How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing for MORE LEADS | Podcast Ep. 285

Foreign.

Hello and welcome to the Evidence Based Chiropractor. I AM your host, Dr. Jeff Langmaid. On today's episode we are doing a deep dive on Google My Business. We're going to break down the three action steps that people can take when they visit your listing. Three optimization tips that you can utilize to to get more traffic and conversions from your listing. We're also gonna break down a lot of the stats of what we're seeing behind the scenes at the Smart Chiropractor so you can gauge how you're doing overall and really share why this is probably the most important. I'm gonna say new channel. I think email is still the most important marketing channel you can have. Email automation. But I wanna break down why Google My business is probably the most important new channel that you need to ensure that you are optimized for the the numbers are probably gonna knock you over, so stay tuned.

We'll go through all that and more.

On today's episode before we get started. The Smart Chiropractor has open enrollment going on right now. You can Visit the smart chiropractor.com we.

Want to help you market better. We have Google My Business auto posting built in. The Smart Chiropractor we have all of the monthly campaigns, weekly topics, daily post automated through the most popular channels. Your Facebook gets updated a couple times a day. Your Instagram will get updated a couple times a day. YouTube can get upd. Google My Business can get updated. The full email automation, all the campaigns. It's all personalized. We make it super easy. Website opt ins a huge area that I want to talk more about in the coming weeks. And streaming video, it sounds like a lot, but it's not complicated. We do all the work for you to ensure that you market your practice better. Right now open enrollment's going on which means we have the best pricing available. Our 500 setup fee is not there and we have three awesome bonuses. An upgraded ticket to access our clinical conference coming up, a Smart Chiropractor T shirt and a pack of optimization guides. A lot of information right there. But check out the Smart Chiropractor. If you listen to this podcast, you like what I'm up to and what I'm doing, I'm going to encourage you. Do a demo. Get started. We have a satisfaction guarantee. Head over to the smart chiropractor.com right now. But as I said at the top, we are talking gmb Google My Business on today's episode and the reason that this has come into our radar. I guess you'd say is that about a year ago we saw a lot of action on Google My Business. We saw a lot of docs talking about it, we saw a lot of docs starting to get interested in it as a channel that was driving significant patient volume into their practice. So we started to look at how do we bring this into what we do at the smart chiropractor. And we have, and it's been an eye opening experience because I can tell you it is much more. We thought maybe a grain of sand on a beach and we walked up and there's a whole beach, right. So there is so much opportunity here that, that it's substantial. Now if you think about, if you're not familiar with Google My business, it's a listing. When somebody types in chiropractor near me. When somebody types into Google your name, your practice name, whatever it might be, there's a variety of things that they could type in and you'll see a Google My business listing pop up. That listing is for you and your business. It's not a website, it just lives on Google. But it gives the pertinent information for somebody to theoretically make what I'm gonna call buying decision on. What does that mean? Well, there are three primary actions that somebody can take from a Google My business listing. That is call, which is sweet because over 50% of traffic is mobile now. And you can touch your phone and call, which is super sweet. You can visit the website, click to visit your website, or you can click for a direction request. So of course Google has your website listed, they have all of your practice address listed and they have your phone number and amongst pictures and some other things in the name. So somebody can either click to call, talk about hot lead. Somebody who's searching chiropractor near me, clicking on a phone number and calling super hot. Somebody could click and visit your website. Now this is where website conversions come in. So important somebody visits your website. Question I have for you is are you collecting their email? Do you have a pop up box, a lead magnet, so to speak, that collects people's email that visit your website. If not you, you're missing out. So check out the smart chiropractor. And the third action they could take is a direction request. So request. Of course they're in Google, right? So go to Google Maps and they could figure out how to get to your practice. So those are the three primary actions that somebody can take on your Google My business listing. Now based upon those actions, you could probably already start to understand why this is so important, those are high intent actions. Google has told us that over just about 50% of the traffic on Google has local intent, which is absolutely incredible. There's nearly 4 billion searches on Google each and every day. So to think that 2 billion of those are locally oriented with local intent is opportunity. And we're going to see the numbers showcase that as time goes on here. But that's substantial. And we also know that 50% of web traffic roughly is mobile at this point, not desktop. So the ability for somebody to click and call your front desk, that, that's impactful as you could probably imagine. Click and visit your website. Well, if you have your website set up properly and having a website's one thing, collecting emails, your website probably gets thousand visitors, 500 visitors a month. If you don't have an email collection system, a pop up box, you're just missing out on opportunity every single month. And that compounds over time, which is why we do that and tie it into our email system with the smart chiropractor so that all of that follow up is automated. And then of course the direction request as well. Perhaps somebody's already scheduled if they're clicking the direction request, but maybe not, maybe they're going to cruise over to the office, walk in and see what's going on. So all three of those actions on your Google My business listing have super high intent. So you can see why this is so critically important for, for you to have your stuff together. So let's dive into some of the numbers then I want to dive in to some of the tips as we've seen them. So I pulled a report from our smart chiropractor members. I've shared this online and I'm happy to share it again as well. And this is what's called the Google My business leads report. So it aggregates the data for the smart chiropractor members. Google My business listings, the one that we're doing the auto posting for, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. And this is over the last previous 30 days literally to today. And what we saw is that the Google My business listings had a lead generation total leads of 9,423. It was over a 30 day period, 9,000 total leads, 2,972 phone calls, that's, that's literally should be 2,972 new patients into these practices. 3,929 website clicks, clicks to the website and 2,522 direction requests. So the total leads are just those three things added up the number of phone calls, website clicks and directions. So about 9,500 total leads. About 3,000 of them were phone calls, 4,000 were website clicks, and 2,500 were direction requests. Now that is absolutely incredible. I mean, that floors me. The first time I opened up this report a couple months back, I nearly my, you know, fell on the floor. I mean it's, this is an insane amount of action and traffic. And let's break that down by practice. So this is the average practice. If we take these numbers divided by the practices, et cetera, that we've set up the auto posting for, here's what those numbers come out to be. And these are super meaningful. So I want you to take these numbers to heart and when we get into the tips section to really understand, hey, these tips and optimization strategies are super important. So total leads. The average doctor that we work with had 165 total leads in the last 30 days from Google, my business. That's a lot. They had 52 phone calls that literally should be 52 new patients coming in the front door. They had 69 website visits and 44 requests for directions. That's per office on average for us. For every smart chiropractor doctor that has auto posting enabled over the last 3:30 days, again, over 50 calls on average to the front desk. 70 website visits and 44 requests for directions. That is absolutely incredible. I come back and I say, how many new patients did you have in your practice last month? If it's 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Heck, even if it's 15, man, you really need to take to heart the tips that I'm going to share, the optimization strategies because these are real numbers of what I'm talking about. I'm happy to share it. If you want to hit me up jeff@the evidencebasedchiropractor.com, i'll send you a screen grab so you can see it for yourself. But these are impactful numbers that can really change your practice. And that is, that's exciting, right? When we see Google my business listings generating this much activity, we know that there's so much gravity there, right? There is. Man, talk about opportunity. And if you're not optimized, you're missing that opportunity. So let's dive into some of the optimization steps because these are the action steps that I'm gonna encourage you to take literally today so that you can start achieving some of these numbers as well. 50 phone calls a month, Just that. I mean, forget even about the website visits for a moment. Forget about the direction requests. 50 phone calls a month. These are people calling the front desk because they're looking for a chiropractor. So even if by some crazy circumstance, you know, only 50% of those people became patients, that's 25 new patients in a month into a practice for 90% of practices out there, maybe 90 of practices, that's more than they do currently. So incredibly impactful and super, super important. So let's dive into the three tips that we've sort of outlined. So as we've gone through this process, we've learned a lot, right? So we came into this pretty newbies to Google my business listings. We had our own for our businesses. The evidence based chiropractor had one, Smart chiropractor had one. We work with a couple private clients where we've worked on them, but not really at scale, but this scale and this data and these numbers really enabled us to drill down and say, okay, what are these three most important things that every doc out there has to do if they want to maximize their conversion, their opportunity, their new patient lead generation? However you want to define that from their Google my business listing, Here are those three things. Number one is verify and confirm your information. Number two is update your pictures. And number three is post at least one time per week. I want to break each one of those down so you understand the action steps to take and why it's so important. We'll start with verify and confirm your information. This might sound obvious, but I'll state it either way. I'll state the obvious. If you have the wrong phone number, the wrong website, or the wrong address, all three of the calls to action are not going to be working for you, right? Those three call to action are click to call your front desk, click to visit your website, or click to have a request for directions. So you want to make sure it's tip number one optimization. Verify and confirm your information. If your phone number is in there incorrectly, you have phone calls going to nowhere. If your website is in there incorrectly, then you're gonna have people visiting websites to know where. And clearly if your address is wrong, good luck getting somebody to your practice. So get in there and verify that information. The other thing is keep a keen eye on some of that stuff. Sometimes somebody sets up their information in Google my business and maybe you put your cell phone or maybe you put a, you might have put a phone number that might not be the best phone number. So double check the phone number. If there's an extension, whatever it might be, make sure that the calls are getting routed to the right place and the. And the end to the phone number that's being answered the most amount of the day, right? So you want to make sure that if you have multiple extensions, you have it going to the right extension. You want to make sure you have it going to the right person so the phone number is not just check for errors. Get it to the right place. Website the same way, if you have a website that's highly developed, you might want to put a specific landing page in that website area. If not, just make sure that the website is correct and then directions as well. Make sure. Sometimes Google address listings get a little weird. And Google's done an incredible job pretty much mapping the whole world. But sometimes there can be little discrepancies, and those discrepancies can limit somebody's ability to find your practice. I've seen it before, especially when they hit directions and then the directions get all weird and it goes to a crazy place. And, you know, if it looks confusing, confusion kills conversion. You want to make sure you have it be as streamlined as possible. So tip number one, get in there and verify and confirm your info. Tip number two is update your pictures. So Google listings allow you to have some nice pictures. Make sure that your pictures are flattering. So this is an area I think, of big concern in many guy writing practices. You know, I'll go to the listing and the picture is just like, I don't know, like, do you want to, like, do I want to go there? Do you want to go there? Take a look at your own listing and ask yourself the honest question, would I be jazzed about going into this practice? If the answer from the picture perspective is anything but yes. Take some new pictures. If you don't feel so you can take pictures, clean things up, get some bright lighting going on. Use your iPhone, take some pictures. You don't have to have them professionally shot, but you should have them look enticing. If you don't shoot pictures very well, you're like, oh, my gosh, I don't really know how to do this. Ask a front desk staff member. Ask a niece or a nephew. Ask a spouse. Ask a child, a grandchild, I don't know, ask somebody else. You probably have somebody that takes really cool pictures on Instagram within your circle of influence. Ask them to take a few pictures of the practice for you and get some. Upload some nice pictures. So when somebody visits your listing, that's one of the things that they first look for is what does this place look like your book will be judged by its cover. So take some nice pictures. They don't need to be super expensive or professional, but make sure that they look nice. So tip number two is update those pictures. That helps conversion. Tip number three is post at least one time per week. Almost nobody out there knows, especially chiropractors. I'm going to say that you can post to your Google My business listing. Yes, Google loves content. What is this going to do? It's going to help you get seen more often. It's going to help more people understand who you are and what you're about. It's going to build your no trust and like factor and it's ultimately going to help you rank higher by what we know. So you have to post at least one time per week if you want to be competitive and show up towards the top. And on mobile these are called updates. If you look at your listing, you click updates. If you're on desktop, you just scroll down below the practice information and you'll see those posts listed there. Now there's a couple primary post types. There's four primary post types of Google My business what's new Events, offers and products. Pretty self explanatory. What's new is what's new in the practice. Events are events coming up, offers are any offers you have going on and products are any new products. So you can see that these are all again high call to action, high intent type posts. This is what we do at the Smart Chiropractor. This is where we found our sweet spot. I don't think and nobody else in my understanding within the chiropractic profession is offering this sort of posting. I don't even know anybody to be honest with you, outside in other healthcare professions. So this is like cutting edge. If you want to take advantage of what's out there, visit this again. We have open enrollment going on right now, so visit the Smart Chiropractor. We'll get you hooked up with Google My Business auto posting. Because when you post what's new? When you post an offer, when you post a product update, when you post an event, we really focus on the what's new. It keeps your listing fresh. So from a consumer, somebody that's visiting chiropractic near me and they see that there's active post, it's like a Facebook page. Does this thing look like a deserted island or does it look like there's activity? So when there's activity and it looks like there's activity, more likely to convert and it helps Google understand who you are, what you're about and, and we'll help you rank higher. Which gets back to tying into our stats and data, tying in to that 165 leads a month for every office that we work with. Tying into that 52 phone calls to the front desk, nearly 70 web visits, 69 in 45 requests for directions. So these are the three things you really want to keep in mind. Verify and confirm that information, update those pictures and post at least one time per week. I know 99.9% of chiropractors do not have the time or the expertise to really post and stay consistent one time per week. That's cool. There's no issue with that whatsoever. But reach out and get help where you can. And with the smart chiropractor, I hope you can tell we're passionate about this stuff. We geek out on this stuff. We learn and we do it at scale. And that scale can help you. So open enrollment's going on right now. Check it out@thesmartchiropractor.com and as we come to a close, if you're going to be out of the practice, your practice at all, you don't close the doors, use cairofficecoverage.com Check us out at Cairo Matchmakers or cairofficecoverage.Com youm can go to either of those places and we can service you. Whether you're looking to hire a dc, hire a CA or whether you're looking for temporary relief coverage, head over to Cairo Matchmakers, check out what we have going on. Or if you're listening to this and you're a student or new doc or removed and your talent right, you're saying, man, I'm looking for my next great opportunity. Please head over to those websites as well. Email us, let us know what's up. We are always looking for awesome talent. We have over 100 jobs open right now across the country and I think you'll be very satisfied to see our salary requirements, et cetera. So check out cairomatchmakers.com have a fantastic week in practice and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Evidence of Based Chiropractor. If you want to grow your practice, come back for next week's episode. If you want to grow faster, visit the evidence based chiropractor.com and join our MD Marketing membership today.