In the busy world of physical therapy, standing out in your community is how you gain a competitive edge over other PT practices in your neighborhood. Doing so, will drive additional foot traffic to your door.
Online, local search does the same thing. When you localize your presence through local SEO website strategies for physical therapists, you pave a clear path from the need for therapy to scheduling an appointment.
At the same time, you boost your authority and reputation because people know that only top brands organically show up on page one in the search results. And with the right tools, it’s easier to dominate local search than you might think.
Still, many small businesses like yours struggle with local search results. You might have found yourself working hard to build an online presence without the payoff.
The key is to focus on high-quality content on an optimized website. Provide helpful information locals are looking for at the right time.
This makes it easier for patients to choose your services over others. Engaging with your audience online, answering their queries, and maintaining a dialogue not only bolsters customer satisfaction. It ensures they think of you first for their physical therapy needs. Here’s how it’s done!
Understanding Local SEO
Local SEO is a set of strategic tasks that optimize your online presence so that search engines (like Google) show your website at the top of the organic search results in your local area. These top spots are valuable because you don’t have to pay per click like you do with search ads. Plus, over 50% of clicks go to the websites in the top 3 organic positions.
You don’t care about being visible nationally. That’s not where your patients are. You only need local visibility. This targets your community. And because it’s targeted, it’s more efficient and doable—even on a small business marketing budget.
Build Content Around Real Local Searches
To become visible, you need to know what potential patients in your area are searching for related to physical therapy. These could be conditions, symptoms, treatment options, costs, home remedies, and other options.
To know for sure, perform keyword research. This just means uncovering which words or phrases people in your area are using when they search online. Specialized tools help you identify the most popular and relevant searches in your area. You then build your core web pages and additional content like blog articles and videos around these searches.
These searches can also guide your social media marketing strategy, helping you maximize your reach online with less work.
Apply On-Page SEO across your website
On-page SEO involves optimizing what people see when they visit your website. It includes strategies like:
- Using relevant industry and local keywords organically on the pages
- Making content readable, engaging, and easy to understand with proper use of headers, flow, and structure
- Encouraging people to click and engage with your website with calls to action and interactive features
- Adding visuals that are both physically pleasing and functional
- Optimizing meta tags (title, description, alt image tags). These help search engines tell people what a page is about in search results and encourage them to click it.
- Enhancing mobile experiences by ensuring your pages load fast and are easy to navigate and view on mobile devices.
Localized Content Creation
Your website provides you with ample opportunities to showcase that you’re connected with your local community. You can naturally use local keywords on the pages like city, state, local landmarks, festivals, etc. by building content around relevant local topics.
Creating location-specific pages is a good idea if you have multiple locations or serve several nearby communities, cities, or towns.
These pages will include the local contact information, directions, maps, and reviews. This way, patients can contact and arrive at the right location. Embedding a Google Map on this page will then help people familiar with the area quickly identify where you are by the businesses and landmarks around you.
Don’t forget to dedicate a little blog space to local events, awards, happenings, and even non-competing businesses to further solidify your place in the community. Since these are Local SEO website strategies for physical therapists, here’s a list of local happenings that are probably relevant to your business:
- Local professional sports
- Local school sports and activities
- Communities walks, events, and fundraisers for certain medical conditions
- Community center activities
- Parks and rec events
- Marathons (lots of potential new patients there!)
Be sure to include customer testimonials and success stories on crucial conversion pages to build trust with new potential patients.
When speaking about your local community, showcase recognizable local places like historic buildings, parks, hiking trails, sportsplexes, skylines, and stadiums. Bonus points if you have real people (who’ve given consent) in the pictures.
Directory Listings Optimization
Local citations are your information found in reputable local directories. These not only help people find local businesses. They can reinforce with Google that you are a local business.
It’s vital to make sure your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) are consistent across these directories—and if NAP is different for each locations that each has the correct location information.
Claim business profiles that exist for your company on review sites, business profile platforms, and social media. Be sure to add your website so people can go directly there from the listing.
Implement Structured Data Markup
Structured data markup, or schema markup, is a code you can add to your website to help search engines return more informative results for users. For a physical therapy practice, utilizing a schema designed for local businesses can provide search engines with a better understanding of what you are doing.
Highlight essential details like your business name, address, phone number, and hours of operation. This markup enhances your visibility in local search results and can improve the accuracy of your business information across the web.
This also gives you a better opportunity to rank rich snippets, those formatted information cards at the tops of search results.
Monitor and Analyze Website Performance
Regular monitoring helps you know when your practice is on track to build a solid presence on the local search results with Local SEO website strategies for physical therapists. Tools like Google Analytics and Search Console, along with paid tools, can help you quickly and continually assess and analyze user behavior and traffic sources.
Why do you care where your visitors are coming from or how they interact with your site? When you look at which pages are most popular and where your traffic is coming from (social media, new sites, other local businesses, etc.), you can make the most of these opportunities and optimize the customer experience to increase your website’s effectiveness.
This can save you a lot of time and effort, which amplifies results. You’ll start making data-informed and strategic adjustments to improve your local search visibility.
Local SEO Website Strategies for Physical Therapists
So, why is local SEO important for physical therapists? Your patients are local, not national. It’s much easier to rank locally with the right Local SEO website strategies for physical therapists. With local SEO, you reach people when they need your services, and you can guide them straight to making an appointment.
You can increase visibility in specific zip codes, increase patient engagement, and grow your business by consistently applying effective SEO practices.
Surefire Local helps small business localize their online marketing to get results. We help you create local signals across platforms and channels like social media, reviews sites, and business profiles. This makes it easier for patients to find you at the perfect time. We’re an all-in-one platform, so you don’t have to juggle a bunch of logins and tools. We streamline your local marketing workflow so it works into your daily routine. Just take a look at these features you get with our all-in-one small business marketing platform:
- Website / Local SEO optimizations. You can make geo-tagged content for your blog, website, and social media.
- Online review management. Automate review requests and quickly respond to reviews. Analyze review sentiment to evaluate how patients experience your practice.
- Directories management – We make it easy to claim, edit, and publish new content like photos or a special offer across 80+ directory platforms.
- Content marketing. You’ll have the local marketing tools to create online content that’s both locally targeted and relevant to your audience across platforms.
- Social media management. Schedule posts, track engagement metrics, and quickly respond to comments from one local marketing software platform.
- Local online advertising. Create ads designed to attract only potential patients, without wasting ad spend on those who aren’t
- Analytics and reporting. Inject some transparency into campaign performance. Know how much revenue is generated directly from your marketing efforts. Plus, get AI-generated recommendations on how to improve your ROI.
- Educational resources. We host webinars and blogs where you’ll learn how to get the most out of our tools time-efficiently. It’s everything small businesses need to get the most out of local.
To learn more about our tools, attend a Surefire Local demo.