Transitioning to from Brick and Mortar to Service Area Best Practices
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Hi. I am a solo practitioner in a healthcare field. I have had a traditional office for 4 years but have been working virtually since March 2020 . I have decided to give up my office space completely and make an attempt at running my practice virtually. Can anyone share the best practices for making this transition from an SEO perspective?
I currently rank between 2nd to 4th for most of my local keywords (so, in the GMB 3-pack). I will be competing against brick and mortar businesses. Is it even realistic to think I can hang onto my current rankings?
I have researched virtual addresses and ruled them out. I have considered searching for someone in my industry and/or a landlord who will accept a small fee in exchange for allowing me to use their address on my website and in GMB, but I'm unsure about this as it seems like a rather unstable arrangement and the shared office space aspect may present a problem with google
As of now my plan is to change my address in GMB to my home address, which I will hide, and remove the street address from my website, but maintain the rest of the NAP. I will then create targeted pages for the three primary counties I serve. I have also decided to advertise a limited number of home visit options for clients in my home county in order to maintain an in-person component to the business.
Does anyone have any suggestions to improve upon this course of action?
As for my current local citations, should I just leave them as is (with outdated address), attempt to remove the street address but retain the rest of the NAP, or something else?
Any feedback is appreciated.
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@custardextract Very helpful details. So, if you believe you will permanently transition to a virtual home office but will be seeing some clients face-to-face, then, yes, you will need to update all of your citations to reflect your new location. So long as you are still going to see some clients in person, you should be able to continue having a GMB listing, but you will certainly want to clean up your whole set of listings so that Google and, more importantly, clients, are not confused by conflicting data about where you are and how you operate. You should be prepared for the changes you have to make to impact your rankings, given the change in location.
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@miriamellis Thank you, Miriam. I'm not yet sure what I will do after COVID. My practice is such that I could continue to work online permanently, but it will depend on whether I can make the SEO work for that. So, for the sake of this discussion let's assume that I plan to stay online permanently. If that happens, I plan to make a limited number of house calls so that my business will retain a face-to-face component to comply with GMB SAB guidelines.
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@custardextract Your scenario is an important one, and I apologize that haven't receive a quicker response. I have one core question for you: if COVID ends, do you plan to resume seeing patients in-person? Or, is your medical specialty such that it is possible and is it your plan to permanently conduct all of your consultations remotely? And, related, if you did resume seeing patients in person, would you re-rent a new office or would you see patients at your house or make house calls?
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