Don’t be left out on the local search. With fewer people using the yellow pages to find providers and retailers of products and service; major newspapers folding and magazine subscriptions down, it becomes more and more important to utilize the internet for getting your message and your name out there to prospective new patient’s.
It can be a bit overwhelming… all this social media stuff: “Tweeting”, Facebooking, YouTubing, blogging, LinkedIn, Yelp, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon… OMG! Well, it is here to stay and we’d better learn how to us these media in order to be found.
It’s being said that Google will NOT “list” those that don’t follow some basic guidelines and relevancy standards! So, I’m sure there are some of you who really don’t need new patients from external marketing efforts; you’re new patients come from existing patient referrals. I congratulate you! You are the exception.
There is a place where you can get listed (FOR FREE) as a business: Google Places (www.google.com/places)! Local search, mobile marketing and social media are the big buzz words today. Google found that over 60% of all searches on its’ search engine were local searches for products and services. So, Google changed to meet the demand. There are some strategies you can use to get better positioning in the search engines, like: linking back to Google, Yahoo and Bing (MSN) local listing sites; loading niche specific keywords in the listings that allow IMAGES and VIDEOS (with proper tags); providing fresh, relevant content (ie: images and videos); and many other things that include social media and social networking sites, review and bookmarking sites…. the list goes on.
There are Social Media Managers out there, but they are in high demand and quite expensive too (average salary for a Social Media Manager is about $40,000/year); and this number is projected to increase due to the demand.
Don’t forget about YAHOO and BING (MSN) local listings; they account for about 50% of all local searches! They all require the basic information, but operate alittle different in their functionality and ranking standards.
