Local SEO for Medical Practices: How to Highlight Multiple Specialties in Search Results

Drawing patients to your multiple medical specialties and clinics with a single marketing strategy can be challenging and time-consuming, yet incredibly rewarding. Local SEO for medical professionals is the key that unlocks this strategy, but it’s a highly specialized one. Boosting visibility and increasing interaction with potential patients are key goals of local medical marketing, but when you have multiple practices or providers to promote at once, how to achieve those goals becomes fuzzy. 

Practices and providers looking to improve their rankings must also avoid competing with themselves while maintaining a sense of unity and consistency in their branding and user experiences. All of this means that local SEO for medical practices is a tango between elevation, localization, and specialization. But before you can identify the best local SEO strategy for your practice, you’ll first need to understand the difference between traditional search engine optimization (SEO) and local SEO. Let’s take a closer look.

What is Local SEO?

While regular SEO is broad, covering all methods of optimizing your website to rank highly on generally relevant searches, local SEO narrows down the focus to, well, locals. Google and other search engines know when people search for things that are nearby to them, and they prioritize relevant results using localized keywords. 

For example, a search for “primary care Durham” will not provide options in a different city or state. By optimizing for local SEO, medical practices with multiple specialties or locations can ensure they always show up whenever nearby patients search for their offered services.

Unpacking the Value of Local SEO for Medical Professionals

These days, three out of every four patients use search engines to find medical care. Leveraging local SEO is the most organic, reliable, and cost-effective way to attract these patients. Being among the top results when someone searches for dentists, urgent care, pediatrician, or any other medical specialty is crucial for establishing or growing your practice.

It also helps improve relationships with existing patients by giving them additional touchpoints through which they can ask questions, learn information, and manage their care needs.

Five Essential Tips for Local SEO for Medical Practices

Clearly, it’s important to invest in local SEO for your medical practice or organization. But how do you go about doing so? How can you ensure you compete with the competition and not your own practices? 

To get the most value out of your local SEO strategy, focus on these five tips.

1. Optimize Your Google Business Profiles (GBPs)

Other search engines exist, but the majority of potential patients will use Google. Showing up on Google Maps, therefore, is essential to local medical practices. Your GBPs will be similar to other medical directories, and you’ll want to ensure your practice name, address, and phone (NAP) are accurate when you set these up. 

Since many patients may not even go to your overall website, it’s important to use your GBPs to the fullest for every specialty and location you have. Here’s what that looks like:

• Clinic profiles. Any clinic or specialty you have needs its own profile. This ensures any physical location or unique specialty you have will appear in searches. 

• Provider profiles. Each of your healthcare providers or specialists should also have their own GBP profile. 

• Hours, insurance, and other information. Put all the information patients need at a glance on your GBP. That means operational hours, accepted insurances, special closures, phone number, parking availability, etc. 

• Photos. Craft a great first impression with inviting photos that set your locations apart from other medical specialties.  

• Appointment links. Cut out a click or two from the process by letting patients schedule an appointment right from your Google profile. 

2. Gather Reviews & Maintain Online Reputation

Google uses positive reviews to weigh local search results in favor of more trusted medical clinics. Take advantage of this to build credibility for your practices with follow-up emails and other calls to action for happy patients to write a review. 

Having someone dedicate a bit of time regularly to responding to reviews and building this positive reputation will make a big difference for your local SEO results. 

3. Keep Consistent Citations

Google is the most important directory to be on, without a doubt, but other medical directories help out your local SEO too. The more places your NAP can be found, the more it will reinforce your local online presence. Just make sure all your information is up to date and consistent across all your citations to avoid confusion. 

4. Post Relevant, High-Quality Content with On-Page SEO

The core of any good local SEO strategy is a website with relevant, well-written content. On-page SEO, meaning the words and formatting people see on your website or social media, is a big part of that. Using local keywords naturally alongside medical keywords will make your website rank higher in local searches.

Here are some examples of relevant content you can feature on your website to boost your local SEO and draw more traffic:

• Location landing pages. Give each of your locations its own page on your website. Describe the services offered, and include a few relevant city/state keywords. 

• Medical condition pages. Similar to your locations, each significant medical condition your practices care for should have its own informational page.   

• Insurance FAQs. Many patients will find clinics while researching where their insurance is accepted. Draw in these searches with some FAQs about insurance.

• Health Tips. Similar to your medical condition pages, publishing some helpful health tips sprinkled with local keywords can attract local patients. 

• Community events/news. Nothing says local like community content!

5. Local Backlinks

When other websites link to yours, it builds authority and credibility in search engines’ eyes. Collaborating with other local businesses, community groups, or medical practices (ideally outside your specialties, to avoid competition) to link to each other in relevant ways can be a mutually beneficial path to grow your local SEO. 

Focus on high-quality link building, though. Most local websites will probably be safe, but any website with a negative or spammy online presence will harm, rather than hurt, your website’s search rankings.  

Make Life Easier with Best-in-Class Local Marketing Technology

Targeting local SEO for multiple medical practices is essential for growth, but it can easily seem to present more obstacles than benefits. Gathering data, creating content strategies, building pages, and creating unified experiences takes time and, in many cases, dedicated resources. But you don’t have to hire an entire marketing or SEO team to improve local rankings and establish yourself as a leader in your industry. All you need are the tools that help you simplify things so you can do more with less, all while still achieving your goals.

PowerChord offers martech solutions that make unified marketing as simple as possible. Our local marketing technology is built to help you grow your online presence, capture new leads, and gain valuable insights into what works (and what doesn’t). 

Uniquely built for multi-location businesses and brands, PowerChord is equipped to help you support multiple practices or providers from one place. Skip the trial and error and jump straight to higher rankings and better local search results. 

Reach out for a free consultation today to see how PowerChord could help market your many specialties and clinics all at once.