Localized SEO is a critical part of online healthcare marketing in most cases. This is because most medical and dental practices operate as standalone offices in a local area. Most of the patients who visit the doctor or dentist belong to the neighboring areas where the office is located. Therefore, the key in health SEO lies in driving the traffic of localized patients to visit the doctor’s website.

Perhaps one of the best role models in how to optimize a medical website for local patients and follow best medical and dental marketing practices is Yelp.com. Yelp has positioned itself as one of the largest local review websites in the world, with over 30 million reviews generated by users. The best part is that local users in a particular area can easily search for reviews that are relevant locally.

Medical SEO researchers say that it is possible to boost your business manifold if you can manage to rank at the top in local search results for keywords that include the name of your city or area where you operate your practice. However, local search engine optimization is a greater challenge as it becomes more difficult to determine the appropriate keywords that local searchers are likely to use.

Yelp is an excellent role model for healthcare marketing online managers because considering the gigantic size of Yelp’s website and its multi-location scale it faces a unique challenge to achieve local search engine optimization. Yelp attaches top priority to localized SEO over national SEO results. Wherever it identifies inferior performance locally, it reviews its local keyword selection and focuses sharply on local SEO results.

Healthcare marketing companies need to develop local-specific landing pages for medical and dental websites in order to optimize for searchers in that particular location where the practice operates. As far as possible, every web page must be customized with content that is directly relevant and specific to the location, so that it drives the targeted traffic of actual potential patients to the website.