Photo by Toralf Thomassen on Unsplash

Excellent physiotherapy care helps improve the health and lives of people who are struggling with chronic pain, ailments, and injuries. As a physiotherapist, you want your patients and make them feel better than they have in years after receiving treatment. 

Unfortunately, no matter how outstanding your physiotherapy services are in today’s health industry, getting new patients to your practice can be challenging. While a web development company in Toronto can help you create a beautiful website, it may not be sufficient enough to attract potential patients.

That is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play.

To ensure better online visibility and higher search engine rankings, you should have high-quality, keyword-rich web content. However, there are other aspects of physiotherapy SEO that require attention, such as link building and technical optimization. 

In this post, we rounded up a quick and easy guide for developing the right physiotherapy SEO strategy to help boost your organic search engine rankings and conversion rates. 

1. Optimize your Google My Business (GMB) Profile 

Creating or claiming a GMB profile for your physio practice is an effective way to improve your local SEO. You can quickly and easily claim your GMB listing and increase your online visibility, which helps attract more prospects to your practice.  

Here is how you can get started with your GMB profile:

• To create your profile, go to business.google.com and follow the instructions provided.
• Provide all the necessary information about your practice, as well as high-quality photos. 
• Include a Google map with your office address on your contact page.

1. Encourage patients to leave reviews

Collecting Google reviews from your previous patients is an effective component of a great physiotherapy SEO strategy to capture more potential clients. When people search for massage therapy in Whitby, they tend to refer to the reviews that appear in Google search results before making a final decision.

Positive reviews enable you to show the credibility of your practice to your potential patients. Since Google uses reviews as a determining search engine ranking factor, it can help improve your SEO efforts. 

Encourage your patients to leave reviews. You can send them a follow-up email. Taking the time to obtain Google reviews not only boosts your rankings but also helps establish your practice as an authority in the physiotherapy industry. 

1. Create More Google Business Profile Posts

Using GMB posts is another way to bring new patients to your door. Potential patients can view your short posts in your GMB listing. You can use your GMB posts to promote events, blogs, and special offers, or even answer questions your potential patients have about your practice. 

1. Optimize for Mobile

A mobile-friendly website is a crucial factor in technical SEO. Your website should not only look beautiful but should also respond well on different mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Websites that are unoptimized for mobile-friendliness are missing out on plenty of target patients searching for sports rehab in North York on mobile devices. 

To check if your website is optimized for mobile devices, enter your website URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. 

In case your website is not mobile-friendly, here are some tips to fix this problem:

• Use a responsive design, which enables your website to automatically adjust to fit any screen size.
• Create a stripped-down version of your website by using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project to enable your mobile device to load quickly.

1. Optimize for Website Speed

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

In addition to providing valuable content and optimized meta tags, you should also optimize the speed of your website. Web loading speed is a significant technical SEO ranking factor. The faster your website loads, the higher your website will rank on SERPs. 

In 2021, Google has introduced a new ranking known as “Core Web Vitals,” which is a set of metrics that measures the performance of a website. 

There are 3 metrics that makeup Core Web Vitals:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – measures the time duration for the largest element on a web page to load
• First Input Delay (FID) – determines the time for a user to interact with a web page
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – gauge the stability of a web page. 

Google considered these metrics as SEO essentials as they affect the user experience. Here is how you can improve your website performance on these metrics and boost your website ranking on SERPs. 

• Minimize the image size and code and use caching to speed up your website’s loading times. 
• Use a fast and reliable server for your hosting
• Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools to determine which areas require speed improvement. 

1. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is another crucial SEO strategy. There are several ways to conduct keyword research: 

• Google Keyword Planner – This keyword research tool enables you to check the number of people searching for a specific keyword each month. 

• Google Suggest – It has a feature that allows you to see what keywords your target audience is searching for. Type in a specific keyword and Google will provide you with a list of suggestions. 

• Google Trends – This keyword research tool lets you check the popularity of a certain keyword over time, helping you identify if the keyword is worth targeting. 

1. Create High-Quality, Relevant, Informative Content

High-quality, relevant, and informative content is crucial in SEO. Keyword-rich titles and descriptions help ensure content quality and allow Google to understand and match your content with relevant search queries. Well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors engages and impresses your target audience. Update your web page content by publishing new blog posts and articles to show Google that your website is active and relevant. This is a great way to improve your search engine rankings. 

1. Acquire backlinks

Backlinks refer to the links from other websites pointing to your website. These links are an integral Google ranking factor as they measure the popularity and relevance of the website. The more quality links linking back to your website, the higher your search engine rankings will be.

Here are 2 effective ways to acquire backlinks:

• Write Guest Posts

This SEO technique provides plenty of benefits to your physiotherapy website. It is a good opportunity to obtain a quality link back from another trusted website. This enables you to share your expertise and knowledge on other websites and establish your practice as a trusted figure within your niche. It is also a great way to develop relationships with other thought leaders and increase your brand exposure to an entirely new audience. 

• Broken Link Building

The process involves finding broken links and reaching out to webmasters. You need to create a resource to replace the link. This link-building technique is beneficial to both the marketer and the webmaster.