Good Stuff Happens in 1:1 Meetings: Why you need them and how to do them well
How To Get Traffic To Your Physical Therapy Website
1. How To Get Traffic To Your
Physical Therapy Website
2. Recently I have been getting emails by PT’s who have their own website with
questions about how to generate website traffic. Some of these PT’s are in private
practice or offer physical therapy continuing education courses. I thought it would be
a great idea to answer some of these questions here on the blog. Basically there are
many ways you can drive traffic to your physical therapy website. I won’t go through
all of them because there are just too many to cover.
However I can give you the 5 most effective ways you can start generating traffic to
your website that you can use right away. These tips will help increase exposure to
your website online and bring in either potential referrals for your clinic or attendees
for your PT ceu course. SEO SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the most
effective and popular ways of getting traffic to your website.
3. By using the right targeted keywords in your website, it can position your website high
on the search engine result pages. This makes it easier for potential visitors to see your
website and know more about your PT clinic or ceu course. You can optimize your
website for maximum search by choosing keywords your target audience is typing into
Google to find your services. For example, if you are a physical therapist with a focus
on pediatrics in the Atlanta GA area then you would optimize your site using local
keywords like “Atlanta Pediatric Physical Therapist” or “Pediatric Physical Therapy In
Atlanta”. Having two to three main keyword phrases per page should be enough to
start driving the right amount of targeted visitors to your website.
4. Below is a screenshot example of someone typing into Google “Atlanta Pediatric
Physical Therapy” and the listed results that come up on the first page. You want to
have your private practice be one of the first few results listed so a potential patient
referral can stumble onto your site early when doing a search for your services.
5. Placing your keywords in the right place also plays a vital part in the optimization of
your website. The best places for your keywords are in the title tags of your website
pages, inserting them into your meta tag keywords and meta tag description of all
your pages and most importantly in the content of your website pages. If you are not
sure where all these these things belong or don’t how to optimze your website, then
you may have to ask your webmaster.
I do offer in-depth SEO training for physical therapists in the PT Marketing
Academy where I explain how to optimize your website for search in step by step
video tutorials. Now what you don’t want to do is stuff your website with all kinds of
unrelated keywords. This hit or miss approach is not good SEO practice and it makes
your website look super spammy. When adding your main keywords to your website
content make sure it reads well and that it provides value to your reader. Regardless if
you attract visitors through good SEO, if your website content reads like crap then no
one is going to stick around to read it.
6. Email Marketing
Sending email newsletters is a good way to keep your message and personal branding
in front of your existing patients or email subscribers. With this type of marketing you
are connecting with your audience and building a relationship through valuable
content you provide to them. This is the best medium to show your expertise by
discussing things related to their functional lives ( i.e injury prevention, back safety,
postural awareness, etc ).
Some physical therapy newsletters I have read have strategically placed links to their
website articles in the newsletter. This forces you to go back to their website. This is a
great idea because it drives the traffic back to your site and it gives your subscribers a
chance to learn more about your PT clinic and the services you offer. You can also
encourage your newsletter subscribers to share your content with their social media
community on Facebook and Twitter to drive even more potential traffic. Make sure to
provide the right call to action buttons in your newsletter so subscribers can share
your content with others. People may forget to share your content after reading it. So
giving them a little nudge from a strategically placed call to action button at the end
can help get your content get passed along for others to read.
7. Social Media
Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube have tons of
traffic in them already. All you need is a virtual pipeline to funnel the targeted traffic
from those social media websites to your own. Below are a few things I have found to
be the best way to utilize social media sites and to drive traffic back to your website.
8. The most effective way to use Social Media:
1. Create discussion groups. Get people talking by creating specific support groups
based on the types of patients you see in the clinic. Examples would be groups
catering to people dealing with post-op hip replacement, knee replacement, etc. As a
PT CEU Instructor, maybe you can create a group around a particular treatment
technique used in the clinic and offer case studies to the group. There are many things
you can do to get the conversation going and effectively get people to visit your
website for more information about you and your services.
2. Provide Q & A sessions for your online communities. By answering questions in your
social community you are displaying your expert status in your profession. You will also
be looked at as a resource for solid information. That is a good thing! Doing this builds
trust and makes people want to learn more about you and your PT practice.
9. 3. Reach out to potential referral makers in your local area ( i.e
physicans, surgeons, pain clinics, etc ). The myth is that these types of referral makers
do not use social media. Not true at all! They are there in full force looking to connect
and create lasting relationships like you and me. So why not connect with these
people on social media and offer ways to help improve their patient outcomes.
Maybe you can provide an educational inservice at their office for their patients. The
goal here is to connect and build a relationship first. Then offer to do something for
them initially before asking for the referral.
4. Provide useful and valuable content specifically for your social community and ask
them to kindly share your content with others. Articles and video that you create or
that you find online that is useful to the community are great ways to build value in
your community. Using these social media tactics consistently will have people
wanting to know more about you. This behavior typically drives people to your
website to learn more about you. It has happened to me many times on all of the
social media sites I use and is probably one of my best targeted traffic referral source.
10. Paid Advertising
Pay Per Click or PPC advertising is one of the common methods of advertising a
product, company or website. This can also bring a lot of traffic to your website. The
only thing is you have to pay for it. There are some pros and cons when using PPC
advertising. I personally like to receive free traffic but eventually you get to a point
where you need to reach a wider audience. So paying for traffic is something you
should think about as your need to acquire more online traffic grows. So let’s talk
about the pros of using PPC advertising to bring traffic to your website. PPC ads are
like turning on the water facet. You pay the service provider and you get traffic almost
instantly! Yes, it’s that simple! It’s probably the fastest way to bring traffic to your
website almost immediately. A good benefit to PPC ads when setting up your
campaigns, you can measure which set of keywords are effective in driving the most
amount of converting traffic and then use those same keywords to optimize your
website pages as we mentioned earlier.
11. The cons of using PPC ads include the fact that it can create a hole in your budget if
you do not know what you are doing. You have to understand ad copy which is
your advertisements verbal or textual content. Another thing is testing multiple ads
against each other to see which ads are converting winners and which are the losers. It
is a process that if you don’t know much about is best left for someone that does. If
you are daring enough to try you can always start off with a small budget to play
around with and learn as you go.
If you decide to try PPC Ads to drive traffic here are some places to start:
1. Facebook Ads
2. Google Ads
3. Yahoo and Bing Ads
4. Local Sponsorship Banner Ads.
These can be websites that have a local presence in your area and offer banner
placement on their website. I will be providing more blog content on PPC ads in the
future. I know it is an area that can seem intimidating but I feel you should have some
working knowledge about how it all works.
12. Offline Marketing Tools Traditional offline marketing tools
are also effective in driving traffic to your website. Some
marketers kind of moved away from this type of marketing
because of all the hype with the internet and social media.
However offline tools can still prove to be very much
effective in driving website traffic and increasing the
exposure of your physical therapy clinic or ceu course.
Below are some effective offline tools you should
remember to stick your website url on to get people to
come back and visit you online:
1. POST CARDS
2. BUSINESS CARDS
3. COMPANY LETTER HEADS
4. BROCHURES
5. ENVELOPES
6. COMPANY VOICEMAILS.
13. A simple line that states “you can always reach us through our website” is often
effective. So those were the 5 ways you can drive traffic to your physical therapy
website. I go more in depth and explain in detail how to do all 5 traffic generating
techniques in the PT Marketing Academy. I would advise you to take a look at if you
want to learn more about marketing your physical therapy business.
Don’t feel like you have to do all of these things at once to start driving traffic to your
site. I’ll admit that it can be a bit overwhelming and an uphill climb to conquer if you
are not familiar with how to drive traffic to a website. I would like to encourage you
though to take action on one of these traffic generating techniques.
Focus on one for now so that you can start building a steady stream of
targeted potential referrals for your PT practice or attendees for your PT ceu course. If
you found this post helpful please share on Facebook and Twitter with the buttons
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14. For More Physical Therapy Marketing Strategies & Tips
Visit http://www.ptmarketingunleashed.com