With the ever-increasing competition among businesses, marketing your business is one aspect which you cannot ignore. The idea is to stay ahead in the race to create a brand name for your business. This implies to all businesses including a physiotherapy clinic, as competition is in every field. Now this race to be ahead is no longer taking place on traditional marketing platforms. Businesses are now trying hard to make their mark on the digital marketing platforms. And the key to making the most of these digital marketing platforms lies in how well you can optimize your website for search engines. In other words, conducting SEO for physiotherapist website. So how do go about it? Well, let us first understand more about what SEO is.

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What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as the name suggests is a comprehensive process of optimizing your website and content to make it rank well on the commonly used search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. So how does this really help? Well, think about it. When you plan to browse anything on the internet, what is the first step you take? Most often than not you open a search engine and do a quick search. Search engines are the most commonly used navigation mode by almost everyone on a daily basis to find anything on the internet.

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When you optimize your website, the traffic of people navigating through the search engines can be diverted to your website and possibly convert into your customers. To make this happen, all you need is to rank on the top of the very first search engine result page (SERP) as a relevant and matching result to the user’s query. This happens when the search engines are able to connect your website or content with the user’s query. To help you be that top ranking result on the search engine, here are some tactics to work on the SEO for physiotherapist website.

Some other blogs: 

2018 Physical Therapy Clinic Marketing – Attracting Patients for your Physiotherapy Business

How to create SEO-friendly content for your physiotherapy website

How to improve your email open-rate for physiotherapists

Research the Keywords

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SEO and keywords are two things that work in harmony to provide the optimum results. Keywords are nothing but the words or phrases that users use to make searches on the search engines. These words are scanned by the search engines and then relevant results to these keywords are shown to the users. As a physiotherapist website, your aim should be to rank high whenever a user searches for anything related to physical therapy. This can be done by adding the right keyword in your website content.

A common mistake is the assumptions people make about keywords. Just because a keyword or a phrase is similar to your business does not mean it will be beneficial for the business. To give you an example, a physiotherapist who has proficiency with different types of massage oil usage, frequently posts about the different types of massage oils and how to use them. Now since his content is related to massage oils, the keywords will also be about massage oils. Such keywords usage will not attract potential patients to his website. You know why? Because no patient will look for massage oils. This type of keyword usage will rank him well for people looking for massage oils, but will not bring him any patient lead though.

When choosing keywords to use in your website content, assumptions don’t work, research does. Though research may seem like an extra effort, it will go a long way in getting the right traffic to your website. So what to look for when scouting for keywords? Look for physiotherapy keywords and phrases which are commonly searched on the search engines. A basic way to look for keywords is by conducting a manual search of a combination of keywords on search engines based on what your target audience might look for. Have a look at the results you get and do analyze where you stand in these searches. Keep a close on your competitors as well. There are also some free tools such as SEMRush and Google Keyword Planner, which help find the apt keywords for your website.

Create Keyword-rich Quality Content

With the keywords and phrases ready to use, you now need to include them properly in your website content. Search engines are smart and have their spiders that crawl the extensive data present online to find the most relevant result for their users. When you use proper keywords in your content, your website is selected as a relevant result for the user by the search engine spiders.

An important thing to keep in mind is that simply stuffing up your content with keywords will not help your SEO. Rather it will make the search engines mark you as a spam website and reduce your ranking. Keywords should be included in your content without spoiling the quality of your content. Keep in mind, your content should not only make the search engines crawl but also engage the readers who visit your website.

In the chase to make your website content SEO-friendly, do not end up making it dull and boring. Make sure your content is informative and interesting for the readers. Provide interesting titles to your content to give a reader an insight into the main content. Keywords should be added to the title and the first 100 words of your content for a better impact. Linking your content to reliable websites works well as it increases your credibility in the eyes of the reader. For example, as a physiotherapist website, you may want to tell your audience about the benefits of physiotherapy for different medical ailments. To back your theory, give some referral links to major medical websites such as WebMD and Mayo Clinic. The last thing to keep in mind is to provide fresh content on a regular basis to keep your reader engaged.

Focus on Quality Link Building

We have already discussed link building in the previous section. However, we would know more about it in this section. Adding links to your content works well for the SEO of your physiotherapist website. The addition of links to your content can be of two types, external linking, and internal linking. External linking takes place when you add links to other websites that provide more information about your content. When adding external links, you need to be extra careful as linking with an irrelevant and deceitful website could have a bad impact on your website ranking. Internal linking happens when you insert links to your website from the existing blog posts. For example, when you write a blog about “using massage therapy for a sports injury rehabilitation”, you can easily include the link to your service page about “rehabilitation therapy”.

While you are busy link building in your content, there are certain things you need to keep in mind. Adding links as a part of the content always works better than adding it as a footer. The anchor text that you use to add the link should have relevance to the link and not just be any random word from your content. For example, if you use the anchor text “massage therapy for babies” and add a link to massage therapy in general, then it may put the reader off. The reason is simple, when the reader clicked on the link, he was expecting to read more about massage therapy for babies and not something in general.

Optimize Your Website Code

Let us now get a little deeper into optimizing the SEO for physiotherapist website. As earlier mentioned, search engines are smart enough to scan your complete content before choosing you as a relevant source. Apart from scanning your content, the search engines go deep into analyzing your complete website code in order to provide the best results to the users. This means that the kind of back-end optimization you do to your website will also count.

To start with the website code optimization, have a look at your meta description tag. The meta description is the description that appears on the search engine result page, right under the heading of your blog or website. This description serves the purpose of informing a user about what your website or blog is about. This description needs to be crisp and informative as it enables a user to decide whether he should click on your website URL or not. The next thing to have a look at is your website URL. Having a clear and easy to comprehend URL makes it easier for a search engine to crawl on your website. If you have an unclear and cluttered URL, your site won’t get indexed by the search engine, which will result in your website ranking low on the search engine result page. Try to keep your URL simple by deleting unnecessary characters such as &, #, $. Keep your URL short and use dashes or forward slashes (-, /) instead of underscores.

Now coming to an important factor. When you upload an image on your website or in your content, you do not pay much attention to it. It’s time you do. Search engines are programmed to crawl on text-based data. This means that they are unable to read through the images that you upload. To optimize your images for the search engines, make sure you fill the “alt tags”. This enables the search engines to recognize the images and connect them to your content. It will be an added advantage if you can use the keywords in the alt tags but make sure the alt tags describe the image.

Improve Your Website

We discussed a lot about making your website and content SEO friendly, but there is one more aspect which can have an impact on the SEO for physiotherapist website. The aspect we are talking about is how user-friendly your website is. So, how do you make your website user-friendly? You need to follow these steps.

• Firstly, keep your website easy to understand and navigate for the user. Keep separate sections with clear and easy to recognize section headers.

• Make sure your URL is simple as mentioned above. Do keep in mind to have consistent contact details on your website and other online directories. This helps the search engine spiders to connect the directories to you.

• Lastly make your website responsive and fast loading on various platforms such as desktops, tablets, and mobiles.

Now you may wonder how does quick loading time help? The answer is by reducing the bounce rate. A bounce rate is when a user opens your website and moves out immediately, without exploring much on your website. When your website is slow and takes time to load, a user looking for a quick back pain remedy might feel restless to wait, and he will move on to a better website that can give him fast information. When this happens, search engines automatically count you as an unresponsive website and lowers your ranking. To avoid this, optimize your website and make it engaging yet easy for the users to explore more pages.

The tips mentioned above should help you with optimizing your physiotherapist website and, therefore, enhance your search ranking. However, the results of the same will take some time to show as SEO is a continuous process. In fact, there will be multiple other physiotherapy websites with good SEO rank. Therefore, to enhance your SEO rank, you need to optimize your website better than those physiotherapy websites which already rank well. This means optimizing your website will take time as the whole process will require in-depth research and patience. If you need assistance in optimizing your website and content, do not hesitate to reach out to us.