If you haven’t incorporated SEO (or search engine optimization) into your plan for getting more physical therapy patients, you may be operating at a serious disadvantage when it comes to promoting your business. In this blog, we’ll teach you 7 easy tips that will SKYROCKET your physical therapy SEO and Google ranking!
Why You Should Care About Physical Therapy SEO
The results in your sales and marketing strategies can be dramatic when you employ solid physical therapy search engine optimization. In the “old way” of sales and marketing, people would blanket a whole segment of the population (usually via TV, radio, and newspaper ads), and hope to hit at least one or two potential customers in the process.
Physical therapy SEO (or any other kind of SEO, for that matter) doesn’t work like that. If people are searching Google for “physical therapy near me,” and your website is one of the first to come up for those keywords, then you have a better chance of landing them as a patient. You’re offering something they’re already looking for. You don’t have to talk them into needing your services like you would with blanket marketing techniques.
Good SEO puts your website moves your physical therapy website up to the front of the line in the search. It’s worth doing.
Practice Promotions offers all-in-one Physical Therapy Website and Advanced SEO services! Check out their SEO services here.
Physical Therapy Search Engine Optimization at a Glance
Before we get into the seven steps you can take to improve your PT SEO profile on Google, we should talk about some important terms you need to know.
If you’re doing your SEO physical therapy marketing right, you’ll get traffic from Google in three ways:
- Google Ads: You buy ads on Google, and when people do a Google search for terms like “back pain relief” or “Physical therapy near me,” your ad should be one of the ads that come up at the top of Google.
- Google Local Search: When people do a local search for PT services in their area, Google uses the criteria on your Google Business Profile (which we explain in a bit) to match your business to those searchers’ inquiry.
- Google Organic: This is when your website’s blog or another aspect of your website shows up on Google for relevant searches–without you paying anything. A search could pull up blog posts, articles, and “Questions other users have asked,” to name but a few.
In the latter case especially, you’re going to see a great return-on-investment (ROI) with content marketing than by “regular” advertising alone. There’s a reason why this is so, according to Statistica:
- Web searchers look at 13 pieces of content before they buy anything
- 70% of them expressed a desire to work with a brand due to content, not ads
- Content marketing generates 3X the leads and costs more than 60% less than other types of marketing
Your physical therapy search engine optimization efforts will play a big role in this, particularly once you optimize for Google.
Here’s how to do it.
1. Create a Google Business Profile for Better Physical Therapy SEO
What if you could have a social media account with all the power of the world’s most powerful search engine behind it? If you sign up for a Google Business Profile, you can!
This single step puts you on the local SEO map — literally — like nobody’s business.
If you put your
- Full business name
- Your hours of operation
- Phone number/s
- Your web address
- And location
…your physical therapy business is more likely to show up on Google Maps and Google Local when someone does a Google search for “physical therapists near me,” and other localized searches.
Your Google Business Profile is the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. If you flesh out your Google Business profile, you’ll appear on Google Maps and Google Organic searches!
One final note for your physical therapy search engine optimization: Be sure to update your Google profile often with news and announcements for your clinic, photos of your staff, and any specials you’re running.
Those features function like social media posts, allowing potential patients to engage with you and your staff before they meet you.
They also do one thing that Google really likes: Add fresh content to the web, which pushes your physical therapy Google rank up higher.
2. Physical Therapy Marketing SEO Ideas: Make Updates on Local Directories
If there’s one thing that Google loves loves loves, it’s a business with a great reputation. And adding your business’s profile to online directories helps you to accomplish this.
Just as you would for your Google Business Profile, you need to add all of your business’s contact information to the requisite directories. Make sure that this information remains consistent across all of the directories. This builds your reputation and online authority with Google.
Below, you’ll find a list of directories to add your business’s profile to:
- Google Business Profile (You did this in step No. 1.)
- Yelp
- The Yellowpages
- The Whitepages
- Rehab.com
Heres’ why this works: The more backlinks your site has, the more reputable Google assumes that your business is. Putting your business on these directories automatically creates backlinks to your site and helps your SEO in the process
3. Update Your Business’s Google Snippet
Your Google Snippet pops up when your website appears on an organic search on Google. It provides searchers with a short and sweet introduction to your business and often counts as the first interaction that a potential patient will have with your business.
For the best results, make sure that the following information appears in your snippet in this order:
- Title: Should include the words “Physical Therapy in [your City, State]”
- Then: Add your practice name
- Finally: Information about your practice, like whether there’s parking nearby, specialties, etc.
Just a note: While it may seem counterintuitive to put “Physical Therapy in [your City, State]” before your business name, from an SEO/ physical therapy marketing standpoint, it makes perfect sense. For more complete instructions, look here for instructions on how to change your Google Snippet.
Finally, be specific. You don’t want to use vague terms in your profile. Think like a person who’s searching the web for physical therapy services in their area. They use specific words to find what they’re looking for. Using those same words on your site will help them find you.
4. Get More Google Reviews
People love social proof. More specifically, they love social proof when it comes time to buy because they want a guarantee that they’re making a good purchase.
That’s not conjecture on our part. According to Shopify,
- 71% of shoppers are more inclined to buy something if they see a referral for it on social media
- 80% of them will look for a recommendation before they purchase anything
- And most importantly, more than 90% of shoppers will read at least one review before they buy something
All of this is to say that getting reviews on sites like Google can only help you, and you can do this by asking your current and past clients to leave reviews for you on sites like Google and Yelp.
Physical therapy SEO tips:
- Get your staff involved; encourage them to ask everyone they’re in contact with for a review.
- Ask for reviews at the right time — if you ask too early on in the relationship, it can be counterproductive.
- Create a review link for patients on your Google Place ID.
- For more review tips, take a look at our handy guide.
5. Stop Trying to Rank for Only “Physical Therapy” on Google
That probably sounds like sacrilege and nonsense, but hear us out. Let’s say you’re a person who’s never had physical therapy and who is experiencing a great deal of back pain.
Would you search for “physical therapy near me” if you didn’t know physical therapy could help you with your pain? (And if you’re like most people, you won’t know physical therapy can help with back pain.)
No, you probably wouldn’t search for those terms. Instead, you’d search for terms like:
- Back pain relief — approximately 33,100 searches on Google
- Shoulder pain relief — approximately 6,600 searches on Google
- Physical therapy near me — approximately 201,000 searches on Google
Given the competitive nature of the search term, you’re going to have a hard time raising your physical therapy SEO profile on Google if you concentrate ONLY on “physical therapy near me.”
Aside from that, and more importantly, people search for “back pain relief” or “shoulder pain relief” because those are the ailments they’re trying to remedy.
That the average Google searcher doesn’t know that physical therapy can help with those issues becomes irrelevant when you, as the PT, put the words they’re already looking for on your site as part of your SEO physical therapy marketing plan.
6. Add an FAQ and Watch Your Physical Therapy Search Engine Optimization Go Up
Google wants people to like them, and the way that the company accomplishes this is by successfully answering people’s questions and inquiries.
Here’s how you can legitimately hack into this. Go to “physical therapy in [My City]” on Google. Then, find the box that says: People also ask.
Create questions on your FAQ page that reflect those questions. So, if people ask questions like:
- How much is physical therapy?
- Or what does a physical therapist do?
Make sure you have those questions on your FAQ page. If you adopt this practice, then you might just find your FAQ as the answer to one of Google’s Snippets.
7. Create Compelling Content on Your Blog
If you don’t regularly add to your blog or create great social posts, then you are missing out on what Google now considers its No. 1 criteria for search engine optimization.
Search engines favor new content. When you add new and helpful content to your website on the regular, you keep your site fresh and relevant in the eyes of Google. This moves you up in the the search ranks.
What’s more, good physical therapy marketing tactics that include a solid content marketing plan are likely to rank better than most. The industry average for sites (in general) that provide good content
- Has a conversion rate that’s 6X higher than other sites of equivalent stature
- Comes at a cost that’s more than 60% lower than other advertising methods
If you’re not regularly publishing high-quality content that establishes you as an authority in the physical therapy field in your local market, you’ll want to start doing that right away. Your search rank will thank you.
Final Thoughts on Physical Therapy SEO
Your efforts to increase your SEO profile on Google will have a direct and sometimes, dramatic effect on your PT business over the course of time. The seven tips in this post give you a solid foundation for creating an SEO profile on Google that has the potential to dramatically increase your business’s bottom line.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can maximize your presence on Google, then please reach out to us. Practice Promotions provides all-in-one Website, Advanced SEO Services, Google Ads PPC, and Patient Newsletters for physical therapists, chiropractors, and occupational therapists.
