Are your SEO efforts optimized for hyperlocal search?
Yes, you read that correctly—hyperlocal search.
When it comes to your digital marketing strategy, local search still remains a significant factor. About half of searches1 include a qualifier for location. And a third of those searches result in a purchase of goods or services. These numbers demonstrate the importance of local search, but they highlight the need for hyperlocal search, too.
There are 8.5 billion searches every day on Google.2 And if half of those searches are for local businesses, services, and organizations, the market for plain old local search can become saturated, especially in large cities and urban centers.
As a result, the need for an even more narrowly focused form of geographic search has presented itself. We call this opportunity hyperlocal search.
What is Hyperlocal Search?
Hyperlocal search is a specific way of approaching your local search strategy that hones in the target audience even further. For example, most hyperlocal searches focus on a single neighborhood in a specific town, rather than the town as a whole. Like searching for the best pizza in Brooklyn instead of the best pizza in New York City.
But you can take hyperlocal search even farther. Not only is the location narrower, but the audience you’re targeting is, too. For example, suppose you’re an orthodontic group looking for new patients from a particular school district. In that case, you could use hyperlocal search to specifically focus on parents of children aged 9 to 14 who also live in that geographic area.
Why Do You Need Hyperlocal Search?
The obvious answer is to target a more specific audience. But there are many other compelling reasons to incorporate hyperlocal principles into the digital marketing strategy for a DSO.
In general, the broad marketing goals for each of the individual practices in your DSO tend to fall into two categories: generating new patient opportunities and converting high-revenue producing procedures. Hyperlocal search delivers on both.
1. Deliver Better Leads
As a DSO, you’re committed to delivering quality leads for your individual dental practice members. But even if you’ve already deployed a high-performing SEO strategy to generate those leads, you can always do better. Hyperlocal search helps you refine your SEO keyword strategies to drive the best quality leads for each of your member practices.
Hyperlocal search also helps you identify missed opportunities in your practices’ target markets. Take a look at your lead demographics and see if you have any unexpected holes. If so, there could be geographic, gender-related, or even age-related gaps in your targeting causing you to miss these new patient opportunities.
Use hyperlocal search to find the patients your practices want to see.
2. Target High-Value Procedures
Your practices, as great as they are, can’t survive and grow on cleanings and checkups alone. The best way for them to create successful, sustainable businesses is by taking on high-value procedures. But finding (and converting) those high-dollar procedure patients doesn’t happen by accident.
With hyperlocal search, you can help connect your individual member practices with patients looking for high-cost services by targeting keywords for procedures like crowns, root canals, and fillings. Identify the high-dollar procedures that your practices offer, and create content like blogs and YouTube videos around those services.
3. Emergency!
Dental emergencies are a serious matter. They usually need to be addressed as soon as possible with very little delay. But so many patients who know they’re on the brink of an emergency still put off getting the care they need.
A recent study by Penn Medicine discovered that health-related Google searches increase threefold a week before most patients visit an emergency room.3 And with hyperlocal marketing, those kinds of searches can result in more new patient leads choosing your practices for their dental emergency.
This will happen if you target keywords for specific dental procedures, but also consider optimizing for symptoms and conditions as well. The outcome may be that your practices easily dominate the search results for dental emergencies in their areas.
A Good Website Makes a Great First Impression
If you’re ready to get hyperlocal, Dreamscape Marketing can help. Call us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session with one of our dental digital marketing experts.
For a list of references, please contact us.