We work closely with many medical practices to activate and syndicate their Digital Business Information (DBI). It starts with ensuring that all online profiles appearing across the ecosystem of search engines, social media platforms, directory sites, nav/mapping apps and voice assistants are fully populated with complete, accurate and consistent information.
Often, this process yields dramatic initial results and leads our clients to ask: “What more can we do”?
With medical practices, one strategy worth considering is expanding the DBI program to add online profiles for the individual doctors within the practice.
In today’s blog, we are going to explore how adding individual Doctor Listings could benefit your practice.
Key Considerations
There are a few key considerations we weigh when evaluating whether to add doctor’s listings to a practice’s DBI program:
- Incremental Traffic – Most importantly, ensure the new listings will increase overall traffic and engagement for the practice.
- Brand Amplification – Ensure that the addition of doctor listings does not dilute the practice’s brand messaging. The goal is to be accretive and not trade one type of traffic for another.
- Practitioner Churn – It is important to be sensitive to potential operational challenges. Some practices by nature have significant turnover and we want to be sure that processing the entrances & exits of practitioners does not become overwhelming.
Increased Opportunity To Be Found
We analyzed results for past and current campaigns and wanted to share our observations.
From a strategic perspective, adding listings for your doctors expands the potential digital real estate for your practice. This intuitively makes sense when we think of search behavior. Some users will search for the practice itself, others will search for a doctor by name and yet another audience segment will search for specialties or specific services.
By having listings for both practice and doctors, you increase overall exposure and with it the chance to be found and chosen by new patients. Looking at actual numbers, we see that doctor listings generate an average of 10%-15% of total pageviews for a practice. If listings are added for multiple physicians, that number spikes to an average of 20%-25%. This is quite a significant jump and a great way to capture incremental users!
As mentioned above, we don’t want the doctor’s listing to in any way dilute traffic from the practice or diminish the name recognition and brand equity the practice has built.
The best way to accomplish this is to ensure that the information on the new doctor listings harmonizes with the practice listing. Most importantly, make sure that the address and phone numbers are the same on both listings. Also, you will want to align the information on the doctor listings to match what is on the practice website including specialties, procedures, certifications, education, languages spoken etc.
Maintaining consistent and complete information will serve to amplify your message to incremental patients as well as also increase your authority for search.
Getting Started With GBP
If your practice decides to move forward with doctor listings, the best place to start is with Google Business Profiles (GBP). GBP is a high traffic, foundational platform that when activated can improve patient engagement as well as attract new patients.
As you research each practitioner, you are likely to find a range of scenarios. Many will not have a GBP profile. Others may have a GBP profile that needs to be enhanced and some may even have well developed profiles.
Obviously, step 1 would be to claim and create a profile for those who do not have one. Since you are working with a blank canvas, it will be easy to make sure the profile closely reflects the practice information as described above.
For those that do have a profile, you will likely need to make additions/edits in order to align the doctor information with the practice’s.
For all profiles, remember to explicitly list all specialties, procedures offered, and products sold. Adding this information to the profiles increases your chances of appearing in search results that include these terms.
Expanding Profile Distribution
Once the GBP component is in place, you will have built out a comprehensive Digital Business Information (DBI) knowledge graph for each doctor.
With this in hand, the next layer to add would be syndicating this information to create profiles across the vast network of search engines, social media sites, online directories and Nav/Mapping apps. This is most efficiently accomplished by using a Listing Management software such as Yext or Uberall which transmits the information across their large networks.
Finally, expand your practice’s online listings strategy even further to include claiming and activating the healthcare related platforms.
For example, Yext offers a bundle of additional healthcare directories that push your accurate, practice verified information to a suite of healthcare sites such as WebMd, Vitals and Doctor.com. Activating these profiles captures an expanded audience at a reasonable price. Specifically, an audience who may be researching reviews and specialties.
Summary
For many medical practices, expanding their DBI to include doctor profiles can be an effective strategy that generates incremental traffic and engagement. In our campaigns, we see overall pageviews lift from 10%-20%.
There are a few key considerations to evaluate before deciding if its right for your practice and your doctors. If you do opt to move forward, our “best practice” would be starting with small steps, evaluating the data and scaling up incrementally.
If you have any questions or need any help with managing your Digital Business Information, please contact us here.