8 Reasons You Should Hire a Local SEO Expert for Your Medical Business
Why hire a local SEO expert for your medical business?
It’s simple. SEO can have a huge impact on your practice or clinic. When people are searching for a new doctor, dentist, or medical information, they turn to search engines for help. As a matter of fact, 77% of people start their health journey this way.
In order for you to stand a chance at getting traffic from these searches, you need to be ranked at the top of those listings.
Here are 8 more reasons why you should hire a local SEO firm for your medical business
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A Local SEO Expert Knows What Works
When you hire a local SEO agency, you’re hiring someone who invests time and energy into keeping up with the best practices of search engine optimization.
What are the top considerations that Google makes when it determines search results? If you said keywords, that’s only part of the answer.
Keywords matter, but so do about 200 other things, such as online reviews, website speed, and how close your business location is to the person searching.
The SEO agency will work on each factor and ensure that all of them work together to create a compelling reason for you to be highly ranked.
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Your Time is Valuable
How much time do you or your staff have to devote to SEO? Not only in doing the daily tasks like blog posts and social media but education as well?
SEO requires a fair amount of technical knowledge and creativity. Being able to devote yourself to learning about SEO and putting what you learn consistently is an essential part of success.
The second question you need to ask yourself is where is that time best spent? Is it learning about SEO or doing other revenue-generating activities like billing and collections?
If you think that your time can be better spent doing other work on your medical business, then hire a local SEO expert.
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You Could Hurt Your Rankings and Not Know It
You may be very familiar with old ways of doing SEO. You know that keywords and backlinks are very important to building your site’s success.
You decide to do SEO yourself and add as many keywords and buy backlinks for your site. You see success for the first couple of weeks and then your site disappears from search results.
While these methods worked 6 or 7 years ago, times have changed. Google penalizes sites that use “black hat” methods such as these.
By doing SEO on your own, could damage your rankings and your company’s reputation.
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Your Website Functions Better
An SEO expert knows that it takes time and energy to get your website just right. They understand that when people first visit your website, you need to make a great first impression to build trust immediately.
Site speed and your website’s structure matters, too.
They’ll recommend changes such as adding reviews to your site. One example is this website from Bliss Medicines.
All of these changes enhance the trust and credibility of your practice with search engines and website visitors. The more they trust you, the better your results will be.
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Get Ahead of Trends and Changes
Voice search. Mobile search. Mobile-first indexing.
If you don’t know what these mean and how your search results will be impacted, then you should consider hiring a local SEO service.
SEO experts have to know what works now but stay ahead of the curve to know what will work in the future.
More people will be using Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant to find information. As a result, search terms will be in the form of a question as opposed to one or two keywords.
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Your Online Listings Look Great
When was the last time you looked at your online listings? Are they accurate?
Your online listings play a huge role in local search results. If there’s information that isn’t accurate or doesn’t match what’s on your website, patients and search engines will be confused.
An SEO services company will be able to clean those listings up immediately.
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You Can Get More Referral Business
Believe it or not, how your medical business appears in search engines can impact your referral business.
When someone gets a referral for a medical practitioner, the first thing they do is look them up online. If they can’t find you online, they’ll go elsewhere, even if they had a recommendation from a trusted friend.
In today’s world, if you don’t appear online, or you have a poor online presence, you don’t exist in the mind of the customer.
That’s why you need to consider hiring SEO services. Your business depends on referral and new business and a solid online brand can deliver.
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You Know the ROI
SEO success is driven by data. A local SEO expert will be able to tell you if your site is getting traffic. They’ll have detailed reporting that will tell you where that traffic is coming from and if there are search terms that are working well.
They’ll also tell you where you’re appearing in search results and if your traffic is converting into contacts or appointments.
Keep in mind that effective SEO is a long-term project. It can take months to see the results that you want. However, you should be able to measure small amounts of progress within the first month or two.
Local SEO Services Can Grow Your Medical Business
As you grow your medical practice, you’re going to have less time to devote to marketing and keeping up with the latest online trends.
The consistent work it takes to build your SEO can’t afford for you to stop when you’re busy and resume when you’re not. You’ll get nowhere fast.
That’s why outsourcing to a local SEO expert makes so much sense. It’s their job to stay abreast of any changes that will impact your listings and adjust your plan accordingly.
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