If you operate one healthcare practice with multiple locations, you might be wondering how to best present this information online to ensure you pop up high in search rankings and give potential patients a great user experience.
Local SEO can be complicated enough when you just have one location, but managing a multiple-location practice’s online presentation and reputation can feel like taking on a second full-time job.
If you’re wondering how to ensure you’re ranking as high as possible for every one of your practice locations, stick with us while we go through the SEO best practices you’ll want to follow.
When you have a healthcare practice with multiple locations, your first instinct might be to build a separate website for each physical office you operate. In reality, though, it’s best to have one primary site that serves all of your locations rather than individual sites for each location. This can help give you higher conversions and much better rankings.
When you have one main site for your healthcare practice, it means you can grow the overall SEO authority of your site a lot faster, which will help to boost your rankings over time. When you have a number of different websites in order to serve each individual location, your rankings will be suppressed, and your overall authority lessened.
Having one site for your business can also be a great way to increase brand awareness in your local area. It also helps to boost conversions because all of the information about your practice is located in one easily navigable site.
Now that you know you want to create one central website for your practice, the next step is to ensure that each individual location will rank well in various search engines. To reach this goal, you’ll want to create individual pages for each location of your healthcare practice.
This means that each location should have a unique page and URL.
For example, let’s say your business name is LMNOP Medical. You already have the URL lmnopmedical.com, but now you need to create separate pages for each clinic location.
If you have three physical offices– one in Springfield, one in Chester, and one in Madison– you’ll want to have URLs that look like this:
Keeping your URLs simple and clean in this way gives each location the best possible chance of ranking well. Since people are most likely looking for medical care in their specific area, you want them to be able to find the most relevant location for their needs.
Each location page should have its own unique, high-quality content to help you achieve a good conversion rate and boost traffic from search engines.
How competitive your local area is will determine how much content you will need on each location page. A good place to start is about 500-1,000 words of unique content on each of these pages. This will give you a good jumping-off point, and you can increase the content over time as needed.
It’s important to invest in high-quality content on these pages for conversion purposes. The more specific information there is about the individual location, the more confidence your potential patients can have when choosing you over your competitors.
You might decide to include info about the individual services offered at each location, the team that works at each office, and details about the physical location of the clinic. On top of that, you’ll want to include information about booking an appointment and all relevant contact information. Many practices allow patients to book appointments online these days using an online booking form.
Google is always trying to provide searchers with the most relevant results, which they do by looking to see how relevant your page is in response to a query. If Google doesn’t determine that your page is relevant to a user, you won’t receive an ideal ranking in the search results when someone is searching for a healthcare practice in your location.
There are a lot of different elements that impact how relevant Google believes your site is. One of the most impactful factors, though, is on-page SEO.
You’ll want to make sure that each location page is optimized for on-page SEO. One thing that Google gives priority to is title tags. Also important are your site speed, mobile responsiveness, metadata, alt tags, and anchor text links.
Formally known as Google My Business, the Google Business Profile is a free and impactful way to put your healthcare practice on the map, literally. When you complete a free business profile through Google, you’re making it possible for potential clients to see your offices on Google Maps when they search for something like “healthcare practices near me.”
These profiles are intended for businesses that operate out of physical storefronts or offices, meaning that you will want to create an individual profile for each of your locations.
Many healthcare practitioners find that these free profiles can help drive many new patients to their offices. You’ll want to ensure that each location has a well-optimized Google Business listing of its own to ensure that people can find the most convenient office.
There are several things you can do to optimize your Google Business Profile, including:
Was your site ranking doing great until the Helpful Content Update was rolled out from Google? If so, check out this guide to help you audit and recover your site after the update.
Anytime your business is listed online, whether on government directories, websites, the Yellow Pages, or Yelp, it’s known as a citation. One of the most important things you can do to show Google that you are a legit and trustworthy business is to make sure that every time your business is mentioned online, the information is up-to-date and accurate.
You’ll want to take the time to list your practice locations in all major relevant online directories, including medical directories specific to your practice. When listing your information on these sites, it’s essential that your name, address, and phone number (NAP) are exactly the same every single time and free from any typos or mistakes.
As mentioned above, you want to make sure that the content on the page for each location is unique rather than copy/pasted from your other location pages. You’ll also want to make it as specific as possible rather than simply including generic information that isn’t particularly useful to the user.
When you’re starting out, it’s a good idea to have at least 500 words of copy on your page. Break this information up using:
Go the extra mile to inform prospective patients about the specific services offered at each location. The more information they are able to gain simply from visiting your site, the more likely they will be to set up an appointment. When you leave people guessing, you’re betting on the fact that they will take the time to call your practice to find out if they can receive the treatment they need rather than simply heading to a competitor with a more informative site.
You’ll also want to include keywords that are relevant to your location on each site page.
Another priority should be user experience. You want to make each location site as easy to navigate as possible. This means that people shouldn’t have to work hard to find your contact information, services provided, or information about scheduling an appointment.
Many healthcare practices include an embedded map of their location on their site with a “Get Directions” button. This can help save people the step of heading to Google Maps to look up where the office is and whether it’s in a convenient location for their needs.
For each of your locations, showcase the providers that comprise your team. Include the name, photo, and a link to a bio page for each team member. This provides patients with valuable information that will help inform their decision to set up an appointment.
You might also consider including video messages from each provider to help your clients get more engaged and receive more useful info about the service they can expect at a specific location.
While it might sound like a lot of work to create unique content for each page, you can create one template that you use for all locations and fill it in with content specific to each location. Not only does this make it easier to create a new site page when you open up a new office, but it also helps create a visual consistency for your viewers that adds authority and professionalism to your site.
Reviews play a big role in a patient’s decision to call one healthcare practice over another. After all, reviews offer valuable information to prospective clients about the experiences of other patients in the past. According to one study, nearly 60% of patients have used positive online reviews to choose their doctor. The same study also notes that the same percentage of patients have avoided a healthcare provider because of negative reviews they read online.
When you have several different locations, you’ll want to work to build a digital reputation for each individual office. Instead of trying to generate reviews for your overarching business, you’ll want to solicit and manage reviews on an individual location basis.
There are many places where patients most commonly read reviews for healthcare providers, including:
Managing the reviews for each location on each of these sites can sound like a lot of work, but it’s well worth it. Depending on the number of locations you have, you might find that hiring a digital marketing company to help you build and manage your online reputation lets you focus on your practice rather than taking on a second full-time job as an SEO expert.
Experiencing the rewards from optimizing the SEO for a healthcare practice with multiple locations can take time, but you should slowly start to notice several things starting to happen:
How quick and easy it is to boost your rankings on search results will have to do with the competition in your local area. If you are the only chiropractor in a twenty-mile radius, you’ll find that even the smallest effort toward your SEO can go a long way in terms of traffic and conversions. On the other hand, if you’re in a big city where there are dozens, if not hundreds, of offices that specialize in the same healthcare branch, you’ll find a more concerted effort is necessary to climb your way up the ranks.
It’s worth noting that Google puts extra pressure on specific industries to ensure information is true and accurate, including the health niche. The Google Medic update first appeared back in 2018 but is still incredibly relevant today. Anyone operating a healthcare-related site will want to become familiar with this highly impactful update.
You have a lot on your plate when you’re operating multiple healthcare locations at once. Luckily, you can outsource all the SEO-related tasks that can help you climb your way up the search rankings, boost traffic, and ultimately get more clients.
Blue Pig Media is a one-stop shop for all of your digital marketing needs. Offering SEO, content management, PPC, and more, we specialize in delivering market-leading results to all of our clients.
If it’s time for you to increase visibility, engagement, and conversions at your healthcare practice locations, contact us today to find out how we can help.
