A medical and health SEO company, in all probability, will recommend a local SEO campaign to improve your organic visibility on Google in the geographic market(s) your organization serves. Local SEO has important benefits:

• Local SEO is a more efficient use of your marketing budget, since only keywords within your market area will be pursued.
• Local results are getting more and more favorable placement on SERPs (search engine results pages) from Google all the time. As a result, local search engine users will be more likely to notice your organic listing.
• Local SEO is in some ways more complex than national SEO — which means competitive organizations may be executing campaigns that are less effective, if they are executing local campaigns at all.

How an Expert Medical and Health SEO Company Executes a Local Campaign

Local SEO campaigns, like any ordinary SEO campaign, involve setup work followed by a basket of on-site and off-site activities aimed at increasing the organic visibility on Google for keywords that are relevant to your services — also highly likely to produce a conversion (appointment, consultation, etc.). What’s different about local SEO is the specific activities involved.

Setup Work

The first thing your medical and health SEO agency will do is conduct a thorough review of your website to make sure it is ready to support a local campaign. Important issues to review include:

• NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) should appear on every page of your website.
• Each primary set of keywords of your campaign needs a page of content dedicated to it. Often, this is not the case, so individual pages relating to your various services need to be created.
• Page titles and meta descriptions must be optimized and/or added.
• Existing content must be optimized with associated targeted keywords.
• Site navigation and internal linking must be clear to Google crawlers and human site visitors.
• The website must be mobile-friendly. Many search engine users are mobile users, and a high percentage of mobile search has local intent.
• Page loading speed and other technical site functionality must be working at peak efficiency.
• The website must have a focused conversion funnel so that organic traffic coming to your site converts, either through a phone call or form submission.
• A Google My Business (GMB) page should be set up and/or optimized, as a strong presence on this Google property strongly enhances your optimization.

On-Site and Off-Site Activities

• On-site, new content will be added to support additional targeted keywords as your campaign gains traction.
• Ongoing monitoring of site performance by your medical and health SEO firm, to ensure nothing is broken that will negatively affect your organic rankings.
• Off-site, cultivating patient/client reviews (following all industry and review site best practices). Positive online reviews carry a great deal of weight in Google’s search algorithm.
• Off-site, obtaining citations (mentions of your organization) on (primarily) local websites, as well as links to your website from relevant, authoritative websites in the health care field — again, with emphasis on local links.

Your budget and the competitive environment largely drive the number and type of keywords you can target. As results improve, new keywords can be targeted.