Over the past few years, Google Maps has gone from a simple GPS tool to the most popular tool for finding local businesses. As such, it has the potential to reshape the future of any business, including your dental practice.
While most dental marketing strategies will help you boost traffic to your website, leveraging your Google Maps profile will help you take potential patients right to make the call-to-action.
Ranking high in Google Maps results is different from ranking high in Google Search results. Doing so can boost your chances of getting a new patient by almost 28% since 76% of consumers who perform business searches on Google Maps end up contacting the business within 24 hours of the search.
Moreover, Google maps is the third most popular app for finding new businesses, preceded by YouTube and Facebook.
Why Should You Care About Your Google Maps Ranking?
As you can see, upon searching for a dental clinic on Google, the Google maps results show in sets of 3. Moreover, these results always show up at the top of the Google results page and therefore overshadow any web results when searching for a business. Therefore, with a higher ranking on Google Maps, you can ensure that your potential patients will most likely call you over competing practices.
There are a few steps you need to complete to boost your practice’s Google Maps ranking.
First, completing your profile to 100% and following good practices will let Google Maps know that your practice is a trustable business and should be recommended to its users.
Add Your Business to Google Maps
The first step on your Google Maps fame journey is to register your dental clinic with Google Maps.
For this, you can search for your practice on Google Maps, and if it shows up, you can claim it.
If it does not show up, you can click on the option to add a missing place.
You will need to provide a few of your details like your name, the name of your clinic, and its exact location and address.
After you submit the information, the moderators will review your listing and add it to Google Maps if they find it accurate.
Complete Your Google Maps Profile to 100%
Once your practice has been listed, it needs to include all the information that your patients may require, such as opening hours, images, reviews, and more. To be more precise, your profile would need the following information:
- Business Name
- Website
- Category
- Working Hours
- Address
Maintain Consistent Details
Consistency is the key to ranking higher in all of Google’s platforms. If your profile has consistent details, it will imply that your practice is legitimate and recognisedacross your area.
This would incentivise the Google Maps algorithm to show your practice at the top when someone from your location searches for a dentist.
You should also avoid making frequent changes to your profile details and ensure only one profile for your practice.
Correctly Describe Your Business
As a practitioner, only you would know what best describes your clinic. Once you know the right words to use in alignment with your business ideals, you can begin matching them with appropriate keywords that would help your practice show up higher. As seen in the picture above, the phrase “emergency dental needs” is the keyword, and sure enough, it helps the practice show up at the top when searching keyword.
Add Pictures of Your Patients, Practice Interior & Exterior, and Staff
Adding pictures to your profile will allow potential patients to get a perspective on your business and its functioning. Therefore, it’s essential to make sure that your pictures are recent and are well-shot. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind when adding pictures to your profile.
- Make Your Logo Your Profile Picture
- A Picture of Your Practice’s Exterior Will Serve as a Wonderful Cover Picture
- You Can Add a Few Pictures of Your Patients (With Their Consent)
- Include Some Beautiful Shots of the Interiors and an excellent your Staff
Publish Regular Posts, Offers, and Events from Your Profile
Google Posts is well-integrated with Google Maps and allows your business to post regular updates from potential patients to observe when they come across your business in search results. You should try to make these as attractive as possible, and hiring a dental marketing company to do this for you would be a good idea. Including a call to action, such as in the image below, will benefit your conversion rates.
Request Reviews from Regular Patients
It’s a well-documented fact that 71% of patients choose a new dentist with online reviews. However, these numbers can be made to work in your favour if you can get enough good reviews on your profile. An excellent place to start would be to request your regular patients to post a review for you, and it’s essential to respond to the reviews since 60% of patients who post reviews expect to see a response from the practice owner.
It is always better to get reviews from accounts that post reviews for other businesses as well.
Get a Responsive Website
Making your dental website responsive isn’t an option since nearly 60% of all Google searches come from mobile devices. Moreover, mobile devices can have varying screen sizes from 12.4-inch tablets to 4.9-inch phones and can dramatically ruin a website’s reputation if it happens to distort.
Use the Google Maps API on Your Website
Embedding a miniature map via the Google Maps API on your contact page would make your dental website earn a higher reputation with Google Maps. This would also make it easier for patients visiting your website to reach your location without separately searching for it on the direction provider app. To embed the map, you should search for your business profile and click on share. Then, you’ll see an option to embed the map, and it will provide you a link which you should then paste on your Contact Page.
Target Using Local Keywords
Keywords will always help Google display your business profile for relevant searches. However, the best way to ensure that you will find patients from within your vicinity is to include local keywords. These would allow you to target a particular region’s potential patients and have your Google Maps profile show up higher in their searches.
Which Analytics Tools Can You Use with Google Maps?
Google Maps is an excellent platform for marketing your dental practice. Moreover, it is compatible with the already-robust Google Analytics Platform, which allows you to review the progress of your Maps marketing campaign. For example, it would allow you to track visits to your website or increased calls from your Google Maps profile.
To get the platforms working together, all you must do is set up an analytics campaign and add channel grouping with Google Maps. This would provide your practice with seamless tracking for your Google Maps posts, events, and more.
Boost Your Practice to New Heights
With Google Maps marketing, your dental practice can achieve success rates never seen before. In addition, since each search would lead to a call or a visit to your website, it provides you with an invaluable asset to increase your number of patients.
If you’re looking for assistance to help you get started with your dental marketing campaign on Google Maps, Head45 Dental is here to help you. We are a digital marketing company exclusively serving dentists and orthodontists in the UK.