Hey what’s up everybody, this is Dr. Nick with LVRG Media. And today I want to talk to you about the three factors that Google itself says that chiropractors need in order to rank number one in their local map pack.
Chiropractors Rank #1 On Google Maps
So the map pack, obviously, is when somebody’s searching for a chiropractor, you’ve got the Google ads, and then you’ve got the map section. That map pack has one Google ad product where someone can have their Google Business Profile listed in there and they have three organic ones.
What Google says that the three organic, how it’s decided which of the three organic is going to show up is based around three different things. So it’s going to be based around relevance, proximity, and prominence. So when we talk about relevance, it means if someone is searching for something, it doesn’t just have to be chiropractic, it could be for you know, a condition like say, well back pain treatment or spinal decompression or chiropractor near me, or Springfield, Illinois, or whatever your city state is. But if they put those at the end of it, that is going to be what’s called local search intent.
And Google is going to show a map pack for those people anytime they’re looking for any type of service or solution to a problem with either near me or city state on the end of it. That is going to be where Google starts to show those map packs. So relevance is going to be around Do you have any pages on your website that are relevant to the searcher? So what is that search intent? What are the keywords that they’re looking for? And does your website contain those?
Google Map Pack For Chiropractic
Now when they’re looking for a chiropractor, they’re going to be mainly looking for who has the best homepage and who is like are all of these relevant? If everybody has, you know, everybody’s kind of like, met the bar there, they tend to move on to the next one.
But when we’re talking about more obscure things, and we’re talking about conditions or types of patients, that’s where you know the pages on your website really matter. And the more that you’ve put into those and the more than you customize those to the way that you explain things, the better you’re going to do in the map pack.
The second one is going to be proximity. So how close is the person to your office? Now obviously, you can’t control where the people search from. So you really want to make sure that you are just optimized as much as you can and so that you can dominate that area close around your practice. Now in more rural areas or smaller towns, that radius may be a little bit further out, but in densely populated areas in cities. You know, you’re going to be pretty close to your practice are going to be the people that you show up for.
Once you get outside of that circle that Google is determined. It’s gonna be tough for you to rank.
What isn’t really important is that because you know this, because when people are outside of that radius that Google wants to show in terms of the proximity. This is where Google ads are really powerful because you can create your own radius around your practice where you can show up in the map pack in that paid ad product and not be so dependent on whether Google is going to show you or not.
So Google used to really allow whoever was the best optimized listing who had the best website, they would really dominate almost, you know, the entire city search, but in November, December of 2021, they made a shift, they actually call it the proximity update. They made a shift where how close you were, was really ramped up in their algorithm.
So there’s lots of different factors they use on who’s going to rank number one or two or three in the map pack. And they’ve really dialed up how close people were. And they really dialed down how many keywords were in the name itself. So it used to be that if you just made sure that the city name and the keyword that you wanted to show up for was in the title of the Google business profile that you would be very likely to show up when people did that search. They dialed that way down and they dialed up how close people were.
Google Maps Tips For Chiropractors
What happened was, you know, because we are healthcare we can not only have listings for our business name, but we can also have listings for for the doctors that work in the business. So what was happening is they were showing, you know, people that were literally like, you know, point one miles away, you know, in my town, at least. In a town where normally I would I would have, you know, like a five mile radius around my practice. That I will be showing up for when people were searching for the keywords that that I wanted to show up for. When they did this proximity update. It was down to like point one in cities it might have been even closer. But what I was doing it was not only just showing the business listings, it was also showing the provider listings.
So there would be listings that like didn’t have a website link to it. They only had about zero maybe less than five reviews. There were just needed it was it was literally only taken into account especially when somebody did chiropractor near me. They were only taking into account how close the person was searching.
So this is why it’s important to be doing all the different things so that when these algorithm updates happen, that you know, your traffic doesn’t drop off the cliff. So like your Google Ad, like in terms of us like our Google Ad performance kind of kept that that traffic steady.
Eventually like I think it was late December, early January when things they kind of dialed it back. But it’s still compared to what it was, you know in fall of 2021. Now it is much more geared towards how close people are.
So again, you can’t really control like where people are searching from when you do want to show up when people are near you. So you’re competing against the people that are very close to your practice. And then you also want to make sure that the Google ads are giving you a better chance of showing up when somebody may be on the other side of town.
The third part is going to be the prominence. So this is going to be how how well are you doing offline? How much are people searching for your name? How often are people clicking through to your website through social media? So Google has all these different signals that it has ways the foot traffic in your in your office.
So if it knows that your office is, let’s say you see 700 people a week, and every other office in town sees 70 people. Well, Google knows where everybody goes because it’s tracking our phones. So if you’re 10 times busier than every other office in town, that’s gonna be a really great prominence signal for you versus the other offices in town.
Also, like how many links are you getting? How many other businesses are linking into you how many, like I said, How many times are people searching for you online? Or how often are they coming in from social media?
So all these other things that you’re doing, this is why you can’t just focus on a single tactic that might be working right now. You have to focus on doing online marketing the right way so that everything is kind of working together. Because all these signals are going back and forth between these platforms.
So what you’re doing over here on Facebook or on YouTube, is still sending signals into into Google to show that you’re, you know, more prominent or relevant than somebody else in town. So these are the three things that Google itself says that it is deciding on who they show over someone else. So you should definitely listen to Google if not mean. So hopefully this was helpful and we’ll see you on the next one.
