With a growing industry, it’s important for optometrists to know how to help their practices stand out from the crowd. Beyond great customer service and excellent eye care, practices can use online marketing tactics to help get their businesses noticed. Longtail Pro, a keyword-expertise website, shared a few changes that optometrists can make to their online presence that can make all the difference.

Have a Professional-Looking Website

In today’s digital age, even word-of-mouth suggestions are researched online before checking it out in person. The first step is making sure you have a website for your practice, then you should be sure it’s up-to-date and simple to use, making a good first impression. EyePromise® offers a practice website toolkit for our partners to help them create a space specifically for EyePromise nutraceutical information for patients.

Claim Yourself as a Business with Online Resources

Potential patients will search for “optometrists” or “eye doctors near me,” and you want to at least have the chance of showing up in that search. By registering your business with Google and other search engines and the like, potential patients can start gaining awareness of your practice. VerticalResponse listed its top review, search, and information sites that the experts suggest you be a part of:

• Google business
• Bing
• Yahoo
• Yelp
• MerchantCircle
• Yellow Pages
• White Pages
• YellowBot
• Manta
• Citysearch
• MapQuest
• local.com
• Foursquare
• DexKnows
• The Business Journals
• Angie’s List

Becoming a member of sites like these allows your practice to have a full profile when people search for things like “optometrists near me.” They also allow you to respond to reviews, add photos of your office, and include accurate office hours and contact information.

Give Potential Patients an Information Center

When potential patients search the web, they usually have more questions than “where’s the nearest OD to me?” Preemptively filling your site (blog, different tabs, FAQs, etc.) with the answer to these questions can put your practice in their minds before they even want to find an eye doctor. Doing this also helps establish you and your practice as an expert and resource for further information. Use search engine “auto-fills” and keyword research to figure out what people are searching for, then create content around that topic. While the keyword research process can appear overwhelming, don’t let it make you nervous. Even seasoned content researchers had to start somewhere. There are a number of tools and resources available to guide you, including this recent article published by Wordstream chock full of helpful information.

Turn Website Visitors into Patients

Having a ton of website traffic is great, but those virtual visits aren’t filling your practice. After creating content that’s based on what patients are searching for, you can build a list of contacts to email directly and encourage to visit your practice. Offer items like a checklist, report, coupons, or a free exam in exchange for their email and other contact information. For our partners, EyePromise has created a series of emails to engage patients and encourage them to schedule their regular eye exams. A list of current customers is a great way to keep your practice top of mind, even between yearly visits. Doing any or all of these will not guarantee that patients will start flocking into your practice, but it will help give you the jump on the competition. This list may seem comprehensive and daunting, but it’s simply broken down into the following steps:

1. Complete your online business profiles.
2. Add content to your website that focuses on common patient questions/problems.
3. Exchange content, coupons, etc. for contact information.