From an organic search perspective, search engines rely on your practice’s citations to be consistent. If they are not consistent, then the search engines cannot objectively provide internet users with the appropriate information when they are searching for the relevant services and products that are offered in your geographical location.
Search Engines Drive Traffic
There are a ton of great free tools that can help drive traffic to your medical practice’s website. However, these tools are created by search engines. The search engines drive traffic from your name, address, and phone number. All of these are essentially database-driven by you as the business owner, so if the information is inconsistent, you’re not going to get the proper value out of these free tools.
Future Traffic and Business Value
The most important part of a consistent name, address, and phone number is that the future impact of the search engines on your business is going to be driven a lot by the name, address, and phone number consistency.
The search engines want to level the playing field. They want it to be less about organic search and more about the value of your business to consumers. What happens is that the search engines are going to make sure that the information is consistent. Then, they will let consumers vote on which business serves best. The different tools they have out there to get the information is going to ultimately help drive rankings. Therefore, it’s imperative that you have your name, address and phone number information consistent not just for today, but for the future of your business as well.
There are a couple of rules to follow to help with this.
Rule 1: Make sure the information is consistent. Make sure that your business name, phone number, address, suite number, zip codes, acronyms, abbreviations and anything else is all listed the exact same way in every place that your business is found online.
Rule 2: Make sure the local ease, axiom, info group and factual are consistent. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.), use four primary databases to verify that what you put into their search engine matches what else is out there on the Internet. Those four primary databases that you can find information out on the internet is going to come down to local ease, axiom, info group and factual. When you verify how your name, address and phone number is listed on the internet, make sure you use the opportunity to correct this information, local ease, axiom, info group and factual so that when the search engines go to verify it, they have the appropriate name, address, and phone number in the databases and the sites themselves.
If you can take care of these basic rules, you’ll be able to take care of the opportunities available to you today, as well as those that will happen in the future.
