18 Apr Don’t Skip Leg Day: Claim and Clean Your Online Profiles
You might think you have a decent handle on your marketing strategy. Your website is updated, you’re optimizing it’s SEO, you post on social media now and then. But if you haven’t claimed and cleaned up your practice’s online profiles across some of the largest review sites on the internet, you’re skipping leg day, bro.
Having a high-ranking, well designed website is often the core of a healthy marketing strategy, as it should be. But some of the websites your site is competing against for top placement on Google may be able to help your business rather than hurt it. Review sites like Yelp, Healthgrades, Google, and Vitals see 35M+ people every month coming to them for help making healthcare decisions. Each of them lists doctors and their contact information alongside reviews in profile pages. These sites are highly optimized for SEO, so it’s very possible that potential patients are clicking on them and reading about you on review sites before finding your website (if they ever do). So even though you might have an impressive website that ranks well, ignoring your online profiles can leave your online presence weak.
The great news is that it’s easy to take control by claiming and cleaning up your online profiles so they can keep up with the rest of your strategy’s momentum and start booking patients. Whether a patient books an appointment by calling the number they found on your website or on your Vitals page doesn’t matter, what does matter is that you made it easy for them to connect with you by providing accurate, convenient information. So, here are three quick steps to cross-training your online presence by claiming and cleaning your profiles.
1. Make it Official: Claim Your Profiles
You’re going to want to start by looking up your profiles on the major review sites listed below, as well as any other directories or listing sites related to your geographic area or medial specialty. Many of them have a “Claim Your Profile” button or similar call-to-action that will allow you to officially identify yourself as the person associated with the listing… sometimes for a fee, but again, this aspect of your online presence is important and should be included in your marketing budget. The benefits of claiming your profile vary (as do the fees), but at the very least you’ll gain a greater visibility on their site, and benefits often include a beefed up profile with lots more customization, significantly better site placement, ad-free listings, call tracking capabilities, and more.
Here are some top healthcare and review sites to get started with:
2. Quality Control: Clean Your Profiles
It’s critical that the information in your profiles is accurate and consistent across all listings and your website. Obviously this is important so that potential patients don’t get lost on their way to your office or call a wrong phone number when trying to reach you, but it’s also important for SEO. Google can become confused when conflicting information is present, and may not display any of the information, or even worse, penalize your search ranking because of the discrepancies.
3. Optimization: Polish Your Profiles
As I mentioned, one of the features that comes with claiming your profiles on most leading healthcare review sites is a more robust profile listing page. This can include the ability to add things like a profile image, treatment/service detail, secondary phone number, image and video gallery, link to your website, practice information, physician bio, staff member names or profiles, and more. Please make sure to take advantage of as many of these additional fields as possible. The more dynamic your profile the better you will measure up to your competitors. Spend time and energy customizing these profiles, especially if you’re paying for upgraded/claimed profile status.
Now that you’ve put your online profiles through boot camp, you can cool down and monitor your ROI.
Want to make sure your online presence is in good shape? Contact us!
