How do patients find doctors?

Knowing how new patients are searching for your medical practice gives you the chance to focus your efforts better so you can bring more business through your door. It also helps identify new marketing opportunities so that you can put together a healthcare marketing plan to reach patients on social platforms you might not be leveraging already. Here’re the three most common ways patients find doctors:

1. Online business listings: Your medical practice probably has a listing on sites like Yelp and Google My Business. However, if you don’t want to claim these listings, you’ll be missing out on opportunities to attract new patients. When you claim a free listing on these sites, make sure the name, address, and phone number of your medical practice are accurate and consistent across all sites. Add good quality pictures of your practice and reply promptly to patient comments and reviews.

2. Local search: The majority of people rely heavily on search engines to find local businesses, including healthcare practices. And, when people search for a local medical practice, your practice’s address, location, website URL, business hours, and contact number are the most sought after details.

3. Voice Search: As per research, nearly 46% of people who use voice search look for local businesses at least once every day. One way to capitalize on voice search is by adding local review schema to your website. Local review schema will direct search engine crawlers to understand your website information and display it on SERPs as snippets. These snippets will be utilized by voice search for the user’s search query.