The Clinic Marketing Podcast - Local SEO & Healthcare Digital Marketing Tips for Clinic Owners & Wellness Providers

How Many Online Listings Does Your Clinic Really Need? A Case Study [Propel Playback]

• Darcy Sullivan

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Online listings or citations are crucial to a clinic's online presence. But how many listings does your clinic truly need for effective SEO? Let's dive into the world of citations, uncover the facts, and review a case study. 

We’ll look at how online listings affect your website ranking on Google and how they affect your Google Maps (Google Business Profile) listing. 

Here you’ll learn:

  • What citations are
  • Key elements of online listings
  • Whether you should pay for citation listing services 
  • How and when you should conduct a citation audit 
  • How many citations do you really need
  • And more 


Whether you're focused on optimizing your visibility or just keeping your business information accurate, this episode offers practical advice to help you navigate the complex landscape of local SEO. Tune in for all the details!

Episode webpage: https://propelyourcompany.com/online-listings-for-seo/

📌Also, be sure to grab our local listing bundle guide: https://propelyourcompany.com/local-listings/

Send in your questions. ❤ We'd love to hear from you!

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Clinic Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, darci Sullivan from Propel Marketing Design. Today, we're talking about citations and we're asking the question how many local listings does your clinic really need for SEO? Really need for SEO? Citation are online listings, ranging from ones that you might be familiar with, like Google Business Profile or Yellow Pages, to ones you've never even heard of. Local citations are multiple, consistent mentions of your company's information on website directories and other properties found online on the internet. Years ago, search engines like Google used these mentioned factors as trust signals, but is that still true? Well, that's what we're talking about today.

Speaker 1:

First, let's talk about your name. Your NAP is your name, address and phone number. We want to make sure that your company name, address and phone number, along with your website and other prevalent information, is consistent throughout all of your online listing. Now, before Google became the powerhouse that we know it as today, it used to rely heavily on gathering data points by looking at other listings to see accuracy. Well, that's really not the case as much anymore as it used to be, but there are key times when you need to make sure that your information is correct online and sometimes invest in either a citation cleanup or invest in your citation your local online listings. First up is when you're a new business. Obviously, when you're a new business and you're just getting started, you're going to have zero listings, right, because you're a new business. So you want to make sure that you go through the actions of gaining online listings to help Google and your potential patients or customers find you with ease. Again, we want to focus on those critical elements your name, your address, your phone number and your website. There can also be times when you should do citation cleanups. This includes if your name, your address, your phone number has changed or if any of your personnel the doctors working for you have changed, when key entities associated with your business perhaps the company name, address, phone number and website have changed. You want to make sure that you go through and conduct what we call a citation audit and a citation cleanup. Now, if you're a member of our DIY SEO program, ready Set Rank, we do a deep dive into this process in the Ready Set Local section. If you're interested in learning more about that DIY SEO program, you can do so by visiting propellyourcompanycom.

Speaker 1:

There are two ways to do a citation cleanup. You can either do it manually or you can go through a service. Now, there are tons of services out there. These include Bright Local, whitespark, yext, moz Local and more. If you are in the category of needing to clean up your citations and you don't want to do a manual audit and do the manual process of cleaning them up meaning you go to each and every listing, make sure you have a login and manually change your information then it might be worth going to one of the providers to help you clean up the citation. If that is the category that you fall in, I suggest that you check out Bright Local or White Spark. Those would really be the only two that I would recommend for a citation cleanup. Yes, I know there's tons of them out there and, yes, I know there are tons of companies out there that promise that they will get you all of these local listings.

Speaker 1:

Sterling Sky recently did a really interesting case study that I want to mention and we'll include the link in the notes associated with this episode. What they did is they took two companies. They took a company that was a handyman and they took a dentist and they added 50 citations were built for both the dentist and the handyman, and what they wanted to do is look at see how this actually impacted rankings, and I think it's very important to note that there are two types of rankings. Right, you have your local pack ranking, that's your Google Maps section ranking, and then you have your general listings on Google. Well, when it came to the map pack, it had barely any improvements at all. It did have impacts on organic results. Those would be the organic results in Google below the Google map pack. But I think this is what's really interesting is that it was apparent that over time, it really wasn't worth it. A month after the citations were submitted, only about 26 out of the 50 remained for the dentist, and after six months, this dwindled down to just two. And for the handyman they experienced a similar drop, with only two out of the 50 again remaining after the six months of being indexed.

Speaker 1:

So do I think that you should pay one of these services that claim that they will get you all of these amazing citations? Is it really worth it? Not necessarily, as we can tell from the case study that we just went through, but if you are just starting out, or even if you are an established company, you do want to make sure that you do have local citations online. So this leads us to the question how many citations do you really need for SEO? And I'm going to tell you as long as you have between 10 to 20, you're doing all right. You don't need to go out there and try to build 200 listings.

Speaker 1:

But I think what's really important is to start by identifying your audience and where they search online for their information. And if you had to prioritize which citations you should focus on, that would be your Google Business Profile listing your Yelp, apple Maps, bing, business. If you are in the health business, it should probably be health grade. Facebook, instagram, Better Business Bureau, yellow Pages, yahoo, waze. Focus on the way your ideal audience searches for information. You want to make sure that every map listing for your business is correct Very important.

Speaker 1:

We want to make sure, if somebody's searching directions to come find you, that they can find you. We also want to make sure that your listings again have the name, the address and phone number that match your website. All right, let's start to wrap this up. While citations can sometimes boost organic rankings, they have little to no impact on your Google Maps, google Business Profile listing in the local pack ranking. Additionally, many of these citations fail to stay indexed by Google, which means they have diminishing returns, so the life and the value of them are minimal. However, there are times when you do need to invest in your local listings, like we mentioned before. That would be if you currently have inaccurate information about your business, if your company has changed or updated any entity related to the business, like the phone number, the name or the address, or if you are a new business.

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Darcy Sullivan

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