The summer months bring an uptick in travel and an increase in “unplanned” care needs, with travelers searching locally for urgent care, sports physicals, and pharmacies. In this week’s episode, our CEO, Jenny Bristow, provides strategies for optimizing during the summer months to capture “near me” searches from individuals and build trust with those who may not be familiar with your organization.
Episode Notes
Strategies for building a strong foundation of organic SEO:
Start with the basics, ensuring your Google Business is up to date with accurate hours for the summer months. Then optimize your organic presence for local searches, by creating local hyper-local landing pages and optimizing them for the conversational, long-tail searches that people are likely to type into their phones.
How to leverage paid search for a precision strike:
If your area allows, increase bids around airports, train stations, or popular resort clusters to capture travelers through those areas. Utilize local inventory ads to show the real-time availability of common summer needs, like EpiPens. Consider call-only ads to capture people with minor crises who want to talk to a real person rather than spending time browsing a website.
Tips for optimizing for AI (GEO & AI Agents):
AI models now summarize the “best” local options, using website’s structured schema.org data, that clearly defines location, services, and credentials. Be sure to maintain a positive online reputation, as AI models increasingly pull from sentiment in reviews. Clearly state insurance acceptant, wait times, and out-of-state policies to assist potential patients and feed accurate data to AI platforms.
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m excited to come to you today to give you some food for thought. As you’re thinking about the upcoming summer months, I want to encourage you to have it be a “near me” kind of summer.
So most marketers are thinking about going into vacation mode, perhaps excited about your own vacation, but people are also entering your service area while they are going on vacation. So are you currently optimizing your searches online through organic, paid, and AI to make sure that you are showing up appropriately for all of those “near me” types of searches?
So today that’s what we’re going to cover. I’m going to break down those three different categories and give you some food for thought and things that you can go back and chat with your team about. Make sure you’re really maximizing all of those opportunities. So first let’s talk about organic SEO. We’re going to kind of break out AI optimization and organic SEO separately.
Just because the recommendations are going to be a little bit different for each area. So with organic SEO, the first thing that you want to think about is really creating or optimizing some hyper-local landing pages. So don’t just have one page for urgent care, perhaps have one for urgent care near “beach name” or near “tourist town name”.
Really think about those areas of how people and why people are entering your service area for their summer vacations, and making sure that you’re creating landing pages that cater to those audiences. Next, think about your Google Business Profile hygiene. Are you making sure that open now hours are accurate, which is really critical for summer holidays? And then also make sure that you use that “post” feature to highlight summer specific services like sunstroke treatment or travel vaccinations.
And then finally, make sure that your content on those landing pages and on your service pages are really optimizing for natural language optimization. So people are asking their phones, where can I get stitches fixed near me? Or where can I get stitches removed or whatever? Right? Make sure that you’re optimizing for those long tail conversational queries rather than lactation repair laceration repair. Right?
Now let’s talk about paid search. This is what we think of as the precision strike. You were 100% making sure that you are more likely to show up for all of those phrases. The first is, if your state allows it, make sure that you are geofencing travel hubs. So make sure that you have ads targeting airports, train stations, popular resort clusters.
Again, there’s a little bit of compliance and privacy concern here because some states, like Texas, do not allow tactics like geofencing. So make sure you understand what your state’s local laws are around that. And if you’re not allowed to do geofencing, you can still do broader geo targeting that is at the county or city level. So make sure that you’re targeting those folks.
And then also make sure that you use call only ads for some of those phrases, because when someone’s in a minor crisis, they aren’t going to click to your home page. They’re going to look at your hours, find the address, or pick up the phone and call. And then finally, make sure that you use local inventory ads, because if you have retail clinics or pharmacies, you can show the real time availability for common summer needs like EpiPens.
And then finally, let’s talk about AI optimization. And for this we’re thinking about both GEO and AI agents. So first make sure that you’re optimizing for those search generative experiences. So Gemini and other platforms summarize the best local options. So if somebody asks ChatGPT or Gemini hey, where’s the best urgent care near me? They are aggregating that data using your site’s structured data.
So your schema.org that clearly defines your location services and credentials. So make sure that that is up to date on your website. And then go kind of big picture for your digital footprint and do a vibe check on yourself. What are your reviews like? I assure you that if somebody is new to your service area and they do not have brand loyalty, if you have a two star review for one of your urgent cares, they are not going to be choosing that location.
So all the work that you do can really be eroded quickly. If you have a bunch of negative reviews available. And then finally make sure that you’re addressing things like out of state insurance or current wait times for clinics, and making sure that you’re incorporating that as much as possible to be able to feed the AI platforms that information.
So that way they can serve it to folks that are asking. And also, if a user goes to be able to understand what kind of insurance that you accept, because that could be a deal breaker for them, that it’s really easy to find. So again, while we always hope to be found for “near me” searches, perhaps for those that are not yet brand loyal to us, summer and summertime travel is an opportunity to really flex those muscles.
So I really encourage you to think about these three different opportunities of ways that you can turn the dial up a little bit, and then do not forget to have Search Console and an AI tool measurement tool in place to be able to understand what potential lift you’re receiving from this work. Because if you do a big push and you’re successful over the summer, you want to be able to have that data as a case study, to be able to share that back out with your marketing team, to be able to really drive those, drive excitement around how you are able to meet patients where they are.
So that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. I hope it gave you a little bit of food for thought and things that you can tackle. If you found this episode helpful, please give us some stars. Share this with a colleague that you think may find the information helpful, and be sure to tune in again next week where we will tackle another hot topic in healthcare marketing.
Have a great day! Cheers!
