Optometrist Marketing Strategies to Attract New Patients

Optometrist Marketing Strategies

As the population of Canada grows older, the percentage of people experiencing eyesight health issues is growing. This means that your optometry practice has great opportunities for winning more patients. At the same time, the existing barriers prevent optometry practices from expanding their scope of services offered.

Unfortunately, just relying on the growth of the number of potential patients isn’t enough to turn them into real clients. Your clinic needs a complex optometry marketing strategy to strengthen your online presence, improve your reputation, and boost conversions.

This guide is brought to you by dNOVO Group marketing experts with extended experience in building marketing strategies for private medical clinics in Canada. It will help you learn the best strategies to grow your optometry practice.

This guide is part of our series dedicated to building digital marketing strategies for private medical clinics in Canada:

• Medical Marketing Guide
• Dental Marketing Guide
• Plastic Surgery Marketing Guide
• Chiropractor Marketing Guide
• IVF Fertility Marketing Guide
• LASIK Marketing Guide

State of Optometry Industry in Canada

Optometry industry experts emphasize that the market has been steadily growing over the past decade and project the continuation of growth in the following decade. They point out three major factors impacting the market and the growth.

First, there is an increasing awareness of the importance of eye care and prevention. Second, Canada’s demographic composition includes a significant portion of older people who are more prone to eye health issues. Third, this portion of the population has high levels of disposable income through work or investment.

These factors make Canada a great place to grow your optometry practice.

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At the same time, optometrists face significant pushback when it comes to scope expansion. According to the Canadian Association of Optometrists Report, these include the opposition from ophthalmology and the medical community (including lobbying efforts), slow pace of changes in laws and regulations, lack of understanding from politicians and necessary resources for advocacy.

Optometry Marketing Plan

Digital marketing includes various strategies and techniques. However, using just one of them usually doesn’t bring the desired results. Furthermore, different techniques have different impacts on client growth depending on many factors, including the industry, target audience, current state of the market, etc.

We usually suggest our clients combine several marketing activities into one strategy to attain their business goals.

A good optometry marketing plan includes several strategies:

1. Website creation
2. Search engine optimization (SEO)
3. Content strategy
4. Social media marketing
5. PPC ads
6. Email campaigns
7. Business listing

It will help you attain several online marketing goals:

1. Lead generation
2. Patient acquisition
3. Client retention

Website: Building Strong Online Presence for Optometry Practice

Website is the solid foundation of your optometry marketing strategy. It is the conversion hub that attracts prospective patients and turns them into real ones. Designing a website requires following a number of technical rules which we discuss in the Technical SEO subsection.

In this section, we discuss website architecture and what web pages and elements you should include in your website.

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Website Architecture & Menu

Website architecture reflects how your pages are organized against one another. The best website architecture for optometry practice is a three-level hierarchy:

1. The first level is the home page
2. Second-level pages are service pages, contacts, doctors, about us, patient resources, etc.
3. Third-level pages are blog pages.

Your Menu should reflect your website architecture. You can also organize second-level pages into categories in your menu for easier navigation. For example, the Eye Care Services category can encompass service pages like Eye Exams, Contact Lenses, Myopia Control, etc.

Service Pages

Service pages can help you get high positions in search rankings for lucrative keywords like contact lenses. A service page should be dedicated to a service entirely and provide all the necessary information about this service to your patient.

Patient Resources

Patient resources include pages like FAQs and blogs. Sometimes, some clinics decide to create second-level pages dedicated to certain topics (e.g., myopia), if they believe it’s important for their customers. We suggest creating a page dedicated to financing. It can include pricing as well as financing options for your patients (e.g., insurance information).

These resources will show your trustworthiness and expertise. They can also help boost your SEO.

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Eye Doctors Info

Eye doctors page can boost your optometry marketing in several ways. First, it can bring you more leads, as some patients will be looking for your doctors rather than practice. That’s why it’s good to have their information on your website.

Second, seeing doctors’ photos and reading about them can help you earn the trust of potential patients. Many people subconsciously choose their doctors by their looks. Hiring a professional photographer and taking photos for your website can be a great idea to boost your digital marketing efforts.

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Online Reviews

Testimonials and positive reviews can help you win over more patients. People trust the experience of other people and when reviewing a business they will deffinitely check on the positive and negative reviews to form their opinion about your optometry practice. That’s why we strogly suggest adding positive patient reviews to your website.

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Locations & Contact

Your website needs to make the contact with your optometry office as easy as possible. Additionaly, if you have several locations, you need to specify it on your website, so that your prospective patients could choose the one that’s mot convenient for them.

To facilitate contact with your clinic and convert more patients, we suggest adding contact info at the top of your website above the menu. You should also freeze the whole section so that the menu and contacts remain visible even when your website visitors scroll down.

Finally, we suggest creating a book appointment page (or widget) where prospective patients can set up a meeting with one of your doctors.

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This practice will help convert patients who do not like to make phone calls. It will also enable you to collect contact data more easily. Just make sure that each of your website pages has at least 1 CTA with a link that leads to your book appointment page (or opens the respective widget).

Dos and Don’ts

In this subsection, we discuss the best and the worst practices, we spot as we studied websites of NA optometry practices.

Good Practices

We saw several optometry offices that had a website version in another language. Others mention the languages in which they provide their services on their website. It’s a great practice.

Canada is a country of many immigrants. While many have mastered English at a sufficient level, getting eye care in their native language can lower the stress and fear of misunderstanding.

Bad Practices

Somehow, we see it over and over when looking at our clients’ competitors and their websites. The text is placed over the photo without any background. Don’t ever do this:

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We understand that many website creators think that it’s posh and beautiful. Moreover, it might work for other types of businesses, but not yours. People with bad eyesight will have to put extra effort into discerning what’s written on the page in the screenshot above. It’s an ableist design showing a complete lack of empathy. That’s a fast way to lose potential patients.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization should become an inalienable part of your optometry marketing plan. There’s no point in having a great website if your potential customers cannot find it online.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential part of SEO optimization. At this stage, you need to find as many words for targeting as possible and then pick the ones that have the best balance in terms of volume and difficulty. In this section, we discuss the three main characteristics of keywords.

Keyword Volume

Check out the screenshot of the SemRush SEO tool below:

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It shows the main stats for the keyword optometrist. You can see its Volume, difficulty, and intent. The stats are shown for Canada (you can tell by the flag next to the volume indicator).

The volume shows the monthly number of searches made in search engines for a certain location. The bigger the volume, the better.

Keyword Difficulty

The previous keyword had a substantial difficulty (65%). In the screenshot below, the difficulty is much lower (only 28%):

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Keyword difficulty shows how hard it will be for a website page optimized for this particular keyword to get to the top of Google search results.

If you target the optometrist, you’ll need 97 referring domains. If you target the optometrists near me, you’ll simply need well-written and optimized content.

Intent

Intent is essential when you want to assign your keyword to a particular page. There are three types of intent:

1. informational – people search for information on a certain topic;
2. commercial – people look for different businesses offering a service or product;
3. transactional – people are ready to make an action (purchase, appointment booking, etc.);

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We suggest using informational keywords for your blogs, leaving commercial and transactional keywords for the service pages and landing pages.

On-Page Optimization

To make sure that a website page reaches the top of Google search results, you need to optimize it for a certain keyword. That’s why you need on-page optimization. In a nutshell, it is a technique of making your page more readable for search engine robots (aka crawlers).

Robots usually don’t read in the way that people do. They scan the page and analyze its contents by counting the number of times each word appears on the page. Obviously, they disregard words like pronouns and prepositions that can be found in each text.

SEO specialists create special tags and code certain parts of the text for the crawlers to better understand the contents of the page. Headers are one such example.

The general practice is to place your focus keywords as follows:

1. once per every 100 words of your content
2. in the first-level header (h1)
3. in at least one second-level header (h2)
4. in meta title and meta description
5. in images alt texts.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO can help your website pages rank higher in major search engines. It is a process of backlink acquisition. Choose websites with high domain authority, websites that write about healthcare, eye care, and optometry. You will also need to disavow backlinks from malicious websites using Google Search Console.

Local SEO

Most optometry practices are local businesses. That’s why investing some time and effort into a local SEO can help you boost your online marketing plan and earn more patients. Essentially, to succeed in local SEO, you need to create several pages with “local keywords” and establish a Google Business Profile.

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In a nutshell, local keywords are your regular keywords with the name of your location attached to it.

Benefits of Google Business Profile:

1. Visibility on Google Maps.
2. You can post essential info for potential patients like business hours, website, and location.
3. Your potential customers can see your online reviews on Google Maps.
4. It marks you as a legitimate local business.
5. It boosts your overall search engine optimization.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a great way to boost your SEO and improve your optometry marketing. It helps you make your website more user-friendly and thus helps you earn new patients.

The best practices include:

1. Working on your website architecture
2. Improving navigation by creating the menu, interlinking, breadcrumbs, and pagination
3. Boosting website speed by using WEBP image format, decreasing video size, and transferring your website to a faster hosting.
4. Removing content duplicates and setting redirects.
5. Helping crawlers by creating the robots.txt file, sitemaps, and indexing new pages manually.

Content Strategy & Social Media Marketing

When creating a content strategy for optometry marketing, we suggest you consider both your website and your social media accounts.

If you are changing the content on your website to meet the requirements we mentioned in the second section of this guide, we suggest first focusing all your content efforts on it. Once all your pages are ready, you can proceed with writing your blog posts and social media posts.

Check out an example of a content plan:

The content plan should include the following info:

1. Keyword (volume + difficulty)
2. Type of page it is used for
3. People in charge
4. Stages of content creation (writing, proofreading, image creation, staging and optimization, publishing and SMM)
5. Ranking (you can use ranking in time).

Topics to write about for optometry marketing:

1. Tips for eye care
2. Self-examination methods
3. Special offers and discount announcements
4. News
5. Videos & photos.
6. Success stories of your happy customers.

Check out this gem. It combines news relevant to your patients and useful tips and it’s posted 1 month ahead of the event giving it an opportunity to climb the search engine rankings:

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Having several social media platforms can be hard, especially if your resources are spread thin. In this case, we suggest creatingan account on Facebook and Instagram and mostly reposting your new blogs there. It will provide backlinks and traffic to your blog.

Additionally, social media accounts will add your clinic credibility in the eyes of prospective clients. Even if you don’t share content regularly there, people will still trust you more just because you have an account on social media platforms and are open to feedback.

Pay-per-Click Advertising to Grow the Patient Base

Online advertising is a great way to strengthen your optometrist marketing. In a nutshell, it’s a banner ad promoting your business online.

Ads are usually posted on the following mediums:

1. Websites that live off banner ads like news outlets
2. Google search results (above organic results)
3. Social media
4. YouTube ads.

Check out the example of eye care banner ad on the business listing:

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How PPC ads can benefit your marketing:

1. You can set up your target audience (by age, geography, interest, behaviour, etc.).
2. Provide your website with backlinks.
3. Get to the top SERP above organic results
4. Boost website traffic (especially when SEO is in early stages).
5. Bring visitors who are interested in your services and are more likely to convert.
6. PPC campaigns have one of the highest ROI of all marketing channels.

Optometry Marketing Ideas

We are finalizing our guide with marketing ideas that will help most businesses boost their online presence and retain customers.

Traditional Marketing

The digital era can make people forget about the very marketing basics. As a result, businesses lose lucrative opportunities for growth. Don’t make this mistake.

Create paper handouts and spread them in your neighbourhood. Participate in local events and spread awareness about eye health. Partner with local charities and offer eye examinations for free. Work on your reputational management and offer referral programs to your patients.

Business Listing

Adding your clinic to a business listing will help you get valuable backlinks from domains with high authority. It will also bring you high-value leads that are more likely to convert.

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Email Marketing to Retain Existing Patients

Email is a great tool for optometry marketing aimed at loyal patients. Send a reminder about an appointment, valuable tips for eye care and disease prevention, remind your recipients that it’s time to check their eye vision once again, or inform them about the discounts. All these emails will be a valuable lifeline between your practice and your patients.

Hire Optometry Marketing Agency

Hiring an Optometrist Marketing Agency to run your campaign can help you in multiple ways. With dNOVO Digital Marketing Agency, you can get valuable expertise along with experience in running marketing campaigns. Hiring us will also help you save your marketing budget.

Are you ready to grow your optometry practice? Book a free one-hour consultation