If you’re a small business owner, Google My Business is your best friend! The Google Maps review system offers customers the chance to leave feedback for other Google users and that’s a great opportunity for your business! Word-of-mouth has always been great for small businesses to gain new business and online reviews are a great way to showcase what your customers think of you to potential customers!

However, getting new reviews is easier said than done. Unfortunately, you’re dependent on your customers to complete the process of leaving a review for your business. While that is a challenge, you do have options to help prod your customers!

Read On to Learn More About Local SEO!

Why Google Reviews Are Important For Your Business

Reputation marketing is a huge opportunity for your business to make a lasting impression on your customers & a positive impact on your bottom line!

Reputation Marketing is Cost-Efficient

- Pay-per-click advertising, like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, is a great way to reach new customers, but it does require some ad spend budget, budgets that smaller brands often don’t have. Reputation marketing uses the quality and quantity of your Google reviews to prove that your customers love your business! While you can use other mediums to promote your Google listing to get your customers to leave reviews, it’s free to create a Google listing on Google Maps!

Reputation Marketing Uses Human Psychology

- Advertising and self-promotion is a great way to promote your brand, but your audience will usually take everything you say with a grain of salt. After all, who doesn’t make themselves look as good as possible on their website or social media profiles? It’s only natural! Your customers and potential customers know this and are a little more guarded when viewing promotional materials. Remember, the average American sees over 1,000 ads in a day! Review sites, like Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yelp, Best Reviews, and Angie’s List, come across as more honest to your potential customers. These sites are sharing what REAL customers think about your brand, warts and all! You can build an amazing website, write perfect ad copy, and have a killer product, but if your business has more negative reviews than positive reviews, you’re in trouble.

Reputation Marketing Improves Your SEO

- Google uses a number of different ranking factors to determine where to put your website on search engine results pages and applies a similar process to ranking addresses on Google Maps. One of the best ways to show Google that your business is a valuable option for your customers is to have great reviews! Remember, Google wants to give their search users a great experience and the best way to do that on Google Maps is to provide the best options possible for those users’ searches! For instance, it’s better for Google to show a coffee shop with forty 4- and 5-star reviews at number 1 on search than the coffee shop with only three reviews. If you’re looking to rank higher on Google Maps, increasing the number of high-quality reviews your listing has is one of your best options!

How to Get More Google Reviews

If you’re a small business owner, you need to find a way to get more Google reviews to dominate the local SEO in your area. However, this can be easier said than done. Asking customers to leave Google reviews is one approach, but it’s one that leaves it up to your customers.

That can leave a lot up to chance and we’d recommend the following over directly asking clients to leave you reviews.

Incorporate Review Requests Into Your Email Marketing

Let’s say you are running an autobody shop and have a new customer email marketing campaign running. You can design that campaign’s first email to link to your shop’s Google listing and ask for a review! This direct approach will drive customers to your listing while your business is still top of mind and will result in more reviews!

Backlink To Your Google Listing From Your Website

Consider making a dedicated webpage to showcase the testimonials you’ve received via your Google listing. This is a great way to promote the many happy customers you’ve served, but it’s also a great way to backlink to your Google listing! Make sure that you’re asking for the review with large text and have the right branding and visuals on the page, but this is a phenomenal way to both show your expertise and gain some reviews!

Ask Via Social Media

If you’re running your social media profiles and are seeing positive feedback in your Facebook comments or Twitter replies, don’t hesitate to ask! This approach is a little bit better than asking in-person customers since your social media followers have already demonstrated that they’re willing to leave you public feedback!

Optimize Your Google Listing

Optimizing your Google listing won’t directly lead to more reviews, but it will help make your listing easy to find on Google Maps, which in turn increases the odds of more people leaving reviews. Contact a local SEO or reputation marketing agency that can claim your listing, ensure all information is correct across multiple review sites, and upload branded listing photos. This Local SEO help will keep you up at the top of Google Maps and visible to Google Map users!

Dominate Google & Local SEO with JSL Marketing & Web Design

Local SEO can be difficult, but rest assured that JSL Marketing & Web Design is a world-class SEO agency! We’ve helped countless clients climb to the top of local and organic SEO in their area and would love to help you do the same! If interested, we’d also recommend any of the following to help highlight your Google listing.

Email Marketing

Social Media

Copywriting

Photography & Videography

Print Marketing

& More

Speaking of reviews, we don’t mean to brag, but we’ve received some great reviews ourselves over the years from our elated clients!

“During the redesign, we were in touch at least once a week, either by phone or email. Now that the site is live we communicate once or twice a month to discuss our SEO services. They’ve been wonderful to work with—they’re always on top of any task or correction, no matter how small.” – Melissa W.

“James and Sarah are great to work with! We were new to the SEO marketing and they were generous with their time in making sure we understood everything that was happening.”-Kate R;

“James and Sarah have done a great job for us. Our pages starting climbing in the search results almost immediately. The content that they have added has been top-notch. Because we are so satisfied with the work that they have done for us, we are having them redesign our website.” – Dickie H.

Call Us Today at 855.458.2873 to Begin Your Local SEO Project!

Medical marketing is part art, part science, but finding the right combo between the two pays big dividends! The medical industry is an extremely profitable one, and certain types of new patients could be immensely lucrative. That alone is a reason to invest substantially in medical marketing if you are a provider!

However, healthcare marketing comes with many unique challenges and obstacles that other industries don’t have to contend with. You will need to be cognizant of many details when marketing in healthcare, including insurance providers, HIPAA compliance, competing practices, and most current scientific treatment plans in your specialty.

Treating patients, managing billing, supervising staff and attending necessary medical conferences, AND staying current in medical marketing is a tall order! If you are a healthcare provider, managing your marketing can be a time suck, an important but demanding process that distracts from the areas you’re an expert in.

That’s the main reason that JSL Marketing recommends outsourcing your marketing needs. It’s just impossible to be a world-class health care provider, run a successful medical practice, and run successful medical marketing for your practice.

This approach ultimately frees up more time for you to focus on what you do best: caring for patients and running your practice. Per that approach, one of the first elements to examine when you are considering hiring external marketing help is your website.

Medical Websites Are Important

Medical websites are an important resource for your patients and potential new patients, but most practice websites are less than ideal. The result is a lose-lose situation for everyone involved. Your practice won’t receive the right quality and quantity of patients, and your patients won’t find what they’re looking for if your practice website is unimpressive or difficult to navigate.

Our medical website designers at JSL Marketing & Web Design have put together some helpful tips and tricks they’ve learned over their years in medical website design! This list will help you evaluate what is and isn’t working on your current website and will help you make an informed decision about a new medical website!

Medical Website Design Don’t

Don’t Use Industry Jargon in Your Medical Website Design

There’s a time and place to bust out the medical dictionary, but health care providers walk a balancing act between educating their website visitors and confusing their website visitors. Content writing is a vastly different beast from medical journal writing, so be sure to use an informal and friendly yet educational tone in whatever content you publish on your website.

Learn More About Website Copy Writing!

We’re not saying you should never use technical, medical terms on a medical website. Far from it! Just be sure that you’re choosing the right time and place to do so! For instance, a webpage about a particular type of overuse injury will naturally be more academic and technical in its language than your staff biography page.

However, if your current website comes across as stuffy and overly technical on most pages, you might want to consider hiring a content writer and web design team.

Don’t Forget to Humanize Your Practice Website

Many Americans have debilitating fears about healthcare. They’re searching for healthcare on Google for very particular reasons, and those reasons typically aren’t ‘sunshine and rainbows.’ A lot of the website visitors your practice receives are scared, nervous, and apprehensive.

Despite that, many medical practices don’t highlight the human nature of healthcare enough on their sites. For optimal medical website design, we always recommend including a biography page for your doctors and important staff members at your practice.

This is a great way to showcase accolades, medical association memberships, and expertise in the field, but it’s also a great way to give your practice a human side! We’d recommend highlighting the hobbies, personalities, and interests of your doctors and staff on these biography pages for the best medical website design.

Don’t Forget to Think like a Patient

If a white-collar worker begins to develop heel pain in the mornings, they will naturally not have the medical knowledge to accurately name their condition. Now, any podiatrist will immediately recognize heel pain first thing in the mornings as a telltale sign of plantar fasciitis. However, our white-collar worker probably isn’t typing “Plantar fasciitis” into Google when they show symptoms. Despite that reality, too many medical practice websites are centered around medical condition keywords and not the terms users are typing into Google. This is just one example of how medical websites often don’t serve the user’s needs.

Furthermore, many medical websites don’t make it easy to find the practice’s contact information, don’t display what types of insurances they accept, don’t advertise locations and hours, and don’t allow site visitors to download necessary practice forms pre-appointment. If your current medical website doesn’t make it easy for your website visitors, you may need to consider a redesign. An easy, stress-free, and quick user experience is great for your website’s SEO and great for your patients!

Medical Website Design Dos

Pay Attention to Your Website Graphic Design

Many medical websites still look like they were designed in 2011, and that’s a guaranteed way to lose site traffic. Your homepage doesn’t need to be a digital Mona Lisa, but it should be clean, professional-looking, and inviting for your website visitors. No one wants to see a doctor with an unprofessional-looking website, but too many practices are still using cookie-cutter web templates! Your medical website homepage should display your practice’s logo, pictures of the staff, and branded videos about the history and mission of the practice. These are sure-fire ways to engage your site visitors and draw them into your site.

Review Our Portfolio of Web Design Projects!

Make it Easy to Contact the Practice Through the Website

We’ve briefly talked about making your contact information visible, but savvy practices should go one step further. If you’ve entrusted your site’s redesign or upkeep to a smart web design agency, they’ve made sure every phone number on your website is clickable from a mobile device to ensure you’re getting the inbound calls you need! Ideally, your website could even incorporate an appointment scheduler for patients!

Contact Us Online to Discuss Website Scheduling Plug-Ins!

Highlight Real People’s Stories

Word-of-mouth is the best way to showcase the good you do for your patients. Take the testimonials and stories of your patients and add them to your website design for a powerful user website experience. These could be simple text testimonials on a webpage or a short video clip of the patient telling their story and experience with the practice. Regardless, it’s a great way to digitally prove you’re the real deal and that your patients trust you!

Medical Web Design From JSL Marketing & Web Design

Web design is tough, but it’s especially tough when you’re running a medical practice. Trust your medical web design needs to the marketing experts. JSL Marketing & Web Design is an award-winning digital marketing and web design agency, with locations in Dallas, TX, San Diego, CA, Austin, TX, and Grand Rapids, MI.

We’ve been helping small businesses grow and reach new customers for years and would love to help your practice reach new heights! Don’t just take our word for it – take the word of our medical clients!

“We have been very pleased with the quality of work, communication, and support from JSL Marketing. Their knowledge and expertise is top-notch, and we’ve seen great results with the SEO, content writing, and forward-thinking ideas”

-ABC Pediatrics

Month: March 2021

How To Get More Google Reviews