15 Dec
Sarah’s daughter accidentally got a huge gash across her palm and needs medical care fast. But Sarah doesn’t know where to drive her daughter off the top of her head. She rushes to her phone and pulls up the results of a quick Google search. She then drives her daughter to the first place she sees listed in the search results.
Situations like these are a common day occurrence for urgent care clinics, since their patients come in a hurry. This just goes to show how important it is for urgent care clinics to have a strong medical website traffic that stays atop its game with good local SEO. Local SEO is the practice of increasing a website’s visibility to appear in the locally made searches on Google. It can benefit the website of any company or business that has a physical location by bringing in more clients/customers/patients
But how does local SEO work for urgent care clinics and what strategies can you use to increase your medical website’s visibility to drive more website traffic? It’s important to understand it all to identify any gaps your clinic’s medical website may have in terms of local SEO.
Why is Local SEO the Best Strategy for Urgent Care Clinics?
Local SEO for urgent care clinics optimizes their online presence for boosted visibility in organic local search engine results. Since there’s a massive demographic of individuals who search for services in their local area, Google’s local search algorithm implemented a proximity factor for search queries. This means Google considers the location of a local searched phrase even if the query doesn’t include the keyword “near me”. Aside from proximity, relevance, and prominence are the two other pillars of local SEO.
According to Google, 50% of individuals who looked up local information such as the nearest grocery store, dentist, urgent care clinic, etc. visited their physical location the same day. That just goes to show the importance of local intent and what it can do for a clinic. Local SEO incorporates a wide range of technical and creative strategies to convince Google that an urgent care clinic should be prominent in their results as a relevant response to online searchers near each clinic’s location. When an urgent care center appears at the top of the search results, it benefits in terms of higher visibility, boosted online traffic, and increased foot traffic to its location.
Local SEO Techniques That Work for Urgent Care Clinics
Urgent care clinics depend on their websites to bring in foot traffic as the usage of local searches grows daily. While helpful digital marketing strategies such as social media marketing can bring in online website traffic , you need a strong local SEO campaign intact to bring in patients to your clinic’s location. Here are five effective local SEO techniques that work wonders for urgent care clinics:
1. Get Verified on Google My Business
Google My Business has become the backbone of local searches these days, as most people base the credibility of a business on its GMB presence. Google shares its content quite generously. If your clinic’s GMB profile meets Google’s verification criteria, it may reward your clinic by ranking its listing on the sidebar space in the local search.
This means that if any potential patients who reside near you look up urgent care clinics or medical services, your clinic is going to appear as the most credible and top option they can go for. You can also share your GMB page on social channels to further boost your visibility.
2. Ensure Proper NAP Placement
NAP stands for a business’s name, address, and phone number (ideally with an area code). Setting up your NAP is the first step towards making it simple for patients and Google to locate you. Google needs to consider your NAP as crawlable HTML content on your medical website so it can show up on local search results.
It’s advised to steer clear of just placing your NAP with an image since text gets indexed better than images. If you wish, you can also include a Google Map embedded on your site to boost your visibility. The ideal location for NAP is the header or footer of a website or a “Contact Us” page.
Since urgent care clinics are likely to have more than one location, it’s ideal for them to create location pages to provide potential patients and Google with their separate names, addresses, phone numbers, and open hours. Above all, ensure that your NAP is consistent across your website, social channels, GMB profile, etc.
3. Create and Share Local Medical Content
There’s a simple trick to remember when publishing medical content. Write for your potential patients and promote them according to search engines. Focusing on publishing medical content that hones on local topics can help attract a local audience. Say your local area is experiencing many malaria cases.
Use this opportunity to publish medical content about awareness methods, and home remedies and promote the medical services of your clinic. This adds relevancy to your medical website, which boosts its prominence. Not only will this make your clinic as the local authority of your industry, but also assist in becoming the primary urgent care service provider in your local area.
4. Optimize Website for Mobile-Friendliness
According to statistics conducted in 2022, searches made on mobile devices are more likely to have local intent. When a potential patient is visiting your medical website traffic, they’re more likely to be scrolling through your clinic’s contact details, directions to your location and its reviews. Your medical website should be properly mobile-optimized for your clinic to attract foot traffic. A website’s loading time, appearance, and navigation are all important factors to improve when optimizing it for mobile use. Here are some tips to remember:
- Avoid including pop-ups when optimizing your medical website traffic for mobile use.
- Compress any infographics or images to boost page loading speed.
- Minimize any drop-down menus on your navigation bar.
- Use a custom CSS to make your medical website responsive
- Develop a simple site design especially for mobile view.
5. Boost Website’s Internal Linking Structure
While external links promote and bring online website traffic to your medical website, internal links boost your SEO rankings, even more so if your internal linking structure uses local community links. Not only does internal linking support your medical website’s navigation, but it also enhances your information stature and website hierarchy. It distributes page authority and rankings, which boosts their search result visibility.
To ensure you implement an internal linking structure that supports your local SEO, try to include links for your local community. For instance, collaboration with a nonprofit organization, local schools and colleges, newspapers and even TV shows can help you access local links which can boost your local SEO and add to your credibility as an authority among urgent care clinics. The more your clinic participates in the local community, the more digital PR it will gain.
Dominate the Local Search Results to Attract More Patients
Nearly 46% of Google searches are local, which makes it a powerful and business-growing tool for urgent care clinics. But if your clinic’s medical website isn’t optimized for local search, it could miss out on potential patients seeking urgent care services in your area. If you want your urgent care clinic to become a local authority, boost its visibility, stay relevant, and drive local potential patients, improving your local SEO is critical. Here at DocMarketo, we understand the specific requirements of urgent care clinic websites in terms of local SEO. Contact us now to learn more about our local SEO solutions for urgent care centers.