With the Department of Transportation’s newly developed Medical Examiner search tool, located on the DOT/FMCSA website, all certified Medical Examiners are listed by name, title, address, National Registry number, and certification date, but this listing alone is not enough to obtain the DOT physical business your clinic is after. From time to time, we receive calls from medical providers asking us how best to market DOT physical services once they complete our course and test to become certified. Beyond reaching out to local trucking companies like FedEx, UPS, USPS, and DHL and offering discounts to their drivers, the single most important thing you can do is spell it out on your website, and that’s free.
Many clinics make the mistake of using only a simple service listing on their website, usually as a bullet item like “CDL Physical” or “DOT Testing”. What is really needed is a dedicated sentence or paragraph discussing CDL physicals using keywords that will match what drivers in your area will be searching for. An example would be “We provide DOT CDL physical testing for Commercial Driver License examinations in the Phoenix, Arizona area.” In that one sentence you will find most of the keywords a driver might use to search for you in that area, such as “dot physical phoenix” or “cdl exam phoenix”.
Using Google's Keyword Planner tool, we identified the most popular CDL examination search terms drivers used monthly nationwide in 2018:
To really score big with the search engines, consider having a dedicated page on your website that discusses what to expect in your DOT physical, the cost and time involved, and other related information for new drivers such as location, insurance and drug testing options. The more keywords you can use in your information without sounding overly repetitive, the better.
A sometimes-overlooked marketing avenue to take advantage of is the free business listing you can obtain from Google My Business. Businesses listed on Google show up for free on a small map when a relevant search is made in that area, such as “cdl exam near me”. Yahoo Small Business and Bing Places for Business also allow you to list your clinic for free, make sure your listing is up to date with your location(s), contact and website information.
Blogging is another free and easy way to increase your website traffic to gain new business. All webmasters will tell you that landing pages (the first page people land on from a search result link) include blog entries. Topics for your blog can include discussions on driver regulations, medications, illness trends, diet and exercise, etc. If you do start a blog, don’t abandon it or visitors will notice. Granted, it can be difficult to write a blog, and sometimes just as hard to blog often, but understand that even if nobody is reading your blog, the search engines are.
Click the chart below to see the top 5 U.S. states for each of the most popular CDL examination search terms on Google for 2018:
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