMB listing for the location plus for each provider and they all use the same address? Providers will be using the address of the main group where they work, and you can have multiple address listings for providers and say hey they sometimes work in this office, sometimes in this one. Generally, though, they’ll have a main priority. Yes, I want you to set up a GMB listing for your location and each provider there, and you can ladder up the providers to the group that they work at. All kinds of fun stuff, but Google knows healthcare, and so it’s got some widgets in there that’ll help you with that.
Even if you don’t want to complicate it providers need their own GMB and Google needs your own- and your location is either on GMB listing. You need reviews on both. When somebody goes and types in Dr. Robinson reviews, GMB will always list first and then you need to see what else lists, is that’s Healthgrades, Vitals, RateMDs, I don’t know, but those are the ones that I would optimize.
Virtual office is very sketchy. A lot of you guys don’t do the- I don’t like the virtual office thing. A lot of you provider groups aren’t doing that, but if you have a service say, “Don’t do it. I don’t like it.” Don’t leave them unclaimed. This is a big no-no whenever I’m consulting for a firm. If I see that the listing says unclaimed, would you want to claim it or anything like that? Not good. You want to make sure everything’s clean, and make sure you’re answering reviews. We talked a lot about this answering questions. You’re welcome, Rebecca. You can even ask your patients. If you want to put in your own questions, some of the people you work with, “Hey, go post this question to our GMB listing. We get asked this all the time.” What kind of insurance plans? What kind of payer partnerships do you have? Are your hours changing during COVID? You can add telehealth appointments now in a widget in GMB. You can almost go and seed these questions on your own. Julian, I hope that that helps answer your question.
You can list the health insurance plans and descriptions. I think categories, you might be able to put your payer partnerships. I’m not really sure, not really sure if that’s possible there but once again I would just ask the question. Post a question in there as a user. What payers do you accept? That’ll be important. I love, though, putting keywords in a business name.
Reviews, reviews, reviews. We know reviews matter, everybody’s going and getting them. I shouldn’t say everybody. Too often I’m finding a practice, a great practice has a three-star average rating with 20 reviews and their competitors all have four and a half’s worth of 100 reviews. It’s not because the practice isn’t good, it’s because it’s not actively soliciting for new reviews. I don’t care how you do it. We have great partners in Birdeye and Podium. I believe Salesforce has a great platform for that as well. Every time a patient leaves your care, please ask them for a review. I know you’re all running great shops, so they’re going to say great things about you.
All right guys, time for some Q&A. I’ve got great checklist in here, great checklist in here that they’re going to help you guys out and examples of our location page and all that kind of fun stuff. That’s going to help you. Want to leave a little bit of time to answer any questions, so go throw them over there. Obviously, we reward interactivity, anything I can do to help. We can also do a live thing. If you want to put a URL in there, I’ll check it, and I’ll give you some ideas. Plenty of time here, feel free to type in some questions while we’re here.
Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see. Samantha, you had asked if you have multiple locations in a single city, how do you determine which local keywords to use for each location? You basically want to look at which keywords are going to have the most volume. I’m looking for search volume in that case if they’re very similar, and I’m going to use the Google keyword tools to do that.
Rosa, how do you adapt your content strategy for local SEO? Basically, your content strategy will remain very similar. You’re there to answer questions and help patients get the best care. In order to do that, I’m going to go back one site so you guys can see this checklist. You guys can go back and answer tons of questions. I want you to use all those tools, Ubersuggests, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Google’s keyword tool. Find out everything anybody’s asking and go answer those questions. Not in blogs alone, as FAQs written up with FAQ schema on your location and service pages.
Kimberly, do you think we need to pay for SEO tools programs to be successful? You or your SEO company will be paying for the tools. There’s almost no other way to find out which keywords to be going after and which keywords you’re ranking for and stuff like that. SEMrush, number one tool. If you’re going to get one, it’s like $200 a month. Get SEMrush, give you keyword tools, competitive analysis.
A really good tip guys for finding out what you should be, and this is something I forgot to mention earlier on but you’re going to want to hear, a good tip for finding out what keywords and what kind of content topics to be writing on is to use your paid search data. Use your page search data, your search queries in your Google ads campaigns, look through those and see what topics and questions people are actually putting in to Google to find your ads.
Let me give you a couple of real-life examples. A lot of home health groups think that they should be writing content on cognitive care. We run paid search for some of the biggest home health care agencies in the country. We look through the search queries and we find out actually people call it dementia care, Alzheimer’s care. They don’t call it cognitive care. You call it cognitive care, they don’t call it cognitive care. That is just one example. They exist in just about every healthcare vertical. Examples of what you think you call it is not what someone else calls it. A lot of people don’t know optometrist, eye doctor. That’s what they call it, eye doctor. Stomach doctor, my GI client had no idea this was happening. We were ranking for gastroenterologist, digestive healthcare. No, they called it stomach doctor. There’s all kind of stuff you’re going to want to rank for, and if you don’t have Google ads going please launch a Google ads campaign. If nothing else to get information around the search queries people use to help inform your SEO.
Kimberly thank you. We’re going to get a gift card out to you. Cara, you as well. How often should you revamp or rebuild your website? Every 24 months generally. It’s going to go out of style. It’s going to get slow. It’s not going to look as good as your competitors. You can delay that a little bit to 36 months if you’re in a smaller market within a non-competitive healthcare vertical. You could delay that a little bit, but 24 months generally for revamps is what I found. It just starts to get kind of ugly and patched together.
Very important, when you are rebuilding your website, that you are not just having a design agency do it with no information coming from an SEO company. Every single month we are handed a website from a design company that is total trash from an SEO perspective, and the client launches it because they haven’t had an SEO company helping along with– The client launches it and their traffic goes like this, and they say, “I don’t understand why the traffic went like that.” Well, they launched it without your individual location pages. On your location pages, they put robot’s text files to where nobody could actually read it including the robots.
Oh, all those pictures that look really beautiful, they’re actually not indexable by Google. Your website is trash, has to be completely rebuilt. When you go to design your website, please make sure you’re doing it with an SEO company alongside you. Very important to engage someone on that. All right we’ll leave two more minutes for questions. Feel free to throw them in there. Let me see if I have any others. Go ahead and send them in. Well, you guys are going to get a little bit of time back which is nice too. We’ve got beautiful weather finally. Snow is defrosting.
Listen, if you want to write down my email, [email protected]. Any questions send them directly to me, I will answer them personally, and we’ll get them out to you. [email protected]. Thank you all for attending today. I had a great time, I hope you did too. All of these checklists will be in there for you. This is one I forgot to get to, and we will leave it at that. Thank you, everybody. Keep helping patients get the best care that we possibly can. We all need a little love right now. If there’s anything you need, please do not hesitate to reach out. All right. You guys have a wonderful day.
[00:41:31] [END OF AUDIO]
