[00:00:00] Hey, it's Zach Dykes and James at HIP Creative and today we're going to talk orthodontics or orthodontist in your city, how to rank number one. So James, I'll kick it over to you. Everybody wants to know, we get asked all the time, how do I rank number one? So how do you do it in a way that not only gets you there today, but you can continue to stay in that place? That is probably one of the
[00:00:28] most popular questions is how do I rank number one for this term in my city? And the truth is it starts with on page, right? The website and also the Google Business Profile itself, the optimization on there. Really, I think what gets missed is how to actually implement that the correct way. And the correct way is, number one, starting with a comprehensive audit of your live site now. And we
[00:00:57] want to find the gaps and a competitive analysis, finding the gaps of who is number one, right? First of all, and what do they have on their site and on their Google Business that we're missing? And we want to fill that gap. That's the first step. That's for the on-page optimization. Then the next step is also with the competitive analysis and depending on where your city is, if it's a big city, if it's very competitive, is the authority of the site. And how we're going to build that is with on-page topical
[00:01:26] authority and then off-page link building. And that's really the secret sauce is link building. I know people hear about this, but I think most people don't know how to implement that the correct way. Right. But that is exactly where the power is going to get built over to your site. For an example, if you are an orthodontist in Omaha, right? And you want to be number one orthodontist in Omaha, first place starting off
[00:01:53] building your citations. So your business listing directories, you know, everyone knows the top ones like Apple Maps, Yelp. But beyond that, there's probably other local directories that you can jump on, maybe Yellow Book, Brown Book, right? Getting a good signal and a link over from those citation platforms over to your site, making sure your name, address, phone number lines up with your Google business, right? Optimizing for that. And then taking it to the next level would be press release
[00:02:20] campaigns, whether they're local press release campaigns in Omaha or even just some type of news outlet where we know, okay, this has good authoritative metrics, these sites, and we're getting optimizations on those sites and links back over to it. And then to take it to the next tier would be if we can get links from very specific sites like dentaltown.com, right? Very relevant, industry
[00:02:46] relevant, and we're getting specific strategic content placed on those sites linking back over to the website. And that's going to build up authority. Definitely. Yeah. For local, I think we've seen Chamber of Commerce a lot. Yep. Reaching out to that, they'll do like ribbon cutting ceremony if you're a startup or, you know, there's different kind of JVs or even like pay to play where you can, you can get
[00:03:10] a backlink and even featured articles. So it is more of like a advertorial instead of just getting a link, you know, it feels real and it's actually beneficial for the community. Yep. So let's kind of go through each one. You talked about them a little bit, but on page, what page do I want to rank specifically? Do I want my homepage to rank for Omaha, Nebraska, or do I want a location page to rank? How's that
[00:03:37] work? Great question. It depends on how many locations you have. Okay. So if you have multiple locations and they're within Omaha, our strategy would be, okay, how can we optimize the homepage for Omaha, like the top hub and then let the locations be location neighborhood pages that live under Omaha? Okay. We'll get strong internal links from those locations over to the homepage and we would build a lot of authority to that homepage. And yes, the goal would be to make sure that we rank that homepage.
[00:04:07] However, if you're just a single location or if you have locations that aren't close to Omaha, right? We see this sometimes too. It wouldn't make sense to try to push up the homepage for Omaha as a hub if not everything lives inside of Omaha. So we would want, we would want to just separate it out. I wouldn't focus. We would still build authority, overall domain authority, but we would really
[00:04:33] focus on those location pages and powering them up so that they, right, we probably build an Omaha one and let's say there's something like an hour away where you have another location. That would be a different one and we would power that up as well. Yeah. So there's a different strategy for multiple locations. There's even a different strategy if the locations are far away versus maybe you have multiple locations across a metro. That's a little bit different than like rural America where you have
[00:05:01] to go an hour, two hours away. Yep. And then people come to us and let's say it's like Egan, Minnesota and there's all these places around Egan that you can attract patients to, right? To your location. But Egan's pretty small. So I want to rank for 12 different communities, but I only have one location. How do I do that? Yeah. So what we would do is we would build up that Egan location. We would
[00:05:27] optimize for Egan, but then we would kind of like a spider web, we would spider out and build what we call neighborhood supporting neighborhood pages. And then from that Egan location, it's going to say areas we serve and we're going to link out to all of those small neighborhoods so that we get good internal link volume going out. It's all those neighborhoods are still going to support Egan, but that's how we build out the community. And then what we would do also though, maybe there is opportunity. I'm not familiar with Egan,
[00:05:56] but we like to research, is there opportunity that maybe Egan is part of something bigger that we're missing. And if we're missing that, why not go for that? Right. Maybe there's a bigger whale where there's a bigger population that Egan's a part of and we can try to pull in eyeballs from there as well. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So going over to Google business profile, I mean, all of this sounds like a lot of work, but what are some things that you have to check the box on, on Google
[00:06:21] business profile? We want to completely fill out. I mean, everyone here is this completely fill out your Google business profile, but I think the strategy behind how to do it is actually using a tool like GMB everywhere and analyzing the competitors that are ranking number one and seeing what are their categories, make sure our categories line up. What services are they listing out? Do you offer the same treatments and services? Let's make sure we're, we're making sure that we have those optimized.
[00:06:49] Do they have descriptions on all the services? Make sure we have descriptions, having a plan and a strategy. Once the Google business is optimized with your office hours, your services, uh, your products, also making sure that there's a posting strategy because Google business will allow you to make posts and we'll just optimize around specific things. For example, if you do Invisalign, it would be great to put a post out about Invisalign for teens. And then maybe
[00:07:15] the next week it's braces for kids, right? So you're capturing also optimization by leveraging the posts and having some type of activity as well. Okay. If somebody is going to get started with a backlink strategy, how would they go about doing that? You know, I mean, you're talking about Dentaltown and obviously you could probably go to their website and there's like a PR email and you can email that, get the info, but how do you start to do this through the community?
[00:07:42] Locally, what I would do is actually, if you just Google, there is a lot of opportunities in your local community by Googling. If you just put in like media kits, local media kits for local businesses, you're going to see sites pop up that probably could be localtown.com, right? Where they're going to offer you a media kit and it could be worth purchasing that where you get featured on their blog. If they do do some type of magazine, maybe they put you out on that for SEO. What we're really
[00:08:11] focused on though, are we going to get an article written about us, right? Brand mentioned, especially where AI search is going. We want to have brand mentions and the brand recognized in a high authoritative platform and then a link back over to the site. So a quick Google search is the way to do that. Some of the big editorials, they're a little tougher to get into. You need to have some type of like outreach campaign like we have where admins allow us to do that. So that's going to be
[00:08:40] tough to do, but at the bare minimum, just doing a quick Google search for local media kits and starting there. I think it's Gannett who owns most of the news sites and papers across the U.S. They do the best of, like for here, it's best of the coast or best of the bay. There's a couple because there's like in weekly here and it runs one contest. And I think Gannett through USA Today
[00:09:07] runs another one. Look into those because one, just winning those is good social proof. I could go on about those contests because I really don't like them. I think they're just money grabs, but still you can win them, good social proof, and then you can get a link back from their site to your site. So that's a good signal also. Well, there you have it. There's how to rank number one in your area for orthodontist.