Developing an effective urgent care marketing strategy requires multiple components and campaigns that ultimately all work together. When this happens, you create a wide marketing reach across multiple platforms.
This not only scales website traffic, organic exposure, walk-in traffic, phone calls, etc. — but it also creates a safety net. In the event that one traffic source dries up or comes to a sudden stop, there will be additional traffic and exposure channels to keep the business thriving.
With so many urgent care marketing options and strategies, how do you know which ones to focus on? What are the most effective ways to market an urgent care clinic? There are no cookie-cutter marketing plans that will work the same for every urgent care facility. In fact, we custom build every urgent care marketing strategy from the ground up, built specifically for each clinics’ needs
But, there are a few urgent care marketing strategies that are must-do for all clinics. We are going to go over three traffic generation strategies for urgent care clinics that deliver the highest quality traffic from Google — organic and paid.
Sheer traffic numbers alone are nothing more than a vanity metric. If your traffic isn’t converting into walk-ins and calls it’s useless. The three online marketing strategies we are going to discuss will help you attract quality website traffic that converts.
You will learn why the one-two-three punch consisting of urgent care PPC, urgent care SEO and attracting reviews for your urgent care clinic can help propel your online visibility to the top, resulting in exponential growth.
Urgent Care Local SEO: Google My Business Profile Optimization
Your urgent care clinic should already have a Google My Business profile. It’s the most influential local business directory listing online. The information found within these listings is what Google’s algorithm uses when determining what businesses show up in the local search results.
Having your urgent care clinic displayed at the top of the Google Maps results ensures that your business receives the bulk of calls and walk-ins related to the services your clinic offers. Our effective urgent care SEO ensures that your online visibility places your business directly in front of your local market when they are searching for, and in need of, the services that your urgent care facility provides.
Someone searching for a local urgent care clinic has an immediate need. He or she is not comparison shopping — they have an emergency and need an immediate solution. The best search engine marketing strategy, specifically designed for urgent care clinics, is what we deliver.
The very first thing we do when we kick off a new urgent care SEO campaign is to conduct a full audit of the existing Google My Business profile. From making sure all of the contact information is formatted correctly, to writing an SEO-friendly business description, your business profile is optimized for performance.
Your Google My Business profile also serves another very important search engine marketing purpose — collecting reviews. Let’s dive into why those are so important for your urgent care clinic’s online visibility.
Make Attracting Urgent Care Google Reviews a Top Priority
One of the easiest ways to increase your online visibility and the overall effectiveness of your urgent care SEO is by consistently attracting Google reviews on your Google My Business profile. Urgent care Google reviews pack a one-two punch.
They contribute to your urgent care clinic’s position in the Google Maps listing and they also help attract more walk-ins and phone calls. Having a lot of positive reviews instills consumer trust.
Now, when someone is searching online for a local urgent care clinic he or she doesn’t have time to do a lot of due diligence. More than likely it’s an emergency situation and they are in need of a solution immediately.
If someone has an emergency and quickly Google’s, “urgent care clinic near me” and sees multiple results, what one are they going to click on — either to call the clinic directly or get directions to? The clinic with the most reviews and the highest overall star rating.
When an emergency arises, the goal is to get the best help available. It’s natural instinct to be drawn to the more favorable listing in terms of quantity of reviews and the average rating of those reviews.
Following up with past clinic patients and asking them to leave a review can have a positive impact on your urgent care search engine optimization effort. Also, developing an automated outreach strategy to ask patients within days of being treated at your clinic is a great way to ensure you always have a steady influx of new Google reviews.
The effort and time devoted to attracting Google reviews greatly benefit your urgent care search engine marketing. In the end, it’s directly responsible for more online visibility and higher click-through rates.
Urgent Care Google Ads
In the beginning, we mentioned that an effective urgent care marketing strategy involves several channels. SEO takes time and doesn’t always produce fast results. It’s a long-term strategy that must be rolled out in a calculated manner in order to build a strong base.
We know you don’t want to wait for urgent care clinic leads, so Google Ads are introduced at the beginning of the campaign. This allows us to attract patients for your urgent care facility instantly though three different channels.
Urgent Care PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
PPC, or pay-per-click advertising allows you to bid on specific terms and search phrases. The maximum bid you are willing to pay for each term will directly dictate how far up in the paid search results your ad is displayed.
We have a very good understanding of what search terms are likely to attract potential patients with an immediate need. This is the paid traffic that will convert into phone calls and walk-in patients.
Our urgent care PPC service includes in-depth keyword research and landing page optimization. Through multiple testing and optimization phases, we are able to identify the top-performing keywords and drive the cost-per-click down. We work with you to achieve your ideal patient acquisition cost.
GDN (Google Display Network)
Remarketing is a highly effective way to pull patients back in that have recently interacted with one of your ads and visited your website. There are a couple of strategies that work when it comes to display ads for an urgent care clinic.
We can create very specific ads that target the potential patient based on the pages they viewed on the website, or place very generic ads in front of them offering to help them with their medical emergency.
The remarketing strategy for an urgent care clinic is much different than a consumer product for example. If an e-commerce company is running a remarketing campaign on the GDN (Google Display Network) they might target the user a day after viewing a specific product and then again five days later and then finally one last time two weeks later.
A potential urgent care patient has an immediate need, which more than likely will not exist a couple of days later. So, our remarketing campaign will be more aggressive, retargeting that website visitor immediately after he or she leaves the website. They will be shown ads over the next 24 hours that are both generic and related to the specific information they viewed on your website.
There is a very small window of time to convert a potential urgent care clinic patient. Running remarketing display ads on the GDN is a great way to pull those potential urgent care patients back in if they decide to look at other options. In most situations, that window of opportunity is less than 24 hours.
