What's the 20/80 rule in local SEO as it relates to health care organizations
-
Hello all,
I'm in charge of local SEO for a health care system that covers the entire state of Nebraska, with dozens of clinics all over the state, but mainly Omaha and Lincoln.
I'm trying to build a cohesive local strategy for our organization, and a big part of that is figuring out what are the 20% of the actions I could take that will get me 80% of the benefit.
Based on your experience as a local SEO specialist or ideally someone who does local SEO in a health care setting, what are the key things I should focus on?
I'm not new to local SEO (just new to health care). My guess would be to focus in on getting a good local page on our website for every clinic/location etc., and getting a good Google Page listing for each one as well. But I figured I'd seek out advice on this before I plunge ahead.
-
Hi Patrick,
As each of these is genuinely a forward-facing department with its own phone number, then listing each should not be regarded by Google as spam in any way. Many hospitals and colleges have numerous departments. It's true - this will lead to quite a cluster of markers on the map, but if customers zoom in, Google will spread them out. Hope this helps!
-
Thanks Miriam,
I'm just talking about our clinics that are front-facing departments. For example, Our newborn intensive care unit has its own name, phone number etc. and will soon have its own page on our website. But the physical address is officially still the address of the hospital as a whole.
I'm just worried we're going to have so many of these in one of our buildings it might not make sense or look spammy to list them all.
-
Hi Patrick!
I'm so happy you re-discovered this thread and that my answer seems to have been 'just what the doctor ordered'
Regarding your follow-up question, can you please define 'clinics' for me? Do you mean different departments like a dental clinic, a family wellness center, an eye clinic? Or, do you mean clinics like 'on Tuesdays, we hold a weight loss clinic in room B'? Want to be sure you are talking about actual, permanent, forward-facing departments in the hospital rather than something like a class.
I'll check back!
-
Hello Miriam,
For some reason I missed the notification that you responded. Your answer (I'm finally reading now several months later) is superb. I'm extremely thankful you took the time to write it. This is the EXACT advice I was looking for!
One follow up question: At the hospitals we have dozens of clinics, each with unique names and phone numbers (and different locations within the larger buildings) and all of whom we want to market. But will Google consider it spam to have 20 or more markers on a hospital building for example? Or will some simply not show up on the map? Or is that considered a bad user experience?
A belated thanks,
Patrick
-
Hi Patrick!
Great topic and here are the first 10 steps I would focus on:
-
Make a spreadsheet with the NAP+W of every office and every practitioner you are planning to market.
-
Check the spreadsheet to make sure no office or practitioner you are planning to market is sharing a phone number with any other entry on the spreadsheet.
-
Also check the spreadsheet to make sure that each office of practitioner you are planning to market has its own landing page on the website. In other words, the office in Lincoln has a dedicated website page, the office in Omaha has a dedicated website page and Dr. John Jones has his own landing page on the site, too. Be sure that each entry in your spreadsheet has a clear, unique URL associated with it (that's the W in your NAP+W).
-
Now, once you've ensured that there is a unique landing page on the website for each entity you are marketing, be sure that the content on those pages is unique and truly helpful. Major funding and effort should go toward this step, as content quality is going to play a key role in both organic and local rankings. Advise the client that they need to make a big spend here.
-
Now, re-read Google's guidelines, paying very close attention to the guidelines for Chains, Departments & Practitioners. Be sure you are current on Google's policies as they sound like they will be highly applicable to your client. Follow these guidelines to the letter.
-
Now, do a citation audit to discover existing citations, duplicates and any inconsistency problems. Document your findings. Make corrections where necessary.
-
Getting all of the above ducks in a row will get you where you need to be to start building a unique citation set for each entity (office or practitioner), referring to your spreadsheet to be sure you've got the right NAP+W for each. Build citations on all of the major platforms. You might choose to use a service for this step, like Moz Local or Whitespark, Bright Local, Yext, etc. Given the scope of the project, a paid service could end up saving valuable time.
-
Then, follow this up by building citations on healthcare-specific entities. You may find a service that builds healthcare citations, or you may choose to do this step manually.
-
Once you've got the content right and the citations developed, the next focus will be earning reviews. These are very important, given their impact on both rankings and conversions. Be aware of any laws governing Nebraska regarding healthcare advertising/solicitation and then create a viable strategy for earning reviews on the major platforms and medical platforms for each entity you are marketing
-
All of the above represents a normal strategy for most local businesses. You need to do these things, even if they are the same things your client's competitors will be doing. Step 10 is where this gets interesting and it's what I'd call the 'competitive difference maker'. As the marketer, you need to audit how the client's direct competitors are marketing themselves in Nebraska and figure out what they either aren't doing at all or aren't doing well that your client could do to make themselves stand out. This is where you will invest creativity, time and funding once you've got the basics covered.
I've seen advertising dollars spent foolishly in the medical field. For example, a one-horse town with just one hospital in it investing in billboards encouraging people to choose that hospital for ER care. If there's only one hospital in town, people don't have a choice and don't need to be convinced to go to the hospital when they break their arm, right? That's a case I've always remembered because it seemed so unnecessary.
By contrast, I saw something that appeared to be an app for an ER in a different region with several hospitals which apparently predicted wait-times for patients, making it easier for them to pick which hospital to go to for fastest service. I didn't look into the details of this fully, but I though the convenience it provided patients was an interesting idea. I wonder how it's working out.
What you need to find is something your client can do that is going to make them more useful, convenient, accessible or beneficial to patients than their competitors are. This step 10 is where your brilliance as an adviser really has a chance to shine!
Hope this helps and good luck with the big project!
-
-
I have worked for the health care hospital based in Florida while I was working for one agency and as far as my experience goes the basic game is pretty much the same. Get your business pages right, keep NAP consistent on all embassies and more.
The only advantage I took was by working with their PR agency. Their PR agency successfully established their brand name displayed on almost all local magazines. I just help the PR team to get the link from their magazines that looks natural (obviously for that I had to build a blog that contain the linkable content).
Links from quality places increase DA and overall authority of the website, right local SEO help me rank for most of the keywords with location pages.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
3 Main Local Ranking Factors
In the Moz article titled Should You Pay for Local Listings Management? by Miriam Ellis, she makes this statement: "Prominence, proximity, and distance are the three types of factors Google tells us it takes into account when ranking local businesses. " I always thought that classic on- and off-page SEO was one of those three factors. What puzzles me about Miriam's statement is this: What's the difference between distance and proximity? Aren't they the same thing?
Local Listings | | btreloar3 -
Accurate Rank Checking for Local SEO
Hi all, I am wondering if anyone out there has cracked the enigma of figuring out how to accurately find local rankings for multi-location businesses. I do understand that "accuracy" should be used loosely given the numerous factors that come into play for local such as distance from searcher and business location being located directly in the city of the search. So I definitely get that nothing will be entirely accurate but the programs I have used and the incognito browser approach just seems so far off. Moz tells me something different than the Google Adword Preview Tool which is different than SEMRush which is different than serps.com and so on. I have done the appending to search strings with near=city as well. I unfortunately do not trust any of them at this point. I would LOVE if my company flew me out to every single city we are in so I could do local searches but that is probably not going to happen 🙂 Any thoughts or recommendations for how I can get the most accurate local rank, even if it is an incredibly manual process? Is there an easy way for me to change my location anymore since Google stripped that option away awhile back? That was the ONLY time I felt I was getting somewhat accurate results. Thanks! -Ben
Local Listings | | Davey_Tree1 -
Do You Know What's Triggering Your Local Packs?
Hey To All My Local Pals, Here 🙂 Recently, I watched a totally fascinating LocalU video in which Mike Blumenthal introduced a hypothesis that there may be a way to analyze what, specifically, is triggering a specific local pack. Now, Mike is stating that correlation is not causation in explaining this, but basically what he starts talking about at around 4:40 in the video is that what you are seeing rank well in the local packs may be demonstrably caused by what you see ranking organically beneath the pack, or may be caused by totally different signals. Mike says, _"If you're seeing the top 10 results are all IYP industry sites, and there's a pack showing, and the highest local site is 24 or something in organic, it's unlikely that that's what's triggering the pack. And so then you want to look at third-party triggers and see if that's what's actually triggering the pack." _ Obviously, all of us who do Local are familiar with the idea that a tremendous variety of elements contribute to pack rankings, but I am particularly intrigued by the idea of looking at the organic result beneath a pack and determining that there is little or no correlation between them, and this then driving one to look elsewhere for contributing factors. In a recent response to another thread here on Q&A, I discussed some common local pack ranking failure causes when organic rank is high. What I'd love to see is whether, if you look at some of your clients' desired packs, can you tell if organic signals are driving them, or can you see that it's not organic signals driving the pack, as Mike suggests. What, in those cases, does appear to be driving the packs? I'd be so interested in a discussion on this. What do you see? What do you think of Mike's suggestions?
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis9 -
Local Directories: What are the best practices for manually updating over 500 listings?
We are currently using an aggregator for a client, but we will be manually updating 5 different local directories that are not included in the distribution for over 500 locations. I am wondering if there are any local experts that have a set of best practices/processes for this type of scenario?
Local Listings | | PureVisibility0 -
I am looking for some Local authoritative websites and aggregators of local business data
Does anyone know where I can obtain a list of aggregators of local business data for the UK? I am also looking to understand the best way to find local authoritative websites that I could build backlinks with. Hope you can help. Many thanks Nick
Local Listings | | SEM_at_Lees0 -
How much local traffic should I expect
I handle mostly small business and provide SEO optimization services and content creation. My question is about local search. what is a reasonable amount of local search traffic for small service companies. For instance I handle an electric and hvac company with an estimated population of 100,000 people within a ten mile radius. With approx 20 companies who provide competition. Should I expect 10 hits a day 20, a hundred? How do I quantify results on a local level as to not make expectations too high. The good metrics I have is the amount of prospects who have found my clients through the web and purchased services. That percentage is high. But Is there room to improve if my client received 15 hits a day?
Local Listings | | donsilvernail0 -
Google + / Local for Business. How to SEO ?... Done the basic but no real change.
Hi All, We have set up all of our Google local for business pages which are verified and these link to the relevant branch pages on our website. The branch pages also link back to the relevant google local page. We only appear for one category on the google local pages and we have also done a large number of citations (NAP) across all locations and the text used in each of the google pages is keyword rich and we mention the city in there as well to localise it. We have a few google + likes and we have used hootsuite to publish the same content across some of the google local pages which links back to our website blog , we are not appearing in local search whereas our competitors seem to be appear for all their branches. Is there any fundamental tips or things we need to do to def. get up on the rankings.. Or any good articles worth reading ?.. I've had a look but can't seem to see anything relating a google local business bible.. thanks Pete
Local Listings | | PeteC121 -
What would Cause listing to fall off local search map spot?
Any reason a listing that was showing in Google between the 3 and 5 spot on local map search would suddenly disappear all together from the map position for a specific keyword?
Local Listings | | scott3150