SEO And Marketing Your Local Business On Patch.com

This page will use Dallas Texas as the example city for various ways in which local businesses can market their products and services on the Patch.com website. There are several ways in which a local business can see an increase in new customers or clients by using the features inside (and outside!) of Patch in intelligent ways.

First, let’s compare Patch with sites like Craigslist and NextDoor:

Craigslist

Service listings in Craigslist now typically require a monthly fee (roughly $5/month) for service business classified ads like HVAC, roofing, and even licensed professions like tax returns and real estate. This is different than it was in the past. However there is no targeted zip code/regional advertising other than the flat monthly fee.

Craigslist doesn’t permit reviews and it doesn’t have a “social” component to its features. You can list events for free, but you will have to pay to get exposure in other regions if your business crosses Craigslist’s regional boundaries.

NextDoor

Nextdoor has very basic free listings for businesses such as this Dallas-area business. Your business is allowed to add a logo, some pictures, hours of operation, a website link, and a small business bio. You will have to pay to get exposure outside of a small radius around your physical office/building/store location. Nextdoor users are allowed to leave reviews, but business owners have minimal option to reply to those reviews unlike Google Business Profile (Google Maps) business listings.

So Why Use Patch?

Patch, at the time of this post, is more powerful at the local level than most people realize. It has the ability to offer some nice benefits to any local business owner:

  • Free to join
  • You can have two listings -> one “personal” and one official “business”
  • Your services can be added as “Classifieds”
  • Your company’s events can be promoted locally
  • Paid advertising options within Patch exist (see more here)
  • The classified ad service listings, if optimized properly, can rank in Google on their own for local keywords
  • You are allowed to add an image with your classified listings (not all classified ad sites permit this)
  • The links inside your business profile and classified listings can help power up your main website, Google Business listing, YouTube channel and other web properties to rank higher in the search engines
  • You can follow other local businesses and like/share their postings, thus raising awareness of your business once they see you engaging with their content
  • Local news keeps you updated on happenings in your area
  • You can post local news (not just service listings) and start to build trust in your company from other local Patch users

Combining the above, you can increase the chances of your business gaining new customers/clients and building goodwill in your local market.

Examples Of This Working

This local Dallas sports bar offers a stage with large screen, DJ booth, microphone system, and more in case a private party wants to rent the restaurant for an awards event, live music event, or even a large birthday party. Their Patch listing ranks #1, even above Maps, in Google for those seeking such a venue:

If you post an event, the links inside the description can be used for “off-page SEO link building” to help send traffic to the inner pages of your website. The goal is to use relevant, authoritative and trustworthy websites to point links to these non-home page portions of your website in order to boost those pages higher up in the search engines.

Patch is interesting in that even after the event has concluded, it keeps the original listing live. This means that the power of those links doesn’t go away once the event is finished. This listing is still live even though the event concluded a few weeks ago (from the time of this post):

Your listing on Patch even can rank well when people go the search engines and look for a wider geographic area. In this case, local training classes for “Dallas Fort Worth” are ranking #1 in the organic listings (just under the Maps listings) in Google despite the Patch listing only being posted in the “Dallas” community:

Sometimes you need to increase your company’s brand name plus the city in which you are located for increasing search engine authority that your business is a legitimate local company. Here is one such example where this was done, especially for a business with office out of the home:

Some times you may be entering a niche within a highly-competitive local market. Bathroom remodeling in Collin County is highly-competitive with the County’s overall revenue potential for quality contractors, so this niche (shower glass doors) is using Patch to begin to enter that market and start getting phone calls:

Occasionally you get a unique situation such as this driving school located on the Garland-Richardson border. The main instructor also is approved by Texas DPS to be an off-site “third party” driving test location. This is so that people won’t have to wait for weeks to take their driving tests, especially in high-population areas like Dallas and Garland.

If you are expanding into a new region, you also can use Patch to test (probe) and see if you need to invest heavily in pay-per-click for a new niche. In this case, a video production company with a Downtown Dallas address wants to enter the niche (“podcast video recording”) in a suburb of Dallas – in this case McKinney. The Patch listing ranks #1 in Google after the “Sponsored” paid ad section of the search result.

What Else Can Be Done With Patch?

In addition to ranking in the search engines and using the description of your profile & classified ad service listings for SEO link building, here are some first step suggestions:

  • Engage with the local businesses and active people in your geographic area. Do this to start to build awareness and trust in your company.
  • Post any open-to-the-public event that you are hosting or promoting. Using the sports bar example earlier, they should use Patch to promote the nights when they have boxing, MMA, or major professional or college sporting event watch parties.
  • Test new niches and/or markets with an ad to determine if your Patch listing will rank in Google quickly (like the podcast video recording example above). If it doesn’t rank on the first two pages in the search engines after a week, then your “probe” indicated that you likely will need to invest more into SEO hard costs like link building, content creation, on-page SEO development and possibly something like a paid press release.
  • Do some low-cost advertising within Patch to reach neighboring areas. Using the sports bar example again, they are located on the border of Dallas and Irving/Las Colinas. Currently they are in the “Dallas” Patch community due to their physical address, so they should consider paying to get exposure in the “Irving” Patch community for their services and/or events.
  • ** An advanced technique is to consider any listing on Patch (your business profile or one of your classified service ads) which links to your website as a “Tier 1” web property. In competitive local markets you can boost both your Patch listing as well as your main website with intelligent “Tier 2” link building, CTR traffic, social sharing and other advanced off-page SEO techniques. Contact us for more details about your specific needs.

Finally, be sure to geo-tag your images with appropriate latitude/longitude, meta data in the Properties field and more to help your efforts. You likely spent time and/or money on your photos and graphic designed image files, so take a few extra steps to give each image file the best odds of helping you. Once geo-tagged you can use these image files where appropriate, such as on your Patch business profile and your individual Patch classified listings.

While Dallas Texas was used as the example in this post, the action steps mentioned are applicable to most areas of the United States. In some cases, you can reduce website costs if you only care about getting quick wins in the search engines; but please note that you can lose your rankings overnight if your Patch profile gets deleted. It always is best for you to have a fully-optimized website which you control all aspects: domain registration, website hosting, content, SEO optimization, images, other multimedia, and control the access as to whom can make changes.

Thank you and hopefully you found some benefit in reading this far! If you need help with your local internet marketing then Contact Us to schedule a call. We then, together, can customize a game plan to help you achieve what you would like to do in order to grow your business.

Medical Practice SEO, Online Marketing And Lead Generation

Case Study For Medical Practice Search Engine Optimization, YouTube Marketing, Pay Per Click, Facebook Ads, And Lead Generation

medical practice online marketing seo lead generation

This post will show the case study results of a multi-month campaign to help a medical practice (in this case a women’s health center in the Midwest United States) increase website traffic and phone calls.  The doctor wanted to target women, with a special emphasis on those seeking help with all things related to pregnancy.   This particular area of the country also faces a significant challenge with women in child-bearing ages who are currently using or struggling from the withdrawl symptoms of opioid and painkiller use before/during/after pregnancy.

The latter is important to know as it was part of the YouTube video ad campaign targeting.  The goals of course were to get more immediate phone calls; but the goals also were to improve search engine rankings and increase social awareness of the doctor’s multiple office locations within roughly 20-30 miles of each other.

 

SEO For The Medical Practice

Several services are performed at his center including OB/GYN services, mammograms, pregnancy care, and much more.  He also performs specialized women’s health surgical procedures.

The SEO efforts worked significantly well for the searches done in/for the towns where he had his various office locations.  Here are just some of the Google ranking results (“SERP’s”) for many of his desired keywords:

  • OB GYN CITY 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #3 in the organic results)
  • OB GYN CITY 2 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #3 in the organic results)
  • pregnancy care CITY 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)
  • pregnancy care CITY 2 (#2 in the Maps rankings and #2 in the organic results)
  • women’s health care CITY 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)
  • women’s health care CITY 2 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)

 

skeptical woman

If you are making decisions for a medical practice and seek guidance on how to gain exposure to your digital/online web properties which have your practice’s contact information (not just your website) then you likely want to know where situations were not as “rosy” or didn’t work out like expected.  That is a healthy (no pun intended!) way to approach any case study you encounter, like the one you see on this page.

So what went wrong?

There are 10 towns nearest to his 3 main office locations which have median household income (according to Census data) of $50,000 or more.  While his website mentioned those towns, he did not have unique pages set up for each of those desired towns – let alone those unique pages having unique content and optimized SEO tags specific to that town.  This hurt his SERP’s (especially in Google) for the same keywords mentioned above.

Here are the results for two of those nearby, higher-median-income towns:

  • OB GYN HIGH INCOME TOWN 1 (YouTube video ranks #4 and “Areas Served” page of website ranking #7 organic)
  • pregnancy care HIGH INCOME TOWN 1 (YouTube video ranks #2 and “Areas Served” page of website ranking #4 organic
  • women’s health care HIGH INCOME TOWN 1 (#1 in the Maps rankings and #1 in the organic results)
  • OB GYN HIGH INCOME TOWN 2 (no rankings anywhere on page 1 of SERP’s)
  • pregnancy care HIGH INCOME TOWN 2 (website’s “Areas Served” page ranking #10 in organic results – bottom of page 1)
  • women’s health care HIGH INCOME TOWN 2 (no rankings anywhere on page 1 of SERP’s)

 

TAKEAWAYS FOR SEO FOR THIS MEDICAL PRACTICE

There were several things which could have been done better to help him rank in the organic rankings in the SERP’s for the nearby towns.  These include, but are not limited to:

  • Build out high-income town-specific pages, each with unique content on them specific to that town.  Then optimize those new pages for relevant keywords and the town name
  • Create more video content, optimized specifically for that town, and embed it on the new town-specific page
  • Geo-tag stock photos (or photos he provided of his practice locations) and upload them onto the new specific town page
  • Double check with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for any errors or other issues preventing these new pages from getting indexed and crawled
  • Create custom Google My Maps with driving directions from the specific high-income town to nearby landmarks, including driving directions to his office locations and more
  • Get testimonials from patients in the specific town and embed on the new town-specific page
  • Possible schema markup for that particular town’s new page
  • Alt text with the specific town for any image embedded on that page
  • List of services for patients in that specific town such as pregnancy support groups, etc.

 

Had the above been done then he likely would have seen an increase in relevant website traffic from the towns he wanted.  Even if the town specific pages had a lower conversion rate than the rest of his website (hopefully not, but just staying conservative for this example) then he still would have noticed an increase in phone calls from the higher-income towns.  This is because the volume of relevant traffic visiting his website and/or videos (or medical/doctor directory listings) which would be ranking well would be so significant that even a lower-percentage conversion rate (calls or emails) would have generated new patient appointments.

We also could have added more outbound links on his new town pages which would have linked to his directory pages on Healthgrades.com, Zocdoc and other places with favorable reviews.

 

Google My Business (Maps) Results For This Medical Practice

This was very favorable for the 5+ mile radius around each of his office locations.  The statistics and metrics given to us for the Google My Business listings (sometimes mistakenly referred to as Maps results/analytics) for his three main office locations showed several favorable benefits over a 3-month period:

  • Nearly 900 phone calls coming to his two main phone numbers which he used (the same two phone numbers applied to each office location as he had a centralized phone service).  It is unknown how many spam/telemarketer calls came in, but even if it was 2/3 of the time (being vastly exaggerated for this example) this would mean he still received 300 phone calls (1/3 of the 900) from possibly legitimate patients.  Of course some would be for current and previous patients, but he still saw an increase in new patients as a result of his favorable Maps/My Business results in the “Snack Pack” (3-pack) of maps results showing for the local Google searches.
  • We didn’t see as dramatic a pickup in calls from Bing, but there was a steady flow of calls each month coming from Bing
  • We didn’t see many click-to-call metrics coming from Yelp, but this was because we didn’t emphasize Yelp that much during this project
  • He saw several hundred “clicks to website” (as defined inside the Google My Business analytics/metrics reporting) and several hundred clicks to get directions to his various office locations.
  • He received some reviews on his Google My Business/Maps locations.  While he received several favorable reviews on Facebook, not as many went to Google to leave positive reviews.  This is an area where he can improve upon in future months

 

Additionally, his two main office locations (of his 3 in total) showed a dramatic increase in the generic searches where his listing appeared, versus just “branded” (practice name) or individual name (such as his name of “Dr. XYZ”) queries.  This means his various business listings, especially for the two main offices, started to gain significant increases in awareness for searches/queries being done within a 10 mile radius of each location for phrases like:

  • “ultrasound near me”
  • “pregnancy doctor CITY 1”
  • “nearby mammogram facility”
  • etc.

google my business maps lead generation seo online marketing

So why did this happen?  What was done right?

Several things were done to help him improve:

  • Double-checking for correct category, business address, hours of operation, etc.
  • Adding all of the services, surgery types, and other benefits of his practice
  • Including links to his listings on Healthgrades.com and other medical professional directories
  • Geo-tagging the images and then choosing the correct category after uploading into the GMB listing
  • Same for raw video files (uploading the raw files, not just the YouTube videos)
  • Sharing content on the updates as “micro” posts (like a mini-blog) and value-added content
  • Doing link building and social sharing of the micro-website (a business.site URL) which automatically comes with all verified GMB listings
  • Intra-linking the Google-provided properties with other Google assets
  • Other advanced GMB tactics

 

WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE?

There were several additional things which could have been done to get him even more exposure, thus more prospective patients:

  • More geo-tagged photos and raw videos, especially for the advanced services and surgeries he offers
  • More quality citations, especially from local county-specific and medical-specific business directories which would permit the addition of his practice’s name, office address, phone number and website
  • Building out the high-income town-specific new pages and sharing them on the GMB updates
  • Taking the individual URL’s (links) for each post/update we made and sharing those links on high-authority web 2.0 properties like a Tumblr blog themed about women’s health.  This would have been even better had we claimed a previously-used high-SEO-authority Tumblr name for the blog and re-purposed it to be about women’s health!
  • Using even more of the GMB advanced tactics
  • More link building to the micro-website
  • More Google business reviews with the names of the towns and/or services provided in the text from the individual reviewers

 

YouTube SEO, Advertising And Other Marketing For Medical Practices

This was as close to a “home run” as we could get for the practice, especially for the limited budget we had regarding YouTube.  Like many doctors, he spent way too much on the videographer services (worrying about lighting and the staff worrying about makeup and wardrobe issues) rather than the big concern which was syndication and exposure to his video content. 

Earlier in this post you read that his YouTube videos ranked well in Google organic results (not just YouTube results) for desired local keywords.  The videos which ranked were just 30 second slide show videos with some stock music and just using stock photos and his logo!  While we tried to help him see the bigger picture, vanity and ego played a role here.  He only provided less than $100 for YouTube ads, but we maximized the exposure for what we were allocated; and had he spent less on videographer concerns – and more on getting his video content seen by the right audiences (e.g. women ages 18-24 looking up other pregnancy-related videos in YouTube within 10 miles of each office location) then his phone likely would have been ringing even more!

medical doctor youtube marketing seo ads paid views online video

 

Nonetheless, here are the results from the YouTube marketing he did:

  • Ranked #1 or #2 organic (in YouTube searches) for almost all of his desired keywords for the towns where he has office locations
  • Ranked #1 or #2 organic (in YouTube searches) for over 50% of his desired keywords for the 10 higher-income towns he wanted which were not the towns in which he has office locations
  • Has generated nearly 2500 views on his channel across all of his videos (slide show videos, him speaking on video, his staff speaking on video, and testimonial videos).  Virtually all views came from the counties where he wanted to attract new patients
  • The 2500 views does not even factor in the views of the raw video files in his Google My Business/Maps listings, nor does it factor in views of his videos when uploaded as raw video files on the Facebook pages for each of his office locations.  The number of “views” factoring those would be over another 1500 views.  The 2500 views is just restricted to views in YouTube either organically, as a paid ad/view in YouTube (targeting women 18-35 in his desired counties), and when the video ranked well in main Google searches.

 

WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE?

The big thing on which he “missed the boat” regarding YouTube is that he never did a thorough video of any kind (him speaking, animation character speaking, slide show video, etc.) talking about the very difficult topic of women dealing with opioid and painkiller problems before, during or right after pregnancy.  The reason why from a marketing standpoint (besides the desire to help these women and innocent babies who would be dealing with all forms of their mothers’ opioid problems) this was a missed opportunity was:

  • We could track that women ages 18-24 in his 4-5 desired counties were watching other YouTube videos on the topic of opioids & pregnancy
  • Many of those videos were on channels which permitted ads to run (typically a video ad before the main video started)
  • Those ad spot opportunities were very inexpensive, sometimes as low as 2-3 cents per “view” (where a “view”, in YouTube ad’s definition, is 25+ seconds of watch time when running as an ad)

 

This means that if he gave us just another $100 to spend, plus just one video speaking directly on the topics of maternity and opioid challenges, then the doctor may have been able to:

  • Get upward of 3000 views (25+ seconds or more of watch time per “view”) from women ages 18-24 in his desired geographic areas.  This would be calculated with a “view” costing him 3 cents, then he would have spent $1 to get 33 “views”.  A $100 ad spend then could have generated 3000+ “views”, possibly more.
  • We could have targeted specific keywords, entire YouTube channels, or even just specific videos which permitted ads to run in front of them like this one:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbeVhMye9NQ

His video also could have been added to a new YouTube playlist on the topic, with his video at the #1 spot (plus a description including a link to his website and phone number), and several videos from authoritative news and medical YouTube channels confirming the issues regarding opioids and pregnant women.

That new multi-video playlist (with his video appearing first) then could have been:

  • Embedded on his website pages
  • Shared on the Google My Business updates/posts section
  • Shared on his Facebook pages
  • Received low-cost paid traffic via Google Display Network ads (an advanced technique here)
  • Included inside a press release about the topic
  • Sent to relevant prospective patients via email
  • Several other ways to show that his words in an opioid-specific video were then being backed up by authoritative other videos (like the PBS News Hour link mentioned earlier)

 

Nonetheless, his YouTube efforts produced solid results and still are ranking well to this day. 

ONE EXTRA BENEFIT TO YOUTUBE ADS

Unlike most other forms of online digital paid advertising, YouTube ads have an unexpected benefit!  That is if you have the videos properly optimized before running them as paid ads in YouTube, then once the ad spend stops… you still may gain long-term benefit.

What does this mean?

In essence, the “views” (25+ seconds or more of watch time when running as an ad in YouTube) coming from the desired geographic area — which match the keywords for which you are optimizing the video — basically help your video(s) rank better in YouTube and, ultimately, Google for desired keywords.  That is why his videos rank well in Google to this day for one of his nearby high-income town keywords.  The paid ads in YouTube came from that town to his slide show video and, once the paid ads/views stopped, the video had gained enough “watch time” and authority to be deemed “authoritative” enough by Google to still rank well for those relevant town-specific keywords.

This is one of the reasons why we fought hard to focus on YouTube ads as much as (if not more than) Facebook ads.  If the “homework” is done properly up front, then the amount spent on ads (views) could be less than Facebook ads… and you might get the long-term SEO rankings as an extra benefit!

 

Facebook Marketing And Ads

His Facebook marketing did okay, but his staff didn’t answer patient inquiries sent through Facebook either at all, or they were very slow to respond.  This hurt his Facebook efforts to gain a ton of new phone calls as women in his area’s younger demographic (18-24) just seem to refuse to pick up the phone and make a phone call to book an appointment.  Most chose to email or send a Facebook message.

Nonetheless, by sharing his videos and some helpful “social” content (like articles about what to do if you believe you are pregnant) and some Facebook ads, we were able to generate about 20-25 phone calls and inquiry appointments for him.

This wasn’t necessarily all that great, considering what could have been the case, but there was no active campaign to have his current and previous patients follow him on Facebook.  That would have been the “seed” to grow the universe to whom he then could share content, with the intent of some of those first-phase followers sharing his “value added” content with their friends and followers.  There were many missed opportunities, but at least the efforts generated new patients nonetheless.

 

 

Instagram, Yelp, Twitter, Tumblr And Nextdoor

instagram medical doctor marketing online lead generation social media

None of these were implemented due to time and budget limitations.  Still, each could have influenced many new prospective patients to call him for appointments as his practice offers a wide range of women’s health services for women of all ages.

Advanced software now can take the Instagram and Twitter and Tumblr platforms to new levels and each can benefit any medical practice across the country in customized ways.  Yes, these social and review platforms even can have search engine optimization (SEO) benefits despite their not being typically associated with SEO or SEM.

In this doctor’s case, Instagram would have been terrific as so many women between the ages of 18-24 use Instagram in his desired geographic areas.  Unfortunately, it is difficult for a third-party marketing service to “handle his Instagram” due to his state’s licensing agencies being stringent on content that is shared on social media.  The content would have had to have been managed primarily by someone on his staff, and there was no willingness to do so by someone with a marketing mindset in his offices.

To clarify, the “marketing mindset” refers to someone who understands that (while staying compliant with state laws and overall levels of appropriateness for the audience) the goal is to grow the practice’s patient numbers.  This would require the intelligent blending of any/all of the following:

  • Choosing the right hashtags to use for Instagram posts.  For example, at the time of this post (February 2020), the Instagram hashtag of #pregnancyannouncement has been used over 570,000 times (https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/pregnancyannouncement/).  Missing the boat on this hashtag and high-volume related hashtags (like #mothertobe and #amipregnant) could lose him valuable new patients from his area.  This wouldn’t even factor in using local hashtags!
  • Incentivizing previous patients to share/like the doctor’s Instagram posts.  This does not mean a monetary incentive, but more of a sense of community and feeling welcomed by the doctor and his staff
  • Choosing appropriate photos showing the overall good feeling his patients get when they arrive at his offices
  • Posts helping with the emotions women feel when they experience any wide number of challenges related to unfortunate health news
  • Attracting to the Instagram page the boyfriends, fiances and husbands in the geographic area to help them better understand women’s health so that they enhance their relationships and trust the doctor (and his team) to protect the health of the women they love
  • When (and when not!) to comment on a patient’s Instagram post, and what to post on behalf of the practice – both from a sense of being appropriate as well as state licensing/compliance agency requirements
  • Much more

 

RECAP

Thank you for reading this far regarding the case study.  There were some solid “wins”, some “losses” and a few missed opportunities.  This website name of “More Than SEO” was chosen for a reason, as you can see that much is required in today’s online marketing environment to grow a local business – especially a medical practice dealing with the high emotions and costs associated with one’s health.

In all, for the time expended and the ad budget given, we are happy with the results but know that so much more could have been achieved.  Either way, you now have a case study showing that medical practice online marketing and SEO is much more than just choosing the color and design of your practice’s website, throwing on the site a few images, and running a few Facebook ads!

We hope that you have a better understanding of your own business model now in order to grow your practice. 

 

FINAL THOUGHTS:  TRUST

trust hands

 

The biggest takeaway we want you to have is that marketing “trust” is now fragmented, even within the very same person you are trying to reach!

For example, if your practice was trying to reach women ages 18-24 in suburban America with a median household income of $50,000 or more then that woman has “fragmented” trust from a marketing perspective.  By this we mean she likely:

  • Doesn’t pick up the phone and call local businesses very often.  She will be more comfortable initiating contact via Facebook or Instagram or email.  Having her fill in complex contact forms on websites (while easier for you to manage) may not necessarily be in her best interest.
  • Spends time with friends online via Snapchat and/or Instagram
  • Won’t respond much (if at all) to local print advertising (e.g. local newspapers, flyers, and local print publications)
  • Might be on Facebook, but may not respond to ads
  • Will be watching videos of interest to her on YouTube
  • Will be making lots of “near me” queries in Google, perhaps via voice searches (e.g. “OB GYN near me” or similar searches)
  • May make home-related decisions on Houzz.com
  • May consult boards on Pinterest for several ideas, especially anything inclined toward static images
  • Will consult national websites for articles like those on Huffington Post or others
  • Uses apps like Poshmark and other apps to make decisions to buy/sell items locally
  • Will rely heavily on local reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc. before making a business decision or a decision regarding her health
  • Will check the reviews not just of the practice but also the social media of the doctor himself/herself.  That is why doctors now have to be more disciplined in their personal lives than ever before
  • May not listen to any local news on the radio
  • Likely doesn’t know or care about your local chamber of commerce
  • Etc.

In previous decades local “trust” was restricted to word-of-mouth referrals, local newspapers, radio, community publications, chamber of commerce, phone book ads, local TV stations, and a few other “trusted” sources.  The internet and social media and apps blew the door wide open so there now are many changes in how someone making decisions for a medical practice (typically in/above the age of 40) differs from someone a generation younger (18-24). 

The big thing is to “get out of your own head” and how you make decisions; and, instead, get “inside the head” of the people you want to become new patients.  Learn how they think, what they trust, and how they make decisions online.  If you do that, stay humble with your marketing, and offer great service (thus generating a consistent flow of favorable patient reviews!), you should see an increase in your business in the coming months.

If you would like help for your medical practice or other medical-related business (ranging anywhere from compounding pharmacies to revenue cycle management to medical equipment) then contact us here:

CONTACT

 

 

 

Pay Per Lead Discussion

One of the new advances in internet marketing for local businesses is the push to work with pay per lead (PPL) services.  There are benefits and drawbacks to this strategy.  Here is a recent page we added to this website which covers the basics of pay per lead companies and whether they are of enough interest to you to warrant further discussion:

The Merits Of Internet Marketing For Local Live Events

I want to thank Greg Smith for the opportunity to contribute a post to his website this week.  He was kind enough to let me share some suggestions and thoughts about the merits of incorporating internet marketing for local events, either free to attend or requiring paid ticket admission.  Here is the link to the article I posted:

Greg and I share some of the same thoughts about tiered link building, promotion of “Tier 1” properties as standalone landing pages and much more.  What this means to you is that, much like most local businesses only care about the phone ringing (or receiving e-mails from qualified prospects), whenever you promote live events you primarily care only about how many people show up to the event/game/show/etc.  There are over 20 online marketing methods to get the word out, and some offer you benefit long after the event has concluded.

Should you find the post to interesting then you are welcome to share it or visit more about our event marketing information and consulting here:

Making The Phone Ring With Online Marketing

One of the biggest challenges of helping clients with their online marketing efforts is to quantify an increase in business.  There are several ways to track different online metrics, but the biggest question is:

“Is my phone ringing with new customers (clients)?”  Equivalent questions could be:

  • “Am I getting more e-mail opt-ins?”
  • “Am I getting more people following me on XYZ social media property?”
  • “Am I getting more walk-ins to my store?”
  • “Am I getting more attendees to my live event?”
  • “Are people ordering more from my website?”

The challenge for an internet marketing consultant is to manage expectations from the beginning of the conversation.  There is only so much that can be addressed by the marketer who is brought in from the outside, especially if the business does not have an in-house marketing director or other salaried staff member in charge of marketing.

Here is a quick breakdown of topics to discuss with any online marketing consultant or agency when it comes to various ways to make your phone ring:

  • Do you have a defined web page (e.g. home page, inner page on your website, YouTube video) to send your prospective audience?
  • Is the audience you are trying to reach:
    • a first-time prospect who was NOT referred by anyone previously?
    • a first-time prospect who was referred by a current customer/client?
    • a current customer/client to whom you are asking to purchase something new?
  • Do you have a simple, easy to understand request (“call to action”) for this person to follow?
  • Is there at least one (or more) method of tracking the activity, including ratios?
  • If you are going to use online paid advertising, have you narrowed down the web properties (or search engine keywords) on which your ad(s) will appear?  If so, do you have strategies in place to prevent your costs from getting out of control?
  • Do you have a method(s) to have this person join one of your lists in case he/she/they do not choose to do business with you at this time?
    • If so, what reasons have you given the person to join your list(s) if he/she has not done so already?
  • If you are getting targeted traffic to your site, but you are not getting phone calls – or at least joining your list – then what are you going to change first:
    • the headline?
    • what the emotional benefit (not feature) is that you are offering?
    • price?
    • an appearance change (font style, color, placement of the offer)?
    • something else?
  • If you are choosing search engine optimization (SEO) as a strategy, where are you ranking right now?  For which keywords/phrases?  How much of a ranking improvement do you need?
    • If your website needs lots of work (on the website + link building to the website), then do you have another web property that you don’t mind ranking on the first page of the search engines in the meantime (aka “Next Best SEO“)?

 

These are just a few of the questions to discuss in your initial conversations with any SEO agency or internet marketing consultant.  If you are interested in getting answers to these questions – and many more – to help you make the phone ring, then you are welcome to contact us.  Thank you.

 

Reaching The Entire DFW Market

Some business owners throughout the Dallas Fort Worth region truly can serve the entire DFW market and even additional markets.  Unlike smaller services which can serve a realistic radius of 5-10 miles (or an even smaller radius), these businesses have a different vision such as:

  • there is enough profit margin in the transaction to justify the time and expense to travel to a small town across the DFW Metroplex and conduct business
  • the business is so unique, or perceived to be so specialized, that prospective customers across the region want the product, service or other benefits associated with the particular business
  • the business can ship products and/or already has representatives near to the smaller towns in DFW

One question is which types of businesses can justify marketing to a wider radius than just the regular small 5-10 mile radius which is common with many local businesses?  Another question is how to reach the smaller towns without having to become a member of each local chamber of commerce or placing ads in every newspaper or print publication across the region?

Types Of Businesses Which Qualify

Here is just a short list of the types of businesses which can pursue larger-radius marketing at the DFW level or even state-wide:

  • Corporate relocation services
  • Specialty legal and financial services
  • Industrial products
  • Higher end home improvement services (e.g. interior design, remodeling, etc.)
  • Custom home builders
  • Surveyors
  • Higher end home repair services (sewer line installation, etc.)
  • Etc.

How To Reach All Of DFW And Beyond

The first thing you need to know is that there are over 200 towns and cities which comprise the DFW region.  This is not just Dallas, Collin, Denton or Tarrant Counties either.  The neighboring counties also are included as there can be highly-qualified prospects in the small towns throughout every DFW county.

To narrow down the options of how to reach these people, and do so in a budget-sensitive manner you have a few options:

  • TV ads — obviously you must be hyper-vigilant about your budget and any tracking you can generate here
  • Same with radio ads
  • Classified ads are a great way to get exposure.  Be sure to optimize your ads to include the towns and cities which you serve; and be sure to play nice by the terms of service and posting rules for the various online classified ads you intend to use
  • Direct mail targeting specific neighborhoods in specific zip codes.  A good mailing list broker, who can highly target your prospects across the region, would be a very wise investment here
  • Paid press release distribution can be beneficial, especially if you mention specific towns in your content
  • Pay Per Click (AdWords) is a smart way to start.  You can target each specific town, but you want to send the traffic to optimized (town-specific) landing pages on your website.  Also, be sure that there is some sort of benefit easily visible to the prospective customer and a “call to action” (e.g. “call today” or “download this coupon”)
    • Note that there are other pay-per-click services besides Google AdWords, Yahoo’s advertising, and Bing’s advertising services.  Please contact us for these alternative options where your competition may not be advertising
  • For business-to-business (B2B) advertising in the Dallas Fort Worth region you may consider targeted advertising within LinkedIn
  • You can do demographic-based targeted advertising, especially town by town, in Facebook.  Just note that:
    • depending on the devices your prospects use, you may not get complete exposure on Facebook to those using mobile devices
    • you likely will have a higher conversion rate if you send the traffic to a page you control within Facebook.  Most Facebook users don’t like to be led automatically off of Facebook at first, so consider sending the traffic to Facebook page you control regularly which has consistently-updated benefit-laden content (coupons, discounts, helpful tips, entertaining videos, etc.)
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  This is one of the trickier, but possibly soundest ways to get hyper-targeted prospects.  You can have created for you a multi-niche website (or a blog which resides alongside your website) which has town-specific optimized pages.  Ideally, the content on each of the 200+ towns is unique including article content, images, any embedded videos, etc.  Just so long as the combination of text/images/videos is unique you should be good, especially for phrases people type in which may have relatively low competition in the search engines.

The latter option (the blog/website with town-optimized pages) gives you additional benefit.  For example, here is a website which has town-optimized pages for varying business niches.  Here is one for a series of highly-related niches.  And here is a site with optimized pages for just one niche.

The benefits here are:

  • That you can control specific content for each town or city in which you want to market.  For example, if you want to give coupons in one town but not another you can do so
  • You have optimized pages to which you can send your pay per click (PPC) traffic such as traffic Google AdWords.  This increases the odds of gaining a higher “quality score” for your ads (assuming everything else is done right) and possibly saving money by reducing your per-click costs
  • The optimized page could rank well in the search engines for the times when the phrase is entered alongside the specific town (e.g. “your business Plano TX”)
  • You even go “deeper” than the specific towns.  For example, if you want to offer incentives to people in specific HOA’s or parts of a town then you can do so.

If you would help on any of these topics then you are welcome to contact us with your specific needs.  Thank you for your time and consideration to share this post.

Next Best SEO – Presentation From McKinney Texas

I want to thank Debra Pope for the invitation to present to her Networking University members who attended the workshop. It took place in the area of McKinney and Allen Texas on May 14 2013.

During the presentation I covered what is known as “Next Best SEO”.  This is where business owners, who simply want the phone to ring with prospective customers or clients, have additional options besides just attempting to rank their respective websites in the search engines.  What many of the attendees didn’t realize is that their websites, or ones given them by a corporate office, may – in fact – be violating several of Google’s best practices.

We covered many of the ways in which a business can grow through the use of internet marketing, of which SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) were just a part.  We briefly reviewed other online marketing techniques such as video, pay-per-click, press releases, online classified ads, etc.

The attendees also learned that each major search engine is, or is part of, a publicly-traded company; and each wants to make ITS quarterly figures!  The goal, then, is to give each search engine’s users the best possible content in a way which is user-friendly, is authoritative and relevant.  One way to accomplish this is to rank OTHER web properties – in addition to the companies’ websites – in order to help get the phone to ring.  Several examples were included in the presentation.

Four (4) action steps were given at the end of the presentation to help any business begin to improve the chances of receiving a call, e-mail or walk-in from a first-time customer or client by SEO efforts on other web properties.  These were labeled also as “promote the promoters” strategies.

Feel free to download this PDF from the workshop:

If you are interested in getting help to promote your website or other web properties which mention you favorably (or otherwise give authority) then you are welcome to contact me.

Thank you again to everyone who attended!

Internet Marketing For Plano And Similar Cities – Without SEO Or Paid Ads?

Small to medium-sized businesses in Collin County and North Dallas have an interesting challenge when it comes to marketing their local services and retail locations to those in Plano Texas, which has a population over 250,000.  For the most part, the city (located in Collin County) borders on Dallas County; and this can present some challenges for the business owner and their retained marketing teams.

While the audience differs depending on the business owner’s industry, let’s take as generic an example as possible. Since most Plano residents do not use mass transportation, the majority of teenagers and adults who drive cars will need to have their car’s oil changed every few months.  Assuming that most people do not, or will not want, to know how to change their oil then there is a demand for this service.  How does a new oil change facility, or an established one, gain market share in Plano and from other drivers who are in town?

The Challenges For Those Who Have Not Started Online Marketing Yet

Here are a couple of problems facing the oil change facility new to the area as well as for those who have declined to start online marketing yet:

  • With Google Places and Google Local Plus, the challenge becomes when a service has a North Dallas address; but in the real world people from Plano are more likely to become customers.  All of the directories listing the business’ address, however, promote Dallas.  This can cause some SEO concerns for reaching Plano residents through the search engines
  • The fastest way to get exposure is to use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to send traffic to a web page.  The costs for phrases like “oil change Plano TX” may be cost-prohibitive to the business due to the current amount of competition for that phrase.  This does not include any “penalties” assigned by Google should the “Quality Score” (QS) of the page to which you are sending the traffic is not properly optimized to match your ad
  • As with all paid advertising, once you stop paying the traffic goes away
  • Search engine optimization, especially with the new Google Plus Local and Google Places optimization campaigns, are confusing to most people.  SEO, while a fantastic way to get new customers, is a constant game of “leap frog”.  If you are able to leap frog a competitor in the search engines then it is possible that, one day, another competitor can leap frog your website
  • Video marketing is a great way to get exposure for any local business.  The problem is that most business owners treat a YouTube video as  a regular “30 second commercial” like they see on TV.  In the online world, you must add value to the video viewer; and this is a tougher “shift” in mindset for the business owner than you might realize.  Also, there are production costs to factor into the equation
  • If you look at many local business videos you will see a glaring problem. A video has been uploaded for 6 months… and it has less than 10 views!  You would think that a business owner has at least 10 friends and family members who would watch the video, but this points out a huge concern.  Most business owners care about the lighting and graphics on a video… but they have no strategy of how to use that video (once completed) to get the word out about their business
  • Online classified ads are great, but many have no marketing skill to create a call-to-action in order to get people to come to the specific oil change location versus that of a competitor
  • Not many oil change facilities have social media properties, let alone reasons why a customer would want to join any of them.  Most also do not even have an e-mail newsletter with tips, coupons or other incentives to bring in the cars of friends and family
  • A press release announcing the store opening, or a new line of service, may not reach your audience due to several factors:  timing, the style of writing, how the release is distributed, etc.

As you can guess, there are several challenges faced by local business owners… and this is not to pick on oil change businesses!  There are some of these businesses who are using social media and other services tremendously in the area of Plano, Frisco, Allen and McKinney.  I just wanted to give as close to a universal example as possible.

So How Do I Start If I Do Not Have Much Of A Budget Nor Much Technology Know-How To Rank My Website # 1?

This is a great question!

There are a few things which can be done which are inexpensive if you get outside help, and they even are no-cost if you learn how to do them yourself.  Depending on your desired new prospects, here are things you can do:

  • Use any e-mail marketing service for which you are currently paying.  If you have ACT, iContact, Constant Contact or a similar program then take the time to learn how to give value to your customers.  If not all of your customers are on your list then do what you can to get their permission to add them to your mailing list.  This becomes an “asset” which you control which won’t go away for a long time.  Make sure that your e-mails have an “opt out” (unsubscribe) option and are compliant with the CAN-SPAM rules
  • If you know that your audience spends time on a particular forum relevant to Plano, Frisco or any of the other North Dallas and Collin County communities then discover what it will take to post helpful tips and answer questions on that forum.  Build trust in that forum and have others sing your praises, both online and in the real world
  • Have ways to get your customers to leave reviews on websites other than yours.  For example, have your happy customers leave positive reviews on AngiesList, Google Plus, Google Places, your Facebook business page, Twitter timeline, Yelp page, LinkedIn and similar services
  • Contact me regarding how to set up various alerts and notifications in order to be informed when someone in Plano (or coming to Plano) has posted something indicating a need for your service.  You then will have ways to get in touch with that person or company needing your help
  • Offer value by promoting an “education” event.  For example, the oil change business can take an afternoon once a year and invite new drivers to learn how to check the tire pressure, check their oil, etc.  Have the attendees take pictures and videos, and encourage them to share these with their friends

These are just a few of the ways to reach an audience who needs your service without having to go through paid advertising or using search engine optimization (SEO) or search engine marketing (SEM).  Please note that paid ads and SEO & SEM are, indeed, worth your time.  They just have drawbacks and costs like all marketing tactics.

In any local market, there are over 60 methods to reach a prospect who does not know you nor knows any of your current customers.  Feel free to contact me to discuss how to customize these methods to come up with a plan that is tailored specifically to your audience and business.  From there, we can discuss ways to put into place a customer “retention and referral” program so that a new customer you gain can become a lead source to help you grow your business quickly.

Increasing Revenues By Looking At Your Business Differently

If you are looking to increase top-line revenues for your business then you can do so in a number of ways, primarily by:

  • increasing more first-time customers or clients who found you without any referrals
  • increasing more first-time customers or clients who were referred to you
  • increasing the size of the average transaction per customer
  • increasing the number of average transactions per customer
  • finding brand new revenues “hidden” within your business or industry

It is that last line item I want to discuss today in order to help you and your business become more profitable.  Some of you know that I have a background in the professional independent baseball leagues (some know them as the “independent minor leagues”).  I was a bullpen catcher, a player, a team official and a league official; and I maintain a few websites dedicated to various aspects of this subset of the professional baseball industry.  Most of these teams are operated by owners and front office staff, as well as league officials, operating under the mindset that, in order to be profitable, the teams primarily must focus on being “local, affordable, family-friendly entertainment.”  This model, however, does not work in all markets even when the owners and front office staff members are ethical, hard-working, and dedicated to make their teams successful.

In recent weeks some national attention has been given to these teams which are failing to pay vendors for months, have players living in substandard situations for minimal pay, and others which have to fold their operations due to not selling enough tickets and sponsorships.

When you have a moment, please take a look at any/all of these 3 blog posts:

Inside each of these articles may be some ideas which serve as a catalyst to help you think about new ways in which your specific business can become more profitable.

This website is called MORE THAN SEO, and it was chosen for a few reasons:

  • many business owners and executives are being sold “SEO” services multiple times each week, some of which produce questionable results
  • these services often keep the business owner “in the dark” and not explain why something is being done
  • to be good at SEO requires a mindset that often is different than an executive or owner has; and not conveying why something must be done often causes problems
  • SEO is just one way to get targeted first-time customers or clients.  Other ways include all forms of online paid advertising, social networks, social news sites, video marketing, and many more

While I love SEO because it suggests a hyper-targeted searcher can find you, it is not the only way to help you increase your profits.  Therefore I have to offer more than just SEO, hence the MoreThanSEO.com name.

By the same token, to increase profitability you may have to look at your business’ growth as being MORE THAN JUST getting another customer or client.  Here is an example:

If you run a local, hamburger established serving families with young kids then you have to acknowledge that your customers are also likely to grill steaks and burgers at home.  While you want them to come to your restaurant 100% of the time they think about red meat, it just won’t happen!

One way to improve revenues in this example is to produce helpful content (e.g. articles, videos, images) which could give tips on grilling techniques.  Your chef could suggest a certain type of grill, grilling accessories, or suggestions for the types of plates which help maintain flavor and temperature the best after grilling.

These pieces of content could be distributed to your customers when they show up at the restaurant (QR code invitation, request to join e-mail newsletter, etc.).  You also could ask your customers to share the video/PDF/article through their e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other channels.  Embedded in the bottom of that content could be an affiliate (tracking) link where people, anywhere in the country, can click that link and order the suggested item(s).  This way friends and family members of your customers who live outside of the area now have an opportunity to put money in your pocket 365 days a year.  This is because you would earn a small percentage of their orders before shipping costs.  By giving away helpful content which does not harm your premium product/service, you can expand your awareness (leading to first time customers) AND you can start to produce some additional profits for simply directing people to a place to order relevant items.

The above example is similar to suggestions I already have made to several independent baseball team owners.  Some of them are starting to understand that they can increase profits, and possibly increase attendance next season, through giving away helpful content.  You can read the articles listed earlier and begin to look at your business differently.  Obviously, you do not want to minimize your main revenue models; so just borrow principles and ideas from the pro sports world to help you grow your business can help you to complement or supplement your current business model.

Feel free to contact me with your questions.  If you want help for your specific business then please contact me through the contact form, and we can arrange a time to help you expand your business with strategies customized to your specific needs and regulations.  Thank you for your time and you are welcome to share this post with anyone you know who might find it helpful in some manner.

Online Classified Ad Websites – How Any Dallas Small Business Can Use Them

Many small business owners across the country, even in Dallas (where this blog post originates), think of classified ad websites as an afterthought or not worth their time to post.  Other internet marketing tools and strategies are seen as being more interesting, supposedly having broader reach, and even seen as targeting a “low class audience”.  Intelligent business owners, in-house marketers, and marketing agencies know that these limiting beliefs can hinder their exposure to a qualified audience.

What you may not be aware of are the extra benefits which classified ads provide you, in addition to the likelihood of receiving a direct phone call/e-mail or walk-in to your store.  When you are looking to acquire new customers or clients in a local market, assuming your industry does not have standards preventing classified ad website marketing, then you can benefit your company in any/all of the following manners:

  • Direct sales of products or services in your local market
  • Announcing open-to-the-public events (either free or paid) on the event calendars
  • The links get crawled by the search engines and, if compliant with the site’s standards, can be a “supplemental” link building strategy for your search engine optimization efforts
  • Some of the classified ad websites may syndicate your ad to other websites which you do not yet know exist
  • Some markets have enterprising people create unique/customized classified ad websites which pull content from other sites.  These may target specific parts of a city or even larger homeowners associations across the country
  • Some of the sites permit the inclusion of your online videos
  • Some of the lesser-known classified ad websites can have your ad rank on the first page of the search engines for some of the lower-competition phrases.  This, of course, is on a case-by-case basis; but it still happens today because it leverages the classified ad website’s “authority” in the search engines
  • You can test out text or graphic/image ads on local classified ad websites before rolling them out as part of your paid advertising efforts
    • You can test headlines, price points, unique tracking phone numbers, specific “calls to action”, etc.
  • Some sites allow for easy sharing of your ad with the readers’ social media or e-mail lists

 

The drawbacks to classified ad website posting are the following:

  • Time consuming
  • Not sure which “add on” features for which you should pay on those sites which charge.  For example, you could pay for highlighting, bold font, etc.
  • No guarantee of a ROI
  • You think that you will look “cheap” and that your competitors will use it against you
    • This usually is a false notion, but it can be perceived that way
  • You go in with the belief that physical classified ads are worth the money and time instead of online classified ads
  • Some sites force you to learn some basic HTML skills in order to get the ad to look the way you want it to look

Most of the listed drawbacks can be overcome easily, but you need to know the benefits of classified advertising before you can counter the perceived drawbacks.

At this point you may be asking, “On which classified ad websites should I place ads?”  There are over 30 classified ad websites which permit ads for virtually any community in the U.S.  Here are a few of these top sites, each of which gets a good amount of traffic including the Dallas Fort Worth region:

  • Craigslist.org
  • Backpage.com
  • Oodle.com
  • OLX.com
  • Ebayclassifieds.com
  • USfreeads.com
  • Adpost.com
  • Classifiedads.com

An often-overlook strategy for attracting new customers is to discover local classified ad sites specific to your local market.  Let’s look at Plano Texas, which is a suburb just north of Dallas and south of the cities of Frisco and McKinney.  In addition to the main classified websites listed earlier, you can type in a likely-entered phrase into the search engines.  In this case, let’s enter “Plano Texas classified ads”.  Here is a screenshot of what this search returned in Google tonight:

Online Marketing With Classified Advertising Websites In Dallas and Plano Texas

You can see two additional websites which are worthy investigating a little bit further.  After the paid ad for Classifiedads.com, you can see two results:

  • planotx.ziply.com
  • www.planotexasclassifiedads.com

Of course, you can modify the search and look for results if you want to market outside of the Dallas and Plano TX area.

Determine if these sites offer free or very low-cost advertising.  In addition, you can follow some basic suggestions on how to determine if this site gets any respectable amount of traffic from your local area.  If you need help on this then be sure to contact me.

Obviously, classified ads on these types of sites are hyper-targeted, but it is best to have a balance between these types of sites,  Craigslist, and the rest of the major national classified ad sites mentioned earlier.

If you want to take this process to another level then you can do any/all of the following:

  • use tracking phone numbers (if permitted in your industry)
  • use tracking websites/domains to determine if the ad is working
  • split test headlines, calls-to-action, colors, placement of images, etc.
  • include helpful video or images when permitted
  • include phone numbers in headlines
  • test the wording of your ad and determine if “scarcity”, “invitation marketing”, humor, or if other underlying approaches work best for your audience in that specific market provided that you get enough traffic to your ad(s)
  • include phrases to help your search engine efforts such as targeting specific HOA’s, demographic groups, etc.

I hope that by reading this far that you have a somewhat better understanding of how and why online classified advertising can help you with your objective of gaining brand new customers/clients who never heard of you previously, nor were referred by any friends or family.  Again, the benefit may be passive (e.g. generating links to boost your main website’s home page in the search engines) versus direct benefit (e.g. getting a call directly from the ad or a walk-in to your location).  By properly structuring your ads and placing them on the appropriate web properties you should be taking constructive steps toward boosting your benefits and doing things which your competition is not doing.

If you have any questions or need help with any aspect of your internet marketing in Dallas or elsewhere around the country then feel free to contact me.