You understand the importance of medical marketing, but you’re also dealing with limitations—not just financial, but the time constraints of your staff. Any endeavor you undertake has to…well, it has to work. The Google My Business directory listing, as prestigious as it may be, is no different.
So that brings up the question—how do you measure the success of Google My Business for doctors and medical facilities?
In asking this question, we’re going to make certain presumptions. We’re going to assume that you have your listing thoroughly filled out—that you’ve used both the short and long descriptions and that you inserted strategically targeted keywords. We’re assuming that your listing information—especially basics like office hours—is 100 percent accurate. We’re assuming that you’re posting content from your blog posts to your events on your Google My Business page.
In short, before we decide how to measure success, we’re assuming you’re taking the steps necessary for success.
The Google My Business dashboard offers some great metrics for performance reporting. The most valuable for a doctor’s office will be phone calls. Keep in mind these can only measure calls made when a searcher directly clicks on your phone number within the search results. By allowing that, you can measure ups and downs in performance and correlate them to any changes you made in your approach to the listing.
Another valuable piece of information is being able to see the search queries that people use to get to your listing. You can tell if they’re looking generally for a “doctor near me” or if it was an informational query that brought them to one of your blog posts. Knowing how people find out about you helps you adjust your content and its accompanying call-to-actions accordingly.
The performance metrics will tell you how often a searcher views your listing in both the “natural” organic search results and how often they view your listing on Google Maps. This is another method of gaining insight into how deep into the marketing funnel your search visitors are.
A good listing should have several photos of the office and staff, designed to convey a friendly and warm environment. The metrics on how often these photos are being viewed are another way of telling you how often people truly engage with your listing, as opposed to merely visiting it.
There are 2 crown jewels of organic search. One is placement in Google’s Local 3-Pack, the listings that are highlighted when someone types in “pediatrician near me.” The other is the rich snippet, the boxed content that appears as the top answer when a searcher asks Google something like “How do I recover from the flu?”
Your Google My Business listing is a fundamental prerequisite for getting those rewards and monitoring the metrics here will give you insight into how well your page is doing.