Most physician offices are bound to have missing, inaccurate and/or duplicative listings for each location and its physicians. These errors can lead to patient confusion and frustration, not to mention a reduction in page ranking and SEO scores.

A recent analysis of 1,800 physicians and 15,000 healthcare facilities across the US showed:

• Nearly one-third (31.5%) lacked an online, local listing. That’s 3.6x greater than the unlisted percentage of other businesses (8.68%).
• Of the listed healthcare facilities, 48% contained basic address errors that could result in misdirected patients.
• 29% of healthcare facilities were also missing accurate phone numbers.

LEVO Health will begin by searching and creating a comprehensive list of all digital listings associated with your practice and its physicians. Once the list is completed, LEVO Health will work with your internal team to secure access to each property, verify the account information and ensure that each listing is optimized with images, descriptions, hours of operations, accepted insurances and other important information. This task is ongoing and will be actively managed throughout the relationship.

The overall goals of optimized listings are:

• Improve the patient experience with accurate location data online, all the time, across desktop and mobile devices.
• Attract and retain more patients with a seamless journey from local search to an in-person appointment.
• Save time and money by eliminating the internal inefficiencies caused by location data conflicts.
• Ensure physician specialties, contact information, and facility affiliations are up-to-date.
• Eliminate duplicative location data that hinders local search performance.

The Health Management Academy and Healthgrades conducted research into which aspects of physicians’ online profiles are the most meaningful drivers of consumer engagement. Key takeaways include: • Specific aspects of a profile cause consumers to choose one physician over another. The most influential of these are:

• a physician’s number of ratings
• their years of experience
• popularity on social media
• whether the profile includes a photo
• physician’s gender

Physician Profiles and Consumer Preferences

Consumers are more likely to choose a female physician over a male physician

• 60% of consumers prefer a female Physician over a male physician. This preference is especially true of women (71%), Millennials (64%), minorities (64%), and infrequent patients (63%). Conversely, seniors (52%) and men (54%) prefer a male over a female physician.

The number of ratings trumps the star rating itself

• Consumers are more likely to select a physician who has a larger number of ratings than a physician with a perfect star rating.¹ 64% of consumers prefer a physician with 4 out of 5 stars and 25 patient responses over one with 5/5 stars and 3 responses.View the study here

As Google Partners, LEVO Health is held to higher standards than other healthcare marketing agencies. LEVO Health provides Healthcare Companies, Hospitals, Surgery Centers, Medical Practices and Doctors with data-driven healthcare marketing, sales and operations.