The process involved in getting your dental practice found locally on Google is way different than what you’d normally do for SEO, but when you optimize your practice for both, that’s where the magic happens!
Since local searchers have more intent and boast higher conversions, optimizing your dental practice for them seems like the next best thing to do to get more patients through your door.
And that is exactly the case in the dental marketing sphere right now. Almost every modern dental practice out there is trying to score local patients by getting on top of Google local searches with Local SEO and, if you haven’t already, it’s about time that you did!
But how do you do it? By listing your correct practice information or citations in relevant directories, websites, apps and social media platforms all over the web.
Each correct listing will increase your practice’s authority in the eyes of Google and will send signals to them that you’re a legitimate business.
The more citations a practice has, higher will be their authority and eventually, it will start ranking higher in local search engine results bringing in more traffic to your practice’s website.
Localisation has been a hot topic of 2018. It is an integral component of our dental marketing services suite as well and it has all the reasons to be. Dental practitioners are slowly jumping onto this wagon for increased foot traffic for their practice and you can too. But there are literally thousands of directories out there related to the dental industry that filling out your business information on all those directories one-by-one can be a daunting task.
As a dentist, you just cannot afford to spend that much time submitting business citations on the web unless you’ve hired a dental marketing agency, like us, that can do the powerlifting for you.
Also, by manually filling out your business details in all those places, you run the risk of filling incorrect business information about your dental practice which can really turn off Google and plummet your hard-earned search engine rankings.
Going down the manual route is recommended only if you wish to list your practice on some select major business listing sites such as Yelp, Facebook, and Google My Business. But if you really want to see a positive effect in your overall search engine rankings, you need to list your practice and mark your presence on every platform where patients are searching for you.
So, to save a lot of time and efforts, you can make use of some tools available online that can streamline the entire dental practice listing process for you. The tools I am about to tell you will literally submit your practice information all around the web and make sure that they are consistent at every touch-point, here they are –
- Bright Local
With over 1600 directories to choose from, Bright Local has their own in-house team to manually create or claim, submit and monitor your practice information on specific directories selected by you. You just need to provide them with your correct practice information and they will take care of the rest. Apart from that, Bright Local also submits your business information to local data aggregators which then supplies your data to wide distribution networks for increased exposure.
- Moz Local
Moz is the leading SEO platform providing users with top-notch keyword research, rank tracking, on-page optimization and link research tools. They also offer a dedicated platform for users to excel locally – Moz Local, which does all the grunt work of submitting your practice information to their search ecosystem. And all of it is done with a click, you just have to submit your practice information once on the platform and make sure that it’s verified with Google or Facebook, they will do the rest!
- Yext
With a recent integration with Amazon Alexa, Yext is a dedicated local discovery platform that submits your practice information to 100+ digital services included in their knowledge network. And the submissions made through Yext is almost instant as they have established a direct API integration with all of them.
Bright Local is at a slight disadvantage if you need to change your practice information as their in-house team will have to manually fix all your practice listings. The process is seamless in Moz Local and Yext.
All the above-mentioned tools offer demo versions to get a hands-on experience of what they have to offer to make sure you’re happy with what you are paying for. You can get your hands on these tools for anything between $29-$150, which is not a lot when compared to the business they can bring in by helping you optimize your dental practice for local searchers.
Sumit Kapoor is a passionate blogger and an accomplished digital marketing trainer from India. He has written blogs on various topics like SEO, Blogging, products reviews, making money online, Google AdWords, etc. He has assisted many clients from different industries and helped them improve their online strategies.