Welcome to another Q&A session! In our last post, we answered a question that we had received from a local business client. We get a lot of them, and I’m honestly thankful for that, because it’s a great opportunity to create content and capitalize on more of those keyword searches that we want our agency to rank for… so thank you to all of our clients who ask great questions.
Here’s one that we received a couple of weeks ago.
Hi Selwa,
I am in (LOCATION – removed for anonymity) and checking the search.
What should I expect when I search for pain management, or joint pain?
I am not seeing anything pop up.
My response was as follows:
Short answer (for SEO): it’s only been a few months. 🙂 It takes time to establish any new online property (website or GMB) as an authority in the medical niche and to get those properties ranking for your targeted keywords.
Long answer (for SEO):Â
Google prioritizes certain types of results based on the types of searches conducted. When I search “joint pain” or “pain management”, for example, I don’t actually get any local business results. There’s no map pack, and most of the organic results are informational sites like Mayo Clinic, or Web MD – which we are not even trying to outrank, because those are huge national websites that are established as the most relevant results for those generic types of searches. (In other words, outranking them – or even showing up at all – for those searches is pretty near impossible for any local business.)
However, when I get more specific and search something like, “joint pain LOCATION” or “pain management LOCATION” or “joint pain near me”, then I’ll see local results come up, because with those types of searches, Google knows it’s more likely that the searcher is looking for a local solution to their joint pain (i.e. a clinic such as QC Kinetix), rather than simply trying to find generic information about joint pain and how to treat it.
Our SEO strategy is focused on helping you show up in local results for searches where users are likely searching for a local solution to their problem, since that’s what you provide. We like to hyper-focus on a small set of keywords at a time and get you ranking for those keywords before we switch and try to rank your properties for new ones. I’ll use an analogy to explain why that is: imagine trying to fill 100 buckets with a single water hose. It’s going to take a lot longer to fill all those buckets than it would to fill, say, 10 buckets at a time. So we like to focus more effort on 10 buckets and move quickly to rank you for those keywords instead of trying to rank you for 100 different keywords right off the bat.
Right now, the list of keywords we are targeting is based on the research we conducted where we found significant average search volume for those terms, wherein local results are likely to be returned for the searcher. It’s also based on the types of keywords that have resulted in conversions across your Google Ads campaigns. I’ll include that list at the bottom of this email so you have an idea.
All that said, please keep in mind that local and organic search results will vary for each searcher, as they are influenced by many different factors. What one person in Panama City sees when they search for a specific keyword phrase may be vastly different from what another person sees when they search the same keyword phrase. That’s because Google’s algorithm looks at a lot of different things, specific to each user, when deciding which results will be most relevant for them, including their browser search history, the type of device they’re using to search, their demographics, their proximity to locations that might be relevant to their search, and more. Results can vary from an Android to an iPhone, for users who are a block away from a location vs. 3 blocks away, and can even change from one hour to the next. It’s a complex algorithm that takes into account 3 main factors, which we are simultaneously trying to influence:
Relevance – refers to how well a local listing matches what someone is searching for
Prominence – refers to how well known a business is
Distance – refers to how close in proximity a business is to the searcher
Our strategy involves creating content and building links to both of your online properties (website and GMB) in order to influence the relevance and prominence of your business, so that you show up for as many searchers as possible who are located at various distances from your clinic.
I hope that helps to answer some of your questions and provides more insight into what we do from an SEO standpoint. Thanks, and let us know if you have anymore questions!