If you’re operating a small, local dermatology practice, it isn’t just what you do that is important. How you do it can become a key competitive advantage. Therefore, any opportunity you have to stand out in a crowd is one worth capitalizing on, and that’s exactly what the right local search marketing strategy can help you accomplish.
Crafting an organic strategy that makes sense for your specific business can also help you overcome a number of important challenges, too. In addition to helping you meaningfully differentiate yourself from your competitors, it can also make sure you’re reaching the right audience.
You need to get your dermatology practice in front of the people who live and work in the same area you operate in. If you’re based out of Cleveland, it ultimately doesn’t benefit you to rank highly in Baltimore because those people aren’t likely to become one of your ideal customers. A local search marketing strategy helps you get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time, dramatically increasing the chances that they’ll become one of your clients in the first place.
Know Your Local Community – Your Customers AND Your Competition
As you begin putting together a local search marketing strategy for your dermatology practice, the first thing you need to do is a thorough demographic analysis. If you don’t know who your “best” customers are, you have no idea what they need to hear (or how they need to hear it) in order to get them to pick up the phone and give you a call.
You should also work to identify key local trends, interests, and preferences that matter to your customers. You can then tailor your messaging to play to these unique qualities, allowing you to turn them into legitimate strengths.
You’ll also need to work to understand your closest local competitors and see what they’re doing in terms of online marketing. Not only can this help you figure out what they’re doing well… you can also see the areas that they’re not doing so well. This can identify gaps that you can fill, ultimately turning them to your advantage.
Local Search Marketing Tactics for Dermatologists: Breaking Things Down
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
If you haven’t already done so, you should begin putting together your local search marketing strategy by claiming and verifying your business on Google. Remember that this is how the vast majority of people will discover your dermatology business for the first time, so you should be in control of the information they’re exposed to.
Optimize your profile with not only general business information but accurate details as they pertain to things like:
- Business hours.
- Your exact address.
- Accurate contact information.
- High quality photos.
- Video and other rich media content.
- Reviews.
- Questions and answers.
- Service areas.
- Services offered.
To speak to the point about reviews, always encourage your satisfied clients to leave reviews that call attention to the areas that you service. This will help with your larger search engine optimization (SEO) efforts because it allows you to rank highly not just in a general sense, but in specific cities and locations.
Localized Content Marketing
Next, you should move on to creating location-specific content that resonates with your customers. Use any opportunity you can to talk about the exact cities that you operate in – not as an afterthought, but in a meaningful way that shows you actually care about these communities.
Above all else, try to incorporate local keywords naturally into the content of your website. This includes not only things like blog posts that you may be writing, but visual content like videos as well.
All the while, you’ll want to leverage local events, news, and trends in blog posts and social media updates. Again, local search marketing isn’t just about getting your name out there in a general sense. It’s about ranking highly for the precise areas that you actually operate in.
Local SEO Strategies
As a dermatologist, you should also implement on-page SEO tactics that focus on locations you want to rank highly in. Did you just participate in an event in one of your service areas? Be sure to write a blog post about it and share your experience.
Likewise, work to acquire high-quality backlinks from other businesses, directories, and community websites. Even the smallest cities usually have official websites. See what you can do to get referenced on it and have them link to your primary domain.
In an over-arching sense, always optimize your website to be both mobile-friendly and fast to load. If your website takes longer than just a few seconds to load, people aren’t going to wait – they’ll hit the “Back” button in their browser and will likely never return.
Local Online Advertising
Create targeted online ads for your dermatology practice through platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and others. As you do, be sure to set specific parameters to target potential customers within a certain radius of your location.
Think about where someone would have to live in order to conveniently drive into your location for an appointment. Then, target the people who live within that radius for the best results.
Over time, you should be proactively monitoring and analyzing your performance. When you see a technique that is working, double down on it. When you see one that isn’t, get rid of it and try something else.
Local Branding
There are probably a lot of other complementary local businesses in your area. Reach out to them and propose a partnership for cross-promotional opportunities. Obviously, the availability of these businesses will change depending on where you operate, but even just one or two partnerships can still make a big difference.
You should also work to connect with local charities or community leaders. This can be a great way to establish your dermatology practice as a voice of authority in the area. It also goes a long way towards giving you the credibility that people need to trust you. Participate in local charity events that have a strong online presence so that their marketing campaign references you and essentially becomes part of yours by default.
Monitor and Analyze Performance
Finally, understand that putting together a local search marketing strategy for your dermatology practice is not something that you “do once and forget about.” You need to track key performance indicators (KPIs) like website traffic, conversion rates, and local search rankings so that you can guarantee you’re always headed in the right direction.
A technique that works wonderfully today may be woefully inadequate in six months. The only way you’ll catch this and be able to pivot to something else is if you’re monitoring with an eye toward continuous improvement.
Utilize tools like Google Analytics to help gain as much insight as possible into local consumer behavior. You should be paying attention to things like:
- How they found your business.
- The content they interact with after visiting your website
- Which actions they took.
This will all help you continue to make strategic, meaningful improvements to your online marketing on a regular basis. At a bare minimum, you won’t be acting on gut instinct or intuition. There will be no “guesswork” involved. You’ll be making data-driven adjustments to your marketing campaigns based on actual, tangible performance data.
Taking Your Dermatology Local Search Marketing Strategy to the Next Level
In the end, crafting a local search marketing strategy is all about improving online visibility for your dermatology practice in a way that attracts as many local customers as possible. It’s not just about increasing visibility in a general sense. You want to increase visibility in specific zip codes to reach the people who are most likely to walk into your location to begin with.
Not only does this allow for a deeper level of customer engagement, but it can also help empower a new level of business growth as well. It’s a powerful opportunity that you’d be hard-pressed to replicate through other means, which is why localized online marketing is so critical.
At Surefire Local, we pride ourselves on our ability to help small businesses with localized online marketing efforts like those outlined above. We’re all about helping your dermatology practice establish your online presence in a meaningful way by creating local signals across platforms and profiles. We make it easier for new customers to find you so that your dermatology services have the chance to take care of the rest.
Overall, Surefire Local is an all-in-one marketing platform that includes features like:
- Website/Local SEO optimizations. This includes creating geotagged content that is published on not just your website but also your blog and social media profiles.
- Online review management. We send review requests, write responses to reviews, analyze your brand sentiment to learn what customers think, and more.
- Directory management. We’ll claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or special offers across 80+ online directory listing platforms.
- Content marketing. We have the tools needed to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, business directories, social media profiles, and more.
- Social media management. Surefire Local has tools for scheduling posts, tracking engagement metrics, and responding to comments.
- Local online advertising. Our ads are designed to attract only the attention of customers within your service area.
- Analytics and reporting. We offer an unparalleled level of transparency into campaign performance and how much revenue your marketing dollars are generating. Our AI-generated recommendations give you specific actions to take to see the improvements that you’re after.
- Educational resources. This includes but is not limited to things like webinars and blogs, all of which are designed to help small businesses learn everything they need to wield the full might of local online marketing to their advantage.
So if all this sounds like exactly what your dermatology practice needs, the good news is that we’re here to help. Contact the team at Surefire Local today to get started or attend a Surefire Local demo to see what our technology can do for you up close and personal.