Online Marketing Services for Medical Practices and Doctors

Looking in-depth as to how the backlinks and locations can grow your business.

As the name suggests, the Local Citations and Backlinks team focuses on two key segments: They are creating backlinks and location citations related to listings and profiles.

What are the key differences between the local citations and backlinks teams and their work?

Backlinks are created using snippets of information about your business/practice. This information is submitted with a link pointing back to the home page or other specific pages on your website.
Local citations are created for the website as a whole and point back to the website's home page. Since local citations can contain more information (e.g., a description of the business, a list of key services/treatments, contact information, etc.), they can even be considered a mini website.
Backlinks specifically improve the strength (in terms of SEO) of individual pages, while local citations help strengthen the overall website in terms of SEO. Along with other factors, if properly optimized, local citations can rank for selected keywords and, in some cases, could even outrank the website in search engines.

How do we submit and track backlinks?

The team's goal for backlinks is to get one or more backlinks pointing back to each of your service/procedure pages. If we had a magic wand, we would like 100% of your website pages to have at least one backlink pointing back to it.

It would be easy to blindly submit dozens or hundreds of backlinks and call it a day, but we strive for quality over quantity. This is why we focus on identifying sites that allow a backlink to be submitted and then filter out sites that do not pass our selection criteria (secure, pages indexed in Google, relevancy, Google Lighthouse evaluation). Like everything else, we do this all manually.

Once a backlink is submitted, it does not mean it will be published or recognized by Google. We need to follow up with the website admins to get it approved and published. Even after it's published, we must wait for Google to recognize and list the backlink in Google Search Console's backlinks reporting tool.

What this means is that unless Google recognizes the backlink, we don't count it.

To put this in perspective, consider the following example; we submit 100 backlinks; after following up with the site admins, only 30 backlinks get published. A month later, Google may recognize only 10 of those backlinks. Several weeks later, Google may recognize another five backlinks but ignore the rest. So, 30 backlinks are published live, but Google recognized only 15.

This is another reason we don't use third-party reporting tools. In the above example, a third-party report could see all 30 backlinks, but Google only sees 15. At the end of the day, what Google sees is what matters.

Finally, the team also routinely checks for bad backlinks and removes them. How can a backlink turn bad? A site that hosts a backlink can be mismanaged, spammed, or blacklisted in terms of SEO, and then any backlinks coming from that website are considered as bad. So, the team consistently looks for and removes bad backlinks.

Local Citations is all about creating new listings for your practice

How do we build Local Citations?

The second focus of the team is to create local citation-related profiles and listings. Since there are different types of local citations, below are the types of local citations that we focus on creating for your business/practice:

Local Data Aggregators - These companies gather data on local businesses and then sell or distribute that data to a network of local search engines, third-party directories, mapping services, etc. Creating a listing on an LDA can exponentially expand the reach of your business/practice and help maintain a consistent NAP. However, making a direct submission to any of these LDAs is extremely difficult, and even those that allow submissions require months of follow-up and coordination to get approved.
Major Directories and Important Platforms - Key local business listings can also be built on popular platforms, which include social and reputation-related platforms. Yes, key social media and online reputation-related profiles are created and maintained by the relevant team, but the local citations team creates other profiles that are not considered mainstream.
Geo/Industry-Specific Platforms - In addition to building local business listings on mainstream platforms that serve all industries or different locations, we seek to build listings on local websites that are specific to your industry.
Unstructured Citations - Any page outside your website that lists a reference to your business/practice and your business information is considered an unstructured citation. It is important to note that not many websites allow these types of submissions. Think of how Yelp or Google My Business Listing lists your business information and compare it with an external site listing the same business information within a few paragraphs. It is important to note that not many websites allow these types of submissions.

Note:

The team would start building local citations and backlinks only in the marketing stage.

What Our Clients Say ?

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As always, we appreciate your input and help you have given us so far. We have seen more new patients calling us who found us on Google, visited our site, liked the layout and what they saw, and decided to call. Some even from across town, which is about 20 miles. So you and your team are doing a GREAT job !!

- Dr. Doug B

We just finished designing our second website with Ekwa and we love it! Everyone works very well together and any questions we have are answered thoroughly. The teams have so much knowledge to share with us, making for a very positive experience.

- Dr. Justin S

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Local Citations & Backlinks