Which category & order to use? Optometrist / Eye Care Center

[Steph H]

Hello,

This is a question I've wondered about for awhile now. I've got a few similar clients like the one below, so hoping someone can shed some light.

I've got a client who just opened an optometric practice. Johnson Eyecare - Optometrist, Eye Doctor in Fort Myers, FL

She's the only doctor, but the practice offers eye exams, has it's own optical, the works.

As "eye doctor" is a term that is searched for more frequently than "optometrist" according to Google Trends in most states, I'm wondering should I lead with Eye Care Center, then add Optometrist, then Optician? All 3 for her GMB?

I initially led with the category "Optometrist", but it seems that when I do searches for "eye doctor" she doesn't come up at all yet, but she does for "Optometrist". The content on her site has both keywords, so it seems it might have a lot do w/ the category designation.

I realize she just opened, but the fact that she's coming up for "Optometrist" already, but not "eye doctor" is concerning.

Thank you for your insight, I'm a newbie to this forum.

Steph H.

 

[whitespark]

I would suggest testing. Does changing the category to "Eye Care Center" improve her rankings for "eye doctor"? And although the kw research might tell you that this term gets more searches, I'm not convinced it will be better than Optometrist. I'd also watch your GMB insights to see which one works better in terms of impressions and actions. Try a month with each primary category and see which one has the best results for you. Also add the other two as secondary categories.

 

[Steph H]

I'll definitely try testing. Thank you, Darren!

Didn't know how long to do it for or anything, so thank you for your advice! Will be interesting to see if it does make a difference and how long it takes.

And also for the info about the secondary categories. Good to know that I should keep each of them.

Thank you again!

Steph

 

[grendal17]

I have had many eye doctors as clients over the years. Testing is key, however, what I've found is it generally falls down to is the following:

If it's a practice listing - Eye Care Center
If it's a practitioner listing - Optometrist or Ophthalmologist.

Worked wonders for me.

 

[tedchan]

We were just looking at this, and we get way more searchers for eye doctors than optometrist for whatever reason. Probably ought to switch up some of the keywords we put on our pages. My main conclusion for that is Google seems to know eye doctor and optometrist mean roughly the same thing and we get traffic for the query without ever having it on the page.

 

[Steph H]

I thought I'd give an update on this. Not sure what has happened, but after switching categories about 1.5 months ago, to make eye care center priority over optometrist, my client is nowhere to be found for either!

I've resubmitted on search console, pretty much everything. I'm hoping somehow she'll bounce back, but it's very worrisome. The client again is Johnson Eyecare - Eye Doctor, Optometrist in Fort Myers, FL she's an eye doctor in Fort Myers, FL.

Any ideas anyone?

 

[Adam Potaznik]

I tried to access her website and it says

403: Access Forbidden
Your location (AU) has been blacklisted.

I don't know what we did to offend you.... but the fact that you are blocking access - I have no idea why you would want to do that, but maybe that is hurting the authority of the brand.

I'd go with optometrist, we have a big brand Specsavers and they use Optometrist - when I think of eye care I think of opthamologist - but what do we know...we don't even spell centre the way same way.

 

[Rich Owings]

If it were my client, one thing I would do is add "optometrist" and "optician" to your home page text. And use all of the relevant GMB categories.

 

[Steph H]

I tried to access her website and it says

403: Access Forbidden
Your location (AU) has been blacklisted.

I don't know what we did to offend you.... but the fact that you are blocking access - I have no idea why you would want to do that, but maybe that is hurting the authority of the brand.

I'd go with optometrist, we have a big brand Specsavers and they use Optometrist - when I think of eye care I think of opthamologist - but what do we know...we don't even spell centre the way same way.

Hi Adam. We use a firewall to block countries other than the US to cut down on hacking. Our clients are very local, so traffic from outside doesn't come into play.