If you want to attract more patients through your door daily, SEO for urgent care clinics needs to be the main focal point of your online marketing effort. In an emergency, there isn’t time to research several different options, and the majority of consumers are going to go to the top-rated urgent care clinic within proximity to their current location.
Being the top listed clinic on Google Maps is the most effective way to attract local foot traffic through your doors. Urgent care clinic search engine optimization focuses heavily on the optimization of your Google My Business profile.
The information contained within this listing is what Google pulls from when returning its local search results. While it’s important to also target the regular search results by publishing blog content, the type of patient we optimize for differs greatly.
The Maps results are located at the very top of the results, and this is where your clinic patients will come from that have an immediate need. An accident or medical condition that requires immediate attention will search on Google, see the top results, find the closest location on top and click-to-call or click to bring up directions to the chosen urgent care clinic.
Under the maps is where the regular search results appear, and this is where we can get pages on your website to rank. The keywords we target here are more informational seeking and not emergency keywords.
Let’s dive into what our main focus areas are when developing an effective SEO for urgent care clinic campaign. These are the same strategies we use as a foundational search engine optimization layer for all of our urgent care clinic marketing clients.
Urgent Care Clinic Local SEO: Google Maps Ranking
Search intent is everything when it comes to getting more website traffic for an emergency clinic. It’s understanding what the individual is going to naturally search for in Google according to the medical attention required as well as the device they are performing the search query from.
Ranking for terms that don’t attract foot traffic and walk-in visits or online appointment scheduling is completely useless and doesn’t contribute to the clinic’s growth. We often hear many clients say that urgent care clinic SEO didn’t work from them in the past and the majority of the time it was because the campaign was targeting the wrong keywords and audience.
Optimizing your Google My Business profile for emergency-intent searches and then accumulating a large number of urgent care clinic Google reviews helps to position your business at the top of the results and attract attention for the type of searches that bring new patients in your doors.
GMB Optimization: Once your business contact information is verified we work on optimizing your listing’s description, and this is where we write content designed to rank for our target emergency-intent keywords.
Google Maps results are at the very top and it’s where consumers gravitate towards when they want quick options. If someone requires an emergency clinic there is a good chance they don’t have time to “shop” around – they want a high-rated clinic that is conveniently located.
Targeting the right keywords is important, as is making sure they are optimized for the clinic’s immediate area. Showing up in the results 50 miles away isn’t going to result in new patients if there is a closer option a mile away. Again, there is a lot more to consider when ranking an urgent care clinic on Google, as we are working within a very small radius.
Urgent Care Clinic Google Reviews: Having a lot of reviews on your business listing instills trust, and sometimes you have less than two seconds to impress someone enough to commit to your clinic. If someone experiences a burn while cooking and they search for medical attention and see a clinic with two reviews and another clinic with fifty reviews and they are both located a mile away what one will they visit? The one with more reviews – they will be more confident in the clinic’s ability to treat their injury.
Our team of marketing experts understands how to properly manage SEO for urgent care clinics, and rank for search queries that will drive emergency visits and additional medical services and treatments offered at your clinic.
Link Building for Urgent Care Clinics
Effective urgent care clinic search engine optimization extends beyond just the Maps results and Google My Business optimization. Below the Maps is where the standard search results appear, and there is an opportunity to rank for several location-intent search terms relevant to the services and procedures your urgent care clinic offers.
Our content team knows how to write blog posts that generate a significant amount of Google traffic for medical clinics. Content posted to your clinic’s blog provides website visitors with helpful information, while also helping to attract traffic originating from Google search.
Each blog article we create is optimized for one target keyword. Once all of the on-page optimizations are finished and the post is published we immediately begin an urgent care clinic link building campaign.
Earning links passes authority to your website and helps to push these pages up in the search results. Building links for your clinic’s website is a long-term strategy and it’s an on-going component of the overall search engine optimization effort.
The outreach tactics we use to build links fall within Google’s best practice guidelines. We don’t use private blog networks or link exchanges. All links earned are from relevant websites that find value in the content we publish on your clinic’s blog. It’s much easier to receive positive replies to outreach pitches that offer quality content assets from websites to link out to.
Search Engine Optimization for Urgent Care Clinics
Along with two areas of focus – optimizing your Google My Business profile for Maps and content marketing for website traffic – there are two types of patients we are targeting through urgent care clinic SEO.
Immediate Attention: Anything that requires immediate medical attention doesn’t have time to read a blog post or visit a website. They are looking for a clinic close in distance with solid reviews. All keywords relevant to immediate medical attention, such as stitches, fractures, falls, etc. are targeted by optimizing the GMB listing and ranking in the Maps results.
Anyone in an emergency situation isn’t going to scroll down past the Maps results and they aren’t going to read website content before deciding on what urgent care clinic to visit. The success of the urgent care SEO effort has a lot to do with what terms are targeted when optimizing the description of Google My Business listing.
Future Appointment: Some services can be booked through your website, and any keywords targeting these are worked into the content marketing strategy. From immune boosters to flu shots and weight management, all of this can be scheduled online.
Not only does this keep everything streamlined and organized, but it also frees up your staff from having to set appointments over the phone. When you can automate all of this scheduling we can continue to increase your clinic’s website traffic to push the patient acquisition numbers to capacity. There isn’t a ceiling when it comes to urgent care clinic SEO and the traffic volume we can generate.
Both customer groups are important and you cannot ignore one or the other if you truly want to increase your urgent care patients using Google. Each one gets added to your patient CMS regardless of what brings them to your clinic initially. From there, you can then send them email offers and SMS messages to get them back in your clinic for additional treatments, services, and medical attention without any acquisition costs.
Final Thoughts
The keywords and approaches we use for our urgent care clinic SEO campaigns will often vary significantly depending on the types of services the particular client’s clinic offers. If a clinic is strictly an emergency clinic, we will focus the majority of our attention on optimizing the Google My Business listing to dominate the local SEO results for the most profitable terms.
If a clinic handles urgent care walk-ins as well as provides regular clinic services like B12 injections and flu shots, then we will also deploy an aggressive content marketing campaign to target service and procedure-related keywords that align with the services and clinic’s location.
If you would like to learn more about how our urgent care clinic SEO service works, please contact us to speak with one of our urgent care clinic marketing experts. Our team can evaluate your current online rankings and traffic volume, and explain what we can do to help drive more patients through your doors.
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