Google Business Profile profiles are a great way to start your dental marketing strategy. You can find almost anything online. We mean it. If you search for anything online, you will get thousands of results to your questions in a matter of seconds. So making sure that your business has a recognizable online presence is one of the crucial steps in making your business grow. Search Business Group has prepared this article as a resource to its current partners and all who are interested in optimizing their business.
There are many resources online available to all business owners, but few of them are as crucial and readily available as a Google Business Profile profile. Users make an average of 3.5 billion searches on Google’s search engine. Being listed as a business in Google’s information index allows your dental practice to pop up on the radar of potential patients who need your dental health services.
Google Business Profile listings matter.
You could, and should, imagine a search engine as a very committed librarian who is determined to get you exactly what you need. When you are searching for any information, you may not always know all the details, but you do know some of the general aspects. When you tell your search engine what it is you want to find, a hidden algorithm kicks into action and starts browsing all indexed data for matches that resemble your description.
It would be hard for any search engine to understand that there is a relation between the services you offer and the needs of a person doing an online search if you haven’t given any useful information about what you do. Google Business Profile listings are a free tool that helps to categorize, or index, what your business does so more people can find it online.
Dental practices, like any other business, depend on well-organized information to have greater exposure online. An online presence means more qualified patients, and this translates into a healthy business that serves its community. This article will help Dental Health professionals better understand the online marketing tools available to them and how to use them to their full potential.
Creating a Dental Health Google Business Profile listing
Google has prepared this quick video summarizing what general steps you have to complete to set up your Google Business Profile listing. Even if creating these profiles is easy, you can rest assured that the only people who can modify them are people with the appropriate permissions. Google will make sure to ask you to verify you own the business, and you can do so through different methods.
Creating these profiles is necessary if you want to develop a good dental marketing campaign for your dental practice. Remember that if you don’t have an online presence, you will seriously limit how potential patients can find your practice (we are not saying it’s like shooting yourself on the foot, but we’re also not not saying it). Because it’s a really easy step anyone can take when looking to improve their business’ performance, we want you to know that even if there are professionals out there who can help you with this, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get started on your own first.
Categorizing is essential for your Google Business Profile profile
Everything starts when you sign in with the Google account used to manage your dental practice’s profiles online. Go to google.com/business and enter your credentials. Managing your dental practice’s profile starts by categorizing your business as a dental health service provider. Make sure that the primary category you choose fits the service you provide to the communities in your area. You could also add categories that better describe medical specializations such as:
- Orthodontics
- Pediatric dentistry
- Endodontics
- Oral and maxillofacial surgery
- And more
Categories will allow Google to find your dental practice when potential patients search for those services in their area. So when Google asks the index what your dental practice is, the categories you chose should answer that question holistically. Be careful not to be redundant when describing your dental practice to Google or your patients.
Where can people find you?
The next step in creating a Google Business Profile profile is to enter your physical address or define the area of coverage. Add your office’s address to allow Google to show your dental practice as a business in its map services. As you continue to grow and decide that part of your dental marketing strategy includes nearby cities and communities, you can add service areas. Letting nearby cities know that you offer solutions to their dental health problems will attract more attention from potential patients.
Remember that if you have more than one office, you should create separate Google Business Profile profiles for each location to avoid confusion. They should have one profile each, and you should apply the same rules for categorizing these locations for your dental practices. Pay special attention that you don’t add categories of nearby businesses because instead of increasing exposure, this will just create ambiguity in your profile.
What additional information should I include?
Here is where it gets more personal. Your dentist SEO strategy should now focus on what makes you and your dental practice stand out. Start by including contact information, like a phone number or a website. These are the resources available to potential patients to get in touch with you. Google will ask if you already have a website set up and running, or you could use their free templates to generate a website that gets populated with the information you update on your Google Business Profile profile. We would still recommend you invest in a website of your own that better sets you apart.
Including information about special campaigns and events at your dental practice will help keep the content in your profile up to date. Fresh, good-quality content, is preferred by search engines, and it gives more reasons for qualified patients to continue with your services while attracting others. In our line of work, Search Business Group aims to increase what is known as conversions. These are a measure of how online users engage with your brand. When online user spots good content, they will interact with it rather than immediately dismissing it as meaningless.
Try to update your profile and your digital assets with good images of your office, short updates on the services you offer, promotions you have available to new and existing patients, and more.
What should my strategy focus on?
Search Business Group relies on a team of trained individuals to help dental health professionals define their brand, organize digital and printed assets to bring uniformity to their design, create high-quality content that describes and promotes their commercial activity and optimize the performance of all available online assets; however, there are some things that you can do on your own before looking for help from a specialized agency like ours.
We want you to focus first on what is readily available to you. Google Business Profile profiles are an excellent way to increase exposure online, to begin cementing your online presence, and to start your digital branding. This resource should be an essential part of your dental marketing strategy because it will put you on the virtual map and make your practice more accessible to patients of all ages.
People of all ages turn to their mobile phones to search for readily available solutions to their problems. Your dental practice will show up as an option to parents and teenagers, children, or adults alike if you are in a search engine’s index. Your dental specialization could be in providing the best dental care to young children, fixing the malalignment of teeth, or performing surgical interventions in a patient’s mouth. Regardless of your field of study, your dental practice will benefit from an online presence.
When you complete your listing with Google, you will show up on the virtual map of your area. We measure the success of our work by analyzing meaningful visits to a client’s website or measuring the increase in appointment booking to get qualified patients, and having a well-organized Google Business Profile practice is essential when executing a good dental marketing campaign.
Keep it running well.
Now that you have finished setting up your Google Business Profile, make sure you don’t leave it unattended. These profiles benefit from frequent updates about your dental practice. Make sure that if you change anything of your physical address, you also update the information available online to patients. Up-to-date information about your team is also key. We run into websites from people seeking our advice where they still show profiles for people who are no longer working with them. So clean-up your content to make sure it is the most reliable source of information for your potential patients.
Having a good Google Business Profile profile is essential if you want to lead an effective dental marketing campaign for your practice, and we hope this article has helped in showing you what needs to be done to create that profile and maintain it. We have other blog posts and FAQs where you can find more information about what is needed to optimize your online branding and you can also look at some case studies of what our strategies can do for other businesses.
