Whether you’ve just started researching content marketing tips for physical therapists or you’re an experienced medical marketer, you’ve probably heard the term, “Content is King”. This is a phrase used by marketers across all industries to describe just how important content is to your SEO and overall digital marketing efforts.
Just as the phrase implies, if you’re trying to increase online traffic, repair or boost your online reputation, or increase conversions on your website, creating high-quality content is key. Google is notoriously closed-mouthed when it comes to specifics about its ranking algorithm. And for good reason!
If people learn how to game the system, it’s the consumer who suffers. And Google’s number one goal is to get searchers from their query to relevant, helpful information in as few clicks as possible.
That’s why, when Google makes a definitive statement about SEO tactics, you should pay attention. In 2019, Google released a statement saying, “We suggest focusing on ensuring you’re offering the best content you can. That’s what our algorithms seek to reward.”
Content is one of Google’s most important ranking factors when determining the visibility of your practice’s website. Content helps keep your online presence recent, relevant, and authoritative, which tells Google and other search engines that they can trust your business enough to rank it highly.
Content is a broad term that covers all things written by your practice that appear online. Website content, blogs, social posts, Google Business Profile information, business directory listings–they all play a part in determining how high you rank in search results.
Not convinced? Over 80% of people surveyed use search results to pick their healthcare professionals. And 75% of people claim they would rather rephrase or give up their search entirely than go to the second page of Google. And the top three Google results get 75.1% of all clicks.
Did content just become more important to your practice? We thought it might! But how to get started?
Here are a few quick content marketing tips for physical therapists to help you get started as well as some in depth instructions on how to create an effective content calendar for your physical therapy practice.
Quick Tips for Success
1. Define Your Audience
To create high-quality content that converts, you first have to understand your audience–i.e. who you’re writing for. A great place to start is with your most frequently asked questions? What concerns do you hear from patients over and over again as a physical therapist?
This is the content that will pull potential patients in and keep them on your site. And the longer they’re on your site, the more of their questions that you answer, the more likely they are to convert and become patients.
2. Watch Your Messaging
Remember, it’s not just about the content you create–how you communicate it is just as important. It can be tempting to just throw information on a page and sprinkle in your keywords, but that’s not a sustainable long-term strategy.
Instead, focus on making your content clear, informative, friendly, and easy to understand. Being in the medical field means you will probably have to use specialized terminology. That’s okay, just try to keep it to a minimum and fully explain any difficult medical terminology or jargon.
Remember, these are your patients, and they are likely coming to your page because they or a loved one is in pain. So write directly to their concerns and needs. That’s how you get your message to resonate.
3. Share Your Content Across Platforms
After you’ve created content, the question is, “Where do I publish it?”
We suggest publishing your content across as many platforms as possible, including:
- Website
- Blog
- Google Business Profile
- Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms
- Business directories
The more places you share your content, the more visibility you’ll earn. Just make sure to tweak your content to suit each platform! You don’t want to get dinged for duplicate content.
4. Plan Ahead with a Content Calendar
Trying to come up with content on the fly is time-consuming, frustrating, and more often than not leads to scattered results. Instead, use a content calendar to plan your content out well ahead of time. This makes your messaging feel cohesive and helps ensure that you stay consistent.
You can start with quarterly calendars that cover high-level concepts like themes, promotions, and other categories. Then, get more specific with a monthly calendar that outlines the exact content you’ll be creating over the next few weeks.
5 Steps to Easily Create Your Own Monthly Content Calendar
Step 1: Understand Your Patients
You’ve defined your audience, but now it’s time to get to know them even better. Not just who they are, but what they’re looking for.
What are their biggest pain points and struggles? What are their search behaviors and patterns? What questions are they asking the search engine instead of you?
A lot of this information you can get from Google Analytics. There are stats that track the queries that bring people to your site, the blogs that are read most often, and the service pages that people most often visit.
Use this information to your advantage and inform your writing with it. If people want to know how to recover from back surgery, write about recovering from back surgery! If people come to your site with queries about knee pain, address knee pain and give them exercises to try at home!
It’s pretty simple. Once you know what the people want, give it to them! If you do, they’ll come back to you again and again for information, help, and advice.
Step 2: Determine Frequency
Now that you have ideas for content, you’ll need to decide how often you’ll publish new content. Remember that different platforms have different purposes and protocols.
For instance, on Twitter, posting multiple times a day is the norm. It’s an of-the-now news platform of sorts and you really can’t post too often.
But on Facebook and LinkedIn, you can accidentally bury your own posts by posting too often. You also risk being unfollowed when you pop up in your followers’ feeds one too many times. Once a day is plenty.
And with larger content pieces like blogs, you’ll need to focus heavily on quality over quantity. Better to post a 2,000-word piece that’s perfectly crafted once a month than 300 poorly-written words once a week.
Your biggest challenge will be not overwhelming yourself with posting to multiple social media platforms. You don’t want to burn yourself out or risk sloppy mistakes. So start slow and step up your content plan from there.
Step 3: Identify Content Categories
Creating content categories is an excellent way to help you create cohesive messaging that doesn’t overwhelm readers. Once you have a list of your categories, make sure you’re creating a variety of content within them. This keeps content fresh and helps you make important timing and editorial decisions.
Here are some examples to help you get started:
- Seasonality topics (summer exercises, winter safety tips, etc.)
- Limited-time promotions/special offers
- General education + How-to’s
- Updates about your practice (new doctors, new buildings, new services, etc.)
- Local community events you’re involved with
- Doctor Bios
- FAQs
Step 4: Brainstorm Topics
Now that you have your categories, try coming up with a list of ideas for each category. Some categories will end up with more ideas than others and that’s okay. You don’t want to be overly sales-y with your content. Focus on creating content that is informative, easy to understand, and relevant to your audience.
Step 5: Create your Calendar
Now that you have your categories and content ideas, it’s time to create your calendar! There are hundreds of templates and apps that allow you to create content calendars. From a simple Excel sheet to a fully automated publishing platform, use the tool that works best for you.
Just take that list of headline and content ideas and add them to the dates you chose as publication days. When you’re finished…voila! An editorial content calendar!
Attend a Surefire Local Marketing Platform Demo
Bonus Step: Use an all-in-one platform to create and schedule your content; while also getting analytics and reports to help you brainstorm future content ideas and to determine how well your campaigns are working!
Manage the content creation workflow from start to finish all from one easy-to-use dashboard. You can manage your content calendar from anywhere with an all-in-one platform accessible across devices and browsers–easy access means you can act as soon as inspiration strikes!
For more content marketing tips for physical therapists, contact our team! We’re happy to schedule a demo and walk you through how the Surefire Local Marketing Platform can help you streamline and automate all of your digital marketing efforts.
