Marketing a sports medicine business is no easy task. While your practice provides many important services that help people recover from injuries and improve mobility, most aren’t familiar with the treatments you offer or search for them regularly. Traditional forms of marketing can help, but the key to improving visibility that helps your practice grow is local search engine optimization (SEO).

Local SEO can improve overall awareness and make it easier for potential patients to find you, no matter what treatment they need. But what can you do to boost local SEO that helps your sports medicine business grow? In this blog, you’ll find out.

What Is Local SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

First, let’s clarify some confusion about what local SEO is and why it matters. Traditional SEO is about enhancing multiple aspects of your website to build organic traffic from search engines. Local SEO aims to do something similar, but it specifically targets people in your area.

Local SEO strategies improve visibility for local businesses, helping you attract patients who can realistically visit your office for treatment. It’s a complex process involving many tasks that support a larger goal. However, the right approach can lead to substantial improvements that help your sports medicine business reach a new level of success.

How Does It Work?

Here’s a quick test that will show local SEO in action. Go to a search engine like Google and type in “sports medicine office near me.” The results will show sports medicine businesses in your immediate area. Where does your office lie in the rankings?

Local SEO considers many factors, including all the usual aspects of traditional SEO. The biggest difference is that it factors geographic location into the algorithm. Like all searches, Google and other engines rank local businesses by relevance. 

The entire goal of local SEO is to appear as high up on the search engine result page (SERP) as possible. Higher rankings have more visibility, and people are likelier to click on links to learn more when a business is high on the SERP.

Why Does Local SEO Matter to Sports Medicine Physicians?

Consider the clientele your sports medicine business serves. Your business performs treatments in an office that your patients must visit. Compared to other companies that might offer products they can ship nationwide, you don’t have the luxury of serving a super-broad demographic. Therefore, you must set your sights on people within your area.

Local SEO prioritizes high-value leads who can realistically visit your office for treatment. Conventional SEO is still important to raise visibility and become an authority in your field. However, you must focus on local audiences to increase business and grow your practice.

Tips to Improve Your Sports Medicine Office’s Local SEO

If you’re looking for ways to boost local SEO for your sports medicine business, you’ve come to the right place. At RankScience, we’re experts in growth and visibility. Here are several strategies you can employ today to raise awareness for your business locally.

1. Optimize Your Google Business Profile

One of the most important things to do is claim and optimize your Google Business Profile. Companies like yours can use Google Business Profile to manage their online presence across Google services. It’s free and vital to how Internet users find local businesses. 

These profiles appear as listings whenever users make relevant local searches. They provide critical information about businesses and can do a lot to attract new patients. After claiming your profile, optimize every section for maximum impact.

Google is more likely to recommend businesses with a fleshed-out profile that includes business hours, contact information, photos, etc. Optimize that information with relevant keywords and fill out as many sections as possible. The more complete your profile, the more informative and valuable it becomes.

2. Use Location-Specific Keywords

Local SEO doesn’t stop with Google Business Profiles. Your website content should also reflect geographical information. Consider using geo-specific long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords typically contain three to five terms, and due to their specificity, targeting them can lead to great results.

Adding geographical terms with those keywords takes things further, enhancing your local SEO. For example, in addition to using terms like “sports medicine office,” you can infuse long-tail keywords like “sports medicine office in San Francisco” to tell search engines more about your business. It’s highly targeted and will help attract more relevant users.

3. Obtain High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks occur whenever another website links out to yours. Internal linking is important for crawling and indexing, but backlinks help to build authority. Think of every backlink as a reference or vote of support from other website owners.

The more backlinks your site has, the more authoritative it becomes to search engines. There are many ways to get backlinks. Focus on sources that have a high impact. The most common strategy is to have your site appear on as many directory websites as possible. The best options are medical directories.

You can also contact other authoritative websites for guest posts or work with local publications. Another option is to simply produce useful content. If your content is informative and valued, other websites will link out to yours naturally.

4. Implement Local Structured Data Markup

Structured data markups, also known as schema markups, are a type of code that helps search engines understand your website and its content better. The markups describe your website, making it easier for search engines like Google to crawl and index it. Many types of data markups are available to explain the meaning of your site and its many elements.

Local structured data markup includes information like business hours, location, services offered, etc. It’s a small change that packs a big punch. When done correctly, data markups can substantially improve visibility by telling search engines precisely what your site is about and how relevant it is to local audiences.

5. Get Online Reviews and Ratings

Ratings and reviews matter. While many sports medicine physicians don’t prioritize reviews in the same way that companies that aren’t in the healthcare industry do, you must work on getting them if you want to boost local SEO.

Search engines like Google prefer to recommend businesses with many reviews. Why? Reviews, ratings and written testimonials provide valuable information that people care about. Your website may be informative, but search engines know your ultimate goal is attracting business. Ratings and reviews are unbiased and can let people learn about facets of your practice that you might not advertise.

Of course, positive reviews are always a plus. Highly rated businesses always climb to the top of the rankings. In addition to doing your best to make your patients happy, go the extra mile and invite them to leave a review. Then, reply to reviews to engage patients while showing your target audience you care.

Supercharge Your SEO With RankScience!

Local SEO can be challenging to master alone, but it doesn’t have to be that way. With help from the experts at RankScience, you can experience growth you never thought possible. We take a personalized approach to every SEO project, developing custom strategies that benefit your business. With innovative techniques and game-changing technologies, we have what it takes to deliver results.

Reach out today to start your growth journey with RankScience!