Effective Local SEO Strategies for Health Clinics: Targeting Service + Location Keywords

As a health clinic owner or marketer, you’re likely aware of the importance of local SEO in attracting patients from your immediate area. But what about potential patients from surrounding suburbs?

How can you effectively target service + location keywords for these areas without having a physical presence there?

Let’s dive into some strategies and insights gleaned from industry experts.

The Challenge of Ranking for Surrounding Areas

Health clinics, like physiotherapy practices, face a unique challenge when it comes to local SEO. Unlike service-based businesses that travel to customers (e.g., plumbers or roofers), clinics have a fixed location where patients come to receive treatment.

This can make it more difficult to rank for service + location keywords in surrounding areas.

Creating Location-Specific Landing Pages: Effective or Spammy?

One common strategy is to create separate landing pages for nearby areas.

But is this effective, or will search engines view it as spam?

According to a therapy office manager who implemented this strategy:

“I have a page for each surrounding town within a 10-km radius of our primary location. Each location page lists all of our services (we have three main ones), and we rank 1 or 2 in organic listings for all.”

This suggests that creating location-specific landing pages can be an effective strategy for organic search rankings, as long as the content is unique and valuable to users in those areas.

The Impact on Google My Business (GMB) Listings

While location pages may help with organic rankings, their impact on Google My Business listings for surrounding areas appears to be limited.

The therapy office manager noted:

“Where I’m not seeing progress is in the GMB listing outside of our main town. We are generally just outside the top 3. I suspect GMB is heavily geared toward proximity of the business to the searcher’s physical location.”

This observation is supported by other SEO professionals, who have noticed a strong correlation between GMB rankings and physical proximity to the searcher.

Strategies for Improving Local SEO for Clinics

1. Create high-quality, location-specific landing pages: Develop unique content for each surrounding area, focusing on your services and how they benefit that specific community.
2. Optimise meta titles and descriptions: To improve local search relevance, include the service and location in your meta tags.
3. Build up reviews (contentious, we know): One SEO professional suggested that increasing the number of Google reviews might help expand your GMB visibility radius. Aim to significantly outperform your competitors in terms of review quantity and quality.
4. Analyse successful competitors: Look for clinics in your area or capital cities and emulate their most effective location page strategies.
5. Target visible areas on Google Maps: When creating location pages, focus on areas that appear in bold when you zoom out on Google Maps, as these represent Google’s defined geographical boundaries.
6. Prepare for future expansion: If you plan to open new locations in surrounding areas, optimise your website for those locations in advance. This can help you build an organic search presence before establishing your new clinic.

The Advantage of Service-Based Businesses

It’s worth noting that service-based businesses like plumbers or roofers may have an advantage in ranking for multiple locations in organic search results.

These businesses can more easily justify creating location pages for a wider geographic area, as they serve customers in those locations.

However, health clinics should focus on creating genuinely helpful content for each location page rather than trying to expand your service area artificially.

Conclusion

While health clinics face unique challenges in local SEO compared to service-based businesses, there are still effective strategies for targeting service + location keywords in surrounding areas.

By creating high-quality, location-specific content, optimising for both organic search and GMB, and building a solid online reputation, health clinics can improve their visibility in nearby communities and attract more patients from a wider geographic area.

Remember, the key to success in local SEO is providing value to potential patients in each location you target.

Focus on creating content that addresses each community’s specific health needs and concerns, and you’ll be well on your way to improving your local search rankings.