Google My Business: How to Boost Your Practice's Local SEO

Excellent dental marketing strategies involve creating and running targeted marketing campaigns that reach your ideal patients where they are. Now more than ever, it is so important to position your dental website and practice in a way that allows your prospective patients to find you easily. This is why you need to prioritize local SEO when implementing your marketing plan. 

One surefire way to improve your local SEO is by optimizing your Google My Business Profile. 

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back and define these terms:

• SEO: This is an acronym for search engine optimization. It is the process of increasing your dental website’s visibility by improving its quality. This process happens in three stages: on-page, off-page and technical. In this article, we will discuss how Google My Business impacts your off-page SEO. 
• Local SEO: This is the process of improving your dental website’s visibility so patients in your local area can easily find it. The actions you take to improve your local SEO result in a higher local ranking, i.e., a higher ranking on Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs) when patients in your local areas look up search queries relevant to or related dental services. 
• Google My Business: Google My Business is a tool created by Google to help you showcase your dental practice on its search engine. You can view most businesses’ Google My Business profile when you look them up on Google. These profiles can be found on the right-hand side of SERPs. 

Next, let’s dig deeper and learn about the importance of having and optimizing your dental practice’s Google My Business profile. 

Why Your Dental Practice Needs a Google My Business Profile

Gone are the days of looking up Yellowpages and physical directories to find local services. With the rise of the internet and the proliferation of mobile and wireless devices, people can search easily for businesses, like your dental practice, online. When patients search for your dental services online, they see a list of dentists and dental practices in their local area. 

This listing results from Google crawlers’ search for relevant and related services within proximity to patients. To ensure your dental website is part of this listing, you need to optimize it by using local dental SEO keywords in your web pages’ content and having an updated Google My Business profile. 

Your Google My Business profile highlights essential details about your dental practice. From your practice’s address, phone number, website, and reviews, everything you need to make an impression on prospective patients can be shared on your Google My Business profile. This allows patients to learn about your practice, make informed decisions and contact you or book appointments with you.

If your practice doesn’t have an optimized website or a Google My Business profile, you risk losing several patients who are actively searching for your dental services online. You should consider contacting Connect the Doc dental marketing specialists to work with you to create a high-converting, mobile responsive website or advise you on how to get your Google My Business profile up soon. 

If you already have a Google My Business Profile, you should make sure it’s updated by taking these steps:

1. Use Location-specific Keywords

If you haven’t already done so, conduct a keyword research to find out what dental-related keywords are most relevant to patients in your local areas. Once you’ve chosen your keywords, add them to your dental practice’s description on your Google My Business profile and use them when replying to patients’ reviews or feedback on your profile. 

2. Update Your Dental Practice’s Details

Ensure your dental practice’s contact information, hours of operation, and location details are accurate and updated. You should also check to confirm that you’ve selected the correct categories for your dental practice and consider using more specific categories such as ‘dental clinic.’ 

3. Update Posts Regularly and Reply Reviews

As you may have already guessed, the more updated your Google My Business profile is, the higher you can rank for your target keywords. Consider sharing posts now and then. Your posts are a good opportunity for you to use your location-specific keywords frequently. 

Your dental practice’s optimized Google My Business profile is a way to tell Google crawlers that your practice is relevant to your target patients, close to them, and trustworthy enough for them to use and enjoy your dental services. It is a vital tool that helps your local search ranking and gets you closer to achieving your dental marketing goals. 

So, get started: Create a Google My Business profile for your dental practice or update your profile if you already have one and start reaching patients who are more willing to book an appointment with you.