As a med spa, you want to attract the right clients, engage them and then retain them for the long term, right? Of course, you do! In this post, we’ll provide you with 3 ways to increase your med spa’s Google visibility in local search results.
Let’s get started!
What are the Tiers of a Google Local Search Results Page?
If you want to attract the right clients to your med spa, it helps to first understand how your med spa can appear on Google. When looking at Google local SERPs, you’ll notice there are 3 main sections: Google Ads, Local Map Pack, and Organic.
Let’s break each of these down quickly.
1. Tier 1- Google Ads
The very first thing anyone sees on Google are paid ads at the very top. To reach local clients looking for medical spas, you’ll need to customize your Google Ads targeting within a given location and radius. This ensures that online visitors within that radius get your ad as the first search result for related terms/keywords.
For example, if your business is in New York, and a searcher types “best med spa near me,” your business will be among the top results. But there are other tips we’ll see later in this post to ensure your Google Ad efforts pay off.
2. Tier 2 – Local Map Pack (aka Google My Business)
Underneath the paid ads, Google brings in a preview of Google Maps, listing out three businesses that match the search criteria. The way you can get into the local map pack is to claim and optimize your Google My Business listing. It’s an easy-to-use and free Google product for local businesses. It helps you manage your online presence across Google’s search engine, including Maps and Search. With Google My Business, local customers can find you, which allows you to tell them your brand’s story. Then, if it resonates with them, it’s easy to get the right leads.
You can also edit your business info and verify your business.
What’s the benefit of a local map pack?
- Helps you manage your business information
- Interact with customers by reading and responding to comments
- Helps you understand and improve your online presence by providing insights into how customers found you.
3. Tier 3 – Organic
The Organic tier involves getting traffic from Google when visitors see your website, social media profiles, and other business directories. This happens by claiming your business on the top directories and social platforms, optimizing your website, and creating content around the topics your prospects are likely to search for when seeking information or seeking med spa services.
What’s the Key to Building a Digital Footprint?
As you’ve noticed, building a consistent and trusted digital footprint is critical to ranking across all 3 tiers of Google local searches. But knowing that, and actually putting theory into practice is quite different. Let’s now shift to talking about what makes a successful digital footprint.
1. Authenticity and Transparency
Business transparency involves being forthright, honest, and open about certain business operations, such as values, internal processes, sourcing, and pricing. As a transparent business, you don’t try to hide it if anything wrong happens, but you confront it and own it up if the mistake is yours.
You have a responsibility to your clients to be authentic and transparent at all times. And small business marketing tools can help you achieve that with ease by maintaining consistency across all your platforms, including social media.
Being authentic will build trust and loyalty to clients, resulting in higher retention and an increased clientele base. A good example is transparency regarding communication. If you don’t have trustworthy and exceptional customer service, your clients will seek other medical spas that care and offer great customer support.
2. Relevance and Coherence
Online visibility cannot increase if you are not relevant to your prospects and clients. For example, is your online communication coherent, and does it reflect your services, brand, personality, and profession?
To be relevant, you need to understand what matters to your target audience. To achieve this, you need local marketing software to help you listen to your clients and customize your online content to resonate with their needs. The right small business marketing platform allows you to monitor online conversations and effectively respond. (Psst. Surefire Local Marketing Platform is perfect for this!)
As you get the information, also find out what’s happening locally, on the ground. You’ll be more relevant when you are in the know of occurrences and trends. For example, is there a particular age bracket desiring specialized treatment in a med spa? Or what’s changing and will affect your practice?
Something else, relevance, involves activity. Know where the audience is hanging out and be active in those platforms, especially social media. Post, comment, engage and communicate with your target audience.
3. Build Relationships
For your med spa to grow consistently, you need to build relationships with prospects and customers. This comes from the way you interact with people both online and offline and how you treat them. For example, did your clients feel cared for? Were the services exceptional and satisfying?
When you build long-lasting relationships with customers, they become brand ambassadors and refer you to their friends and family, which helps increase your revenue. But the challenge is getting the time and resources to build such relationships. A small business marketing platform can help you build relationships through features like email marketing, scheduling posts, and auto-responders.
4. Visibility and Timeliness
People need to hear and see you regularly if you are to build a reputable digital footprint. This involves planning your online content to know what and when you’ll communicate. You’ll also need to respond quickly to comments, reviews, and conversations surrounding your brand while maintaining your tone, voice, and values.
The reality is that issues arise and evolve so rapidly that it can be challenging to catch up with what is happening. It can even worsen if the conversations are on multiple media, like social, traditional, and digital.
That’s where utilizing small business software can be helpful. You can get alerts on things that matter to you instead of spending too much time trying to figure out which conversations are relevant to you.
5. Preparation for Crisis Management
At one point, your business will be faced with difficult issues that need to be addressed. For example, a customer was not happy at your spa, or the experience was not as satisfying as promised, or your brand has been criticized online. It is such a moment of testing that you can either build or ruin your reputation.
To build a digital footprint that cannot be shaken, it’s important to prepare for online crises and online brand reputational threats that may arise. For example, most businesses were not prepared to handle the global pandemic, but they at least needed to have frameworks in place to ensure business continuity in similar cases.
These frameworks include ways of adapting, responding, and communicating with clients and stakeholders using various social and digital platforms. Sadly, most businesses had not made such preparations, and at the onset of the pandemic, they were trying to figure it out, which affected their operations.
To ensure your crisis management can stand the test of time, simulate possible situations and see whether you have the right small business marketing tools to allow continuity in the face of a crisis.
Simple Strategies to Improve Google Visibility for Med Spas
Tips to improve Google visibility with Google Ads:
1. Use local-friendly ads extensions to attract the right people. For example
- Location extension – relates to the geographical location of your med spa.
- Phone call local business extension is because most people use mobile devices and want to call to find more information.
- Affiliate location extension – this shows the location of affiliates that carry your product.
2. Target local firm locations and keywords
This involves changing the default Google Ads setting. The reason is, this setting looks for people who show interest in a particular location, though they may not be prospects. That’s why you want to focus on people living or regularly seen in those locations.
3. Use modifiers and additional location targeting
In this, you are focusing on a smaller radius near your practice for a possible higher ROI than a wider radius with possibly more people and fewer leads.
Tips to improve Google visibility with Google My Business:
1. Complete every section of the listing – this improves your ranking and increases the number of actions customers can take from your profile.
2. Consistency of your business name, contact information, and availability across platforms. Ensure no discrepancy in your company details, as this affects your Google ranking negatively.
3. Choose a category- Most people are likely to find you through a service/product. As such, you need to select the right category to optimize your business. This will help in:
- Being found in discovery searches
- Highlighting category-specific features
Tips to improve Google visibility in organic search results
1. Use long-tail keywords – avoid choosing keywords that have high volume but are highly competitive. Instead, focus on the specific keywords that relate to your business. This will result in a higher ranking, more clicks, and higher conversions. Traffic can be a vain metric if it does not bring you traffic.
2. Optimize all your pages with keywords, local schema, and structured data. You can use small business marketing software and an SEO tool to help in keyword research. Be thorough and use a conversational writing style to improve the odds of ranking in voice searches. This requires some creativity though!
3. Make use of links – internal and external. Internal links communicate to Google that your pages are related and are focused. Link to other authoritative sites to validate claims you make in your content, like blog posts. Also, ensure you get high-quality backlinks as they serve as an upvote on the quality of your site.
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform demo!
Not sure where to start with your digital marketing to increase Google visibility for your med spa in local search results? We understand, and we’re here for you! Contact us to learn more and see a demo of our business intelligence marketing software.