You might not realize this, but you have a home-field advantage over your larger national competitors. Search engine algorithms tend to favor local results over national results, which is ideal for local businesses like yours. It allows you to focus in on the potential hearing aid customers in your specific area.
This is why it’s important for your hearing practice to leverage all aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to attract your future customers online. Today, we’ll focus on the search engine Google as they clearly have the largest search engine share out of all the search engine companies, so efforts to comply with Google’s guidelines will lead to maximum benefits.
If you’re looking to increase your number of local hearing patient leads, you should focus on maintaining accuracy in your local listing information.
Why it’s in Google’s interest for your hearing practice information to be accurate
Google ranks listings higher the more accurate they are. This makes perfect business sense. If a person looking for a local hearing evaluation is repeatedly sent to the wrong address, or calls ahead and is met with an incorrect number message, then they are more likely to stop using Google. Its clear that this would be disastrous for the company.
You may have searched for your hearing practice recently on Google and come across all kinds of information, such as a name, address, phone numbers, and the like. What few people realize is this: If Google is not confident that this information is correct then they wont show it, for the reasons we mentioned above. And that could be extremely detrimental to your business.
How inconsistent information can harm your hearing website’s ranking
You might have worked hard to built a beautiful website and followed our previous advice to set up your Google My Business account. All of the information is there an accurate and you have images, but your business is still not showing up. What gives? It’s because Google has a low confidence about the accuracy of your business.
You may have given them the correct information, but you might not realize that there might be spelling variations of your address on other websites, or a phone number that is no longer up-to-date.
These small differences are more important than you think. Google doesn’t just take your word for it that your address is ‘35 Main Street’. In order to determine your listing accuracy, they crawl the web for every mention of your business and cross-references it with the information you have given. By searching the web, they have access to every local business directory which contains your hearing practice’s name, address and phone number.
Whenever one of these locations lists your exact information, Google’s confidence in the data you have supplied rises and makes them more likely to display your hearing practice in their search results.
However, if you have these other variants of your basic information, then suddenly Google has some contradictory versions of your name, address or phone number. They are less trusting about the details you’ve supplied. This might mean they remove the ‘call’ button on your business search result, which means potential customers wont be able to call you to set up a hearing consultation directly from the search engine results page.
What you should do now
So how do you solve this predicament? You should find all the instances in which your business information is incorrect, and correct it. Make sure the name, address and telephone number of your company (NAP), is accurate, especially in the more well-known business directories like Yelp.
On each directory, your company listing should also include a backlink to your website and a detailed description of your practice.
Consistent information is important not only for your SEO, but for your customer experience too. Inaccurate information can kill any motivation and drive a customer has to continue with their pursuit of your services. It’s important to focus on making it as easy as possible for the customer to contact you should they need that hearing test or consultation.
Nick Fitzgerald is the President and Owner of AuDSEO. With 13 years of digital marketing experience, Nick is a highly data-driven marketer, with expertise in search engine optimization, digital analytics and forensics, social media, digital advertising, and web development. He has been involved in the construction and optimization of nearly 1,000 web presences, including some of the largest Fortune 500 companies.
