Now that you have set up a physical therapy website the next step is to promote it so that you can generate traffic, which ultimately translates into patient referrals or clients for your physical therapy business.
There are three sources of traffic for any website:
1. Direct traffic: This is traffic coming from people who directly go to the website. News sites like the New York Times tend to have big traffic coming directly. People are aware of these websites because of brand popularity and go to them for their daily dose of news.
2. Referral Traffic: Referral traffic is the traffic that comes from other websites that link to your site. This can be sites like Facebook, Twitter, article directories or any other website that links to you and sends traffic your way. Popular websites and blogs have a lot of referral traffic. Plenty of other bloggers and people read them and send tweets about them or link to them with their own blogs.
3. Search Traffic: This is by far the major source of traffic for most websites and refers to people searching something on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Users typically find your website in the search results and click on the link to get to your website.
When you are starting out with your website or blog it is important to focus on getting traffic. Search engine traffic can bring a constant flow of visitors to your site which can potentially lead to potential clients, customers or patient referrals.
Search traffic is really important and you need to build and maintain your website in a manner that is optimized for search engines. This is commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Now keep in mind that the website you are building is for real people and that’s the most important thing. What SEO does is it takes your content and fine tunes it so that more people can discover it through search engines.
There is a world of difference between a website that is SEO optimized and one that is not. By getting optimized for search engines, you tune into what your potential clients or patients are looking for online through keywords or phrases that are located in the content of your website or blog. Doing this helps you fine-tune your content in a manner that is easily discoverable by search engines and is placed higher on search result pages when people look for relevant information about your physical therapy clinic or physical therapy business.
SEO has several aspects to it and all of them contribute to people finding your website on search engines easily. An example would be you are writing a blog post or creating a website page on a type of outpatient therapy (i.e Vestibular Rehab) and include some diagrams or pictures in the page or blog post. If you were to optimize your page for search engines you will add keyword phrases like Atlanta physical therapy vestibular rehab or Atlanta vestibular therapy, etc. You can also optimize your images by adding “alt text” to your images. This is nothing but a description to your images which will make it easier for search engines to understand what they are and further help your website in getting ranked higher in the search engine results for vestibular rehab.
This is just one of several ways in which your website can be optimized for search engines. Physical therapists that have their websites or blogs optimized will have a definite edge over those who don’t because their content will be easily discoverable in search engines and will get more targeted visitors. I can’t emphasize enough how important SEO is to your physical therapy business. People don’t go to the Yellow Pages to search for services any more. They look to Google to search for services they need now. There is a whole new wave of business waiting for you and if you don’t capitalize on it now you will miss a golden opportunity.
SEO allows people to discover your physical therapy website or blog through search. So writing great content is only good if people can find it. If you don’t have an optimized physical therapy website, you will make it difficult for people seeking your services to find you through search. Assess your physical therapy website and take action now to make sure potential referrals and client customers can find your website online through the search engines.
