With 63% of patients selecting a physician because of a strong online presence, the need and desire for leading physicians to outrank their local competitors in online search continues to rise.
Whether you have an established online presence, or are just getting started, below, you’ll find some helpful tips that will help you in your journey of outranking your local physician competitors.
Look for Strategic Insights for Top Ranking Physicians
One of the first steps in local physician SEO is to evaluate the competition that is ranking well. Keyword tools such as SEMRush can be very helpful in this area and are usually the best place to start.
Next, you’ll still want to take it one step further with your own evaluations. With the keyword data, start looking at the profiles of each of your top-ranking competitors.
Also, pay close attention to their Google My Business profiles to see if you can pick up any insights as to why they’re ranking where they are.
In most cases, high-ranking local physicians can be unseated in local search results. Identify the areas where your competitors are winning, and use those insights to prioritize the action steps in your local SEO strategy.
Gain Local Wins
Depending on your findings, there may be some excellent opportunities to gain some local wins. Some of the action steps you may want to take include:
- Primary category adjustment
- Building backlinks with local influencers
- Adding more images in your Google My Business profile
- Geotagging images on your website
- Generating more Google reviews
While Google’s local search algorithm isn’t fully known or communicated, these steps often help generate a rankings increase.
Keep Your Website as the Central Strategy
For illustrative purposes, I find it best to think of your personal physician website as a country, a country which you own. Google My Business, Facebook, Instagram, etc., are all embassies of your country. You want to have a presence there, but you don’t own it.
If you want to have long-term success ranking locally, the primary focus of your efforts should be on your website and creating consistent content designed to rank for these keywords.
Not only does having a website you own help you rank better in local search results, but your online marketing efforts also won’t be at the mercy of platforms you don’t control. In today’s world of deplatforming, this is more true than ever.
Outranking your local physician competitors isn’t something that will happen overnight, but it can be done.
By having a strong local SEO strategy and building your website the right way, you can not only outrank your competition, but you can also maintain the top positions for years to come.