Posted on March 24, 2014

Building a Location Page for Your Practice

As the importance of local search continues to grow in 2014, it is more important to build a compatible relationship between an organic website and a business’ local profile(s). These independent entities compliment and support each other and the relationship needs to be as healthy as possible. One of the rather important ways to accomplish this is to build an in-depth and robust location page.

A location page should contain the basic information of name, address and phone number for each of the locations of your practice, yet there is more to consider than just the basics. Below is a listing of seven items or categories that your practice should consider adding.

1. A brief description of the practice’s intent (no more than three sentences).

A brief statement of a practice’s goals is important to beginning a locations page. This establishes the tone and desired intent of the practice straight away.

2. A listing or a few sentences describing the specific services and procedures offered at the specific location.

Not only does this tell prospective patients what the practice does and offers for individual services, but it also reinforces key words for localized searches. For example “LASIK Boston” will be likelier found as the locations page will have the address in Boston as well as a description that LASIK is performed by the practice.

3. A listing or a few sentences describing the surrounding towns/cities/service area.

It is becoming harder and harder for a brick and mortar business to rank for a city it is not physically located in. Reviews definitely assist in this area, but you will want to make sure that you do everything you can to rank for the widest area you possibly can. Listing the surrounding cities and counties you service will provide a greater opportunity for ranking in nearby locations.

4. A listing of the doctors and/or professionals that operate out of the specific location.

Listing the doctors and professionals that operate out of a specific location assists those that are searching for a particular doctor. Often a doctor is the reason a search is being performed in the first place, and while attention to individual doctors should not override the reputation of the practice, people do search for doctors by name.

5. Directions

Directions are an all important aspect to display on your website and there is no place more perfect than the locations page itself. There are a few different options on how to display the directions. You can embed clickable driving directions, a module to enter your address and then receive directions, or spell out the directions from nearby key locations (North, South, East, and West for example),

6. An embedded map

Having an embedded map provides a visual representation of your surroundings demonstrating that you are a part of your community and hence, that you are local. And that of course is the point; you want to show that you are a local business.

7. Office Hours, Local Phone number, Fax number, Address (matching exactly anywhere else the address appears)

These are basic pieces of information that any locations page should contain. Without this most basic information it will be difficult for prospective clients to find you and for you to rank on any local basis.