Written on July 12th, 2011 by tasha
“Location, location, location.” While most elder care providers do not seek to drive traffic to the office (you are a service not a place), your brick-and-mortar physical location is becoming a key factor in how high you place in “local search.” All three of the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!) now have some form of local search: the little square near the top of a results page that has pointers on a map and then a list of the businesses noted.
50% of people who get to a website from a search engine, get there because they clicked on a link in the map.
Businesses pay lots of money to get optimized so that their company website comes up on the first page of a search result, and preferably in the first 3 “organic” links. They also pay money to appear in sponsored links (which only 20% of searcher pay attention to.) IT’s difficult to get on the first page when you are competing with every U.S. business on the Web.
Know how much it costs to get listed in the map section? NOTHING! It’s free! And you are only competing locally, not with the thousands of others who offer services like yours across the nation.
In my last blogpost, I talked about the advantages of local search and where to sign your company up on the 3 main search engines. Not surprisingly, though, there are ways to register that will boost you to the top of the list by the map. (You guessed it. Everyone wants to be one of the first three listed in that portion of a search result.)
In this blogpost, I’ll be talking about how to register for local search in a way that is most likely to put you at the top.
As with basic search engine optimization, many of the same factors impact your ranking. With local search, though, the order of the priorities change:
- Relevance: How likely is it that your business is addressing the keyword the seeker entered? Start by making a list of the keywords your target audience is searching for. Certainly the name of your industry, but don’t limit yourself. Think also about the “precursors” to contacting you. What events or problems are families searching for relating to situations that commonly prompt them to seek out your services? Make a list of these. They will be important later.
- Physical proximity: How close are you to where the seeker is? Especially with GPS and mobile search, it’s becoming easier for search engines to physically identify the location of the seeker’s computer or smart phone and therefore come up with a likely map of relevant nearby businesses. Alternatively, if the seeker lives in California but enters “Atlanta” as part of the search, local search will offer a map of services in/near Atlanta.
- Credibility: Within the list of local businesses, the search engines want to put the “most recognized” companies first. How do they determine that? They pay attention to how many other businesses have links to your business website. They also pay attention to how many LIKES you have on your business Facebook page, and how many comments. The logic is if people are linking to you and engaging with you online, you must be pretty prominent in your field. Not perfect logic, but it does have merit.
How does this play out in terms of optimal completion of your local profile?
Use lots of text sprinkled liberally with keywords. Clearly, your business is meeting a need, or solving a problem. Remember those precursor keywords? Those are the words to be sure you include in your profile. Particularly for businesses in an industry that is little understood by the public (think “palliative care” or “geriatric care manager”), precursor words have a greater likelihood of being searched.
- Services, products and brands. Describe your offerings in as much detail as you can. Text is what search engines catalogue to determine your relevance to the keyword a seeker enters. Don’t be shy about lots of text. That’s what helps the search engine decide your page IS relevant.
- Meta-descriptions- This is usually a limited space (e.g., 150 – 250 characters). Type in your elevator speech about your service. Make it reasonable for people to read, but include as many keywords as you can. That means you need to prioritize your top keywords.
- Specialties and amenities. This is where you distinguish yourself from your competitors. Again, focus on keywords that reflect your unique offerings to the community, what sets you apart (e.g., dementia, congestive heart failure…). Fill in as much detail as the profile will allow. This could be what tips the scale in choosing between your business and your competition.
- Keywords in your web address. If your web address includes a keyword (e.g., “hospice”) then the search engines figure it’s a good bet your business emphasizes hospice, so they will put your listing higher in a search for “hospice” than a business that does not have “hospice” in the web address. Don’t have a web address with good keywords? Reserve a few web addresses, especially with the name of your service area, and set them to redirect to your company site. A web address costs only $10/year.
Make it easy for search engines to accurately locate you. It sounds silly, but computers are stupid. You need to make your profile entries easy for the search engines to read so they can accurately determine where you are located and accurately display your entry on a local search.
- Be sure your address is one that accurately pinpoints you on a map. Go to Google Maps and type in the exact text you will be entering in the address fields of your profile. Does Google Maps position you correctly? If not, experiment. Who knows why it chokes? It may prefer “Avenue” to “Ave.” Or it may be stumbling on your suite number. If Google maps cannot accurately place you, then Google Places (or Bing or Yahoo) will have trouble as well. As a consequence, you may not appear on a local search. Track down the problem and fix it.
- Avoid nicknames for the city, such as “NYC” “The Windy City” “LAX”. Computers do not know what these mean. Spell everything out the way it would formally be written, especially in the address field.
- Zip Code. Again, accuracy is key. You do not need to put the extra, 4-digit appendage afterwards. That is for the post office and is not really used by mapping programs.
- List your regular phone number rather than a vanity number. Search engines cannot readily read “1-703-HOSPICE”. Your phone number is a unique identifier and is part of how a search engine confirms your location and that you are a real business. Be sure the phone number is accurate (no typos!) and that it is the numeric version.
- Complete “Areas served” and list all nicknames for larger regions as well as smaller neighborhoods. This is where you might want to put colloquial terms for the city and the county you are in, and the nickname for a region (“Tri-City area”). Also, you know your local slang and what people in your area call the various neighborhoods. You never know what people might search for. Some may search “Boston” but others might search “Back Bay,” “Beacon Hill,” “West End” or “Charlestown.” To be sure you are covered, include the name of all the wards, neighborhoods or burroughs that you serve here.
Further tips for catching visual attention. Like the phone book, local search means you are being presented at the same time as your competition, so you want to do things that help your brand to literally stand out and capture the seeker’s attention first.
- Take the time to upload your logo. Visuals draw the eye. If there are 7 listings and 2 have graphics, those are the two that will capture the seeker’s attention first.
- Upload photos to your profile. Again, the more visuals you include, the more the flavor of your company will jump out at the seeker. (Be sure to tag photos with keywords. Never miss an opportunity to enhance your relevance!)
- Insert a little phone graphic by your telephone number. Studies have show that the little icon of an old fashioned phone draws the eye more than just having a number. The “code” for making that graphic appear is “&9742;”. Type this text string with a space after it in front of your phone number in a description field and see how it appears on your profile in normal view.
- Date founded. If you’ve been in business for more than 2 years, commercial wisdom says to go ahead and enter the date you were founded. If your competition has been around 30 years, however, I’m not sure I’d list anything unless you have been in business for ten years or more.
- Associations you belong to. Part of standing out from your competition involves building your credibility. The more organizations you belong to, the better. It shows your commitment to quality (for national organizations) and your commitment to community (for local organizations).
- Being listed first. Of course being the first one on the list makes you a top attention-getter. So, look above and try to do everything noted here. You can also pay attention to general search priorities, in particular such as getting other websites to link to you, increasing the number of LIKES on your Facebook business page, etc.
If all of this is starting to sound like you are making a website (or Facebook profile) within the search engine, you are absolutely right! The search engines are looking to compete with Facebook. The more they can keep people on search, the better. And for you, since many of your audience are still not on Facebook, the stronger presence you can make on the search engines (where the majority of your audience is going), all the better. Plus, in local search, you don’t have to worry about comments, HIPAA, daily posts or other social media concerns.
What have you been doing with local search?
Posted in GCM Marketing, Home Health Marketing, Hospice Marketing, Internet Marketing, Private Duty Marketing
Leave a Reply
