How Google My Business Can Take Charge of Your Dental Practice’s Online Presence

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

How Google My Business Can Take Charge of Your Dental Practice’s Online Presence

Google has finally thrown a bone to local businesses, including dental practices. Businesses used to have separate pages for everything—Google Maps, Google Places, Google+, Google+ Local, Google Analytics. It was confusing trying to remember all the different links and frustrating trying to manage everything Google-related to your practice. Duplicate entries were created and different information was used throughout various Google products, making it hard to unify a business’ online profile.

But then, the search engine giant finally wised up and decided to create a one-stop shop for local business owners.

Last month Google launched Google My Business—one platform with one dashboard for managing all of Google’s services. If you currently have a Google Places for Business Page or Google+ Page, you’ve already been automatically upgraded to a Google My Business page.

Google stated this new product is, “a free and easy way to find and connect with your people, wherever you are.” Here’s the video when Google introduced the new service.

Now, dentists can engage and interact with their patients from one location. You can think of Google My Business as a simple customer relationship management (CRM) tool. You can change anything with just a click whether you’re on a desktop computer in your office or on your smartphone at home. You just need to enter your practice’s information one time and it will populate across all of Google’s products.

With the new integrated platform, you can work off just one screen to manage how your practice appears on:

  • Google Maps: Update valuable practice information, add photos or virtual tours of your office
  • Reviews: Manage your Google reviews and view other reviews around the web
  • Google+: A social platform where you can post photos, text, videos, events and links
  • Insights: After verifying your practice, you can view insight into your Google+ analytics to manage metrics such as visibility, engagement and audience
  • Google Analytics: Check your analytics and learn more about your practice website’s visitors
  • Hangouts: You can start a video chat with your patients right from the platform

Through Google My Business, your dental practice will gain visibility on Search, Maps, and Google+ across all devices.

How Does Google My Business Help My Dental Practice?

Here are three scenarios where Google My Business would come in handy:

Increasing your online presence. With this integrated service, your Google profile is now more unified. You are combining your brand page, information, location, reviews and social media into one central location. When people are searching for a local dentist office, they will see all of this information, giving you a more complete online presence. It all shows up on a Google search and reaches more people.

Responding to negative reviews. You’ve been getting some poor reviews from some unsatisfied patients that could start affecting your dental business negatively. Through the new platform, you can view all your reviews, respond to those negative naysayers as the owner, or even host a Hangout with angry patients to try and resolve any problems.

Launching new product and marketing campaigns. As you are developing a new marketing campaign or launching a new dental service, you can utilize your Google Insights to see where your patients are coming from, what interests them, what keeps them engaged, and more. Through your reviews, you can see which patients love your services, who would like to see improvements and which patients need more of your attention. You could even launch your new campaigns through Google+.

Helpful Tips

To maximize your benefits from Google My Business, here are a few best practices to keep in mind:

  • Claim your local business listing – If you haven’t already done so, claim your local listing and make sure all the information is correct. It will give your practice more exposure on the search engine so more potential patients can find you, even on mobile devices. Then you can begin to set up your My Business profile.
  • Frequently review your Google Insights – You can learn more about how your dental practice is performing from these analytics, which are split into three sections: visibility, engagement and audience. You can see how people are finding your office, how often your practice’s information is being seen, and how often they directly go to your website from a Google search. You can see how the user activity on your Google+ page is doing - how many comments, +1s, shares and views you receive on each post. You also can see how many followers you have as well as a breakdown of demographics of your visitors.
  • Add effective photos. Google believes that photos and images are one of the best ways to attract searchers, and they noticeably feature pictures throughout their products. Therefore, it is important to post compelling images on your profile - your staff, your satisfied patients, the inside of your office, new products, your before and after gallery showcasing your popular dental services, and company or community events. Remember when you’re sharing visual content such as videos, memes, infographics and images on Google+ you are more likely to see an increase in engagement and expand your reach with local visitors.

Overall, Google is trying to get more businesses online, help local businesses get found and make life easier for owners to manage their presence on Google. Google My Business is a big step forward making this process simpler for you and better for the patients searching for you online.

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