When They Search Your Practice’s Name, What Comes Up
This Part
Before you read the rest of this part, pick up your phone, open the browser in incognito mode and search your own name on Google. The reason for incognito is that Google adjusts results slightly based on each person’s search history, and you need to see the same result a new patient sees.
A patient who searches your name is different from a patient who searches their question. They have made their choice, because they either heard about you from a friend or saw the practice sign, and now they only want to find the number and the address. That is why losing this patient should be the hardest thing to do, yet in practice it happens a lot, because what comes up in the results is not yours.
What you see on the phone usually consists of three parts.
The practice information box
If Google knows your practice, it shows a box that displays the address on a map, together with the phone number and opening hours. Compare this box with the file you made in part 7. Any difference, even one digit of a phone number or one opening hour, may send a patient who had already decided to a closed door. If you see no such box, it means Google is not yet sure that the information it has gathered about you from different places belongs to one practice. Where this box is filled from, and what role patients’ reviews play in it, is a separate topic we will come back to later.
The results that appear beneath the box
Beneath this box you will probably see your Instagram account, a few appointment-booking platforms or medical directories, and perhaps a doctor with the same name in another city or specialty. Write one of three labels next to each result. The label “mine” is for something whose address and content are entirely in your control. The label “fixable” is for an account you have access to, or a platform you can ask for a correction. And the label “out of reach” is for results that are neither of the two.
Every result labelled “fixable” that carries wrong information should be corrected this week. This is the same thing part 7 asked of you, with the difference that now you know exactly where those places are.
The result that does not exist yet
Most likely the “mine” column has stayed empty, because Instagram too, as we saw in part 1, is not yours and sits in the “fixable” column. This empty slot is exactly what you are building in this series. When the first entry of your site is published, a new result will appear in this same search with your own site’s name written above it, just as above the result for https://dentcast.ir/card/ the name of DentCast’s site, that is dentcast.ir, can be seen. You do not need to rank above Instagram. It is enough that the patient, without scrolling down, sees a result that is your own and whose information matches the practice box.
Once your site has several entries, Google sometimes also shows a few smaller links beneath this same result that take the patient straight to the site’s other doors. Google chooses these links itself based on the site’s structure, and a site built from the start as a building with several doors has a better chance of having them shown.
This part’s output: the identity line
Now type your name slowly into Google’s search box and look at the suggestions that appear beneath it. These suggestions show how people actually search for your name, for example with the word “Dr.” or without it, with the surname alone, with the practice’s name, or with a spelling guessed from pronunciation. Repeat the same thing in English letters.
Based on what you saw, write one line that always presents your name in one form, together with your specialty and city, and make it the first line of the part 7 file. If the practice has a separate name, that name should also appear in this line. For example, this line could be “Dr. So-and-so, prosthodontist, Ahvaz” or “So-and-so Clinic, Dr. So-and-so, Ahvaz”. From now on this same line is repeated without any change in your Instagram bio, on the booking platforms and on the first entry of your site.
Putting your specialty and city in this line has two benefits. The first is that it separates you from people with the same name. The second becomes clear later. In health-related topics Google gives more weight to who stands behind a text, and it is this line that connects your later texts to a real dentist with a defined specialty. We open this topic in part 12.
The test of this exercise is two things. First, that the identity line is identical letter for letter in the file, in your Instagram bio and on every platform labelled “fixable”. Second, that a patient who knows someone with your name understands, on reading this line, that you are not that person.
This line is also the raw material for the next step. In the next part we choose the site’s name, that is, the thing called a domain, which in part 3 we likened to the name of the building. The first question there is which form of this same line should go into the site’s name.