All right, chiropractors, today we’re going to go through the Google business profile, the Google Maps, how to get your practice position on Google Maps so you can consistently drive in new patients through the Google Maps platform.
As we know, ranking on Google is extremely important for your practice. This is how patients are finding you online. It’s through the Google search results. The Google map pack is one of the key components and showing up and having a presence on that Google search results page.
So what is Google business? Google business is the profile account that you can claim your business on Google Maps with Google.
Once you create your listing with Google, now it’s about optimizing it and doing activities to help make sure that you’re growing in the rankings. end goal is to have your practice ranking in the top positions on the Map Pack.
The map pack is the term to describe the section on the Google search results page that shows the top three businesses on Google Maps.
This section on the Google search results page is extremely valuable real estate. 52 percent of the clicks land somewhere in that map pack. So getting your practice positioned properly inside of that map pack and towards the top is extremely important for your practice.
So now the question is, how do you get there?
Well, there’s a ton of activities that you can do to help optimize your listing. So you’re showing up consistently at the top. Obviously, the first step is to actually claim your business on Google Maps. You can go through the Google Business website and actually claim your business. They’ll do a verification process.
Sometimes it’s mailing you a postcard. Sometimes they want to do a phone verification. And other times they want to do a video verification. But once you have your business claimed on Google Maps, now you can start doing all these activities to help grow in the rankings.
The first step is to make sure all of your business information is filled out on the profile. There’s several different sections where you can fill in all sorts of details related to your business, location, phone number, website, social media links, hours of operation.
These are all going to be extremely important. Fill out as much information as you can. The more that it’s filled out, the better it will look in the eyes of Google.
You can optimize this information, making sure that you’re using good keywords and your descriptions and your products and services that you list off on the profile. So think through that carefully.
Next, make sure you add your logo, photos, videos, get as much of that media uploaded to the profile as well. Patients are going to be looking through that stuff to kind of get a vibe of what your business is like. They want to see the inside. They want to see you working with patients. That way they understand what the experience is like in the office.
Google’s looking at this. Google knows that users like viewing that media, so profiles that have that content available tend to rank higher on the search engine results.
We even recommend setting up a virtual tour.
You can get one of these. It’s a specialty camera. That takes 360 photos. We’ll ship these out to our clients to take those photos and then we take all the, the 360 shots and we stitch ’em all together for a virtual walkthrough through the entire office. Having a virtual tour increases your engagement on the listing and therefore increases your rankings.
Typically, listings that have a virtual tool will outrank others. There’s even a section on your profile where you can preload common q and As. So if you’re receiving common questions from patients about what chiropractic care is or different things about your specific business, you can preload that information as a question and then answer it right on the profile.
This gives Google more context to your business right out the gate. And it helps patients get those questions answered without even having to reach out to you.
And another huge component of getting your business to grow in the rankings is getting reviews. Obviously, you want to have lots of good reviews, but you also want to have reviews consistently over time. Google doesn’t want to see a big burst of a bunch of reviews and then no reviews over the next several months.
The goal is to have reviews coming in consistently over time. And there’s lots of really great ways that you can help generate more patient reviews on your Google listing.
One of those ways is to use automated texting. So after patients leave, have your system kick off a text message, asking them to leave a review.
We set that up with our clients when we onboard them.
Another method is to use a Google Review Stand. We have these stands.
They’re little NFC chips inside of this little stand. You can set it at the front desk. As patients exit, they can tap their phone on here. It’s a one tap. They get a little notification on their phone, and it allows them to go ahead and, you know, just tap to leave a review.
You’ll actually get tons of reviews that way. Just by consistently asking and making it easy for patients to leave reviews will drastically increase your ability to collect lots of reviews, but also getting reviews consistently over time.
Some other activities with your Google listing would include posting on a regular basis. A lot of people don’t know that your Google business profile acts a lot like a social media profile, just like when you post on your Facebook page and you’re keeping your feed active, you can do the same thing with your Google business profile.
Businesses that are posting on a regular basis will always outrank ones that are not. We recommend posting at least once a week.
Citations and directories is another huge area to focus on. These are going to be third party listing sites like Yelp, Foursquare, MapQuest, Apple Maps, Bing. Getting your businesses listed on all these other directories is going to drastically increase your visibility online.
Not only for patients that are using those platforms, but also for Google when they crawl those websites, they want to see your businesses listed there. If Google is comparing two practices, everything else being equal, one is listed on all these other citations and directories, and the other is not listed anywhere, who do you think will rank higher?
Of course it’s going to be the one that’s listed everywhere, that has a bigger online reputation in Google’s eyes, and therefore will show up higher in the search results.
Also, make sure that you embed your Google business profile map onto your website. So it correlates the two.
The more places you can embed that map, the better, and your website is an easy win for that.
There are tons of other activities as well that go into ranking your map. properly on the Google search results page. So if you’re struggling to get yourself in that, in those top spots, uh, you want help optimizing your listing or doing those activities on a regular places to get that off of your plate, let us know.
We have a whole program that we can make sure that you’re showing up properly on the Google search results page, not only From the map pack, but also your website. And maybe you want to run some paid advertising at the top. Lots of different ways to capitalize on the Google space and the Google search results, real estate that’s available for your business.
Remember, patients are already actively looking for you on Google. So positioning yourself on Google is low hanging fruit to get new patients in your door consistently.
