Why Localization Should Be a Must For Your Dental Practice
Saffron Edge
May 14, 2018
6 min read
In our last blog we talked about the importance of online reviews for your dental practice and how you’d have to list your practice to Yelp, Google My Business, and Facebook and ask people to explicitly review on them to start a self-feeding review cycle.
Other than gaining a lot of reviews, listing your dental practice on these website opens some other doors that can prove to be detrimental to the success of your dental practice. Which doors exactly? It brings you in front of your local audience who are searching for dental practices online night and day. Say, you run a dental practice in New Jersey. If a person searches on Google for dental practices in New Jersey and your practice website is nowhere to be seen, he will choose one of your competitors and get on with it. That must not happen. This is where Localization of your dental practice is so important. You’ll have to be on top to let your local searchers find your practice instead of your competitor’s. How? By claiming your listings in local directories. Here are 3 reasons why you absolutely need to create or claim the listing of your dental practice in local directories -
Yelp is a goliath in the US. 90% of the people in the United States use Yelp to find local businesses and healthcare practices and 30% of those searches are for healthcare practitioners (including dentists). Having more than 160 million website visitors a month is no big deal for them but if your dental practice is listed on a platform with such massive exposure, it can be a big deal for your practice. So, here’s how to claim your listing on the platform - Scroll down the bottom of yelp’s homepage and click on the ‘Claim your Business Page’ 
After clicking on it, you’ll be redirected to the ‘Yelp for Business Owners’ page where you’ll need to enter your practice’s name and street address to claim your listing. 
Find your practice from all the listed local practices in the specified area and just claim your listing, it’s that easy! 
After that, it’s just the task of filling relevant information of your practice. On Yelp, try to submit genuine images of your practice and staff members to gain more credibility on the platform. 
Go to the ‘Google My Business’ homepage and click ‘Start Now’. You’ll be redirected to their listing page where you can begin with listing your dental practice. 
After that, it’s about filling all your correct practice information (you can have a look at our previous blog to know exactly what information about your practice you need to get listed on Google My Business). 
Biggest disadvantage? Getting your practice listed on the platform is not free, you’ll have to pay a flat $3000 annual fee to get your practice listed. But if you decide to get listed on this platform, the exposure you’ll gain it is tremendous. Zocdoc even lets potential patients book appointments of their chosen practice directly from their platform, which can really sky-rocket the patient traffic coming to your dental practice. Letting patients book appointments online is why Zocdoc is so popular. We will be covering why this feature is so vital for patients in the next blog. So, stay tuned! To get yourself listed on the platform, you’’ have to click on ‘List your practice on Zocdoc’ tab on the top right of its homepage. 
After you click on ‘List Your Practice’, the process of getting your practice listed is almost the same as the other platforms mentioned above. These 3 directories are not the only directories out there but are the one ones with the most authority in their space. So, it makes sense to target them first to get the ball rolling. Know some more high authority local directories that proved to be useful in bringing some dental patients through your door? Let us know in the comments. 
Other than gaining a lot of reviews, listing your dental practice on these website opens some other doors that can prove to be detrimental to the success of your dental practice. Which doors exactly? It brings you in front of your local audience who are searching for dental practices online night and day. Say, you run a dental practice in New Jersey. If a person searches on Google for dental practices in New Jersey and your practice website is nowhere to be seen, he will choose one of your competitors and get on with it. That must not happen. This is where Localization of your dental practice is so important. You’ll have to be on top to let your local searchers find your practice instead of your competitor’s. How? By claiming your listings in local directories. Here are 3 reasons why you absolutely need to create or claim the listing of your dental practice in local directories - - Increased exposure to hyper-targeted dental patients When it comes to local searchers, the buyer intent is super high and they are almost at the end of the buyer funnel looking for just the right type of services that will fulfill their needs. According to a study, as much as 50% of all local searches convert to foot traffic the same or next day. So, capturing those laser targeted searchers gets easier when you are present on all the top ranking directories which cater to the dental space.
- Each valid listing will increase your authority We’ve stated before that local listings impact both search engines and people... searching on search engines. With each valid local listing of your dental practice, Google will see you as an authority in the dental space around your locality and will start ranking your website higher in search engine results. Searchers, seeing that your website ranks high on Google, will take you as an authority in your industry as well and prefer your practice over your competitors. Also, being a part of the community is always great for building relationships with prospective patients and convincing them to try out your practice.
- Increase in rankings (including Google local business rankings)
Everything SEO related is done to increase the ranking of a website. And listing your dental practice on local directories is a sure-fire way to do that. Not only listing your dental practice in high authority directories increase your authority in the dental space, it will also increase your rankings in Google Local Businesses tab that often comes first in local search results showing the nearest places around you and mind you, that tab boasts some of the highest click-through rates on Google.
But what exactly are those high authority directories?
As we stated in the beginning, the biggest players when it comes to local directories are without a doubt Yelp and Google My Business. The best part, they also cater to national and worldwide audiences but primarily focus on helping local searchers as they are the ones who are most likely to convert quickly. And conversions is what you need. So, maintaining a presence on such directories becomes all the more important to increase your local footprint. For conversions, claiming your listings on these platforms is what you need to begin with...Listing your dental practice on Yelp
After clicking on it, you’ll be redirected to the ‘Yelp for Business Owners’ page where you’ll need to enter your practice’s name and street address to claim your listing. Find your practice from all the listed local practices in the specified area and just claim your listing, it’s that easy! After that, it’s just the task of filling relevant information of your practice. On Yelp, try to submit genuine images of your practice and staff members to gain more credibility on the platform. Listing your dental practice on Google My Business
Listing your dental practice on Google My Business is a sure-fire way to get more local eyes on your dental practice. By listing your business in the Google local business directory, you’ll gain a lot of exposure amongst people searching on Google Search and Google Maps, which apparently is a lot. To get yourself listed as a local dental practice, you’ll have to submit all your correct business details to Google. Don’t know how? Here’s how you can do it as well - Go to the ‘Google My Business’ homepage and click ‘Start Now’. You’ll be redirected to their listing page where you can begin with listing your dental practice. After that, it’s about filling all your correct practice information (you can have a look at our previous blog to know exactly what information about your practice you need to get listed on Google My Business). Listing your dental practice on Zocdoc
Ever heard of Zocdoc before? Even if you haven’t, I am sure potential patients in your locality use this service to find dentists like you every day. It’s that popular. Zocdoc is by far the most popular directory that caters directly to healthcare practitioners. With more than 6 million monthly users and 120 million annual searches, this directory is a goldmine for dentists. Biggest disadvantage? Getting your practice listed on the platform is not free, you’ll have to pay a flat $3000 annual fee to get your practice listed. But if you decide to get listed on this platform, the exposure you’ll gain it is tremendous. Zocdoc even lets potential patients book appointments of their chosen practice directly from their platform, which can really sky-rocket the patient traffic coming to your dental practice. Letting patients book appointments online is why Zocdoc is so popular. We will be covering why this feature is so vital for patients in the next blog. So, stay tuned! To get yourself listed on the platform, you’’ have to click on ‘List your practice on Zocdoc’ tab on the top right of its homepage. After you click on ‘List Your Practice’, the process of getting your practice listed is almost the same as the other platforms mentioned above. These 3 directories are not the only directories out there but are the one ones with the most authority in their space. So, it makes sense to target them first to get the ball rolling. Know some more high authority local directories that proved to be useful in bringing some dental patients through your door? Let us know in the comments. 
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