Patients in need of care expect a few things when they research your services using a search engine or scroll through your location pages. They want accurate, up-to-date information, addresses and phone numbers, and even a photo or a map of the location they’re researching. But your healthcare location profiles can offer so much more than just the basic information — you can optimize your profiles to be a valuable tool in your marketing toolbox.
Beyond just appearing in search results, a well-maintained location profile builds trust and enhances user experience — essential components for driving conversions.
Before we dive into ways to optimize your location profiles, let’s have a quick refresher on why ensuring your profiles are accurate and up-to-date is so important:
Why healthcare location profiles matter
Reach patients in your geographic area
When people search for healthcare providers near them, they rely heavily on search engines like Google. Having accurate and consistent location information ensures that search engines trust your organization enough to display it prominently in search results.
Improve your search engine rankings
Search engines prioritize businesses with reliable and complete location profiles. Mismatched or outdated details, such as incorrect phone numbers or hours of operation, can hurt your visibility and rankings.
Enhance the user experience
Inconsistent or incomplete information frustrates users and may drive them to competitors. A trustworthy profile fosters confidence, ensuring users can easily find and contact your business.
Key elements of a location profile
Before you can optimize your location listings, make sure you have the basic components locked down:
- Contact information: Ensure each location’s name, address (including whether an office is located within a larger location), and phone number are accurate across not just the location profiles but across all of your channels (social media platforms, business listings, etc.)
- Business hours: Keep your hours of operation updated, especially during holidays or other special circumstances (extreme weather events, etc.)
- Photos and descriptions: High-quality images of the location, as well as any staff, patient, and provider images, make each profile more appealing and credible.
Time to optimize your healthcare location profiles
If your healthcare location profiles could use a little sprucing up, try these strategies for optimizing your location pages into powerful marketing assets:
- Optimized HTML titles and meta description: Craft unique, keyword-rich HTML titles and meta descriptions for each location page. Include relevant details such as the city, neighborhood, and services offered to increase the likelihood of appearing in local search results.
- Schema-structured data: Structured data helps search engines understand your business better. Add Schema markup to provide detailed information such as your address, hours, contact information, and reviews. This enhances your chances of appearing in rich search results like Google’s Local Pack.
- Maps: Embedding a map of a location on its location page is a fantastic way to give prospective patients an idea of how far a location is from their home and the directions they’ll use to get there.
- Keyword research: Identify the localized and service-specific keywords your audience is searching for. Incorporate these keywords naturally into your profile’s descriptions and content.
- Mobile optimization: Most local healthcare searches happen on mobile devices. Make sure your location profiles are mobile-friendly, with easy-to-click links, correctly scaled images and maps, and legible information to improve the user experience and ranking potential.
Other content components
When building out your location profiles, consider adding these additional content pieces to fully illustrate the experience patients can expect from a given location:
- Accreditation, awards, or certificates: Did a particular location in your health system recently pick up an award? Include a mention or badge on its location page!
- Provider profiles: Healthcare location profiles are a fantastic place to embed provider profiles and show patients who they can expect to work with at a given office or hospital.
- Patient reviews: Do you have a program that encourages patient reviews after they’ve visited a location or specific provider? Add reviews to the relevant location profile.
- Service lines: What conditions does a particular location handle? Will patients have to go to another location to receive care?
- Amenities: Can patients grab a coffee or pick up a prescription at a given location? Add in a list of amenities that the location has on-site.
- Parking information: Give patients the most stress-free visit possible by including parking instructions if a location requires parking garage, street, or valet parking.
- Virtual tours: A 3D walkthrough or video tour helps prepare patients for their visit and can help remove some of the anxieties around visiting a new healthcare location.
Accurate, up-to-date, and optimized healthcare location profiles are a powerful tool for boosting your organization’s visibility in search engines and building trust with prospective patients. By implementing the tactics outlined above, you can ensure your organization stands out against your competition in location search results and provides an excellent user experience.
Get ready for results
What kind of results can you expect when you optimize your healthcare location profiles?
We worked with Cedar Rapids, IA-based Mercy Medical Center, to enhance the profiles for its 63 locations with new images, trackable URLs, and more. Over the course of one year, Mercy was found more than 3.6 million times in online searches, with 117,802 of those searchers visiting Mercy’s website, another 216,305 initiating a phone call, and 64,236 getting directions.
For North Carolina-based Cone Health, we created a keyword portfolio to focus on the content of each location profile, as well as conducted stakeholder interviews to create unique content about the benefits, services, and FAQs about each location. These changes led to an increase of 274% in pageviews and a decrease of 40% in the bounce rate for the top new location profile in a five-month period after launch compared to the same time period a year earlier.
If you’re ready to optimize your healthcare location profiles and give prospective patients the best first impression of your unique office locations, Geonetric is ready to help. Contact our team today to get started!