You thought patients would flood your doors when opened up your medical practice. 6 months down the line, you're barely scratching the surface. It's like no one seem to be interested in what you offer. Sometimes, you wonder if people really have health problems. Opening a medical practice, meant that you'll finally be independent, charge your own rates and enjoy the practice. If you've been struggling to get your medical practice running, there is good news. Instead of listing all the various ways you can market your medical practice, today I want you to focus only on 6 legitimate marketing strategy. If you want to market effectively, you don't need to be a jack of all trades and master of none. You just need to focus on improving one aspect of marketing and until you master it. Then you can move to the next. There are lots of people who would list 20 ways of marketing your medical practice without giving you a solid guidance on each of them. The following steps will help you a lot. Get A WebsiteIn a World where everybody knows "Googling" their way to right information. You need to have a website. There is no way you can operate without one in 2017. In fact, patients are becoming more savvy. Before they visit you, they want to do a search on you. They want to find out if you have their ideal solution. They want to know the number of positive reviews that you have online. Do people trust you enough. In fact, 80% of customers will trust something that they saw on Google than when they hear it from a trusted friend. In other words, head over to namecheap.com, buy a domain name and get hosting. Take Advantage of Local SEOA website is important for your website. If you can't market your website, it's like you are having a supermarket that people rely buy. The question is, how do you market your website on shoe string budget? Simple. All you need is to take advantage of the local SEO. The following short steps will guide you on creating in winning local SEO ranking. Step 0: Ensure Your NAP is consistent across all the directories you're listed on.NAP means:
ConstantContact did a survey and found out that 49% of business never update their listing online. In other words, it is common to find business with different names, email address and phone numbers. That makes it hard for clients to contact you. In case you change your phone number, you need to update it across the all the directories you're listed. Here is an exact example of how NAP looks like: Arthur's NAP Dental Services Step 1: Get ReviewsIf you have past clients, you can ask them politely to write reviews for your business. Good reviews make your medical practice standout. More importantly, they will increase the your conversion rate. 90% of online customers admit that reviews influence their purchasing decision. You need to make sure that most of your reviews that are coming from customers are positive. Even if you have one negative review, chances of that ruining your entire practice is high. If you get a negative review from a customer, be cautious enough to respond or follow back on the customer. You not only want to ask for an apology, you want to make it up for them. You want them to come back again. How do you get reviews from customers? Five ways:
Step 2: Claim Your Google ListingChances are, you're losing clients because you have not yet claimed your Google listing. Google listing allows you to manage your medical practice online. Let me explain. Head over to Google and search for "dentist." What do you see on the first page of Google. You may or not see ads. But what will catch your attention is the listing of nearby dental places in the neighbourhood. People that list their business on Google, will get more traffic and more customers than those who don't. To get better results, you must work hard so that you're at least in the first 3 spots that Google gives local business. To do that, head over to Google.com/business. Click on the button that says "Get on Google". Then you log in with your Google account if you have one. Search for the name of your medical practice, if you found it the claim it. If not, click on add your business. Key in the main information about your business in the listing. Google will send you a postcard to verify your business. If you have verified your business. You need to upload high quality images that will show up in the Google listing. In fact, hire a celebrity photographer to take stunning photos of your places. Have as many photos as possible. Step 3: Add mapsWhen people search your services, they are also looking for a direction. How far or near is the places from where they are. To make it easier for the clients, create Google maps for your business. The maps make it easier for people to find you. It would be appropriate to have maps because 86% of people, check maps to find where business are located. Local Search EngineCreate time to make sure that your business is listed in many relevant local business directories. Google, Yahoo and Bing crawl on those directories to update their information and validate citation. In other words, a website needs to have been listed in the local business directories have a higher chance of getting indexed and gain rankings. As a medical practitioner, you want to take advantage of local search engines. Here are a few local search engine you can get started with: Bing Places for BusinessBing is the third largest search engine on the planet as from 2013. It is just a matter of time before it takes the position two. When you're building your medical practice, you want to be everywhere your competitor has never thought about. For instance, Bing is the most forgot search engines by most marketers. To be ahead, you need to be on Bing. Here are the steps on how you can get a listing from bing. Step 1: Step 2: Step 3: Yelp for business ownersEarly on, I talked about being getting a review from Yelp. However, you need to be listed on Yelp, before you can get a review from there. Yelp is a social network, user reviews and local search web site. In other words, it is a site that helps people to find cool places to eat, drink, shop, relax or even hang out. If your medical practice is not listed on Yelp, you're leaving free traffic on the table. Here are the three step process to get started Step 1: Step 2: Step 3: Step 4: MerchantCircleAs of the time of writing, Merchant circle has 1.7 million local businesses. What started as an online marketplace is now an engaging platform that brings lots of traffic to both small and medium-sized business. More importantly, the merchant circle offers local business services for its visitors. Here is how to create a merchant circle account. Step 1: Step 2: Step 3: Another option may cost money and it may be worth to pay if you want to give your medical practice a little bit of exposure. For instance, if you choose the premium with MC. A merchantcircle representative will have to call you after you've filled down your information on the best possible way to help you. Step 4: Yellow PageBefore the internet, there was a yellow page. Although it is quite odd, believe me, today people still search for businesses on the Yellow Page. Because it is neglected, not most people would want to use it. Yellow page has their online version, you can use that to your advantage. Yellow page gives you two listing options, you can either choose the free option or the paid listing. The free option is perfect for medical practice. You don't have to pay premium unless you really want. Here are the steps to creating a yellow page account: Step 1: Step 2: Step 3: Step 4: Yahoo listing on Yahoo.It is the second largest powerful search engines. There are people that still use Yahoo, a listing from Yahoo can get you on the edge. Like I said, not most, medical practitioners will utilize these marketing gems. Listing on Yahoo is a little bit complicated if you don't know what you're doing. Here is a 4 step from that simplifies the things: Step 1: Step 2 : Step 3: Step 4: Healthcare directories/CitationsA great way for people to get to know your practice, is listing it in the health citation. Most of these health directories have millions of visitors. My job is to help you tap into these visitors. Even if you have 50 clients from any of these health directories, that can be a huge boosts to your practice. More important, is the SEO boost that you get when your website is listed on these healthcare directories. Some health care directories will serve as a knowledge pool for patients. In other words, they provide lots of details about the doctors and areas of their specialties. What is more, is the number of reviews that these doctors have, which establishes trust. Here are some health care situations and brief explanation on what you do to take advantage. Here are a few health directories that you can get listed on: Healthgrades
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