Liz Roop
What Are Your Patients Finding When They Search for PT Help?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is critical to the success of your PT website and digital marketing. An effective SEO strategy helps your website rank higher in natural search. Planning for your keywords and SEO will help your website show up higher on the page in Google and other search engines. There are numerous components that go into your search engine performance, but let’s focus on keywords.
SEO keywords are the single word or set of words on each website page that are indexed for by search engines.
Think about SEO keywords as a traditional textbook index. If you wanted to find “spinal stenosis” in your physical therapy textbook, you would flip to the index at the back and search for spinal stenosis. The index tells you all the pages with the words “spinal stenosis”. Keywords function the same way for your website. Search engines index each page for one keyword or phrase. So when someone searches “sports rehabilitation” if your page uses that as a keyword, it is more likely to show up in the search engine results.
Physical Therapy Keyword Ideas To Target:
Obviously, you want to appear if someone searches for “Physical therapy (your town here).” You also want to appear when someone in your area searches for “physical therapy near me” which is most effectively done by leveraging Business Directory sites.
But, is that all? Will enough people search for those terms to grow your practice consistently?
Odds are… no.
In addition to your main keywords, you want to target searches by people who don’t even know they need physical therapy yet. Here are some ideas:
- Back pain
- Lower back pain relief
- Knee pain tips
- Stiff Neck
- Sciatica help
- Natural pain relief
- Arthritis / “Do I Have Arthritis?”
- Stretches for sore [insert condition]
Blogs on your site or condition-specific pages are a great way to capture extra traffic from keywords like this. Educate people on common causes, provide tips they can do at home, and explain how Physical Therapy is designed to help them get better and avoid further problems.
Best Practices For SEO Keywords
Now there is a trick with keywords—you can overuse SEO keywords. For example, if you use “physical therapy” as the keywords for every page, then the search engine can drop your ranking for overuse. It’s might not seem fair, but sometimes you have to play the game by the other team’s rules. Let’s learn how to use keywords correctly to improve your SEO.
- Keep a Spreadsheet of all your website’s pages and the corresponding keywords to avoid overusing any specific words or phrases.
- Check for Frequency of use on the page. A keyword should be used between 5-10 times on a page with 500 words. Avoid using a keyword 30+ times.
- Include the Keyword in the URL for that page. If the keyword is dry needling, make sure the page URL is .com/physical-therapy/dry-needling for example. Use a hyphen in between keywords to indicate a space (and don’t combine the keywords into a single word ie. /dryneedling as this does not work for SEO).
- Include the Keyword in the Title of the page. The keyword is indexed better if it is in the title of the page. Also, include it in the SEO page title (the title that shows up in search engines and is populated through your website’s content system).
Using SEO keywords correctly can be a bit experimental. Working with a professional website design and marketing team helps to eliminate the guesswork and increase results.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why should I even care about SEO?
When you don’t know the answer to something, what do you do? You Google it! Your potential patients are doing the same thing. The only question is: is your clinic name showing up when patients Google “back pain relief near me”? We made a short video explaining more:
2. How long does it take for SEO to work for my practice?
Improving your practice’s SEO and Google ranking can take several months–but the efforts can last long term. We made a video about that, too!
3. How can I get even more new patients using Google?
Improving your Google ranking takes time and specialized skills — but it is possible! CEO & Former Practice Owner Neil Trickett put together a 30-minute webinar called “How to Get More New Patients Using Google.” Check it out!
