According to one recent study, approximately 80% of all local searches convert. That’s right – most of the people who search not for generic terms like “physical therapist” but “physical therapist near me” or “physical therapist in [city]” will pick up the phone and give you a call. A second study indicated that about 72% of people who do a local search will visit a business within just five miles of their home.
Statistics like these show how important it is for a business like a physical therapist to localize their online marketing tactics as much as possible. Competition is fierce and there are a lot of other organizations vying for the same audience that you are. If you can’t outspend them, you can still outperform them with the right approach.
Get to Know Your Community
Physical therapy is an inherently intimate process, which is a big part of the reason why it’s so important to get to know your community. In terms of putting together a local search marketing strategy, this happens in two ways: via your customers AND your competitors.
To speak to the former, you should conduct a thorough demographic analysis of who your “best” customers currently are. That way, you know what they need to hear and when they need to hear it to always stay at the top of their mind.
You should also identify key local trends, interests, and preferences that matter to your customers. This will help you make the most positive impression possible while also differentiating you from your competitors.
Speaking of your competitors, you should also work to understand your local competition and their online marketing efforts. What are they doing that works? What are they doing that doesn’t work? You can absolutely learn from and imitate their successes while avoiding the mistakes of their failures along the way.
Local Search Marketing Tactics for Physical Therapists: An Overview
Optimize That Google Business Profile
According to one recent study, Google had an enormous 91.54% global search engine market share as of 2023. The engine in second place – Bing – had just 3.19%. This is why the first thing you do as you work to create a local search marketing strategy for your physical therapy practice involves claiming and verifying your business on Google.
Optimize your Google Business profile with business information that is up-to-date and accurate. Include not just your business hours and address, but other contact information, photos, videos, questions and answers, service areas, services offered, and more.
When you do have positive interactions with patients, encourage them to leave reviews that call attention to the areas you service. This will help not only generate some much-needed social proof, but it will also help your local SEO efforts enormously.
Why Localized Content Marketing Matters
Speaking of local SEO, you’ll also want to create location-specific content that resonates with your customers. Don’t just write blog posts in a general way. Try to organically work in the areas where you service for the best results.
Incorporate those local keywords as naturally as you can into all the content on your website. This includes both the written word and any visual collateral you create like videos as well. You should also, at a bare minimum, have unique pages for every separate business location you run. Don’t just have a single site for all of them.
Make it a priority to leverage local events, news, and trends in your blog posts and social media updates. Any opportunity you have to tie your business to a physical location is one you should take because that is what will connect with your audience (and it will make Google happy, too).
Building a Better Local SEO Strategy
About your larger local SEO strategies, always implement on-page SEO tactics with a focus on the locations you want to rank highly in. If you have five separate locations in five separate cities, use the names of those cities as often (and as organically) as you can.
As you do this, work to acquire high-quality backlinks from other local businesses, directories, and community websites. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the more authority your domain will have in the eyes of Google. This will dramatically improve your rankings overall.
Note that you also need to optimize your website to be both mobile-friendly and fast to load. The vast majority of local searchers are looking for business information on a smartphone, so if your site is an unusable mess on an iPhone, you have a problem that must be solved immediately. Likewise, if your site takes longer than just a few seconds to load, you run the risk of alienating a core segment of your audience.
The Untapped Potential of Local Online Advertising
Work to create targeted online ads through platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Again, don’t just create an ad for “physical therapy.” Lean into “physical therapy in [zip code]” and similar specific alternatives.
As you put together your local online advertising campaign, set specific parameters to target potential customers within a certain radius of your location. Think about how far someone would be willing to drive to see a physical therapist that they value and trust and target people within that range. Then, write ad copy that localizes your PT practice even further and speaks directly to them.
All the while, be proactive and monitor your ad performance. Analyze every metric available to you to see what works and what doesn’t. Learn from any mistakes you make and optimize your campaigns for better results in the future.
Fortify Your Local Branding
One major element of your local branding efforts should involve partnering with complementary local businesses for cross-promotional opportunities. Similarly, you can connect with local charities or community leaders. If someone is throwing an event with a strong online presence, participate in it however you can. It has the potential to take a part of someone else’s audience and make it your own.
Monitor, Analyze, Improve
Throughout all of this, understand that “continuous improvement” is the name of the game. Always track key performance indicators (KPIs) like website traffic, conversion rates, and local search rankings. That way, you can see specifically what you need to do to increase each one as things move along.
Take advantage of tools like Google Analytics to gain insights into local customer behavior. The more time you spend with these tools, the more you’ll learn about how people found your business. You’ll see what content they interacted with while they were on your website. You’ll see what actions they took. All this is invaluable because it helps you make data-driven adjustments to your marketing campaigns based on actual performance.
Better Local Search Marketing for Physical Therapists Begins Now
As the owner of a highly specialized business like a physical therapy practice, you need to do whatever you can to stand out in a crowd. In the modern era, putting together an organic local search marketing strategy is a big part of how you do it. Not only does it improve your online visibility, it does so in a targeted way – meaning that it puts you in a position to attract the attention of the people who were most likely to become your clients in the first place.
A local search marketing strategy can help you increase visibility in specific zip codes. This can lead to better customer engagement, which in turn generates more sustained business growth over time.
At Surefire Local, our goal is to help you with all this and more. We’re an all-in-one marketing platform for local businesses that helps you create local signals across platforms and profiles, making it easier than ever for people looking for a physical therapist to find you. Our platform includes features like:
- Website and local SEO optimizations, which leverage geotagging and other features to help make the content published on your website, blog, and even on your social media channels highly visible.
- Online review management, which can help build not only local SEO, but social proof as well.
- Directories management. Our platform allows you to claim, edit, and publish new content to 80+ online directory listing platforms from one place. It’ll also allow you to manage photos, special offers, and more.
- Content marketing. We have the tools needed to create locally targeted and relevant physical therapy content. This will get published on your blog, on your Google Business Profile, on business directories, and even on your social media profiles.
- Social media engagement. We can schedule posts, track essential engagement metrics, and even respond to comments.
- Local online advertising. Our ads are designed to attract only the attention of the customers that your physical therapy practice has the best chance of serving.
- Analytics and reporting. We generate total transparency into these processes, helping you understand your campaign performance like never before. You’ll see how much revenue is being generated by each marketing dollar and our AI-generated recommendations will tell you all the specific actions you need to take to help your physical therapy practice shine.
- Educational resources. We have webinars, blogs, and a wealth of other information that is designed to help a small business like yours wield the full might of local online marketing to your advantage.
So if all this sounds like exactly what your local search marketing strategy has been missing, terrific – we’re here to help. Contact the team at Surefire Local today or click here to attend a Surefire Local demo so that you can see exactly what our platform can do for your physical therapy practice right away.