You already know that as a dentist, local SEO is critical to your success. There are a number of steps you can take to optimize your local SEO strategy and one of them is local listing management, also referred to as online business directories. Here’s what that means and how our local search experts at Dentalfone can help.
Understanding Local Listings
Your dental practice’s information is all over the internet. The most important pieces of data from a local search perspective are the name of your practice, its address, and its phone number, which we often short-hand as NAP. Your NAP is in local directories, on your website, in press releases, your city’s chamber of commerce website, and elsewhere. The more places your NAP appears, the stronger your overall visibility and performance in local search. Your NAP is the “glue” that connects your practice to the Internet.
Local listing data goes beyond NAP, though. For a dental practice, other important information in local listings includes your dental specialty, your office hours and days of operation, the specific services you offer, and the names of your primary employees. The name, address, and phone number are primary pieces of data for your local listing, while these other pieces of data are considered secondary.
The Importance of Local Listing Management
We want local listings for your dental practice to appear all over the web, but here’s the caveat: the more places your listing is located, the more work you have to do to manage these listings. That’s because it’s not enough to simply show up everywhere—as Google and other business directories are binary, the information displayed about your office must also be accurate and consistent.
When there is incongruence between different directories and websites, it has the potential to hurt your business because business directories, mapping apps, and review websites don’t know which information source is trustworthy; to avoid sharing inaccurate information about your practice, Google may opt to recommend your competitor over you because it’s more certain as to the accuracy of their primary and secondary data.
This might not seem fair, but think about times when you’ve followed Google Maps’ directions to a business only to find that it moved or that the hours listed on Google were inaccurate. It’s frustrating, isn’t it? Search engines don’t want to create these kinds of situations for their users, which is why they place such an emphasis on data that is consistent across a number of different local directories and websites, because consistency is an indicator of accuracy.
According to BrightLocal (an integrated SEO and local citation platform that provides SEO experts with some of tools necessary to help increase the visibility of your business and attract more patients using local search.), 80% of consumers lose trust in a local business if it has incorrect or inconsistent contact details and 40% would give up looking for a local business they couldn’t find because the address was wrong online.
Why It Pays to Have Dentalfone Manage Your Local Listings
Managing your local listings yourself is time-consuming for you and your staff. Wouldn’t you rather focus on what you do best? Leave local listing management to us and we’ll do the work to ensure that all of the information available online about your business is accurate and consistent.
Our work doesn’t end there, though. We provide daily monitoring for new local listings and, should you change your office hours or location, we’ll make updates to your local listings across the web. We leverage our relationships with the leading online directories and data sources to get results fast.
Learn More About Local Listing Management
To discuss how we can help your dental practice with local listing management, schedule a meeting with Dentalfone SEO.