Local Listings for Medical Marketing
What is a Local Citation?
A local listing is a citation that includes your practice or doctor’s name, address, and phone number. These practice listings occur on local business directory websites.
They are different from listings on hospital websites, college and association websites and on social platforms.
Medical practices should actively manage these citations to ensure accuracy and consistency so they help patients and referrers discover your practice and reinforce your practice information to search engine algorithms.
Why Doctors Should Manage Local Listings?
Local Listings Impact Search Engine Rankings.
The number of citations a business accrues, the consistency and accuracy of the data they feature, and the quality of the platforms all influences your website’s ranking credibility.
Search engines like Google amass data about each business. If their search bots encounter consistency, your search engine trust factor increases.
Conversely, inconsistent data erodes search engine ranking.
Local Listings Impact consumers.
Accurate citations help people discover a local business, which can result in web, phone, and foot traffic, culminating in new patient bookings.
Inaccurate citations, however, can either confuse or misdirect patients, leading to loss of reputation and revenue.
What are the Types of Local Citations?
Practice owners can add or request listings and backlinks from a variety of local platforms such as
- Directories like White Pages, True Local, Yellow Pages, Hot Frog more …
- Reviews like Yelp, RateMDS
- Medical like hospitals, colleges, associations, and research website citations.
- Search Engines like Google My Business, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo
- News & Research like news media sites, communities, charity, blogs, research
Automatic Medical Practice Listings
Many Medical Practice Listings appear without any action. They can be scraped from public data and added to a Directory website. This can be both good and bad.
Unclaimed medical citations can be inaccurate, leading to out of date and inconsistent data on the internet. In most cases by claiming the citation your practice has the opportunity to take control and correct the listing info, preventing patient confusion or any negative impact on local search rankings.
What are the Components of a Local Citation?
The core components of a citation are your practice name, address, and phone number and can also include a reference or link to a designated page of your practice’s website.
In addition to this, a citation may incorporate some or all of the following elements:
- Practice categories
- Hours of operation
- Driving directions
- Practice description
- Booking links
- Images
- Videos
- Attributes
- Reviews
- Owner responses
- Taglines
- Links to social and other forms of media
- Email addresses
- Fax numbers
- Alternate phone numbers
- Geo-coordinates
All Doctors Should Nurture Their Practice Listings
Practices should be concerned about rankings, reputation, and revenue. Local citations are vital, given that they factor into all three of these areas.
Every practice should understand the risk/benefit scenario of a passive vs. an active approach to citation management and include local citation’s as a part of their marketing strategy.
Risks to a Passive Medical Listing Approach:
Neglecting citation development and management risks the following damage to rankings, reputation, and revenue:
- A small/weak set of local citations,
- Inaccurate citations,
- Duplicate local business listings,
- No awareness of user or competitor edits to local practice listings,
- No strategy for discovering inaccurate data,
- No strategy for managing citations in the event of rebranding, business moves, changes in phone numbers, hours of operation, or other data,
- No strategy for promoting, discovering and managing reviews, and
- Little control over how the practice is being represented across the web.
Benefits of an Active Medical Listing Approach:
- Actively managing citations can positively impact rankings, reputation, and revenue via:
- A robust, accurate citation set on major platforms,
- Awareness, discovery, and correction of inaccurate data,
- Permanent closure of duplicate local business listings,
- A solid strategy for editing citation data in the event of rebranding, business moves, changes in phone numbers, hours of operation, or other data,
- A solid strategy for discovering and managing reviews,
- Maximum control over how the practice is being represented across the web
By weighing these risks/benefits, you’ll soon determine that active citation management can be neglected. It simply isn’t good business.
Local Citations Summary
Citations are publications of your core practice data on the Internet.
They influence patient discovery and local search engine rankings. Accurate citations positively impact rankings, reputation, and revenue, whereas inaccurate citations detract from these assets.
Due to the high stakes of these assets, active location data management is a necessity for all practices.
How We Can Help With Your Local Listings
Managing your Online Citations is a process and can help you grow your online visibility. We can help your practice list and manage these listings.
Contact Us and we can perform a Free Listing Audit of your practice.
