If you are a dental business that owns multiple locations this article is for you. Whether you are a DSO or dental group, you’ll want to implement these strategies to give you the foundation to rank in the google maps section, which is where the majority of calls come from when someone is searching on their mobile device and desktop computer for a local service like a dentist.
Note: Doing this is not the only thing you must do to get in the 3-pack of google. If you want to discuss this, contact us and founder Mike Pedersen will jump on a call with you and show you your market potential via a computer screen share.
For most dental businesses local SEO is the main focus as each of your locations is in a city or town, making it a local SEO strategy. The more competitive the city the more resources you must put into that campaign to compete with the top 3 dental offices in the maps section of google.
In speaking with many dental support organization (DSOs) marketing VP’s, many of them are allocating only a small percent of gross revenues to marketing and advertising. According to the SBA, any business that wants to grow should be investing up to 10% (or more) of gross revenues into marketing and advertising. I had a call with a 196 location DSO VP of marketing and he said they were investing 1%-3% in marketing/advertising. If your locations are in remote areas with very few competing dental offices, that allocation may be okay. But if your locations are in cities of 20,000 or more you just can’t compete with the top dental offices with that low of a marketing budget.
The Biggest Challenge For DSOs
The challenge for most DSOs or group practices is they do not allocate the same dental marketing budget as the solo practice owner who is doing well from a revenue standpoint and has a growth mindset. For executives in a DSO this should be acknowledged and recognized as it will be nearly impossible to beat this solo dentist who is investing 5 to 10 times more per month into dominating their city.
This solo dental office who is at the top and investing the most to stay there, has an optimized website, all the social and geo signals for every mile radius around their office, as well as implementing the current SEO strategies to dominate for the near future. To compete against that you’ve got to get out of the mindset of getting Cheap SEO and focus on results. If not, you will have a very difficult time beating the local leaders in the cities you are located and just waste a lot of time and money on ineffective SEO.
Now that we’ve addressed the elephant in the room for your DSO or group practice, let’s proceed with building the foundation to having a better chance at ranking all your locations for multiple dental procedures. This is referred to as Local SEO for Multiple Locations.
Google Updates
Because of all the google updates (thousands per year) you must stay on top of these and be able to revise your SEO strategies quickly or you quite possibly can lose a majority of your high rankings for all your locations. In fact, just in 2019 google had 5 major updates that changed the SEO landscape for tens of thousands of businesses. That’s a major update every 2 month approximately.
When someone asks me how long should they work with an SEO agency, my answer is indefinitely if you want to maintain high rankings and be the dental office getting the majority of the calls from google search.
There are critical on-page SEO elements that must be implemented so when google crawls your multi-location website, they can easily find each location, and give it the authority it needs to rank high in that city or town.
If all your locations are on one main business website:
When you build these pages, get creative to make them all unique and different, like:
Make sure each location has a separate listing for all the below sites, and this is just the start of what needs to be done:
Disclaimer
Even with the above website setup google treats each business (as it should) as a separate entity, so any good local Dental SEO agency has to do all the same strategies to each and every location every month. There is no shortcut if you truly want each location to rank in the 3-pack of the maps. It’s very labor-intensive and that is why most DSOs and dental groups are not performing well in the maps section and you are missing out on double or more the calls to each location.
If you are a DSO or dental group and you are serious about implementing a local SEO campaign to start ranking all your locations in the maps, contact us, and founder Mike Pedersen will get on a call with you to show you how we can help you achieve these goals and double the calls to each of your locations.
Tags: dental support organization, DSO, multi-location seo
