The marketing strategy for a medical practice with more than one location will vary from that of a single office. The competition, patient population, and other factors can vary widely from one area to the next.
The most effective medical group practices market themselves in a way that capitalizes on their many locations and providers. If you play your cards well, you may boost your brand’s profile in both paid and unpaid (organic) marketing.
How to Market a Medical Practice with Many Locations
Consistency
Consistent branding across locations is an important best practice that should not be overlooked. While your locations may be unique from one another, you still need to have a unified brand identity from the start.
It’s important to have a unified logo and a clearly defined visual identity that extends to things like fonts, color schemes, and image selection. This usually involves developing a brand “style guide” to establish and distribute these standards across each location.
One Website, or Multiple?
As a rule of thumb, we advocate for one website as opposed to several sites. Potential patients will be less confused, and you will save time and effort by only having to make updates to one website.
From an SEO perspective, having a single website with location-specific pages is beneficial. Your brand’s online visibility will be strengthened by the cumulative effect of all the visits to your various locations’ pages. Yet you can’t get far without learning how to optimize your website for numerous locations.
However, in special circumstances, separate websites may be needed, especially if you have a special partnership agreement with a doctor that allows them to keep ownership of their website. If you really must do so, know that your efforts will be multiplied because you have many locations.
Create a Page for Each Location
A location page for each office should at least have the following information:
- Detailed directions to the office
- Office location with a map
- Hours
- Contact information
- Providers
- Services
- Anything else a patient might find helpful
Clear Locations for Website Viewers
Any locations you have should be made obvious to any site visitors. This is typically included in the website footer for many practice groups, which is great. However, you should also include a “locations” tab in your main menu bar. Instead of hoping people will look at your footer, you should add a module to your site that highlights such spots on the most important pages.
Create Local Listings for Each Location
If you want your medical practice to show up in Google search results for phrases like “knee surgeon in Charlotte, NC”, then you need to claim your free Google My Business (GMB) profile.
Having well-optimized Google Business Profile Listings for each of your locations is the single most critical thing you can do for local marketing purposes. This involves making full use of the information provided and the more advanced elements of the Google Business Profile listing.
Create Local Listings for Each Physician
Google Business Profile not only lets you build a listing for each location, but it also allows separate physician listings if you have more than one provider at a given location.
Make directories of providers as well as locations. It will allow you to connect with patients more frequently and effectively.
Collect Reviews for Each Location
Promoting reviews for each location is a great strategy to rise to the top of search engine results and gain credibility with new patients. Having more positive reviews increases your site’s visibility in search results.
One of the most significant ranking factors is the quantity and quality of reviews on your Google Business Profile listings.
Getting a large number of positive reviews requires setting up a system to make sure review requests are being sent often and appropriately across all of your locations.
Use Local Keywords
Keyword research is the first step in creating excellent local content.
When doing keyword research to align content creation or when optimizing your website, don’t forget to include geographical modifiers.
Try something like “top fertility physicians in Boston” instead of just “fertility physicians”. Choose which keywords to focus on first based on how much traffic they receive and how difficult they are to rank for.
Publishing each location’s involvement in its local community as blog posts on the main website is one approach to generating original and interesting local content. Each location’s involvement in its local community is, indeed, essential so that we may boast about it on the blog and bring in more traffic.
For medical practices that have several sites and clinicians, the above tips reflect the gold standard. However, there are challenges practices face when attempting to individually adopt these guidelines, as each additional location introduces new tasks and complexity.
SEO for Multi-Location Medical Practices
Medical SEO is very useful for healthcare organizations with multiple locations. By creating a patient portal, medical and dental offices may provide patients with a wealth of useful information, including a list of offices, contact information (including hours and phone numbers), the ability to schedule appointments and read reviews, and a full rundown of the services offered.
It’s difficult enough to handle the SEO needs of a single medical facility. Multi-location medical practices add another layer of complexity to the situation.
When running a medical practice with multiple locations, it’s important to make each one shine by emphasizing what makes it special and where it is most likely to attract new customers.
Grow Your Multi-Location Medical Practice
For doctors who aren’t familiar with search engine optimization or healthcare marketing in general, all of this may seem like a lot to take in at once. Here at Intrepy, our experts will help you expand your online presence across all of your clinics.
We have many multi-location medical practice clients we help market. Our case studies will help showcase these positive improvements.
