Marketing in the initial era was all about spreading the word about your business through the limited channels available at hand. The limited channels included advertising through electronic media such as television and radio, print media such as newspapers and magazines and outdoor media such as billboards and banners. Not to forget, there were other creative ways such as human banners and distribution of individual brochures and leaflets too.
Things have moved on now, and some of these media are less popular today. With the dawn of the digital era, the whole marketplace is up on the internet, and everyone is working towards creating SEO-friendly content to reach out to a large audience and promote their products and services. Many professionals such as lawyers, accountants, etc. are using SEO to publicize their business, and hence, SEO for physiotherapy website is an idea you should consider if you want to acquire more patients and publicize your services on a large scale.
Before you begin your expedition on SEO for your physiotherapy website, you need to understand what SEO is. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of boosting your website rank in the search results organically in order to increase the web traffic and acquire quality leads for your business. For this purpose, you need to work on creating SEO-friendly content for your physiotherapy website. How do you that? Well, here are some ideas.
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Research and Use the Right Keywords
Keywords are one of the important factors to optimize your website during the SEO process. Keywords are words or phrases which are generally used by your target audience to search for the matter they are looking for on a search engine. The use of these keywords hence brings up your SERP ranking as the search engine finds your website content relevant to what the user is looking for.
In order to find the most suitable keywords for your website content, you need to conduct keyword research. For this research, you can make use of tools such as Keywordtool.io, Moz Keyword Explorer, and Long Tail Pro.
Another way to find the keywords is to look for what keywords are bringing up your competitors ranking on SERP. This can be simply done by carrying out a Google search of the keywords you want to use and see how your competitors rank on them. You could also make use of SEMRush tool to find this information.
Create SEO-friendly Headings
Once you have found the best keywords and phrases to make use of for the SEO for physiotherapy website, it’s time to make the right use of these keywords. A good way to use these keywords is in the heading of your content. A heading is the very first thing that is read by a user, and also an important element with regards to search engine optimization. Having a proper, easy to comprehend and crisp heading for your content makes it easier for a search engine to understand what your content is about.
A good technique to make your blog posts SEO-friendly is to try and add a context-specific keyword or phrase in the heading. When doing so, keep in mind that SERPs can only accommodate a limited number of words, which will lead to your heading not being displayed completely. To avoid this, try making a heading which is not large and yet providing the right details.
Another important aspect to work on for an SEO-friendly physiotherapy website is to have subheadings in blog posts. It will be an added advantage if you are able to add keywords and phrases in these subtitles as it will help boost your website’s SEO rank. But be careful not to over-do this addition of keywords as it will harm the essence of your blog and mark you as spam.
Focus on the Content
Once you have your keywords, headings, and subheadings in place, it’s time to work on the main body or the content. While a lot of strategizing is required to come up with the right keywords of the SEO for physiotherapy website, bad quality content could just make all the strategies fall flat. Bad quality content refers to matter which has meaningless sentences, improper grammar and forced technical terminologies. You should avoid such content and create your content that is engaging, crisp to the point and keyword-rich.
One common mistake to avoid when writing quality content is the forced use of keywords to make the content keyword-rich. Such attempts will not only hamper the quality of your content but also affect your SERP ranking as the search engines may mark you as spam.
When creating blogs or articles for your website, do keep a check on the word count. While the quality is important, quantity also affects your SEO. The content that you prepare should not be too small. In order to capture the essence of what you want to say, create content which is around 400-500 words. Having long-form content will help bring up your website ranking as it gives you more scope to insert links to the blog. When you have a long engaging article, it will automatically make the reader stay on your website for a long time, which is helpful for your SEO. The idea is to have well-written content and not something that is simply stretched to increase the word count.
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Linking Your Content is a Must
When we talk about linking or link-building to create SEO-friendly content, it refers to the process of inserting related links within your content. The inclusion of these links will help in bringing up your SERP ranking by diverting the reader to another similar content on your website and making him stay longer on your website. For instance, if you are writing blogs about the benefits of physiotherapy for patients of Parkinson’s disease, you can insert links for giving more details about Parkinson’s disease such as the causes of the diseases, the symptoms, etc., which could be either on your website or a well-trusted website.
Link-building can be done of two types, internal link building, and external link building. Internal link building takes place when you insert links only from your website to tell the reader about more information of a part of your content being present in another blog or article. This method helps boost your SERP ranking as internal linking makes it easier for search engines to crawl within your website and comprehend it well.
External linking is referred to the process of incorporating links from other websites. However, you need to be extra careful when adding external links. If you choose to link your content with a bad external link, it will raise a question about your website’s credibility. Always choose links, websites, and sources which are reliable. So if you have a blog or article talking about the “benefits of physiotherapy for Epilepsy patients” and want to provide more details about the disease, you could choose to insert a link about epilepsy from a trusted website.
Optimize Your URL
An important factor which usually gets ignored by many during their SEO planning is the optimization of the URL. A Uniform Resource Locator (URL)is what the reader gets to read in the address bar of the browser when they open your blog or website. To optimize the URL for physiotherapy website, it is essential that your URL is readable and has words, not numbers.
When you create a blog or article for your website, the URL is automatically generated and consists of a random set of numbers, for example, https://www.yoursitedomain.com/blog/5923-4-590=323. Now the problem with this URL is that the reader would not be able to identify your topic through the link. A good way to avoid this is by optimizing your URL like this – https://www.yoursitedomain.com/blog/benefits-of-physiotherapy-for-epilepsy.
Apart from making your URL easy to comprehend, focus on making your URL more SEO-friendly. This can be achieved by using the keyword in the heading of your blog post and the extended ending of your URL as mentioned above. When you add keywords in the URLs, search engines will take this into account and increase your SERP ranking as optimized URL can easily be identified by search engines. But do keep in mind, your URL should not be too long. Just keep in mind that for your website ranking, the first 3-6 words are the ones that are given more leverage.
Utilize Meta Description
The meta description is the brief narrative or explanation of what your website content is about. This information is found on the search result pages, right under the heading and the URL of your website content. The purpose of this meta-description is to give a quick insight of the article on your website in the precise text of not more than one or two statements.
When you write a meta-description of the SEO for physiotherapy website content, it is essential to make it crisp and catchy. You need to understand that when a user searches for information on a search engine, they tend to go through the headings and meta-description instead of opening every link. Remember, the better your meta-description, the better the chances of a higher click-through rate (CTR).
So how do you make a good meta-description? Summarize the whole gist of your content in one or two sentences. It will be good if you use keywords in the description without it sounding forced and unusual.
Insert Images
You may write a very good content for your physiotherapy website, but the lack of images could be a drawback for the content. Though your content should be the king, having images along with good content will help engage more readers. Having appealing and topic-related images in your content makes it interesting, and people want to read it.
You could also strategically use images to boost your content message. For example, if you have a service page or blog about physiotherapy for different body parts, you could depict the same in an image form for the user to understand better.
When you do insert images in your content, do not forget to assign appropriate Alt tags to the images. Alt attributes work in favor of the SEO for your physiotherapy website when you insert your focused keyword in the image’s Alt tag. These alt tags are easily crawled upon by the spiders making your website easily comprehensible.
Have a Responsive Website
When we talk about having a responsive website, the focus should be to make a faster loading and mobile-friendly website. With the boom in the smartphones sale, every other person has a smartphone to browse through. This means that if your website is not easily loading on mobile phones, the majority of readers are lost.
Having a fast loading website is another important aspect of planning the SEO for physiotherapy website. If you have a slow loading website, it will make users impatient and may result in them leaving your page even before the content loads.
To make both the factors mentioned above work cohesively, you can get your web pages built using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This method helps to create fast loading content to help optimize the user experience.
Although planning SEO for physiotherapy websites may seem like a tough task, it is much simpler once you follow the above steps. The idea is not to overdo such SEO-friendly tactics as Google is a very smart search engine which can identify plagiarism, lack of good backlinks and forced use of keywords for a better ranking. These factors may have a reverse effect on your website, and it might lower your ranking instead. Therefore, if you are not confident enough to plan the optimum SEO strategy for your physiotherapy website, get the professionals to do the right job for you.
Other blogs on Physical Therapy clinic marketing:
2018 Physical Therapy Clinic Marketing – Attracting Patients for your Physiotherapy Business
How Physiotherapists Can Use Social Media Marketing To Grow Their Business