6 tips for attracting new patients to your optometry clinic
By Daniel Reid
Optometry clinic patient growth: having a visible location isn’t enough. Your next patient is likely checking you out online before they ever step foot in your clinic.
You’re doing everything you can to be a successful optometrist: you take great care in observing, diagnosing and treating your patients’ health needs, you never stop learning, always vowing to keep your training up-to-date and you’re building relationships with your patients, ensuring they receive the highest quality of care.
So why aren’t new patients booking eye exams?
Almost all consumers (87 per cent) research a business online before visiting the physical location. If they can’t find your website or read your negative reviews on Google or Yelp, that could be a problem.
Here are six things you should do to ensure new patients discover your optometry clinic and book their next eye exam.
1. Rank for keywords potential patients are using
If patients aren’t walking through your front door, it might be because they aren’t finding your website.
So, why aren’t they finding your website? One reason could be that you aren’t using the right keywords on your website. If they are doing a Google search for “local eye exams” and you aren’t ranking for that term in your region, that’s a problem.
The solution? A local search engine optimization strategy to target people in your specific area: do some keyword research to discover how people find optometrists in your region and then use those terms, in the right places, on your website.
You should also put a strong focus on getting other reputable websites to link to your website: every link to your website is like a vote of confidence in your service. It sends a strong signal to search engines that you not only create content that is worth sharing but also that other trust-worthy websites have given you their approval.
You want to be found in search. Google is the heart and soul of the internet. There are more than 2.3 million Google searches conducted each minute. Outranking your competitors for top local keywords is essential for attracting new patients to your optometry clinic.
2. Use blog posts to get patients on your website
Blogs can do more than update your visitors on special promotions. You can also use them to elevate your brand by writing about topics your audience actually cares about and is actively searching for on Google.
If you know your audience is searching for “myopia control treatments,” you could do a blog post about the benefits of distance-centre multifocal contact lenses.
In addition to being useful content for your audience, each new blog post is also an extra opportunity to be discovered in a Google search — companies that produce a blog have 434 per cent more search engine-indexed pages than those that don’t.
3. Social media can help you attract and retain patients
While social media content can help you retain patients, and can help you reach new ones, the biggest benefit is one many companies have still yet to properly explore: paid ads.
You can use small paid budgets to reach big audiences on social media that check all the right boxes in terms of geography and demographics.
On Facebook, you can market your services to ‘look-alike audiences’ that are similar to your current patients. On Instagram, you can offer special promotions to people currently in your neighbourhood. On LinkedIn, you can market your services to potential patients according to job title and seniority.
Instead of waiting for patients to find you, social media lets you bring the content to them.
4. Positive reviews prove that you are legitimate
Take a look at your rating on Google, Yelp and Facebook. Do you have reviews? If so, are they positive?
Though it might seem hard to believe, 78 per cent of consumers trust online reviews from strangers as much as they trust personal recommendations from friends and family. Fifty seven per cent of people won’t even consider giving your business a chance if your rating is under 4 stars.
If you don’t have reviews, you can start asking patients to leave you a positive rating.
If you have negative reviews, the worst thing you could do is ignore them: this tells future customers that you may not be trustworthy.
If you reply to a negative comment, you are showing that you take complaints seriously and that you listen to your patients. It’s also an opportunity to re-engage the patient who left you a negative review and get a second chance to make it right.
5. Take control of your online business listings
If people are looking up reliable businesses on Better Business Bureau or searching for local optometry clinics on RateMDs, they’re probably in the market for a new optometrist. This could be an easy win.
Your Google My Business and Bing Places for Business listings can also be a shortcut to helping your business appear at the top of local searches.
You can use business listing managers to highlight your services, update your business address, add photos and promote important events.
The stakes are high. RateMDs alone has reviews of more than two million doctors, 1.7 million health care providers and gets about two million visits per year in Canada.
6. Don’t forget to refresh your website
Since your next patient is most likely to research your business online before they see your physical clinic, it’s important to put a little care into the look, content and functionality of your website.
Your website should be clean, simple, uncluttered, informative and professional. It should also be optimized for mobile devices, since 78 per cent of location-based mobile searches result in a purchase made offline.
Conclusion
Attracting new patients to your optometry clinic is no easy feat, but these cost-effective digital marketing techniques will have an immediate impact on your online visibility and credibility which will invariably lead to new appointments.
If you need a little help putting together and executing your digital marketing plan, get in touch with us. We can analyze your efforts online and work out an effective strategy that is right for your business and budget.