Michael Epps Utley {kind=image/jpg}
Word of mouth is the best source of new business growth, but what does that look like today for health systems and local healthcare providers? It looks like this: driving your reputation up on your Google Business Profile (formerly “Google My Business”).
But what does that mean? It means having processes in place to know the competitive landscape, drive good reviews, and engage with prospective and current patients on their terms. Let’s break it down.
Setting Up Your Google Business Profile
First, make a list of your locations, and check to see if you have active and claimed listings for each location. If you don’t or you find one that is not claimed, get those verified to proceed. Also, check with a few Google Maps searches to make sure you only have one listing active for each location. More is not better if it creates confusion. You need to have direct control of each of your location listings, with no overlap or confusion with other listings.
If you find a listing is verified, and you don’t have access to manage it, you may need to work through Google’s customer service options to correct the situation. That can be a bear, but it is critical to control this off-site piece of your brand’s presence online.
Seeing the Competition
Google’s approach to who to show in these listings is not completely transparent. But, business listings with a steady flow of new reviews and a higher star rating do better on average. It’s not a pure sort based on review volume and rating level, but these are the two biggest factors you can see and use to manage your placement in listings. For marketing programs we manage, we make a short list of the competitors with their review volume and rating levels and track everyone’s progress to work our way up in the rankings.
Optimizing Your Google Business Profile
Once you have your set of claimed listings for each of your locations, you can optimize. It is essential to check all business information and update it as needed. This includes the business name, address, phone, hours, website, and services. We recommend looking at the data for multiple listings in a dataset, and maintaining what you have out there in a single location. This will help you more easily catch things like variations in the name (which are easy to miss if none of them is technically “wrong”). Consistent naming is better for brands with more than one location, unless the variations add helpful information, like a variation of services or the general service area.
Another feature of your Google Business Profile is a primary and secondary category for your offerings. Check the available options carefully and choose well — these have a big impact on what searches in Google will result in your listing being shown.
Key Features to Utilize on Google Business Profile
Next, add content to your Google Business Profile with photos and a virtual tour to give potential patients a real feel for your practice before they even step inside. Post regular updates to keep Google aware of the freshness of your profile. Additionally, use the Q&A feature to proactively address common patient concerns and convert more searches into appointments by eliminating uncertainties.
Gaining More Reviews
We recommend you share a review link with each prospective reviewer in a workflow you keep running. This can be with a QR code at the front desk, in emails, or SMS messages to happy patients. There are lots of HIPAA-friendly platforms out there for this type of service. A steady flow of new four- and five-star reviews is highly valuable to your placement in search engines.
Managing Reviews and Engaging With Patients
It’s a best practice to respond to each review that comes in. For healthcare, it is critical to avoid disclosing any private information in a response. It is best to develop a set of responses that a team member or your marketing agency can use to respond within a day to each incoming review.
These responses can be planned and crafted to handle a variety of reviews, from glowingly positive to wiltingly negative. These should range from “Thank you so much…” to “Thank you for your feedback.” Each message should be succinct and used to simply acknowledge the review. Then, issues and feedback may be sent to a customer service resource for direct, personal follow-up offline and never in the review channel itself.
The steady flow of new reviews and your engagement with each review signal to Google that your profile is active and you are an engaged provider. This is good for your placement in search engines.
Tracking Performance & Making Data-Driven Improvements
Track your progress. You can use the Google Insights feature in your Google Business Profile to see how prospective patients are engaging with your listing:
How search engine users find you
What actions they take
Photo and post performance
These insights will help you refine your strategy, improve engagement, and optimize your Google Business Profile further.
Need Help With Your Google Business Profile?
Do you need help with all this? We do this work in our search engine optimization programs for practices that want to grow their patient volume. Reach out to us to set an intro call and see if we are a good fit to help you grow.
