Are you a local business? According to the Business Dictionary, if you provide goods or services to the local population, you are a local business. While all businesses have a physical address, a local business has the goal of attracting new customers to walk through the door.
Examples of local businesses include hair salons, chiropractors, dentists, doctors, retail shops and many more. Some local businesses require appointments and some are open for walk-in business during certain hours.
If you are managing a local SEO for addiction treatment campaign or you are working with a medical addiction marketing professional, you must take into account a few special considerations. One of the most important items to focus on is setting up your business to be found on Google Maps. The proper way to do this is to login to your account on Google My Business. To do this, you must already have a Google account such as a Gmail account. if you do not already have a Google account, you will be prompted to set one up.
You may already be aware of the Google My Business pages and how to set up your business information to appear on Google Maps. Yet, please do not stop reading. Google is constantly improving and adding features. I would like to bring to your attention two features that are brand new as of the time that this article is being written.
One new feature which is only a few days old as of this writing is a button which allows a new customer or existing customer to book an appointment right from your Maps listing. When you go to set up this feature, you will be presented with a page of scheduling vendors who are compatible with this feature. If you are already using a vendor for scheduling appointment and you do not see your vendor listed, before going to set up a new account with one of the list of vendors, you may want to reach out to your current vendor and ask about their plans for implementing this connection with Google My Business. For example, I recently reached out to vcita, a scheduling product which is also HIPAA compliant for use by medical businesses. VCita is not currently listed, but they assured me that they will have this feature working by early 2018.
Another feature which is still very new and is now fully functional is the ability to post current short articles to be found by users who find your business by searching on Google Maps or in Google search. These post are similar to a blog post or a social media post. the difference is that they must be current. The system will purge these posts after a short period of time. With each post you may include a picture and 100 to 300 words. You may also set a call to action button and set up the post as an event with a specific date and time range.
I would suggest that all local SEO for addiction treatment campaigns start using this feature immediately and start posting unique content on a very regular basis. One thing to keep in mind that is very important is to not use duplicate content. You must not take a post from your blog or copy any text that already exists somewhere else to use in these postings. In general, reusing any content puts you at risk for being penalized by Google in search. You may consider hiring an agency to generate useful timely and relevant content or you will just have to put in the extra time and effort to write this material yourself.
Keep in mind that you should complete all of the requested information including the name of your business your address your phone number and full and accurate operating hours. Posting pictures is also very important. If you set up multiple locations for the same business, each location should have a unique phone number associated with it.
