Introduction
You can spend millions on advertising to attract patients — but without accurate business listings, those patients may not find you online.
Pew Research found 77 percent of online health seekers start at search engines — and what they find in their search often helps them decide where to go for care. A complete, high-ranking business listing will help your healthcare organization stand out from the competition.
Incorrect location information, such as address, phone number or office hours on sites like Google or Healthgrades, impacts your customers’ experience before they ever enter your office, clinic or hospital. The ripple effect can prompt negative reviews, lost business and brand damage.
Manage Your Listings on the Sites That Matter
There are hundreds of sites that list business information for you — from dedicated review sites, to online maps, to directories, to specialty healthcare sites.
How do you break through the noise to choose the sites most relevant to your business?
Start with Google.
The majority — 89 percent — of internet searches are completed on this leading search engine.1 Google processes 100 billion searches a month2 and more than half of those are carried out on mobile devices. You simply have to get your providers’ and locations’ listings right on Google, if you want them to be found.
After Google, you should look at industry-specific sites, such as Healthgrades, to gain the biggest initial return. Facebook should be included in your next tier of priorities, followed by YP and Yahoo Local. UCompareHealth and RateMDs have lesser impact — and “Web 1.0” directories like Superpages have very little influence on consumers at this point.
Capitalize on Local Search
Don’t frustrate and possibly lose potential patients before they’ve even walked in your front door. Make sure your business listings are 100 percent accurate, and make sure you monitor those listings on a regular basis.
We know how difficult and time-consuming it can be to manage location listings for your hospitals, clinics and physicians. Reputation.com can help you claim, manage and optimize your listings with a centralized, state-of-the-art dashboard. We scrub key listings sites, fix mistakes and keep all of your doctor and location listings accurate and consistent.
By helping you rank higher with optimized business listings, our service provides a cost-effective, high-impact alternative to simply spending more marketing dollars on media buying and advertising.
1 Statista
2,3 Mashable
4 Moz