Local SEO - Be Patient

Local SEO needs to be consistent and demands patience

This is something we have continuously highlighted to our customers search engine optimisation is an ongoing process and to be successful one needs to be patient and persistent. This often ets lost with the demans of running a small business where demands to drive up revenue and footfall immediately puts what the benefits SEO will bring to the business into the background.

Improve Your Practice with Customer Feedback

Being able to gauge what your customers think about you is very powerful and makes your business more agile to respond and react to their customer desires. I have included in this post some ways getting more customer feedback to gain insights and drive more referrals and customers to your practice. 

Reviews

There are so many ways todays that your customers should be able to reach you whether it is on your Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter accounts what you need to be doing is cafully datamining this data and pulling some insights into what you are doing that your customers want to change. There is nothing better that drives customer engagement and loyalty. It will also gives you a sense of just how your patients are discussing you and how they are describing you and what they are asking from you the next time they have an interaction with you.

In person

This way you can call some your patients and just see what they thought about the service that you provided and can simply be a matter of spending an hour a day for a week calling some of your customers and seeing what their responses are. this is an authentic way of creating a community and find out what they are saying about you and your business.

Blog Posts

This is a simple way to get your customers talking about you by posting and getting comments and reviews asking your customers to drop their comments. This post could be from the person in charge of writing the posts or from one of team asking for example their opinions on the plans to build a new gym or have more yoga classes on a Wednesday morning. This is brilliant and avoids a probable disaster for you in creating something for the business when there isn’t even a need in the first place.
What was your reason for cancelling today. Most people will go for the but then they have the opportunity to give you some more reasons and insight into the exact reason maybe it was that they do not need the service right now or that the price point was too high. If you can take these answers and react to them, as a practice you will be seen as more agile and react to your customers needs and desires and solving your customers problems and increasing customer sentiment.

Customer Boards

What about going to your social platforms Facebook and Linkedin and ask your customers what they think of you as a company and if they can describe you in a phrase. This is gold and not only do you have your customers engaging with you but they are replying to your questions and at the same time you are showing them you are interested in what they have to say. The option to this is doing alot of data mining. This way I have explained is much better. 

Teams

Why not try to make use of the teams that you work with and even if you are a small outfit it can be as simple as asking the secretary what the questions and complaints customers have come to her with or asking your collegue who recently went to CPD training what new developments have been happening out there that you need to be aware of and if so improved upon. This is not something to do once a year but should be done consistently to make sure your practice is up to date with all the latest news and developments in the industry.

Use of customer surveys
There are various online customer surveys available such as 4Q which allow business owners to evaluate the online experience, measure customer satisfaction which allow you to quickly implement website improvements based on real visitor feedback. Use of these tools are easy enough and there are some free trial of these tools available but it is an excellent resource.

Most surveys are done as a pulse read, we have a thought in mind, a question we want answered, a project we are doing and we do a survey. That is great. But surveys can be hugely powerful as a continuous and ongoing measurement system. Having surveys continuously deployed on your website will mean that you will always have your finger on the pulse of your visitors. More importantly it will mean that you can account for seasonality, external influences (like press releases or company events) and marketing campaigns. 

I hope this has provided some ways of using customer feedback to gain insights and make your healthcare practice more robust and agile to your customer needs and desires. Please feel free to drop by and leave a comment if you have found other ways of getting more feedback from your customers.

Local SEO 101

How is Local SEO different from National SEO?

While all of the elements that apply to national SEO also impact local SEO (on-page factors, links, social, indexing, etc.), local comes with a few unique elements.

The first and probably most important is that for local SEO you need to create and claim a local profile on Google (and other platforms as desired.) Your local listing is what will show (usually) for localized search results.

The second most important thing is called a "citation". A citation is any place online that uses your company (name, address, phone number) all on the same page, in the same format as your local listing. It is extremely important that you include these details always in the same way regardless of where you will provide a citation. This is just to help Google index your business address more effectively and will help you not lose a potential citation because you have listed it in a different format and Google has mistaken it for another business address. So for example if your business address is 113 Gauden Road Clapham SW4 7BQ, it is imperative that you stick to this format everywhere.

Third, reviews are extremely important. The more reviews that can be left on your Google Places page the better and the more authentic the reviews that you have with both good and bad reviews wil add genuinity to your business and make people more believe that your business is human after all. This is an important ranking factor. In a previous post I highlighted a number of ways for you as a practice to get reviews. 

How does on-site optimization differ for Local SEO vs. National SEO?
All of the same elements apply, but there are four things you should strongly consider mixing in. One, make sure your name, address and phone number are used on every page of your site, in the same format as your Google local listing (in the footer is an ideal location.) Two, use your City and County names in your Title tags, Meta descriptions, and the content on your site (as it fits, don’t just force it in there.)  Three, make use of Schema Local Mark Up to better help search engines identify and show your location. 

What are the most important signals that boost local SEO rankings?

The three biggest factors in local listings appear to be the number of citations, the number of reviews (primarily on your Google Places listing, though other places do count), and how positive the reviews are overall. Positive reviews do beat citations for obvious reasons, so persuading your customers and clients to leave great reviews on your Google local page is the single most important thing you can do. Of course, there are some things that have a big impact and that may not be directly in your control, such as how close your business is to the city center. I will include a later post on how to set up Google Places account.

What does the location of a business close to a town center have to do with anything?

Google uses something commonly called “centroid bias”, which means that if someone searches for, say, Clapham Physiotherapist, there will be a bias towards the physiotherapist locations that are closest to the center of the city. While it is possible for a business in a neighboring city to rank for a metro keyword (i.e. a business in Cambridge trying to rank for a Boston keyword), if you’re on the outskirts of a city, or in a city neighbouring a major metropolitan area, you’re going to be at a disadvantage.

Can you outline a brief action plan you’d recommend for new company looking to compete for local search results?
First, claim your local listing on Google Places, and make sure to complete your listing until it’s at 100%. This will require adding images, videos, and more. When creating this listing, DO NOT use any keywords or location names in your business title or business description that aren’t a part of your official business name or absolutely critical to accurately describing your business.

Second, use a service like Yext to make sure that the information from your Google Places page is spread across all of the other major local platforms, in the same format. Each of these will become a citation, which is hugely valuable.

Next, make sure you have your on-site SEO in order, and that at least some of the links you build contain your target City/County combo (you can also use some postal codes in your anchors as well, to spice things up.) 

Last but not least, do everything you can to get your happy customers to leave positive reviews for you on Google Places. You aren’t supposed to directly solicit positive reviews, but there are plenty of ways to encourage great reviews.

What are some of the best ways a local practice can use to get citations
You can use a tool like the White Spart Local Citation Finder to locate the best citation sources for your city. There are many other tools available to find citations but industrywide this one is recommended and easy to use. Guest blog posts are also a fantastic way to get citations, as you can often work them into your author bio. The only thing is it will take time to build relationships with bloggers, this is the time that it takes them to feel confident in you and do some research into you to see what type of content you write and if you would be a good fit in with their practice. Obviously you will need to measure this vs the time you have and necessities of the practice to make money.

How can a local practice get reviews?
Let your customers or clients know that they can rate their experience with you on your Google Places profile. Have logos up in your windows or in your office showing the places where people can leave reviews. Include your profile links in your email communications (particularly in follow-up emails after a purchase or visit), direct mail, and anywhere else you can think of to get it in front of customers. Bear in mind to get positive reviews you need to provide excellent service and engage your customer to make them fell that they are special and that your business is special as well that they want to go back and tell their friends, they want to talk about you on Twitter and Facebook. You get positive reviews by providing an "excellent service". Nuff said.

One of the things you are encouraged to avoid is going out and buying links. A few years back this was common practice but now it is not something that is advised and most of the major search engines will look down very badly on you if you are caught out which means you could lose your site rankings and positions which will affect your business bottom line. Once you have lost these rankings it may be extremely difficult to get them back

Will getting your practice in directories help?
Getting your practice placed in local directories will help immensely and the easy way to do this is simply finding what local directories exist in your local area and get yourself a listing. Say for example I have my practice in Clapham all I have to do to find the relevant local directories is to do a google search with the search query;

directories "clapham"

Is it recommended for a practice to do its own SEO or an SEO expert?
What are the pros and cons of each? This depends entirely on your budget. There are plenty of guides out there that will walk you through local SEO, and you could quite easily put an intern in charge of reading those posts and following instructions (getting citations isn’t terribly complex.) Of course, if they mess things up, neither you nor they may realize it until it’s far too late. An agency will almost certainly be able to do the same things much, much faster, and while an agency may cost more upfront it might end up being worth it for the speed and accuracy.

Are there any specific services, websites, or tools that help companies with local SEO?
The WhiteSpark Local Citation Finder should be your first investment. It’s pretty cheap, about $16/mo, and is the best tool available for finding citation sources. You’ll also want to set-up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, so that you can effectively track what keywords are driving search impressions and traffic to your site.

Is Local SEO an ongoing effort, or is it something I need to do one off and that is it?
There is alway a cost for an SEO service but the most important thing is that is SEO is an ongoing effort to be able to reap the rewards in the future and for a small business the need to bring in customers and show the effect on bottomline immediately may for some outweigh any benefits that may arise from anyone coming in and helping you out with your SEO effort in the long term if you are only going to use him for one month and then stop. Rome was not built in a day and just as things change in life your rankings in the search engines will change as well so to reap the benefits local SEO is a longe term project. The most important thing is that as a customer you need to be able to measure what your ROI is from these efforts. So if you establish that you need a local SEO service for six months costing £200 per month then you know that in six months the amount you have invested needs to be at least doubled in revenue  from your SEO effort for it to be worhwhile.

Do I have to get a mobile version of my website?For the past few years everyone has been saying that it is the year of the mobile. In 2013 mobile and tablet use is expected to overtake desktop access to the internet. So this will have an effect on my local SEO efforts. To make sure that my local SEO efforts are optimised, you should

• make sure your website is optimised to work on mobiles and tablets
• your business is listed on Apple Maps
• your Google+ listings is displayed in Google Maps
• your business is listed in all prominent local apps (for example; I did a search for Clapham for this and I got back 2-3 apps which were relevant to my area)

I hope this guide has been of some help and if there are any comments anyone would like to include any more ways please feel free to have your say.

Local SEO to Your Website in Quick and Easy Steps

SEO is a skill and it takes time to get good at and we working within this sector your time will be more taken up at times with the business and you will not have the time to get to grips of how the search engines rank websites and today it is even more of a puzzle as search engines like Google continue to change their algorithms every other month whereby you start to believe that it may be more worthwhile to get someone to do it for you. However, if you do not have the money to do this or in your spare time you like to get deep down in computer code well here I have included a few quick steps to get your website ranking as quickly as possible. Lets call it the Internet Marketing 101 for physiotherapists and osteopaths. 

1. Update Your Page Titles

The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. This is something that is pretty easy to do and if anyone like your web developer tells you different then get another one.

2. Figure Out Your Target Audience

Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What keywords are your competitors using to rank for and what your potential customers are using to which your competitors are ranking for? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? 

In general pick terms that match up with the service you are providing, for example a physiotherapy clinic may use a keyword phrase such as sports massage clapham or sport physiotherapy clapham if I had a clinic in the Clapham area, the important thing is to make sure that there a sufficient search volume for the keyword or keyword phrase for it to be beneficial to optimise the webpage you will be directing the traffic. To get an idea of search volume use can use the Google Keyword Tool.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique

It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the

h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links

The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page

Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. 

6. Claim Your Profile on Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.

There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. There is alot of value to be got from listings in these directories and even better they are free.

7. Make a Video

Making a video is more harder than it sounds and can be as simple as plucking up the courage to mention and provide value to your clinic. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (ie: Balance Physiotherapy Clapham). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

8. Add a Blog To Your Site

A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website and can be set up pretty easily in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Pleasanton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Pleasanton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blogsearch engine. Now everytime you write something on the blog it will rank for these keywords.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues

There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Links

Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:

- Chambers of commerce/local business groups

- Local business directories/Local newspaper site

- Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)

- Partners/Vendors

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. SEO takes a little time to et used to but in the end it will be well worth your while. Use these quick steps and your website will be well on its way to rank in the search engines.

10 Ways To Get More Reviews On Your Practice Website

Customer reviews are extremely important to drive referrals and footfall to your practice in addition online it can be said to increase conversion rates by up to 18% in sales. Research also shows that 61% of customers read online before making a purchase decision and 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews. Although this research is from the retail vertical we can see how online reviews can have a similar effect on a business in the healthcare sector.

We all know how difficult it is as health practitioners to get reviews from our customers and even more so in our particular service industry as a physio or osteopath, as normally people tend to leave reviews when they have something bad to say. However having said all that it is not impossible to get reviews and there are some ingenious ways I have come up across to get these reviews on to your site. To make your patients leave a review you have to come up with a reason for them to want to write one for you. Below are a list of different ways I have come across and some I ave come across surfing the web and grabbing ideas from other websites. Below I have included a list of some of the ways to do this.

1.    Just ask for a review 
Its pretty obvious that when you go into a restaurant at the end you are asked if you enjoyed the meal but how many do we as clinicians do the same thing and ask for reviews from our patients after a treatment session. It’s the same principle, so if im using your service at anytime and anywhere just ask the patient what they think.

2. Create a reviewgraphic. 
Collect data from customers and turn it into graphs and data sets to show on an infographic. It is ideal for presenting lots of customer data in one go.

3. Add reviews to your site 
This is an obvious step but one that is missed a lot. By adding some reviews this will also add unique content to your site and help you go up in Google rankings. Reviews lets your customers know what your other customers think about your service of you and acknowledges your practice as a good place to go to to get treatment.

4. Have your past clients bring in more referrals. 
This is golden. If past customers bring in new clients through reviews create offers to give to them like free massage or 5% discount on treatment session. This way you will get more clients through sales from of word of mouth and extra customers. 

5. Get profiles 
Go online and research where your competitors have reviews and get your profile posted in the same place. If not potential clients make have to go to these sites to set up your business and then may not be able to leave a review by default.

6. Local Listings 
This is where you find where your business is located so get local listings on Qype, Yelp and Brownbook to start off with.  

        

7. Create a Google+ Business Listing      
This is extremely important as Google+  automatically pulls in information from various directories and automatically lists these reviews. So it may well be of use to scan some of the popular directories such as the ones above to see if you have not already recieved some reviews from these places and more importantly that you have responded to any negative feedback.

7. Give me what I want
If your clients have compiled a list of reviews and you take action to implemt change this shows that your business “listens” to its customers and wants to do what it can to improve your experience to make sure you tell your friends about them and you come back. To do this effectively you will have to data mine your reviews on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter or on whatever social platforms you use to engage with your customers.

8. Email followups

Get customer emails at the point of payment. You can then email that person to ask if they would like to leave some feedback. Of course you will need to keep track of these emails when they go out so that customers are not bombarded with the same email.

9. Publish good and bad reviews
Having only positive reviews on your website is not a good thing as someone looking at these reviews may think that it lacks a bit of authenticity. I think it is important to include negative reviews as well but if there are negative reviews that you are doing the right thing and responding to these complaints as well. This encourages customer feedback and in the long term more customers will feel at ease to include more feedback.

10. Create a blog post
By creating a blog post that goes out and asks your customers their opinions about the service they have received at your practice, this is s great way to get a ton of comments and suggestions from people who really want to have a voice and you want these customers to come along with a story and for them to feel part of the story by leveraging the interaction you can get in a blogpost interaction. It does'nt matter if it is the secretary or associate physiotheapist who puts up the post but it can be as simple as saying "hey guys we are thinking of doing this thing or something new and would love your feedback".

In a later post I will include  how to get reviews from bloggers and from the media and how social media can be used to get reviews. Please feel free to leave any comments perhaps you can share your ideas on some other ways to get online reviews.