As an optometrist, it’s fair to say they need quality local leads and a ready supply of them to keep your practice open and growing.
To do that, it’s far better to focus on localizing your online marketing tactics. You can tailor your marketing to the exact people you’re trying to reach in the local area where you operate. That’s much easier than creating general content and hoping some of it reaches the right people.
The internet is a crowded place with millions of other websites, social platforms, and other distractions. You need your business to stand out in all of that, and the way to do it is to focus right down. You don’t need the whole internet to become patients. You just need the right ones for you that are from your local area.
Stay tuned to learn about local search marketing tactics for optometrists.
Know Your Local Community
It all starts with getting to know your local community, including your current and potential patients, but also your competition.
1. Conduct a thorough demographic analysis of who your “best” patients are
You’re probably quite familiar with at least some of your regular patients, even if it’s only to say “hello” to them. But how much do you really know about them?
Do you know what to say to sell them on why you’re the best optometrist for them? Do you know what their concerns are and what they want from an optometrist?
If you don’t, this is where you deep dive into your patients.
You can start quite casually by simply chatting to your regulars. While you have to concentrate during eye tests, you still have a little time to chat and get to know your patients. Ask them how they like your premises. Ask them why they picked your company. Don’t go overboard about it, just treat it like a casual chat, and you should get some good information.
You can then go further by sending out short surveys with specific questions to find out more about who your patients are and what they think of you. This can be a little uncomfortable, but it is vital information.
2. Identify key local trends, interests, and preferences that matter to your patients
You’re probably quite familiar with your local area, but by paying more attention to what goes on and what local trends, interests, and preferences are, you can find out what your patients are likely to be interested in.
Start following the local news and reading any paper or online newspapers. Join some community groups and see what people are talking about. Do whatever you can to see how people are thinking, what bothers them, what they like about other local businesses, and anything else you think could be helpful.
3. Understand your local competition and their online marketing efforts
You really do have to keep an eye on your competition. It’s so important that you understand who they are and why people go to them instead of you. You also need to know how they market themselves, partly so you aren’t caught on the hop, and partly so you can learn from them.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the old-established business, and they’re the new guys. They’ll still have something to teach you that you hadn’t thought of.
Follow them on their social channels and sign up for their newsletter. Examine every aspect of their marketing – what they talk about, how they talk to their patients, what tone they use, what keywords they use, what they include in their newsletters, and more.
You can then analyze this information to get ideas and inspiration for your own marketing, and to see how you can do better.
Localized Online Marketing Tactics
1. Optimize your Google Business Profile
If you don’t already have your Google Business Profile (GBP), then claim it now. You’ll struggle to manage local marketing if you don’t have a GBP. All you need to do is go to Google Maps and search for your business. If there is an entry, you can request to claim it, and if there isn’t, just create one, and then claim it.
Verify your business with Google quickly and easily by post, email, text, or video.
Once you have access, set aside some time and focus on writing the best possible profile you can. Fill in every section of your GBP with quality, fully keyworded (including local keywords!) copy.
Don’t leave anything out and really put in your best effort here. Add your services, your service area, your full address and contact details, your business hours, questions and answers, and select the right categories for your business. Once you include your opening hours, you can then be found by voice search with “optometrist, your local area, open now.”
Add videos and quality images to make your profile pop and look attractive. You’ll also need to keep updating it with your latest news, new services, awards, new equipment, and any other posts you know your potential clients will want to see.
All of this gives you plenty of space for local keywords to help you appear on local search. Your GBP is also the only way you have a chance of appearing in the Local Map Pack at the top of Google Maps. If you don’t have a fully optimized profile, you can’t buy your way into those listings.
Encourage your patients to leave reviews that call attention to the areas you service. The more reviews you have the better, but particularly on your GBP. The number of reviews and your star rating will appear if you use paid Google Ads and this can attract people to click if they can see your ratings are good.
2. Localized Content Marketing
Create location-specific content that resonates with your patients. You should have a far better understanding of what your patients want to hear after all that research at the beginning. Don’t forget to incorporate local keywords naturally into your content so that you are more likely to appear in local search. Don’t just save this for your website, though. Add your local keywords to your GBP, your paid ads, and your social channels.
You can also use more of your earlier research here by writing about local events, news, and trends in your blog posts and social media updates. This shows people that you’re a part of their community, that you understand their concerns, and who they are, and that they’re more likely to matter to you as a local business.
3. Local SEO Strategies
We’ve talked about local keywords a lot, but that’s because they’re important. What you can do is create individual pages for every area you cover. That works really well if you have more than one location, but you can still do it even if you only have one office. You can then add your local keywords and include your full address and contact details on each page.
Include your keywords in the page URL, your headline, at least one subheading, in the first paragraph, your meta title and meta description, in image descriptions and alt text, and naturally throughout your copy. However, keep in mind that you’re writing for people first and search engines second.
You can also gain more local visibility by acquiring high-quality backlinks from other local businesses, directories, and community websites. Request these, especially from complementary businesses to yours, but be prepared to swap backlinks rather than expect to just get them with no exchange.
You will also need to ensure your website is fully optimized for mobile and fast to load. People will not wait if your site takes over three seconds to load. They will look elsewhere. And if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then you are losing a lot of traffic as so many people now shop and research on their mobile phones now. Google also has a say in this, and they now list the mobile version of sites first in the results and will penalize any site that isn’t mobile-friendly.
4. Local Online Advertising
You can create targeted online ads through platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads to boost your visibility and reach your target audience. You can focus on particular demographics and set specific parameters to target potential patients within a certain radius of your location. You can also exclude any areas where you don’t operate so you aren’t spending your budget where it won’t do any good.
You will have to monitor your ad performance regularly, but this is a good thing. You will be able to see which ads are performing well and quickly switch off any ads that are costing you money but not converting well. You can then copy the successful ads and continually optimize them to increase your results and your conversion rate.
5. Local Branding
Get involved in your local community. You did your research earlier and now it’s time to put it to good use. You can network with other local businesses and support each other, and you can also partner with complementary local businesses for cross-promotion opportunities. You could do joint newsletter promotions to grow your subscribers, run competitions to increase your online followers, and more. You’ll each benefit from reaching each other’s audience.
You can also connect with local charities and community leaders to see where you can help your community and give back. While it’s a great thing to do and can be very fulfilling, you’ll also be building your local reputation and likely gaining publicity and new leads from your involvement.
This works particularly well if you join in with events that have a strong online presence. You will gain online publicity and likely acquire more local followers, as well as raise awareness of your brand.
6. Monitor and Analyze Performance
If you started this journey with some well-set goals, you can keep track of your performance by tracking your results against those goals. You can also track your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as website traffic, conversion rates, your local search rankings, customer lifetime value, and more.
Use tools like Google Analytics to gain insights into local customer behavior. Along with your website stats, social platform stats, and any data from paid ads, you should have a complete picture of who your patients are, how they found you, what they think, what they want, what content they interacted with, what keywords they used and questions they asked, what actions they took, and more.
You can then make adjustments to your marketing using real data and results, and continue to improve what you do as you go.
This isn’t a quick and easy fix, but it does work very well to improve your online visibility and attract more local patients. With local search marketing, you can gain more visibility in specific zip codes, get better customer engagement, improve how you market, and gain more leads, and grow your business.
Localize Your Online Presence with Surefire Local
Surefire Local prides itself on helping small businesses with localized online marketing. We’re all about helping small business build their online presence by creating local signals across platforms and profiles that make it easier for new patients to find them. We’re also the all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses, helping you to market more efficiently, save time and effort, and spend your marketing budget on the right things.
- Website / Local SEO optimizations – creating geo-tagged content that is published on your website, blog, and social media profiles
- Online review management – send review requests, write responses to reviews, and analyze your brand sentiment to learn what patients think about your business
- Directories management – claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or a special offer for your business across 80+ online directory listings platforms
- Content marketing – tools to create locally targeted and relevant content on your blog, Google Business Profile, business directories, and social media profiles
- Social media management – tools for scheduling posts, tracking engagement metrics, and responding to comments
- Local online advertising – Ads designed to attract only the attention of patients within your service area
- Analytics and reporting – Transparency into campaign performance and how much revenue your marketing dollars are generating, with AI-generated recommendations on specific actions you can take to see improvements
- Educational resources – webinars and blogs designed to help small businesses learn all things local online marketing
Why not book a Surefire Local marketing platform demo and see what a difference we can make to your marketing?