If you Google your practice name, your Google My Business profile is the panel of information and photos that typically comes up on the right side of your screen. The profile is free, easy to edit and packed with features that can help patients learn about your practice and services. Having a well-optimised Google My Business profile is also consistently listed as a top local search ranking factor, making it a great place to spend a few minutes of your time.

Optimising your Google My Business profile may sound complicated, but it’s actually quite simple and user-friendly. If you know that you have access to your Google My Business profile, log into it at business.google.com or if you’re not sure how to get into your profile, follow these instructions from Google.

Add as much information about your practice as possible, complete with descriptions of your credentials, care philosophy, services and plenty of attractive photos, which are often the most-viewed part of your profile when a patient is searching for a dentist. If your office has multiple practitioners, Google allows for each doctor to have their own Google My Business profile as well, and I recommend creating and maintaining one for each of the doctors at the practice so long as each profile links to the practice’s website and includes the practice’s phone number.

Patient reviews are one of the simplest and most powerful positive signals you can send to search engines according to the Local Search Ranking Factors study. The quality, quantity and pace at which your practice collects new reviews alI affect your practice’s local search visibility. I’ve seen practices surge in search results after simply ramping up their review collection efforts, yet too many practices lack a strategy to gain reviews where they matter most.

When it comes to asking for reviews, there are two common mistakes that practices make:

First, doctors are sometimes uncomfortable with asking for reviews or too concerned about the potential for negative feedback to be posted online, so they don’t ask for any at all. While a lot of us can empathise with this concern, not collecting reviews is hurting the practice far more than the rare negative review that most practitioners will eventually have to handle with care. Lost visibility is more harmful than poor feedback, especially when you consider that the average rating for a business on Google is overwhelmingly positive, at 4.42 stars, and most dentists deliver care that’s far above the average!

Second, many offices that do actively ask patients for reviews do so with automated systems in a patient recare system like SolutionReach or Revenuewell. While the intention here is good, reviews collected in these systems are usually routed to a microsite for the practice rather than to Google, where they help the practice’s search visibility most. Use your downtime to automate the process of collecting reviews, ensuring that you’ll keep gaining a steady stream of reviews long after you’re back at the office.

Now especially, people are receptive to ways they can help their favourite local businesses weather the crisis. Consider sending patients a note to ask for a review now. Let them know that it’s one of the simplest ways they can help your practice.

The number and quality of links to a website is another of the most important ranking factors in local search. Each link to your website is like a little vote of confidence in the quality of your information or services. Generally, the practices with the most high-quality links receive the most visibility when patients search Google for a dentist.

While building quality links is difficult and time-consuming, there are a few quick and easy ways you can gain some important and valuable links for your website:

First, make sure that your ADA profile links to your website. Each profile on the ADA Find a Dentist website has a field for your website address. Making sure that field includes your website address is an easy way to get a link from a high-authority website in dentistry.

Don’t stop there. Do you belong to other professional associations or organisations? Do you have a profile on their website too? If so, log into it and make sure your information is accurate. If the profile asks for your website, filling it out will likely result in yet another link for your website. Rinse and repeat!

Are you a member of your local chamber of commerce? Have you sponsored a local event recently? Are you an Invisalign provider or does your office offer patient financing with Care Credit or a membership plan with Kleer? If you take some time to think about it and spend a few more minutes finding your profiles and ensuring they include a website link to your practice, it’s likely you’ll be able to score a handful of links that will help improve your search engine visibility.