* The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Stewart Gandolf
Hello, everyone. I'm Stewart Gandolf. Welcome to local SEO for multi-location providers. I'm excited to have you attend today and it looks like we have. People are still coming in, but we can go ahead and get started here. Grant is going to be switching. Next slide. So I'm Stewart. If you're new to our webinar series, I'm CEO of HealthCare Success.

Stewart Gandolf
Some of you that are regular viewers or readers to our blog will know that I love SEO and digital marketing. I built my own company this way. We certainly do a lot of it for our clients. Today's topic is about multi-location providers, so that could be addiction, DSOs and dentistry, PBMs and medical health systems. So it's all about multi-location providers and a key strategy for our clients that we work with here would be local SEO, showing up and owning Google locally.

Stewart Gandolf
Back up. I got to introduce you. Grant is our senior strategist. He's a big part of our team and we have a bunch of people on our SEO team. And so Grant leads strategy and client relationships on much of the work we do and Grant say established. I always say this Grant a very experienced.

Grant Simmons
CC say I'm with that.

Stewart Gandolf
So Grant will be leading most of this presentation to answer your questions before you ask it. Yes, we will have a recording of this webinar, so be registered. The recording will be available and we will have a brief Q&A. Grant and I both like to move quickly. So in a move at light speed here and cover a whole bunch of territory pretty quickly.

Stewart Gandolf
Grant Any comments before I jump in?

Grant Simmons
I'm just going to say it is focused on multi-location. You know, if you do have one or two locations now this strategy and these tactics will be really important. It's really around, you know, local local practices. Obviously, we focus a lot on the multi-location, but I think you also find some use if you have a large single location or just a couple of locations.

Grant Simmons
So, yeah, I'm looking forward to this.

Stewart Gandolf
Okay. All right. Let's jump in. Next slide. Okay, Next slide. So we're going to talk about today briefly. Here's the agenda for the day. What the heck is local ACA? Why do we care? Why It's especially important to multi-location providers. Those ground really set in any location, any kind of provider. It matters to what are some of the local features and products and diving deep into the map that we love and we call.

Stewart Gandolf
How does Google rank local businesses? You know, the reality is, no matter how smart we are and how much we try, we can't control and neither can you. Everything when it comes to local Axios. So we'll talk about realistically what you can control, what you can control, some of the challenges and some of the ways that, you know, our firm can help.

Stewart Gandolf
If you're interested in this, I'm sure you're going to walk away with plenty of information. Fake news. You may feel like you're drinking from a firehose today. Next slide. So what is local SEO? Well, local SEO really essentially is coming up on a location by location basis on Google predominantly, but also on being slash Microsoft, where we're going to focus today primarily on Google, just because that's where the the big, big numbers are.

Stewart Gandolf
And I just want to point out, as Bret Graham and I were preparing for this meeting that I remember, because I've been just fascinated with the Internet since the very beginning, how horrible it was that local in the old days. Like, I remember looking for a dentist online when the Internet was still relatively new and would give me topics about how to become a dentist or something to be ADA.

Stewart Gandolf
And I could even say, you know, the little bit of dentist near me and I just couldn't find anything. So local search was definitely an afterthought in those early days, and now it's a big part of it. And in fact, now if you just put the word dentists and chances are it's going to give you local searches and Google is always trying to determine your intent.

Stewart Gandolf
And so now it's erring on the side of local as opposed to an afterthought. Next slide. So, you know, local SEO is really interesting because as we look here at a SERP, as we call it in the business search engine results page, there's typically a lot of different things going on sometimes. And many times there's ads at the top up there.

Stewart Gandolf
Sometimes there's a carousel or different kinds of results up there. The map pack is what I refer to it as the map pack. I hate go grab calls at the local park, but typically we'll see three or four businesses there like we see here. And that's really the game we're talking about today, how to show up amongst those on the front page for your location, for people that are searching for you, how do you win that game?

Stewart Gandolf
And that is not like what I have found is, again, when we first started this, you know, most people were at most companies were incompetent this but now, especially multi-location providers, there's one or two losers. Some are really, really good at this and have, you know, proper, you know, agencies and teams of people to make sure that stuff is going well and others not so much and then not so much category means you're not there in those top three.

Stewart Gandolf
So it's a win really takes some effort and energy. We're going to talk about how to do that today. First of all, recognize that back up there is one of the biggest things is to recognize that there is a different algorithm for local SER. So it's a whole different game. We talked about SEO on some of our other webinars.

Stewart Gandolf
This is a whole different game and that's going to be talking about a lot of those details as to how the other point I just wanted to reaffirm here is this is all about a people that are looking to go to a business specifically because of its location. All right. Next slide now. So the another point we like to make here is just how often are people are using local SEO?

Stewart Gandolf
And those of you that have good SEO probably already recognizes that it does drive a whole bunch of users to local providers, even when people are, you know, certainly consumer direct specialties like dentistry and dermatology. But even when people are being referred to a gastroenterologist or, you know, a neurosurgeon, they often will check what else is available near me.

Stewart Gandolf
And, you know, I personally have chose a my medical group because they've got a really good urgent care as well as doctor near me. So that's a big driver. And so Google and has the local search is really important. And you can see just from this data that search engines are driving lots and lots of people looking for health information.

Stewart Gandolf
Looks like the one of the things that we talk about here, too, is that as you scale, as you get bigger, this becomes harder. So it's hard even for a single location. But if you have dozens of locations, it just expands, as you would expect, on a multiplicative or logarithmic way, because you need to be. Think of thinking about how to do this so that you look like your local location specific.

Stewart Gandolf
You want to have consistent and accurate information for all of your locations. You want to have differentiated content for each location. A way of making it easy for search engines to figure out what exactly it is you're doing. Logical site structure. This needs to be, by the way. And Grant, we'll talk about this coordinated with your efforts with your Google directories, but also with what's happening on your website.

Stewart Gandolf
And you need to monitor your results and adjust track, track, test and adjust and optimize your local location. So again, as you start entering dozens of locations or hundreds of locations, the complexity just increases. And this is just a vitally important part of this. And the but what's the great news is when you play this right, it's a very powerful strategy.

Stewart Gandolf
First of all, we love page Search, as you probably know from other seminar or other webinars we've done. We love organic SEO, but local SEO married opt to pay them for the organic part of this. You can't advertise in the map, but you can get a tremendous amount of traffic and business from the local ACL. And in fact, here again we are targeting thinking about local.

Stewart Gandolf
Everything should be about how do I get these people who are searching for me in my area? Next slide. Just this is a fun fact going back to my discussion a moment ago, if back in the early days, you know, Google was pretty horrible at doing local searches and therefore nobody was searching that way. Over time, though, you can see here by a chart that searches, including the term near me, just rocketed.

Stewart Gandolf
And I actually remember talking about this back and round. When is that? 2014, 2016 used to do a lot of lives seminars in Las Vegas. And so we show the front end of that chart and you know, it's only grown since then. So the interest in near me searches has rocketed. And, you know, again, we want to be there.

Stewart Gandolf
Next slide. Another category to think about as the businesses we have today that we work with vary a lot. You know, we work with, you know, pharma device and telehealth and software and lots of different businesses, but a lot of our clients are providers. And of those providers, telemedicine or telehealth are typically big parts and growing parts of their business.

Stewart Gandolf
And we and so it's really important. But even for those providers that based, it may still matter to most patients. So telehealth, depending on the business model, sometimes it's all they have, but a lot of times it's more of an adjunct. Interestingly, if you're a cloud provider, not being able to show up in a local pack is a problem, right?

Stewart Gandolf
If you're not local anywhere, you're not showing up locally anywhere. So there'll be old fashioned providers of physical facilities have an advantage in this category. So anyway, the again was we started thinking about our marketing. This should be a broader strategy. And how does telehealth fit? But recognizing those local locations are an incredible asset. We should be maximizing them even if we have a telehealth business or even if we're trying to expand our 12 services.

Stewart Gandolf
And with that, I want to turn this over to grant my colleague. I'll chime in as a co-host. Grant, take it away.

Grant Simmons
Thank you. I get into a little bit more geeky stuff, but you've already mentioned a lot of the key components here. When we talk about intent, you know, we're really talking about whether Google can understand what someone is, is hoping to find. And a local intent can be demonstrated to you with a geo targeted query or a geo modified query.

Grant Simmons
A geo target is when Google takes what you've typed in and says this is definitely a local intent query. So I live in Virginia Beach, so you can see a lot of Virginia Beach examples. But E.A. Dr. in naturally targets the locality and it thinks about, you know, where is the nearest location, you know, who is the best location that I can recommend.

Grant Simmons
So on this, this particular instance, you know, when I do anti doctor, we can see some generic results happen. When I do anti doctor in Virginia Beach, I get this local PAC that actually shows the locations of doctors near me. So there is a distinct difference between those geo targeted than geo modified time terms. And we see both and we see both as important because although there are some generic terms you can show up for, you've got to build out a lot more content authority be out to show for that first.

Grant Simmons
So we really say any time you have a physical location, you should be looking at both. Whether you're driving traffic from a geo targeting town or whether you're driving from a modified time. And you notice that Google, when you put in a geo modified term like this case and doctor in Washington, D.C., it then targets and gives you results for Washington, D.C. So it does recognize that difference.

Grant Simmons
Even though I search from Virginia Beach, it's going to give me practices in what they say. Now, why is this important? Because not everyone is necessarily looking for results in their local area. For example, an addiction potentially, someone might be looking for something out of their area just because that's their preference. And so sometimes someone might be visiting a particular area and wants to see something local.

Grant Simmons
So we have to be really careful and distinct about how we position our website, how we say where we exist to make sure that search engine understand the your local local results where people are actually local and your local for results, where people are modifying their query to put a specific location in. Now, we talked about this area, the local park called lots of different things.

Grant Simmons
Google has rebranded this a lot right now. It's it's title is places and this is really a mini set of results. It uses a different algorithm, as you had mentioned, and we're going to cover a lot of these differences in the presentation, how you can show up in this local back in this places area, how you can show up better and how you can improve the tech for right from there.

Grant Simmons
So why should someone choose position three over position one? So we're going to go through this as well to talk about how we can show up better. Now, this does appear generally above the organic results, but sometimes, often there are quite search results above. And there's also one or two organic results potentially. So we don't forget SEO. This is an adjunct to the SCA.

Grant Simmons
Now other stuff that Google also geo targets based on where you are all in the auto completes when you start typing in the search, Google try and complete it for you. Now it's interesting because it is total great, but you can see there's a lot of variety there. Why I love Auto Complete is that you you're typing for each of your occasions and you're going to find that there are opportunities in there.

Grant Simmons
For example accepting Medicaid anti doctor for child do you have a child service pediatric service and there's some specific ways around challenges in say jumped near me for earwax removal so it's really important to look at this as well. And we dig in and look just to make sure the content matches some of these search queries that Google suggesting.

Grant Simmons
Now there's auto complete does come from your past searches. So I understand what you've already said. So it comes from trends. So this and this time, based on the language and the location it's from, it's also based on real search results, a real search query. So it's really good to data mine as well. Now they're also when someone explicitly searches for a doctor in one of your practices or specifically searches for your practice, you are going to see these people and business names show up within the search results above the local bank.

Grant Simmons
So even though they both have a local presence in that local park, you can also show up, as I said, in organic for specific intent driven queries. So a lot of this is important because we have a chance to influence some of this by adding in additional information, specifically around our doctors, around our practices. And the key thing there is Google doesn't just look at what we put out.

Grant Simmons
It also looks at what's out on other websites, such as hospitals that might mention the doctor. And by the way, they might be credentialed. Other things like where they went to school, other reviews around the web. So we want to be really aware of every single doctor, every single practice and every single site that might be out there to be able to build the best display, to obviously drive the click through.

Grant Simmons
Right now, if I do click on one of the places in the act at the local bank, I'm going to go here. This is called the Google Local Finder. And most of us use Google and most of us have probably clicked on a result. But this is more of a deeper dive and obviously a wide area in this case where it gives you another longer list of all the different folks within the area.

Grant Simmons
And there is an order here, a best match order that is Google's algorithm, as we talked about, different from the organic. And there is an opportunity for users to add particular filters to this. So it's really important to make sure that you give all the information to Google because this things like a new algorithm called openness and openness is based on when someone searches are you open, and if you're open, you're going to turn up higher.

Grant Simmons
So these are things we can control is we can't control opening hours. If we control that Google has that information and access that information. Now, the default best match is generally based on proximity. So how far you are from where Google recognized the user searching you reviews played a really large part in rankings as well, and the audience open or not.

Grant Simmons
And you can see that Google also provides different filters and these are based on the results. So you can see not only are the giving options like Medicaid accepted or not Medicare really important to make sure that these things exist on your site and that we give this information to Google reviews. We have definitely have control over the quality and the amount of all.

Grant Simmons
We get reviews The best match or distance. So you can actually filter it because there's many components going to this. But you know, users can say what's closest to me, it's part of the algorithm. And as we said, the openness, whether something is open that time and everything else, if I then click on a result, they are in that local finder.

Grant Simmons
I get what's called a knowledge panel. Now, more often than not, this is pulled from many sources around the web as well as something we're going to cover in a lot of detail tonight, which is the Google business profile. One is specific to business. We really want to make sure once again, all the information we have that we provide to Google.

Grant Simmons
Now, in this particular area, photos can be from users or from the business. We can influence that by contributing high quality photos to our Google business profile, and we can also interact with things like the reviews and elements like that. And we can obviously make sure when we have multiple locations that all our locations address is an actual physical location on the map are correct.

Grant Simmons
As I say, there's a lot of moving parts here and as Stewart said, multi-location. The more location that the more complex it can get. The fundamentals are still the same. We just got to be at a scale. Now, if you haven't at the very highest level, claim your business on Google Business profile. So when you do a search and you do a search for your business, if it hasn't been claimed, it's going to say you claim this business, You then have to jump through a few hoops to verify that it's actually your business.

Grant Simmons
So first thing is claim your business. Second thing is modify, modify or edit your Google business profile. Really important stuff to fit in like ours for openness and what you actually offer and things like that. Once again, we're going to add details site. So those elements though can affect the filtering, what's available or whether people can actually find you.

Grant Simmons
So, you know, if you have five star reviews, if people filter by five stars, you're going to show up. You know, by the same token, if people are filtering out five stars, you get four stars are opportunities to try and improve that. So I'm going to give you a very high level what the ranking factors are. So if you're going to be able to see this, you're going to be able to follow up, you know, in this presentation for the very highest level and we will go into some of these details is Google Business Profile signals how far you are away, the categories you enter, the keywords used in your Google business profile, image quality

Grant Simmons
and openness. These are basic stuff. So whether you're open or not on paid signals, so the presence of name, address and phone number, making sure you have that very clear feature of location, location is in title. So manuscripts, since this is obvious, if you say AT&T in Virginia Beach versus another location, you might have agency in Chesapeake. You want to make sure that that is really clear on the page in titles and inscriptions and in headings, that that's really where that location is and content helpfulness is something Google puts out an algorithm update that over the last 1214 months called a helpful content update.

Grant Simmons
And that really is how do you add additional value, how do you add additional content to that particular page to make it more helpful for the users? Something like we accept Medicare or something like, you know, we have accessibility, so we have ramp access, all these things add to the helpfulness and have to be customized on a per location basis.

Grant Simmons
Link signals. You probably hear about link building, how it drives, you know, Google. It used to drive Google a lot and Google was in fact built on links coming to your site. It's still important, not quite as much on a local basis of saying the more links, the better or the better links, the better it really is based on.

Grant Simmons
Can you get links from other local businesses in your area on the air if your particular clinical practice? And that's also something that takes a little bit of time, energy and effort and we go through a couple of these things in a bit more detail. Citation signals as where you are mentioned on the web. Some of these can be in like directories, like, you know, doctor reviews or something like that.

Grant Simmons
And some of them can also be in things like Yelp or Apple Maps or Bing maps or in go squared or other directories that Google uses to make sure every address is consistent. And so we we have systems that I use to go out and check every single mention of every single location you have and make sure that that is syndicated with the right name, address and phone number so that Google understands that consistency and understands that you are a the right business and be the right business in the right location when it reviews very, very, very important and not just how many you get, but the diversity and quality of care.

Grant Simmons
So if it's just a star review that's different than someone actually leaves a comment and Google expects you're not going to get all five stars. So a diversity in that is also important as well. So if you get in for four and a half stars and five stars, that's sometimes better than getting all five stars. But Google thinks you're just saying, Hey, give us five stars, we give you an extra 10% of that does happen with some businesses.

Grant Simmons
Generally medical businesses, not so much. But we would say that responding to reviews that show that you have an intent to provide the best service and so responding to reviews is also really important social signals. So Google engagement, so how people interact with your, you know, Google business profile response and posting Facebook signals, these are not actual ranking factors, but signals.

Grant Simmons
Do you have a Facebook page? All people engage in Twitter are people engaging? Google sees a lot of connections, not directly, indirectly. And some of these can help in just branding and visibility, and that contributes to that brand mentioned, which is really important, Google Labs brands. And so if you can create more of a ecosystem of people talking about you two very important behavioral signals, this actually came out in Google's antitrust lawsuit that's going on right now.

Grant Simmons
They do use click through from the search results to have a better understanding of whether I present the result is trusted. So, you know, we've set about how we can show up in different positions within local, but also inspire the clicks from local. Having five star reviews is a classic thing. You're probably going to get more clicks with more reviews, better reviews than if you don't have as good reviews.

Grant Simmons
So it's really important. Also, a mobile, when someone pulls up their business, they can click to Cool. So Google was able to track that on page actions, submitting forms, whatever Google can see, they're actually going to, you know, give some precedence over things that they can't necessarily see. So building out the site, building out a location is really important that we tend to search.

Grant Simmons
So if someone searches, doesn't find a want and then comes back to the search results, we want to make sure that they stay on the site by providing this helpful content. So really important few locations. Personalization. We can't really control. That's generally based on what users already search for and proximity we can't really control either how close the business is to where the surgery is, but these are the local rankings.

Grant Simmons
In a nutshell, probably take a snapshot of that. Now we go through this in more detail, but it's interesting to know to know that Google simplifies this down to relevance, distance and prominence. So all those things kind of filter down to relevance how well a local business matches what somebody's searching for distance, how far away you might be from where that searcher is who prominence, how well the business is known within the web ecosystem such as, you know, reviews, number one from local people, brand mentions on social and things like that.

Grant Simmons
Click through rates. How how people understand that your business is in fact a brand that your medical practice is trusted. Now, one last thing that's really important is also nothing happens in a vacuum. And so Google says your position in web results is also a factor. So search engine optimization SEO should be applied. So your location pages should always be looked at when you have lines before jumping to this, did you have anything to add to that?

Stewart Gandolf
So Well, yes. The main thing I think is that as we have those factors, especially the idea of the main website, is such a critical thing having we're talking today about the Google directory, we're talking about, you know, claiming and I think grant to talk talking a moment about verifying. But this is hard. I guess two things to keep in mind here.

Stewart Gandolf
Grants information is obviously very valid. Number one, the location page on the website is going to be absolutely critical. And number two, the when Grant goes into the verification process, which he alluded to a little bit ago, it's hard for everybody. So that is one bit of good news here for you as you think about your, you know, showing up online competitively.

Stewart Gandolf
You know, I've been to Google headquarters where people raise their hand and say, I used to make this local process an easier for us. This is back. I don't know. And New York may be a 90 or 90, but 2018. And, you know, the problem still persists. So keep going, Right? This is awesome.

Grant Simmons
Okay. Thank you. I'm also here a few questions in the Q&A as we go along. So if you see me typing off to one side, I'm doing that. Please, if you have any questions, we can certainly, you know, answer in real time. And also we'll save some to the end as well. But please keep keep asking those questions.

Grant Simmons
Thank you. All right. Google business profile. Absolutely fundamental to your local presence on Google. All right. And I am going to spend some time on this because it's really important. Now, remember that in your organization, I know you probably don't have an SEO specialist or know quite so specialist that's just waiting around to do all this stuff. There is a lot of things you want to make sure are done.

Grant Simmons
Obviously we can help. Obviously it needs to get done. So if you are signed in to your Google account for your business and you go to look at your business, this is what you're saying. And it's obviously healthcare success. But you'll see your business. You'll see this different areas of what you can do. And you can also see your knowledge panel on one side to see how other people might see your business.

Grant Simmons
The main thing here is if you have multiple locations, you're going to say something like this. So you essentially have all these different locations within your Google business account and you have to verify each of them. Now, verification is, frankly, this probably a technical term, still a pain in the church because there's a lot of ways that Google wants to make sure that someone doesn't say they use some verification phone or text to a business number, email to a business, email a video recording.

Grant Simmons
A lot of times, medical takes because there's a higher standard for medical locations, Google will ask you to do a video of the inside or outside or both of your practice of your location, and then you have to upload that into Google. Now, obviously, this is something we have to be on site. You have to have someone with a phone just doing a recording and then uploading that to the Google account.

Grant Simmons
That can be a live video call. Same way a Google rep will walk me through the actual you have to take a picture this of this of that picture of that and also said there's a snail mail option of doing it via email when they'll send you a postcard to your business address with a verification code. Now a lot of work to get this done, but like I said, it is important because you cannot change your listing until you have actually verified that account.

Stewart Gandolf
I'd just like to add that we do this with our clients back to that slide graph. Yes, we do this with our clients all the time. And it's a we always say, like when you're working with an agency, they're going to help with a lot of the strategy and every detail they can. But there's still we throw the ball to you, you throw it back.

Stewart Gandolf
So, for example, one of the challenges for that mail option is I can't tell you how many times the the office throws the postcard away. So we have to work with our clients and just recognize is that granular that you have to alert to the front desk at, you know, office number 22 to look for that postcard. They throw it away.

Stewart Gandolf
Guess what? You're back to square one so it can be maddening. And there's no easy way around this, but it requires patience, thoroughness and just a lot of work and detail to make this work good.

Grant Simmons
Yeah. So I'm just answering some of these questions. Great questions. You can come in place. All right. So when you go into control, you may. So this is a single profile. Now I'm looking at the most important thing is the primary business category. And those are limited. You can't just put in anything. You have to line with one of the Google business categories, which is taken, I think, from the national registry.

Grant Simmons
The goal is to use an engaging description. We talked about click through rates, we talked about building trust, which where a lot of different things want to make sure that description is really engaging, says what you do says why you're different and things like this. Be specific and it's important. You can't have too many categories. But there's very rare that businesses have more than three or four categories because it's limited.

Grant Simmons
You want to make sure the primary is the key. It really is very, very important. I can't stress that enough. Second thing is you can obviously control, you know, your name and address and your social profiles. These are all important to make sure filled out an asset. As you said, we do help our clients get this stuff done because it can be tedious, but we want to make sure that this is done.

Grant Simmons
That location as well is super important sometimes, and we've all done this where we've looked up at somewhere, we've gone to drive there. It ends up it's not exactly right. You know, you have to take a back street or something. So it's really important to make sure that your business location on the map matches actually where your business location is.

Grant Simmons
And sometimes that's reflected in bad reviews. If someone says, you know, I followed the Google map and I and I had to then take it actually to get there. So make sure it's really clear. And if you have to provide some directions in the description, you do that to make sure the customer is fully satisfied. You can define service areas.

Grant Simmons
Now these are generally for service based companies. So generally something like a plumber or someone where they have a physical location, where they service an area. You can't do it if you're a medical practice. You have to actually go to someone's place of where they live or place a business to be able to find that service. So there might be something like house calls or delivery deliveries of prescriptions or medical device maintenance where you're actually all servicing an area, but otherwise don't fill out a service area.

Grant Simmons
It's not valid or worthwhile to do. And you can actually get dinged by Google for that. So thanks. Think is openness. We talk about a rank, in fact to make sure business hours are correct. And there also are an opportunity to add more hours, as you can see here, or special hours for delivery certain times or for holidays or certain times when your business might be closed.

Grant Simmons
You can affect it here. Really important, I say, based on this openness quotient that you fill that in and then more, more is really more about culture, to be honest. So you can identify your business, identify who you might serve, accessibility and everything else. I would say it's important to find out the planning and service offerings that the most important thing to say, whether you accept appointments and deciding what the service options might be.

Grant Simmons
So well, this stuff generally, you know, a dropdown list that you can choose from office selections you can like. This is cool to actually sign up for the right things, for the right stuff for your business. I'm reading port. Then you get to this completeness of what else can we add? So if you back out to your business over the profile now, I would say walk through your dashboard.

Grant Simmons
It's really important to look at these different things and understand what each thing is important for. So one of these, for example, is, is services. So you can add lots of services to each of your categories. So you made it on a per category basis, but it's really important to make sure you do add completely what you can do.

Grant Simmons
So that's important. Also, as you can see, as I as I go back here, there's reading response reviews and reviews asked for reviews, I profiles I quality the all these are very important to get a complete, complete profile. And one of the other things also look at is that response to reviews as being paramount to showing that you're engaged.

Grant Simmons
So for example, someone asks a question and respond to that directly and they'll ensure the information you collect, answer the questions directly. There's also a whole load of other elements that Google gives you within the actual your business area. So, you know, adding updates. I think one of the things that biggest miss and one of the largest kind of links for a multi-location business is adding updates that are relevant to the location.

Grant Simmons
But you should be adding updates. They won't appear in your Google business profile for a specific location. You should be adding an AI fairly consistent basis, maybe once a week, maybe once every two weeks. Something that's specific to that location. Update Got new doctor An update of any new service, an update, your support in local baseball, whatever it might be, you should do that.

Grant Simmons
And that can be done via your website when you publish a particular article, it can be done directly in Google. In the Google business platform, Chat allows people and your potential agents to connect with via Google Chat so they can open the check. They create an ad. Obviously Google loves money. That's how they make their money at a your website can help make a connection between your profile and your website.

Grant Simmons
Create an offer. If there's something you want to do for you have a sale or, you know, 10% of something for dermatology, something like that. The treatment. Now you can create an offer that appears within the Google business profile and on search results, get more reviews and an exterior photo. Now photos, high quality photos of your physical location.

Grant Simmons
The outside insights of Google suggests and this is kind of mind blowing what Google likes, but take a picture from the front as if someone is walking across the street to your clinic on location. Take a picture from down the street, the left down the street to the right so that people understand that they're getting close to a location based on those photos.

Grant Simmons
Really important to follow, like, say, get as complete as possible. We can help. But certainly this is stuff that needs to be done on a location basis. And then the last thing, only positive reviews and ratings provide exceptional service. There is no difference that you can't buy reviews that Google is going to accept. You know, eventually they look at whether a user is committed anywhere else.

Grant Simmons
They're going to ding us. They're not real reviews, honest reviews. Biggest people don't actually ask, make it easy to leave reviews. So on your website, make that connection, Respond to reviews. We talked about that average social media when you see a positive comment about your location practice, you know, take that social media comment and put it in as a review on your website because it's important that Google sees this complete picture.

Grant Simmons
Timing is key as far as responses and just looking at that, making sure it's consistent, educate your staff about any post reviews. Obviously you see some practices, some locations have a little sign that says stand to leave review. Make sure that you're getting folks that are happy scanning to leave review offer reminders. So put it on the back of the bill.

Grant Simmons
On the front of the bill after someone's paid the bill. Thank you so much. Please leave a review and monitor details so you can have some monitoring. We can monitor. You can have something that aggregates the reviews to make it much easier to respond to. And I'm going to take a little breath there. I know where we're over halfway through.

Grant Simmons
Sure. Everything you want to add before I go into these local signals.

Stewart Gandolf
Now, I think you're doing great. I love the comments and questions we're getting. It's I guess the last second time, if it sounds complicated and painful, it is like all these little things, photos and directory listings and getting it verified and there's just a million moving parts and they all cumulatively matter. And that's the secret to this, is to take this seriously.

Stewart Gandolf
And I would say one thing that Graham and I talked about offline is that if, you know, like we talk a lot about the minimum daily requirements for our clients that, you know, there's a lot of things, there's SCA, there's paid searches page social, there's all these different things out there that are available for you as a marketer.

Stewart Gandolf
One of the things we say is, look, if you're serious at all about marketing, local search has to be really at the top of the list. I mean, we love Page Search, for example, and we think it's a very powerful tool that's not right for every location, but for local SEO, even the ones that are already busy. If you're serious about marketing, do you want to be there or not?

Stewart Gandolf
I guess that's my main comment. Do you want to be there or not? And so these techniques I know it sounds like a lot of work, but I would argue you want to dominate that local search page period and that's why it's worth doing all these things. Go ahead.

Grant Simmons
I know. So I'm going to jump to the next fairly quickly. We covered a high level and obviously for folks looking at the recording going to be able to stop and read these a little bit on page signals, these are things you can control, presence, name and address and obviously make sure it's consistent. Schema markup is something else.

Grant Simmons
It's a little bit more advanced. Some content management systems like WordPress have plugins for locations. Put your location titles, manuscript scenes and location noticing pages. It's obvious it doesn't be everywhere. You got this stuff on putting absolutely everywhere, but it's important to have a differentiation between your locations and link signals so you can influence some of these as around internal links.

Grant Simmons
So making sure that internal links point with saying the location where might be, you know, some of this stuff like I said, earning earning links is about publishing great content being authority, building thought leadership like e-books. But even stuff around the local area or particular location really important. So it's controllable. But you also try to inspire people to link to citation signals.

Grant Simmons
Mostly controllable. So making sure that everything out there and this is a Yelp example, everything's consistent. And so we have tools, analysis to scale that that wants to have, you know, 2 to 2000 locations reading, want to make sure that's consistent at the local content creation, 100%. You can control this. So I use this example, seasonal pollen. If you're in Atlanta for a particular month of the year, you know, the pollen is going to be a problem.

Grant Simmons
So write some local content around that particular location. Really key to think about those things, whether it's near a park, you can write something different than if you're downtown. So think about that stuff. Content should be differentiated for location ideas as well as creating supporting local content. You can publish within Google Business Profile on your site about local content creation.

Grant Simmons
Once again, it's really key when you're creating location pages for multi-location, you create pages for each location. One question we had is whether it's better to have location domain or domain dot com forward slash location. Generally, it's better to have a subdirectory. So forward slash location generally it's better to have a structural hierarchy. Your mileage may vary and it can vary on a plant by client basis.

Grant Simmons
You have to look at the competition. You have to look at what Google is ranking to have a better understanding of which might be best in your particular area. Generally, it's directories. I review signals, obviously you can't control every review across the internet, but you can respond to reviews, maybe reputation management platforms, which we obviously so, you know, sell as a service.

Grant Simmons
But it's really important to make sure your reputation is kept up, respond to reviews, even negative reviews. And you must make sure that you are interacting to show Google, demonstrate algorithmically that you're trying to provide the best service and best support and social signals. Yeah, these are mostly controllable and you can publish content within your social ecosystem. You can respond to use there.

Grant Simmons
You can make sure you have multimedia content, all different types of content. Really key to keep those social signals live to show you are still a viable, valuable business that behavioral signals are tough to control. Exactly. But if you provide a better search result with things like ours and someone else, to the question of, you know, how how does Google rank things differently in in the actual Google business profile, a local packaging local finder, they are looking at whether people are clicking on your results as part of their algorithm.

Grant Simmons
They are looking at whether people are interacting, searching for your brand name and other stuff. So there's lots of things we can help control to influence. You know exactly why someone should bother clicking on us rather than someone else. And then personalization signals we can't control where someone is. We can only control what they've searched for before. But it's good to know that if you're showing a particular result to a stakeholder in your company might not look the same as a user.

Grant Simmons
They're actually searching for your business. And finally, proximity, same thing, uncontrollable, but certainly having things like photos of the front of your, you know, storefront, your clinic, the photos to the left and the right does help Google say these guys are legit. And if we're not quite there, if we're not quite in the area, you know, we can show some options on how to find that particular business.

Grant Simmons
So don't discount making sure everything is 100% complete within all your Google business profiles. Very different locations. I talked about some geeky stuff schema. Really important. There is different schema. This is basically machine readable categories for search engines to understand who you are, what you do, what you're about, what you offer from a procedure or condition, what you treat, what kind of therapies you offer.

Grant Simmons
Physician type that define what school or into what their training is. Certifications. All this can be defined. It is quite technical and certainly stunning. That is a differentiator. Often if people doing them do it and and competition. This is the really important thing that we try and set expectations, which is it's a it's a zero sum game. If you win, someone else loses.

Grant Simmons
If someone else wins, you lose. So it's not something that you set and forget. And that's why publishing content is holding your brand really, really important focus on the signals you can control, as opposed to worry about some of things you can't control. Really important. And then last thing is, you know, from a competition standpoint, party guides get preference, so not something to say.

Grant Simmons
You don't do pide because you shop good in the local bank. But I would say definitely 100%. Look at holistically what kind of marketing you need do in your local area based on the competition in the different areas. Now I'm I'm going to take a quick breath, but I'm going to go through the types of medical practice. Know that a lot of people here are multi-location, but I'm going to cover this as well.

Grant Simmons
As far as different types of data. So let's start with just multi-location practices. So think locally at the enterprise level, really important centralized management, localized content, Asian generally handled centrally are local keyword strategy and looking at holistically. Yeah, the business itself number two is, you know, hospitals and large healthcare facilities. Sometimes they can have sub facilities or remote offices or satellite offices.

Grant Simmons
So important to understand that sometimes a large hospital, a hospital, large healthcare facilities might have different locations they need to worry about. But if it's one location has multiple departments, then we can create different department strategies, different department tactics to actually address each of those departments. Really, really important to look at that and make sure some of these hospitals, some hospitals I know are really big.

Grant Simmons
So sometimes having a mobile experience that's wonderful, help someone get from one end of the hospital to the other so they can go from the entrance to the colonial cardiac area. So these are really important. Think about specialized medical services. So niche keywords for localization, language, keyword research for local objects. So this is one of our clients, innovative renal care, 200 and something locations.

Grant Simmons
You have to make sure you rank nationally as some of the, you know, CKD type queries, dialysis type queries, and then locate your your ranking for basically dialysis center near me or dialysis center in Florida, I'd say center in Palm Beach. So those are things that you have to really focus, you know, globally or on enterprise level and then also down to their location level as well.

Grant Simmons
And then look for folks that are just a single location, medical practice, really important to have a well filled out, complete Google business profile. I can't stress that enough. No matter what kind of business you are in medicine, people are searching for someone local or searching by location. So it's really key to make sure you have a Google business profile, complete, engage with the community.

Grant Simmons
You get local backlinks and citations from other local businesses and you have a focus content strategy, not generic, focused on your area, your location, the challenges, what you see from a data standpoint in all areas. Well, and then obviously all this stuff, it's moot if we cannot measure it. So Google does provide some really good dashboards and they provide data from your Google business profile that you can see like this data we use a third party agency analytics that pulls in the local Google business data they can present.

Grant Simmons
It will create custom dashboards for some of our clients. But the key thing here is, you know, what's important API is obviously search rankings, where you show up to see SEO being informed about local business to website traffic. Also important conversion important obviously where the rubber meets the road, the Google business profile insights are really important. You can see whether people click to cool, whether they ask for directions like they can get me directions.

Grant Simmons
How many takes go through your website? These are really, really important metrics. Google kind of puts them in one box called interactions, so everything adds up to how many interactions that you get. And to see that change over time and to see the differences between different locations can provide a lot of value. So aggregating this so you can see in an easy format is sometimes a much better way of looking at than just going through each one.

Grant Simmons
And within the Google business profile, the challenge is I'll go through this pretty quickly. The first one is it takes time and leveraging enterprise software is really important. Obviously, we haven't been fast enough with the software, but it's really important to leverage that. So you can see things like data at scale, you can see things like whether your name, address, phone number is consistent across Apple Maps and across Yelp.

Grant Simmons
So all that stuff can be seen at an enterprise level that's 30,000 foot view, but it takes time and it takes focus. It's got to be done right. It's going to be done incessantly. I keep underscoring that and completeness as well. When you're looking for something matter, experts, you know, you want to make sure that you have partners that have relationships with some of their enterprise tools.

Grant Simmons
You want to make sure that they have local experience. Obviously, in the medical space, definitely sometimes it's challenging to develop that kind of expertise in-house. Not impossible, but it's generally better to partner. And also you want to make sure that you can save money on some of these tools as well. I hate to talk about that, but, you know, sometimes you get a preferred deal when you go through an agency.

Grant Simmons
For example, Google, if you want to go direct to Google, you have to go through one of their providers. Unless you're spending multiple million dollars, you are allowed to use some of the Google enterprise tools. So important to understand that as well. I'm measuring success now. I mentioned that as a challenge. It must make sure you're watching the right metrics and you're able to say something like this.

Grant Simmons
We've got a dashboard that has all your different Google profiles out. Much easier, much better to say or might be performing better and what might not be. And that's how you can essentially, you know, focus in the right place, because we say it's a lot of work more often not. It's a matter of focusing on ten locations, focused on the next ten locations, make sure they complete everything else.

Grant Simmons
And with that, I'm going to take a breath. That's what I have as our local search presentation today, specifically for multi-location businesses and how we can help and how you can help yourselves, us to step in and we can do some Q&A.

Stewart Gandolf
Yeah, sure. While you look at the grants, the Q&A, I want to switch to the next slide there. But our grant rather sorry. So. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, we're here to help you. We are, as you know, an agency that works in nothing but health care. Digital marketing is our favorite muscle, are truly integrated. So we do really everything that you would need.

Stewart Gandolf
But this is a part of what we do. Local SEO and we were covering in these webinars many of the different things that matter. There's lots this is just one topic and we've taken and breakneck speed, almost a full hour going at a very cursory level. One thing I would like to point out to is this is just the first level like.

Stewart Gandolf
So for example, once this is all done right, then you have to go back and look at Apple Maps as your location showing up. Right There is a ban. And even though we use tools to get things consistently across all these different directories still there's aberrations. So it's a lot of work, but the rewards are worth it. And as once it's finally working, you can never stop, but it's a lot easier to manage once it's up and running versus starting from scratch.

Stewart Gandolf
Because if you stop, continue with a lot of those local directories, it will eventually decay very, very quickly. In our experience. So it's but again, it's, you know, an object. Emotion tends to stay in motion. It's a lot easier once it's up and running. Grant One of the questions that you're to add or so I'm sorry, one more thing if you have it, if you're interested in work with us, just reach out to us.

Stewart Gandolf
We can do a sort of local SEO check up for you, show you, for example, how you're looking to Google XYZ and how you look on local directories. So we're happy to do that if you're interested to work with us. Grant Going to the Q&A, what are the questions? Why is that? You answered But they may not be familiar with it.

Stewart Gandolf
So essentially there was a question surrounding the subdomain versus the directory. And to make it easy for you, it's generally better to be your practice dot com slash Toledo, your practice dot com slash Chicago versus Chicago dot your practice dot com. That's not generally the best way to do it and if you're asking that question that's a much bigger problem meaning that your entire web site URL structure needs to be really thought through so local is part of this, but the entire thing like you want to make your directory structure so that it's obvious for humans and it's obvious to Google, you know, how your services are rendered and where and what your procedures you're

Stewart Gandolf
doing, all those things. So that's, you know, on site SEO as opposed to the local stuff. But it all works together.

Grant Simmons
Yeah. I'll add to that. Yeah. But I know there are no absolutes in ACL, so your mileage may vary. There might be scenarios where having a subdomain like location, dot business time, dot com may make sense sometimes. That's if you've had that particular structure for years. You built up equity in it. It's not worthwhile sometimes, sometimes changing it.

Grant Simmons
But I always want to make that caveat because.

Stewart Gandolf
Sure, that's, that's why you did it. Yeah, right. Yeah. I look at this because we have that same thing we have in our Web site, things that happen. We started in 2006, so we have some legacy domain structure on our site that, you know, it's already working. If you mess with it, you risk the wrath of Google. So you have to make experience based decisions on this.

Stewart Gandolf
So they ask repeatedly an answer. Generally, that's the right answer. But it really requires someone with experience and knowledge to look at it because there are tradeoffs. And these are the kinds of things that our team talks about when we're working with a client. Usually the answer is clear, but sometimes there's tradeoffs. And that's really where the experience part, as well as the expertise, comes down to.

Grant Simmons
Anonymous ATTENDEE Thank you. Thank you. That's right. I'm an honest presenter. Not so. I'm curious. This is the question. I'm curious to tell with data. How low can I say it's actually working from a business perspective? How do you measure actual success? Increased new patients more frequent well visits from existing patients? How do you know SEO is actually having an effect on your business?

Grant Simmons
Calories in strategy? That's a it's a really good question and everything has to be justified. You know, there's no use just painting the wall yellow if it's not going to make a difference fundamentally to your business. So Google does provide tools that basically shows how many people are clicking through. And as I showed you on that agency analytics dashboard, you know, you can see interactions and within Google business profile, you can see interactions of of what people are actually doing on your business profile, i.e. clicks, calls, sending appointments.

Grant Simmons
All this stuff can be tracked as well as chats and things like that. So indirectly that would be a fractional conversion to know that someone has actually made an action, look for directions or other things like that. Number two is more often than not we have location specific tags that allow us to know where a particular action takes place.

Grant Simmons
So for example, fill out a form or click a button or make an appointment on a location page. We're able to track back and we're able to track that often back to where they came from originally. So attributing that back to either a Google business profile, click or an organic click in search results or pay click in the same token, we can tell the channel.

Grant Simmons
So in that way you can actually segment your overall conversions by conversion source or buy the page where the conversion happened. So in go for events and things like that, you can tell where it happened and assign a value to that particular action. So in that case we can give attribution to our local efforts. Always starts with traffic and are we generating traffic always starts with is our Google business profile interactions improving?

Grant Simmons
And then we have to see where the rubber meets the road as fast as that. Actually through site tracking demonstrate that that is adding value. Is anything going to add to that at Augusta?

Stewart Gandolf
Now? I think you've covered that pretty well. I did want to pivot just for a moment. And, you know, this stuff does work on our website. If you go to our case studies, one of them is on Illinois Dermatology, which is predominantly about local SEO. And this particular business had said, we don't show all of our clients here clearly, but this is just one.

Stewart Gandolf
But after going through this process, this is 17 locations. So it's, you know, still a big left but can be much bigger. But, you know, over a period of time, once we got it up and running, you know, the results are 243% increase. And Google business profile views year over year, 114% local searches, 82% in organic clicks year over year, 78% in keyword rankings year over year.

Stewart Gandolf
So I probably should have had those stats up, you know, for new searches. 1,175,000 up hundred and 14% year over year. Number of views, 2.4 million, 16,000 clicks to the website. These are huge factors that really matter. So this isn't just theory, it's you know, we talked about how hard this is, but the reward is there, especially if you're in a business where, you know, search matters to you.

Stewart Gandolf
This is something that you really want to take seriously.

Grant Simmons
I think everyone search say.

Stewart Gandolf
Well.

Grant Simmons
The local, local, actual physical location is going to matter to everyone. And, you know, I don't see this reducing down either aways. Some of the I and your search that's coming out still, Google is presenting the most relevant results and that's going to come from that relevance, the proximity and prominence that Google pushes and comes from. How are you doing SEO as far as the ranking story?

Grant Simmons
So it's not going away. Even with the newest updates the good was going to push out. They still want to present someone searching locally. They want to make sure they present the best local option. And that can be your practice and your clinic and your location. So yeah.

Stewart Gandolf
I'm very thank you for your time today. We've gone over a few minutes. Appreciate your time. Awesome. Co-presenting with you as always. And we'll see you at the next one. And our next client meeting.

Grant Simmons
That's why. Cheers. Thanks to.