Search engine optimisation (SEO) and local SEO is difficult enough to do well with just one location, let alone needing to worry about the complexities involved in having multiple practice locations. Everything you need to do SEO-wise for one location needs to be repeated for all other practice locations.

Not only does that work need to be repeated, it needs to be done in a way that gives each practice location the best chance to rank organically and in local searches (think Google maps). It also needs to leave you room to grow if you open more practice locations in the future.   

On top of all that, you will also need to make sure that all patients are able to navigate around your site easily to make bookings and can contact your individual practices with ease.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? That’s why we’ve put together 5 rank-boosting strategies for multi-location medical practices. Each of these strategies will help make sure you are ranking as high as possible for every one of your practice locations. 

Medical practice multi-location SEO strategies

1. Have a single website for your business

If you own 5 businesses with 5 different names, then you need 5 different websites. If you own 1 business that operates across 5 locations, then you only need one website. 

It might be tempting to use different domain names and have different websites for each practice location but in the medium to long term it’s going to be better to have one site for your business with all practice locations listed there. 

Having a single website that covers all practice locations will give you much better rankings and higher conversions overall. 

Having one single well-designed medical website for all locations allows you to grow the overall SEO authority of your domain name more quickly which helps increase your site rankings over time (having multiple websites weakens that authority and suppresses your rankings). 

Having a single website also helps to grow your brand name in your local area. It’s better for conversions too as all your practice information is right there on one easy-to-navigate website.

2. Location pages for each practice

You’ve got one website for your multi-location practice. So far, so good. Now, you need your individual locations to rank well in Google and other search engines like Bing. To achieve that, you need to create a separate page for each clinic location. 

By separate, we mean having its own unique page and URL, i.e., mypracticewebsite.com.au/chermside/ or mypracticewebsite.com.au/bendigo/.

This gives your individual locations the best chance to rank well as they will all have their own pages, which will be highly relevant when people are searching for a medical practice in your local area. 

You will also need to make sure your location pages have enough high-quality content to:

  • Rank well in search engines
  • Achieve a good conversion rate

Ranking well is great but not enough. You need those pages to convert visitors into new patients. You need them to make a booking or call your practices as possible. 

For ranking purposes, how much content each location page needs depends on how competitive your local area is, however a good starting point is 500 words of unique content per page. This will give you a good baseline to work with and you can add more content if needed.

For conversion purposes, you want to make sure your content is unique to that individual location and of a high quality. The type of content you can put on a location page could be information about the team, individual services offered, details about the location of the practice, contact information and an online booking form.

3. On-page SEO

When Google ranks a page, it’s looking mostly for relevancy. It’s trying to work out whether your page is the most relevant search result when someone searches for a medical practice in your local area.

Many factors go into relevance but on-page SEO optimisation is one of the bigger factors. 

Each of your location pages will need to be on-page SEO optimised. This plays a massive role in your website and location pages ranking well in search engines. 

The most important part of the on-page SEO strategy for your location pages (other than having good quality, relevant content) is going to be their title tags. Google gives a lot of weight to title tags.

For example, if you have a medical centre in Prahran, the title tag for that page could be something like: Medical Centre in Prahran VIC | Your Practice Name 

This shows Google that this page is relevant for search terms including medical centres in Prahran. 

It’s often worthwhile hiring a medical SEO expert to analyse your site, as small SEO tweaks can make big ranking impacts.

4. Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)

Now, you only need one website for your multi-location website but you should have a separate Google Business listing for each separate location. This will allow you to rank locally in Google Maps when people search for a medical practice in your local area.

A free Google Business listing can drive large numbers of new patients to your medical practice. More and more people are clicking on these listings as they often show up first in local Google searches. It’s vital that each of your practice locations has its own well-optimised Google Business listing.

Optimise your individual location Google Business listings by:

  • Ensuring the data you enter exactly matches your business information
  • Ensuring that your practice’s name, address and phone number is correct (NAP – name, address, phone number – is very important for local SEO)
  • Linking back to your website to the relevant practice location page on your website. 

5. Citations & NAP

A citation is any mention of your business online. Your site might be listed in Yelp, Yellow Pages or government directories or websites. Making sure your citations are accurate and up-to-date is an invaluable but often overlooked aspect of local SEO success.

Each of your practice locations should be listed in all major online directories as well as any specific medical directories. It’s important to make sure these directories have your correct NAP (name, address, phone number) as Google does use this information in its ranking algorithms. 

Managing many locations can become quite time consuming and we would recommend you either hire a medical marketing agency to help you with this or use a monthly service like Moz Local to help manage your listings.

While multi-location SEO can be tricky, using the 5 strategies above will put you streets ahead of your competitors with a well-optimised multi-location medical practice.