When you think about your number one goal for running a successful optometry practice, what comes to mind? It’s probably getting a steady stream of appointments to fill your schedule, right? A well-optimized Google Business Profile is one of the most effective ways to reach new patients in your community.
Since you’re an optometrist and not a marketing or Google whiz, we’ll walk you through exactly what a Google Business Profile is, why it’s such a powerful tool for a local business like yours, and offer some helpful tips to optimize your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile right here in this post.
What is Google Business Profile?
A Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free tool that helps optometrists like you and other local business owners manage their online presence on Google Search and Google Maps. Essentially, it allows you to showcase your optometry practice’s important info, helps you connect with customers, and generate leads.
Without a Google Business Profile, your optometry practice won’t show up in that map section that displays on Google when potential patients search things like “eye doctor near me” or “optometrist in [city]”.
Why is a Google Business Profile important for optometrists?
As an optometrist, you rely on patients visiting your physical office to treat them. Studies show that 97% of users primarily learn about local companies online. A Google Business Profile helps potential patients that reside within your area find and visit your practice. Your practice’s complete and well-optimized GBP can benefit your business by:
- Increasing local visibility: As we mentioned, a GBP enables your practice to show up in local search results so patients in your area can find you.
- Driving website traffic and appointments: Your profile will provide the essential information needed to easily navigate to your website or booking link.
- Getting you to the top of the search engine rankings: GBPs and the map pack are positioned above the organic search results on Google’s search engine results page (SERP).
- Building trust and credibility: A complete and accurate profile in a prominent position on Google makes your practice appear more legitimate and professional.
- Helping you get reviews: Current patients will be able to leave their reviews right on your profile for potential patients to read and decide if your practice is right for them.
[Related: 5 Ways to Increase Visibility and Growth for Your Local Business]
Claiming and verifying your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile
Now that we’ve outlined all the benefits this free tool has to offer for your optometry practice, let’s talk about the next steps—claiming and verifying your profile. You can claim (or possibly create if your business is super new) your GBP right here. Once you’ve claimed or created your profile, you’ll be able to do things like:
- Customize and maintain your optometry practice’s information
- Respond to customer reviews
- Add your logo and images of your practice and staff
- Access analytics associated with your profile
The next step in the process is verification, or confirming you are the rightful owner of your optometry practice and have permission to manage it.
This step is important because verified businesses are twice as likely to be considered reputable by users. Because of that increased reputation, a verified Google Business Profile receives 200 monthly interactions and 595 annual calls on average.
Most businesses stop at this point. They claim their profile, verify it, and add the bare minimum of details then rarely come back to it. In fact, research shows that nearly 6 out of 10 companies don’t optimize for local search. You don’t want your optometry practice to be among those numbers, because if you can highlight unique aspects of your business, like specialized services and customer testimonials, you can differentiate your practice from the competition.
[Related: 9 Tips to Generate Organic Visits for Google Business Profile]
Tips for optimizing your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile
To really make your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile work for you, you’ll want to be continually optimizing it. Your GBP isn’t something you can just “set and forget.” You need to maximize all the features that Google Business Profiles has to offer—posting regular updates, adding high-quality photos, engaging with patients through Google Messages—to give your optometry practice an edge over competitors who aren’t as active on their GBPs as they could be. Customers are 70% more likely to visit and 50% more likely to consider purchasing from businesses with a complete Business Profile.
We’re going to go through each section of your practice’s GBP that you’ll want to optimize and offer some practical tips:
1. Name, address, phone number (NAP)
Your optometry practice’s name, address, and phone number should be accurate and consistent everywhere. Your name should appear on your profile exactly as it appears on your website, physical office location, social media, etc. The same goes for your address. For example, if you used “5th Ave.” on one listing, you can’t say “5th Avenue” or “Fifth Ave.” on another. Your contact information like phone number and email address should also be clearly listed and updated on your profile immediately if it should change.
2. Business description
When writing your optometry practice’s business description, you need to keep local SEO in mind while being true to your business and offerings. Give background information like when you started your practice or how long you’ve been practicing, include keywords your potential patients might be using to find you like “we offer quick eye exams in the [city you service] area,” and include any unique services that will set your practice apart from the competition.
3. Business Categories
Google lets you choose one primary business category and up to nine additional business categories for your profile. Choosing the correct categories is crucial, because it’s one of the biggest ranking categories in the Local/Map pack. Google offers around 4,000 categories to choose from and what you choose depends on your individual optometry practice’s offers. To get started, we’d recommend setting your primary category as Optometrist, then choosing options like Eye care center, Ophthalmologist, Ophthalmology clinic, optician, Lasik surgeon, Glasses repair service for your secondary categories. You can also check out your competitors for inspiration.
4. Website URL
This one is a no-brainer. You want to make sure your GBP is optimized to include an accurate URL to your optometry practice’s website homepage so potential patients can get more information about your services and appointment booking. If you really want to drive that appointment booking home and your profile does a good job of outlining your offerings, you might want that URL to drive directly to your booking page. Surveys show this is an effective method, with 45% of companies receiving appointment requests through GMB. Whichever method you choose, make sure your URL is present and always up to date.
5. Updated and accurate business hours
Have you ever shown up to a business only to find it closed when its online hours listed it as open? It can be pretty frustrating, and statistics show that 80% of consumers lose trust in local businesses when they encounter incorrect business information. You don’t want your patients feeling that same frustration and distrust for your optometry practice. That’s why we always recommend that you continually update your business hours within your Google Business Profile. This goes for any changes in regular hours due to holidays, vacations, special occasions, anything that would cause your hours to differ from the norm—update them. Not only will this help you gain trust with your patients, but with Google too. Keeping your profile updated and accurate tells Google you’re an active business and they’ll reward you for it.
6. Fresh and high-quality photos/videos
You may not always need to be updating your business hours to keep your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile fresh, but you can update your photos and videos regularly to build that trust with both patients and Google. We recommend posting photos of both the interior and exterior of your optometry practice along with photos of you (the doctor), and your staff. As for videos, customer testimonials (with permission of course), ask me anything sessions around eye exams, glasses fittings, contact lenses, etc., and office tours are solid ideas.
7. Actively manage your reviews
Surveys show that 83% of people are using Google to find business reviews. This just goes to show how much potential patients rely on what others are saying about your optometry practice before they decide to call and make an appointment. Not only this, but Google considers the amount and diversity of reviews when ranking businesses. To optimize your Google reviews, you should be actively managing them by requesting new reviews from patients and responding to all reviews left on your Google profile.
[Related: How to ask Your Customers for Reviews]
8. List your services
The services your optometry practice offers can set you apart from the competition, especially if they’re unique or specialized. If you offer eye exams, glasses fitting and repair, glaucoma or cataract treatment, make the extra effort to list them out on your Google Business Profile.
9. Manage the Q&A section
The Q&A section on Google Business Profile allows users to ask and answer questions about your optometry practice, but it also allows you as the business owner to answer questions or add your own FAQs. We highly recommend doing this as part of your optimization process. You’ll build trust with potential patients by providing information about your practice without any extra clicks and those FAQs are a goldmine for placing SEO-rich keywords in your profile.
10. Utilize Google Posts
Google Business Profile also offers a section specifically for your optometry practice to publish updates, offers, events, and service highlights right on Google Search and Maps. Because they give your customers the latest information on your business right from the initial search, we recommend optimizing your profile by utilizing this posting feature just as you would your social media profiles. Running a new patient promotion? Post it on your profile. Added a new designer to your eyewear selections? Post it. Updated your waiting room? You guessed it, post! Your audience will love staying informed and Google will love seeing new activity on your profile.
11. Link social media accounts
Lastly, our final tip for optimizing your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile is to link your social media accounts in your profile. This is as easy as navigating to the edit profile icon on your profile, scrolling to “social profiles”, clicking add, and then selecting the profiles you want to add before pasting in the corresponding URLs. We’d definitely recommend at least adding your Facebook and Instagram profiles, but YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok are also great if you have them. Adding your socials to your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile can help enhance your visibility, improve your SEO, and build trust with potential patients.
How Hibu can enhance your optometry practice’s digital marketing
Claiming, verifying, and fully optimizing your optometry practice’s Google Business Profile is just one way you can stay ahead of the competition and keep your schedule full of patients. Hibu offers AI-powered digital marketing solutions for optometrists that can not only help you dominate the search results like we’ve been discussing but can also enhance your online reputation and automatically send patient emails and texts, to save you both time and money.
If you’re interested in the ways Hibu can help your optometry practice grow, call us at 877-237-6120 or complete our short Get Started form to book a free consultation with a digital marketing expert.
