North Texas Dentistry Volume 8 Issue 4 2018 ISSUE 4 DE | Page 19

Add photos and videos to humanize and personalize your listing. Don’t miss the opportunity to allow your GMB visi- tors to “meet” you, your team, and see your office. Google recommends that videos are limited to 30 seconds or less. A proactive patient review process to populate your GMB listing with positive reviews will help your practice stand out. Reviews not only improve listing visibility, positive reviews increase the chances that a prospective patient will call to schedule an appointment. Citations are references to your business’ name, address and phone number (NAP) online. Businesses with numer- ous, accurate, and consistent citations are viewed as more credible to Google. If you haven’t done so, you should con- duct an audit of your citations to ensure your practice is listed on the leading directory sites and that the information is correct. How many citations you need largely depends on how strong the competitors are in your area. image tags, schema markup, and sitemaps. Google takes this hidden information very seriously, using it to classify websites while confirming content consistency throughout. The Pay-Off After ads, the Local Pack is the most visible section dis- played on a Google search results page. Unlike ads, you aren’t paying Google to appear in the Local Pack. As evidenced by the screenshots of a few of our client’s tracking dashboards (see below), prominent placement in this valuable piece of online real estate can generate dozens of additional phone calls each month from prospective patients. Business Descriptions are a feature Google added this past March. Per Google’s guidelines, this should be a “brief description of your business – what you offer, what sets you apart, your history, or anything else that’s helpful for cus- tomers to know. Focus primarily on details about your busi- ness instead of promotions, prices or sales. Do not include URLs or HTML code, or exceed 750 characters.” Optimize Your Website The authority of your website is a factor in where your GMB listing ranks in the Local Pack. While there are hundreds of factors that Google uses to determine the authority of a website, here are a few of the more important factors. Inbound Links – other websites pointing to your website has been one of Google’s key ranking criteria since they started displaying search results. It’s important to note that Google looks at both the quality and quantity of the links. The more authoritative and relevant the websites are that link to your site, the greater your chances of ranking well. Quality Content – when Google’s search robots crawl your website, they want to see robust, unique and relevant con- tent. Content that is duplicated on other dentist’s websites, is low quality or thin, can have a negative effect on your placement and visibility on Google. Page Speed – most likely the majority of traffic to your website will come from visitors on a mobile device. Google found that 53% of mobile searchers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. If your website loads quickly, Google will reward you with a higher ranking over slower sites with similar content and links. Technical On-Page Optimization – this is all the nerdy, behind-the-scenes coding like page title tags, header tags, Marc Fowler is the founder of Bullseye Media, LLC. Since 2006, the team at Bullseye Media has helped over 375 dental practices across the U.S. and Canada lever- age the internet to achieve their practice growth goals. Learn more at BullseyeDental.com. To receive a complimentary analysis of your Google My Business listing, website, and competition, email [email protected] or visit BullseyeDental.com/Call to schedule time on his calendar. www.northtexasdentistry.com | NORTH TEXAS DENTISTRY 19