Technical SEO creates a lot of competition for showing on search engine result pages. With Google’s algorithm always changing, many medical practices find it hard to build an online presence. Local SEO for doctors is an important tool for finding patients.
Campaigns can help with advertising for a business. However, even campaigns with good local SEO strategies can fail. This often happens because they do not consider location.
Geo-specific marketing can improve your digital ads for small businesses and large group practices. Taking steps to optimize SEO will help ensure you find new patients and long-term patients coming back.
What is Geotracking?
At its core, geotracking provides users’ locations within your area as data. Marketers commonly use this technique in medical internet marketing, specifically for healthcare campaigns. It allows businesses to curate content for potential customers within a specific area.
Geotracking helps in advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). It ensures that people searching your area can find you on Google and other search engines. The goal is to use location to share your message. Appearing in local search results helps present ideas that matter to your target audience.
Here’s an example: Imagine you run a primary care practice and want to start a campaign for flu shots. The CDC suggests that people get flu shots in September and October before the flu spreads. This data can help you start a small campaign to prevent the flu and help patients get flu shots before they get sick.
Over the next few months, targeted advertising will remind them of your practice. They’ll see advertisements for your practice and your services. This will encourage them to return to your office, or even better, new patients may come to your practice.
If you take the example above and run a larger campaign, it may fail. This is because it would go too far beyond what your business does. Your advertisement may not matter to people who are far from your office.
This is especially true unless you are a large institution, like a state-wide hospital. It could also hurt your return on investment.
How Geotracking Tracks Down Data
Information about a user’s location relies on IP addresses, which people assign, move, and change. This data is essential to local SEO, and search engines know its importance to their users. In advertising platforms like Google Ads, web spidering helps automate the process.
It sends bots to scan web pages, tech devices, and other indexes. Crawlers are bots that search the Internet for data. They collect this data and send it to Google Ads, which helps inform users about possible marketing opportunities.
Ways To Use Location Targeting
So, how can marketers use geotracking in medical internet marketing? Geotracking focuses on location. Successful medical campaigns must actively manage and control the locations where they show their ads.
Marketing campaigns commonly use three approaches to target locations to break it all down. These include:
Geotargeting:
Geotargeting is the foundation of an effective local SEO marketing campaign. It ensures that your advertising efforts reach your target audience. Focusing on the area where you serve patients makes it a critical part of medical and dental SEO.
Geotargeting doesn’t have to apply to your entire site. Each page on your site can target specific areas, making it perfect for clinics with multiple locations. Through geotargeting and traditional SEO, patients can be directed to the right location for their needed services.
This makes geotargeting a vital tool for practices with multiple locations covering large areas. Nationwide hospitals and group practices that serve multiple areas need to ensure that those searching for care can find their location.
Geofencing:
Geofencing is an aspect of geotargeting that seeks to tighten the reach of your advertising efforts. This SEO approach goes beyond merely targeting those in your local area. Only those in your service area will see you in their searches. This is achieved by setting up a virtual fence that ensures your ads are location-specific and your advertising dollars are spent where you need them most.
Geofencing is incredibly precise and can lock the reach of your ads and promotions to an area as tight as a competitor’s store or as large as you need. It’s a very effective technique for driving foot traffic and reaching potential customers, even when they’re at a competitor’s event.
Geoconquesting:
Geoconquesting is a powerful SEO tool that can target customers at critical points. This is the word for the technique that targets customers in precise locations like your competition’s store. Those in highly competitive industries find that this strategy helps give them an important edge. While it’s commonly used in retail and restaurant industries, it can be vital in healthcare advertising.
If your practice is in an area with a high density of medical care providers, geo-conquesting can ensure you stand out from the competition. It can also grab attention when your patients are in areas with multiple options for their care, such as medical parks. By targeting these areas with ads for promotions, discounts, or other incentives, you can seal their decision on which provider to use.
In online marketing, data is the backbone of good advertising. This is why so many medical SEO services offer it as an option for creating campaigns. Some platforms, like Twitter and Google Ads, will include tools and settings to help you choose target locations.
With these services, you can select areas within a country. You can also choose a radius around a location or specific groups of locations.
All options depend on your region’s demographics. You can customize local SEO for doctors to determine how wide or narrow your campaign will reach. Depending on the length and size of your campaign, you can also send it out in bulk for longer periods.
Local SEO and Geotracking: A Two-For-One Strategy
Browsers like Google use automated bots to analyze text on web pages, including online reviews. These bots compare the text with the search index used by patient searches. This helps show how popular the search rates are.
Local SEO for doctors focuses on keywords searched in a specific area. This strategy is often the best choice for smaller businesses, as these keywords provide important information about your audience.
Reducing your SEO audits with medical SEO services can help you see how your location relates to your audience. This can improve your understanding of local engagement. It also helps you tailor your strategies effectively.
Leveraging these two aspects, you can create a strong dental SEO marketing campaign using local SEO for doctors. This approach helps you plan and execute your campaign effectively.
It also shows what to expect from new patient conversion rates. You can compare new patients to returning ones. Additionally, it helps you tailor your content to your audience’s concerns and interests.
Setting Up Your Campaign With Geotracking
If you are having trouble with your campaign’s design, here are some ideas to help you improve local SEO with geotracking:
Search Engine Rankings
Your addresses and phone numbers should appear in existing and potential patient searches. Local SEO for doctors requires using relevant keywords in every part of your practice’s online presence, including blog posts and pages for patient reviews.
This includes your website, Google business profile, and social media accounts. When your campaign begins in your target area, users will find your addresses easier in Google search results. This will also make your phone numbers simpler to locate for appointments.
Website Design
Campaigns should use target keywords that support your website’s design over time. Search engines like Google often show websites that focus on user experience. Features like accessibility and engaging colors can help your campaign succeed in search results.
Google Maps widgets and other design elements also contribute. These elements work together to enhance your overall campaign effectiveness. It helps you use geotracking data better. This demonstrates to your audience that your local presence supports your online presence.
Link Building
Geotracking can help you control how your content is written and choose where to build links in your campaign. This makes your content more relevant to your patients.
Social media campaigns should use posts that link to a specific page on your website. Geotracking helps you manage your content and decide where to place your links, making your campaign more relevant to your patients.
Leverage Your Geotracking Campaign With Opt360’s SEO Experts
We’re experts in using local SEO for doctors to create campaigns for the people you serve. The Opt360 team can track Google Ads target rates when you choose our SEO services. We will tailor keywords to match your campaign’s goals. We also create affordable campaigns that you design for the people you serve. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and get more information to start.
