Is your social media ad account eating deep into your clinic's fund?
Are you interested in a cost-effective method of driving millions of potential clients from Google Search Engine to your website?
If yes, this is the most reliable guide you will ever read on SEO for physical therapists.
They don't know it yet, but your customers are on their way to your clinic. Your sole responsibility is to get them there safely.
In the next five minutes, you will learn how to position your site for high traffic. We won't just teach you how to catch "fish"; you will also learn to make them multiply in your fish so you won't always have to stress yourself to the sea whenever you need customers.
In marketing, you find customers. In SEO, customers find you.
The rule of thumb in every marketing practice is to target potential clients where they gather the most. But it's different with SEO marketing.
When you optimize your site to rank better on Google, you are making it easier for your clients to find you.
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It refers to a website enhancement process that increases your chances of being discovered on the first page of Google. Over 8.5 billion searches are made on Google daily.
These searches include the clinical services you provide and relevant physical therapy topics. The recurring words in these searches are called keywords. Keywords let the readers know if your content is the right fit for them.
Also, the algorithm cannot understand your article, it can only link the user to the right articles with keywords.
When done right, the Google search engine can bring millions of potential customers to your physical therapy business every month.
There are different search engines apart from Google. Other search engine examples include Yankee, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDyckGo, Naver, Baidu, etc.
However, Google is the most used and popular. Here, we're limiting our discussion to Google SEO, the most relevant search engine.
SEO keywords are words and phrases that allow people to locate your site easily on Google.
SERP is an acronym for search engine optimization results page. These are pages that Google users are directed to when they submit a search query using relevant keywords.
In this guide, we'll use SEO and SERP a lot.
Most physical therapists rely on regional offline networking with other medical professionals to gain new clients.
We've discussed turning normal clients into brand ambassadors using quality patient education. Nonetheless, we'll teach you how to get more customers through the Google search engine. That way, you'll never have to worry about demand decline.
Follow the steps below to rank higher on SERPs.
The Google Algorithm barely understands your content or the user's search intent but connects the dots using keywords. If you want the algorithm to show your articles to your potential clients, you need to use the keywords your potential clients are browsing for.
For instance, one of the most relevant keywords in physical therapy is "back pain". From back pain, you can derive long tail keywords like:
The more natural the long tail keyword, the more effective it is. There are keywords people don't organically search for. Stick to the popular ones.
Follow the steps below when conducting keyword research for your articles and on-page SEO content.
Frontloading your keyword means adding it at the beginning of your title. A good example is the title:
"Lower back pain: 7 exercises that will make you feel better."
I know you want to be creative, but SEO is about quickly identifying people's problems and giving them the solution.
Adding your keyword in the title lets the readers know whether your article is for them.
The length of an article should depend on the search intent of Google users. The search intent can be informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.
If you are writing an article on "the best physical therapy clinics in New York", the search intent is navigational. The article should not be over 1500 words. It can be as low as 500 words.
If the title of your blog post is "How to prevent recurring back pain," the search intent is informational, and your article can range from 1500 to 3000 words. Content on commercial or transactional pages shouldn't be more than 300 words.
Your blog posts are expected to be informational due to the nature of the physical therapy profession. Hence your article should range between 1,500-4500 words.
What Google loves more than backlinks is consistency. Consistency helps build up the keyword density on your website. It shows that you are serious.
Quality content reduces your site's bounce rate. The bounce rate is the speed at which people land and bounce off your site.
A high bounce rate means your content is not good or what the users want. Google penalizes pages with high bounce rates and rewards those with lower bounce rates.
There is a duration of time that Google expects readers to spend on your blog per article. It usually takes 5 minutes to complete a 1000-word article. So if users bounce off under after 30 seconds, that's a bad signal.
Follow the steps below to reduce your site's bounce rate:
Since we inferred that keywords are the building blocks of a good SEO post, it is tempting to think you can get to the first page of Google by stocking your articles with keywords. Overusing keywords will only get your page penalized.
On a page with 500 words, only use a keyword 5-10 times. Instead of using the same keywords throughout, you can use LSI keywords. LSI keywords are words that are semantically related to the main keyword you want to rank for on Google. For instance, instead of back pain, you can also use backache.
Using LSI keywords can make your content sound more natural while keeping it a buck on the SEO part. Why? If we are being real, SEO makes articles sound forced, but you can give it a more human tone by adding more LSI keywords.
I used the term 'fix" intentionally because your on-page SEO is muddled up by default. You need to work on it to make things right.
The written part of your page is not the only part that needs optimization. On-page SEO covers every website element like:
To optimize your images for SEO, add the appropriate photo titles, captions, filenames, and alt text.
A good URL slug looks like this https://www.physicaltherapyseo.com/marketing/how-to-rank-on-google.
The structure includes;
Follow the tips below when optimizing your URL slug.
As you dish out more content regularly, you must reference old posts in new posts. Let's say you are writing about bad habits that cause neck pain; you can link to an old article where you discussed the best exercises that help eliminate neck pain. Internal linking helps users stay on your site longer, improving your chances of ranking higher.
The title tag is a brief version of your page title (usually shorter than 60 characters), which entails your primary keyword, secondary keyword, and brand identity. To know how your title is displayed on SERPs, use Moz's preview tool.
Add Meta description: Meta description tells readers what to expect from your guide. It has no more than 160 characters.
Have you noticed declining website traffic and drop-off in keyword placements? Here, we will explain the reasons for the decline and what you can do to bump up your website traffic quickly.
The latest Google algorithm change will allow previously under-rewarded pages to appear more in the search results. While the core update is unknown, many site owners have started seeing the changes' side effects or positive impact.
You might need to index and reassess your Web pages using Google crawlers to notice the changes.
If your page has been hit with these unseen SEO sanctions and you want to boost your daily traffic, here are some tips you can implement for better traffic.
The new algorithm was rolled out on March 13, and the update installation took 13 days. Monitor your site metrics around the end of March to assess the impact of the algorithm update on your website.
There's a limit to what site insights can tell you. So you will need a full website audit to get to the root of the matter. You need to highlight the affected pages and their respective searches/keywords.
Some site owners pump keywords into their articles without considering the readers first. You need to put the readers first to rank better on Google.
Quality content shows expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E.A.T). If your content doesn't solve people's needs, they will bounce off your site as soon as they get there, hence sending negative signals to Google. User engagements let Google algorithm decide what content is useful to its users.
Also, you need to stand out. If your competitors provide A, B, and C, your job is to outsmart them by providing A - Z. The more value you offer, the longer users stay on your site. Longer duration tells the Google algorithm that your content is useful and top-notch.
One of the many mistakes site owners make is overlook on-page SEO. They invest a lot in producing flawless content but undermine the power of technical SEO.
It doesn't work like that. There are 30 to 50 million Web pages indexed through Google. If your Web pages aren't optimized for Google, the algorithm won't recommend your site when users search for physical therapy-related keywords.
Other factors that affect your site's search engine ranking are load speed, mobile optimization, and site structure. Troubleshoot your site by implementing the steps below.
Confirm our website's loading speed using tools like dotcom-monitor, sematext, geekflare, GTMetrix, Sucuri, and Pingdom. The lighter your site, the more accessible it is.
Ranking on Google is a long-term feat. It takes regular posting and backlink building. It is advisable to turn to temporary means of traffic, like social media marketing and Google ads, as you build your domain authority.