2 Easy Ways to Improve Your Physical Therapy Online Marketing Content

physical therapy online marketing

“Content is king” is a common, hard truth that marketing strategists rally behind when talking about physical therapy online marketing. Any good website builds quality content in order to improve its ranking and support its marketing strategy at an optimal level. But what actually makes content “king,” and how can you improve it? For one, it’s not about the quantity of content: even if you blog every day for a year, it won’t draw in visitors and patients if it doesn’t have the right content. With that said, we bring you these two easy-to-integrate tips for making sure your content is king:

1. Get into (Info)Graphics

People love visuals, whether it’s an infographic or a candid photo. Your physical therapy online marketing content becomes more valuable when there’s an attached graphic that draws people in. In addition, infographics in all their forms—photo lists, data visualizations, timelines, photo-filled posts and articles—make people more inclined to read through, share or become convinced by the content. As we have seen in our own physical therapy work and the science behind it, visuals and visualizing treatment can be an important component to healing and rehabilitation. Why not apply the importance of visuals to your physical therapy online marketing content?

If your blog or website doesn’t currently have many photos or graphics, it’s time to add them. To start with, add professional photos of your staff in action on your “About” or “Staff” pages. [pullquote1 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]Your physical therapy office has a wealth of information that’s easy to transform into images or graphics; it’s just a matter of finding the right content and properly distributing it[/pullquote1] You can also create your own flow charts about common treatments performed at your clinic and publish them, or provide data charts to help patients visualize their healing process. You should realize that your physical therapy office has a wealth of information that’s easy to transform into images or graphics; it’s just a matter of finding the right content and properly distributing it. There are many different online tools that can help you create infographics, but hiring someone to add creative, unique and personal content will also go a long way in improving your website.

When posting any sort of  image, remember to provide descriptive metadata. This helps search engines properly “read” the image and allows it to pop up in searches.

2. Do Link Building the Right Way

You can think of link building in two ways: inbound and outbound. Link building in general can involve a long list of tactics, but at its most basic level, you should link relevant parts of your content back to other pages on your site. This is how to utilize inbound marketing, and some examples of how this works include the following:

  • Did you mention another office or location of your physical therapy practice? Link that phrase back to the location page on your website.
  • Did you refer to a post you made about a specific injury from last month? Link it so your readers can find it easily.
  • Did you mention your monthly physical therapy newsletter as a resource for special offers and tips? Link the sign up form for the newsletters in that sentence.

This type of inbound link building helps prioritize your message and site, and keeps people from navigating away from it. By providing the relevant links on the same page or blog post, you’ll improve the traffic of your website.

When it comes to outbound linking, you’ll want to make it easy to share and spread your content to others. Make sure that you’re automatically sharing your content on your social media profiles, or making it easy for people to share on various platforms directly from your website. For those with a budget, tools like Bitly are great for sharing shorter links that are optimized for social media and mobile users, and they also allow you see the analytics for each of those pages.

It’s also important to remember that there is a limit to link building: going overboard and providing a link to every phrase can actually penalize your site. This is especially true for websites that pay to generate links, as many analytics tools—like Google—will see it as spam and flag your website as a result. Therefore, it’s best to make sure that each of your links are relevant to the phrase used and distributed in a natural way.

We Can Offer Additional Physical Therapy Online Marketing Tips

[squeeze_box4]By focusing on these two strategies, you will easily boost the quality of your physical therapy online marketing content and present a much higher-quality and professional-looking website. If you still feel you could use some assistance with improving your online marketing, contact us today. We can offer additional tips or establish a specific strategy that addresses all important aspects of your website.[/squeeze_box4]

 

5 More Physical Therapy Online Marketing Terms Explained in Simple English

physical therapy online marketing

So, you’ve decide to start focusing on marketing your physical therapy practice online. You know you need to set up a website, a blog and social media pages. You now understand what search engine optimization (SEO) refers to and why it’s necessary to include keywords throughout your website, but there may still be some physical therapy online marketing terms that you don’t understand.

For instance, you may have heard the term web content, but don’t know exactly what that means. The same may be true for inline or outbound marketing, terms you know are important but don’t completely “get.” While you may not think that you need to know all these terms, it never hurts to have a basic comprehension of the ins and outs of physical therapy online marketing in order to better promote your practice. This is a field that’s likely to only grow in the future, so the more you understand it now, the better you’re going to be prepared for what’s ahead.

5 More Physical Therapy Online Marketing Terms Explained

With that said, we present you with 5 more physical therapy online marketing terms explained in simple English:

1. Web Content

Web content refers to all the components that make up a website. This includes the written words on the website, as well as all the images and videos, if any are present. Written content is most important and most likely to help you get found by patients, since search engines like Google and Bing only search through words and can’t do so with images. Good written content with lots of effective keywords is therefore all that’s necessary to initially attract visitors to your site. Once they get there, though, you should keep them engaged with good images, video, layout, and other attractive elements.

2. Content Marketing

The aim of content marketing is to draw more traffic to your website. As mentioned above, this is largely done by using good written content with a number of keywords embedded in it, preferably in a natural way. But you should also consider using good images for content marketing. Using images with people in them, striking images with lots of contrast and images that are strictly relevant to your subject matter can all help to keep your reader’s attention and keep them coming back to your website.

3. Listicle

What are you reading right now? You got it. This very blog is called a listicle, or a numbered list. In this case, the list reviews physical therapy online marketing terms, but listicles can be used for just about anything. For example, “5 Great Physical Therapists from History” or “7 Types of Cutting Edge Physical Therapy that Might Be Able to Help You” can both be used as attractive titles for listicles. The advantage of listicles is that people can skip over the things they already know and read only those that they are unfamiliar with.

4. Outbound Marketing

Traditional marketing is all outbound. It reaches out to the consumer and tries to sell a certain product or service. Consider the advertisements you see in magazines, on billboards and on TV. Did you ask for these advertisements to be shown to you? Of course not. In fact, you were given no choice in the matter, and yet at times they do catch your eye and you end up buying some of those products. In the online world, you may also see similar advertisements on websites fairly often, and sometimes you may receive emails that try to sell you certain products. These are all examples of outbound marketing.

5. Inbound Marketing

These days, people prefer to practice inbound marketing rather than outbound marketing. In inbound marketing, you’re not forcing the patient to look at your advertisements, but instead, you just wait until they reach out to you. How can you accomplish this? It could happen via word of mouth, on social media or in some other way. There are many ways in which a patient could hear about your physical therapy services, and any of these can cause them to look your practice up online. When they do this, you need to have a website, blog and social media pages ready to give them all the information they need. This state of readiness to serve a patient and provide them with information is referred to as inbound marketing.

[titled_box title=”We’re Here to Help Your Physical Therapy Online Marketing” bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#000000″]This blog is just the beginning, and improving your physical therapy online marketing campaign takes regular, focused effort. If it seems like too large a task for you to handle on your own, allow E-Rehab to step in and offer our assistance. Contact us today to ask about our services and how we can revamp your practice’s online marketing.[/titled_box]

 

5 Physical Therapy Online Marketing Terms Explained in Simple English

physical therapy online marketing

Most people realize that online marketing is the future, but in many cases, they may not be entirely sure how to actually use it to their advantage. This can be particularly true for physical therapists, as the whole physical therapy online marketing world can seem a bit confusing. Going to a digital marketing expert may help by giving you lots of ideas, but it may also complicate matters and make you feel overwhelmed with all the options they present to you.

5 Physical Therapy Online Marketing Terms Explained

To help simplify things, here are few explanations of 5 physical therapy online marketing terms that will help you to understand what will help increase your business.

1. Website

Of course everyone knows what a website is, so the term doesn’t need much of an explanation. A website is the main vehicle through which you’re going to start your digital marketing efforts. It’s used to tell patients who you are, what types of physical therapy services you provide, what your weekly hours are, your phone number, location and how they can make an appointment, as well as any other essential details.

2. Blog

Most people also know what a blog is but they may not understand what purpose they serve. Some practice owners may struggle with figuring out an effective approach to take on blogging, and they may question whether or not they should actually have a blog in the first place. The truth is that you have to find something new and interesting to write about every week. Doing this will enable you to use a number of keywords and be found in many searches, which improves your visibility and gets your name out there. In addition, it convinces patients that you know what you’re doing and what’s happening in your field.

3. Keywords

Though the term “keywords” is tossed around often, many people still may not understand why they are important. It is true that keywords don’t hold the same power as they once did in the past, but search engines still look through all the words on your website for keywords that people might have searched for. For example, “physical therapy,” “physical therapist” and “physiotherapy” are some of the primary keywords used in the physical therapy field. So you should try to use keywords like these on a regular basis throughout your website in order to be found by more patients looking for treatment.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is another term that a number of individuals struggle with. Even people who work in the SEO field might not be able to define exactly what it means. In basic terms, a search engine is a system like Google or Bing that looks through a large number of websites to find the ones that are most relevant to a person’s search. SEO refers to the creation of websites in such a way that they’ll show up among the first few results when people search for certain keywords. This can be accomplished by using keywords, introducing keyword variety, providing quality content or using lists and bullet points, to name a few possible approaches.

5. Call to Action

Keep in mind that you can spend lots of time setting up your website and providing information to your patients, but it’s not going to do you much good unless you also ask them to participate in the process. This is called a “call to action.” It refers to the point where you say, “contact us for more information.” You can say this in nearly every section of your website, whether it’s your “about us” page, your “services” page or even your blog. Essentially, you should make sure that each page of your website contains this call to action and links back to your “contact us” page, so that patients can easily get in touch with you.

We Can Improve Your Physical Therapy Online Marketing

[squeeze_box5]This is just a brief overview of some of the most commonly used physical therapy online marketing terms, but you may need some helping actually putting them into action. Contact us at E-Rehab for more information on any of these terms or for specific guidance with improving your website and online strategy.[/squeeze_box5]

Why Physical Therapy Reputation Management Matters

physical therapy reputation management

Business owners have always known that excellent customer service is an integral part of running a successful business. Physical therapy is no exception, as satisfied patients spread the word of their positive experience and are largely responsible for helping a practice grow. Disgruntled patients, on the other hand, likely won’t return to your practice and may even tell other people that they weren’t pleased with their treatment. This underlines the importance of physical therapy reputation management, which must be a major focus of your strategy if you want your practice to continue thriving.

Patients May Critique Both Patient Care and Customer Service

These days, with just about everything being on the Internet, your online reputation is priceless. The [pullquote2 textColor=”#000000″]Managing what’s being said about your physical therapy practice may be the most essential marketing you can do[/pullquote2] reputation you develop is largely based on what’s been said about your practice on review sites, and there is currently an abundance of these types of sites that patients can use to speak their minds. This is why managing what’s being said about your physical therapy practice may be the most essential marketing you can do.

If you break it down, there are actually two processes of your practice that your patients can review on social media. The most common area they may comment on is their actual patient care, which is the hands-on treatment that he or she receives from a physical therapist. But they may also take note of and review your customer service and the way they are treated by your receptionist, billing department and other support staff. When you take stock of your online reputation, look at each of the comments and categorize them into customer service-related comments and patient care-related comments, so you can address their feedback with the appropriate members of your practice.

Addressing Pain in Physical Therapy Reputation Management

There are some aspects of physical therapy reputation management that can be a little tricky. Physical therapy sometimes involves pain for the patient. [pullquote2 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]If you are receiving online feedback from patients expressing frustration about this aspect of their treatment, you may want to try to be a little more compassionate and offer clearer explanations to your patients. [/pullquote2]It often involves pushing patients slightly past their levels of comfort to help them improve their strength and regain critical physical skills to improve their quality of life after an injury or painful condition. If you are receiving online feedback from patients expressing frustration about this aspect of their treatment, you may want to try to be a little more compassionate and offer clearer explanations to your patients. This will allow you to maintain the same treatment regimen with your patients, but broadens their understanding and minimizes their complaints. In many cases, complaints about physical therapy “hurting” or being “too aggressive” are really a failure in communication and not a failure in therapy.

Responding to comments as they are posted online and making sure you have a much higher percentage of positive ratings than negative ratings are crucial first steps. However, how can you focus on providing the excellent customer service your patients need if you’re spending all your time on your physical therapy reputation marketing? Can you develop internal processes to improve patient care if you are constantly monitoring your reviews online? It can be a bit of an endless cycle that leaves you spread too thin to grow your practice effectively, and you may need some additional help with these efforts.

[colored_box bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#de2022″]We would love to help you out by doing what we do best, so that you can continue providing the best customer service and patient care possible to all of your patients, which will help ensure they post glowing reviews about your practice online. Please contact us to find out how we can help your practice thrive in the age of social media. In addition to helping you with physical therapy reputation marketing, we can optimize your mobile website, send out newsletters for your practice, and handle all your marketing needs both on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as search engine based marketing on sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo.[/colored_box]

Complete Beginner’s Guide to Physical Therapy Search Marketing

physical therapy search marketing

As a private practice owner, physical therapy search marketing is a channel that you cannot afford to neglect. Search engines account for an enormous percentage of all online traffic. They are constantly directing traffic to one website or another and the search giants of today have held strong percentages of market share since their origin. Google, Bing and Yahoo are unlikely to disappear for a while so long as the Internet relies on search engines to be navigated.

This also applies when it comes to potential patients looking for information on physical therapy or searching for a nearby practice online. In just about all cases, they’re using a search engine to accomplish this task. This is why businesses like yours need to capitalize on physical therapy search marketing and use it to your full advantage, as it remains the dominant source of traffic for all businesses, including physical therapy facilities. Below, we offer some relevant keywords and search marketing opportunities that your practice can start taking advantage of right away.

Use the Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner can help you find relevant physical therapy search marketing keywords. Once found, you can begin targeting them with your search marketing campaigns.

To begin driving traffic to your website immediately, you can use Google AdWords, also known as a PPC ad campaign. PPC stands for “pay-per-click” and it implies that every time your ad is clicked, there is a fee. Although it’s a modest one, these fees can add up to quickly consume a several hundreds dollar search marketing budget. Many businesses in other niches spend thousands to tens-of-thousands of dollars per month on PPC campaigns.

PPC ads are featured at the top of Google and the Keyword Planner is a very important tool for PPC campaigns. When creating your ads you enter targeted keywords that your ads will be displayed for. To get you started, below is a collection of some of the most effective keywords that you should be using on your website. By simply adding the city name in which your facility is located somewhere in the phrase, you’ll have a complete list of targeted keyword phrases to begin creating profitable PPC ads with:

  • physical therapy
  • neck physical therapy
  • back physical therapy
  • arm physical therapy
  • leg physical therapy
  • foot physical therapy
  • knee physical therapy
  • hip physical therapy
  • shoulder physical therapy
  • physical therapy programs
  • physical therapy association
  • physical therapy clinics
  • sports physical therapy
  • physical therapy clinic
  • pediatric physical therapy
  • outpatient physical therapy
  • doctor of physical therapy
  • physical therapy services
  • advanced physical therapy
  • orthopedic physical therapy
  • physical therapy offices
  • performance physical therapy
  • physical therapy rehabilitation
  • professional physical therapy
  • physical therapy program
  • physical therapy treatments
  • geriatric physical therapy
  • physical therapy centers
  • physical therapy center
  • dynamic physical therapy
  • hand physical therapy
  • physical therapy locations

Google’s Keyword Planner provides a competition rating and suggested bid amount for each keyword that you intend to target. These metrics are very important. The higher the suggested bid and competition rating, the more that keyword will cost to target with your PPC campaign. Costs can add up quickly when targeting keywords that are highly competitive.

Search Engine Optimization

Just as you can pay to be at the top of search engines, you can also rank there naturally. Using the same keywords that you are targeting through PPC with Google Adwords, you can begin to optimize your website to naturally overtake your competitors and be a top contender for Google’s top 10 search results for a given keyword.

[pullquote1 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]Search engine optimization (SEO) is relatively straightforward and revolves around one simple concept: content is king[/pullquote1] Search engine optimization (SEO) is relatively straightforward and revolves around one simple concept: content is king. Google has been telling webmasters this for years and while some listen, many have not.

What this means is that the content of your website dictates your results through SEO. When you produce valuable content that your audience and readers will benefit from, you will see more promising results. One way to do this is to utilize your website’s blog and integrate targeted keywords into insightful and knowledgeable blog posts. You can write content such as “how-to” guides, tutorials for physical therapy, suggestions, and home-based treatments for patients, to name a few. Always keep in mind that quality content is better than high quantities of content and that your readers are much more likely to share an article that is worth reading.

To optimize your content for search engines, insert your targeted keywords into the following as possible:

  • Page Title
  • Meta Description
  • Meta Keywords
  • Tags
  • Categories
  • H1 Heading
  • H2 Heading
  • H3 Heading
  • Image ALT Text
  • URL Structure
  • Body of the Content

By following this basic structure, your content will be well optimized and ready for sharing. The more your content is shared, the more it will link back to your site, which will increase its search engine rankings. Remember to keep the content readable and not overuse the keywords. Your audience wants an article that flows well and doesn’t sound robotic.

Contact Us for Additional Physical Therapy Search Marketing Tips

[squeeze_box]If you still feel like you can use some help with your physical therapy search marketing, contact us at E-Rehab today. We can work together to establish a strategy that’s feasible for you, and soon enough, you’ll see as your website starts ascending in the search rankings.[/squeeze_box]

Reputation Marketing for Physical Therapists: 3 Top Tips

reputation marketing for physical therapists

In the field of medicine, your reputation is everything. Getting just one bad online review can have negatively impact your business in major ways. The worst part is, you may never know the business that you actually lost, since no one is going to tell you about it. This highlights why reputation marketing for physical therapists should be an essential component of your online strategy.

You need to be proactive when it comes to managing your reputation in the online space. If you’re not, competitors and the inevitable disgruntled patient will otherwise control the entire narrative of your practice online. With that, we bring you these three top tips for reputation marketing for physical therapists.

Use Negative Keywords When Marketing Online

Having a good keyword strategy is a necessity. However, this keyword strategy must include a way to limit your exposure to people who do not need your services. This saves your practice a great deal of money and ensures your patient base trusts you more through the door.

The negative keyword keeps your ads from showing up in places you would rather not be. If you start out with a happier patient base, you risk less problems down the road. However, no medical practice truthfully has the time to keep up with the ever-changing world of keywords. One of the best investments of resources in medicine is outsourcing at least the initial research of the proper keywords to target.

Aggregate All Citations

It’s difficult to have a complete grasp of what people are saying about you online. With a seemingly-endless number of review sites—Yelp, Google and Foursquare, to name a few—it’s possible for people to talk about your practice without you ever knowing it, since you may not even know that the page exists. In addition, there are many niche-oriented deep web pages that dedicate themselves to reviewing medical practices that you may not know about.

Fortunately, with the right software or the right partner, you don’t have to know about every comment that people make about you. You can focus on your current patients while the algorithm scours the Internet automatically for all citations or mentions of your practice across the entire Internet. This information comes to you delivered neatly for analysis.

[pullquote1 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]Once you know who is saying what, you can fix immediate problems[/pullquote1] Once you know who is saying what, you can fix immediate problems. When you trace back comments to their source, you also figure out where people comment on you most frequently across the Internet. With this information, you can make a real decision about whether to monitor that space more frequently. This allows you to better control the narrative about your practice.

The number one advantage to aggregating citations is pointing out trends. It’s much easier to see problems in your practice when you have information from multiple sources in one place.

Build Positive Links Consistently

The major search engines pay attention to pages with dynamic content. They also associate pages with similar citations to each other. In short, if the underlying message associated with your practice is negative, Google will raise the profile of all websites with negative information about you. If the consensus is that your practice provides good service and effective treatment, Google will raise those sites.

Aside from providing good service, you also tip the odds in your favor through consistent link building. Crowdsourcing articles related to your practice or putting up a few video marketing examples is a great way to advertise your practice directly and build links for the search engines.

We Can Help with Reputation Marketing for Physical Therapists 

[info_box]Please feel free to contact us with any question about your presence on the Internet. We pride ourselves in offering a wide variety of services that encompass the entire spectrum of what you need to succeed online. We guide your company in search engine marketing, email newsletters, websites and responsive websites, video marketing, social media marketing and reputation marketing.[/info_box]

 

Make Your Physical Therapy Website Local SEO Friendly

physical therapy website

The phrase “location, location, location” doesn’t only apply to real estate. When you design your physical therapy website, focusing on your location with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind is an absolute must, whether you have one location or multiple offices spread across the state.

The thing is, you can’t just have your physical address posted on your website and call it a day. There are multiple strategies that you should use to help you promote and improve your local SEO. By utilizing all of these practices, you’ll improve your reach across the Internet and among local searchers that are in need of your physical therapy services. Read on to find out how to make your physical therapy website more “SEO-friendly.”

Make Your Location a Prominent SEO Keyword

Your address or location should not be listed only in the header or footer of your website. Instead, you should focus on integrating it into your SEO strategy by putting it in key elements of your website. For instance, title headings for your webpages can be SEO-optimized instead of just giving them generic titles. Here’s an example: instead of using “Our Office” for your location page, optimize it with your location to “Our Brooklyn Office.” Other elements you can optimize include headings, titles, tags, image tags and other HTML and metadata descriptions. The more you use the name of your location throughout your website, the more optimized it will become.

Make Separate Local Pages for Each Location

If you have multiple offices, it’s important to provide separate pages that are dedicated specifically to these locations instead of just publishing content for multiple locations on the same page.[pullquote4 bgColor=”#ea8400″ textColor=”#000000″]Having multiple local pages not only helps people find the right location for their needs, but also improves your searchability across different places.[/pullquote4] Having multiple local pages not only helps people find the right location for their needs, but also improves your searchability across different places.

On each separate page, also be sure to include location-specific descriptions and content, instead of copying and pasting the same generic description or your mission statement. A good practice is to include local events you’ve sponsored in that area or describe the location in relation to special features or physical landmarks to make the description rich with local SEO.

The same should be done with other location listings: have separate pages on Google+, Yelp, Yellow Pages and other sites for each of your locations, too.

Attempt Address Accuracy Across All Map Listings

Search engines prefer consistency, especially when it comes to contact information like telephone numbers and addresses. To reach the most people, make sure that your practice is listed with the same contact information in every listing. For example, if your physical therapy office is located on “43 Main Street,” decide whether or not you will spell out “Street” or abbreviate it to “St.,” and stick to this designation throughout all uses of your address. The same goes for your practice name. The more consistent your name, number and address are, the more likely your website will be cited correctly and found.

Collect Reviews

Reviews are also an important part of building your practice’s local reputation. Besides adding testimonials to your website, you should also try to gather reviews for your local listings, such as your Google+ local page.

One of the best ways to get a Google+ review from your patients is to kindly request that they add a review before leaving your office. Set up a laptop or tablet that they can log into, and give them a few guidelines to help them write a short review. Not only does this give you a better spotlight in Google rankings, but they can also be helpful for you and your office. A great tool to use is Whitespark’s Review Generator, which will print out instructions for computer or smartphone use based on your office’s information.

Improving Your Local SEO Can Better Establish Your Physical Therapy Website

[highlight1 bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#3391ff”]Overall, improving the local SEO of your physical therapy website can make a big difference in your online efforts and significantly draw in new visitors that may become patients. By establishing your local SEO presence, your potential patients will be able to find you and your current patients can lend their own experience and recommendations to your practice. To get more help with your physical therapy website, contact us at E-Rehab today, and we can show you how to elevate your SEO to the next level.[/highlight1]

 

Physical Therapy Blogging: How You Can Make Your Strategy More Effective

physical therapy blogging

We listen to feedback from our clients all the time, and it’s often clear that physical therapy blogging can be an intimidating pursuit, especially for a new office or website. Another pressing question that many private practices have is this: with so many other great blogs out there, how can we differentiate ourselves and draw people in to read our content?

Believe it or not, but it’s actually quite simple to get started, so long as you know where to start. That’s why we present you with these “main ingredients,” which we believe are necessary for your physical therapy blogging to become successful.

Purpose

Every good blog, no matter their industry, has a focus or niche, which makes blogging easier for you to reach the right visitors.

So how can you make sure your blog has a purpose? Ask yourself questions like:

  • Who is my blog targeting? Who do I want to target (age, gender, location, types of therapy, etc.)?
  • What do I want my blog to provide? Extra tips and advice supplementary to my therapeutic work? My opinion on different practices? Statistics and news?
  • If I was a prospective patient trying to find my practice, what topics would I search for? What kind of results should show up complementary to my website?

Remember, you can cover multiple topics in your blog, but if you’re the only one providing content, you should be writing about topics that interest you, are worth your time and effort, and ones that make it easier for you to remain consistent. If you’re spending hours researching a topic you’re not interested in or find yourself dragging your feet, you’re less likely to be building a blog that’s true to your purpose or goal.  As a result, you increase the likelihood that you’re not meeting the best successful standard to blogging: consistency.

Consistency

Consistency is a key part of not just connecting with your audience, but also helping to maintain your web presence and website ranking. On the other hand, blogs that are infrequently posted may leave visitors wondering how reliable your office and the treatment you offer is.

Establishing a schedule (e.g. at least once a week or once a month) will help you remain consistent. You can always post compelling work whenever you find it outside of this regular schedule, but making your minimum posting at least keeps your blog and website active and engaged.

Engagement

In addition to purpose and consistency, you need to be engaging in your physical therapy blogging. Connecting with your audience—whether they love your writing or bring up counterarguments—adds authenticity and personality to your blog.[pullquote2 align=”left” textColor=”#000000″]Connecting with your audience—whether they love your writing or bring up counterarguments—adds authenticity and personality to your blog [/pullquote2] Ask questions, call for their own experiences or opinions, and reply to their comments to show that you’re not a robot generating random content, but a concerned therapist looking out for visitors and patients.

Engagement also doesn’t stop at your website’s blog page. You’ll need to reach people through social media by sharing your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or even LinkedIn. Make sure that there are sharing buttons to various social media networks you use, and automate your posts so that they show up on your own social media feeds whenever you post.

In addition, following thought leaders in the field and engaging with their work through conversation, guest posting or sharing can help broaden your blog’s visibility and get you connected to prominent bloggers and authoritative figures in physical therapy.

Your Voice

At its foundation, the most successful aspect of physical therapy blogging comes down to you and your voice.[pullquote2 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″] The success of the best blogs with lots of followers is always due to the voice of the writer, who isn’t afraid to reveal his or her true emotions, whether it’s excitement or even disappointment.[/pullquote2] Your voice is key to making your blog unique and providing an engaging, fun, and caring perspective. The success of the best blogs with lots of followers is always due to the voice of the writer, who isn’t afraid to reveal his or her true emotions, whether it’s excitement or even disappointment.

Having that voice is extremely important in the physical therapy industry: when people are searching for a new doctor or therapist, they want someone who they can connect with and someone who shows that they care. When you use your voice on your blog and talk about some of your favorite aspects of the job, what new therapeutic techniques you love or think needs more research, or updates on patients that are transformed by your work, you’ll easily draw people in.

Let Us Guide Your Physical Therapy Blogging

[squeeze_box3]Having a purpose, being consistent, showing engagement and presenting your own voice will really make a difference in your physical therapy blogging and the results that you see come from it. If you need guidance to get you started blogging, or at any other step in the process, E-Rehab can help. Contact us today to find out what we can do for your practice.[/squeeze_box3]

How to Improve Physical Therapy Search Marketing

physical therapy search marketing

It’s 2016, and just about everything imaginable can be found on the Internet. As this expansion inevitably continues, you may start to grow concerned that the larger the Internet gets, the smaller your physical therapy practice’s website becomes, especially when all your competitors also have a sites of their own. The reality of the age we live in may cause a stir, but you’re not powerless against it: create a strategy to improve your physical therapy search marketing and you’ll establish your practice as a visible name that stands out above the rest.

More than Just ‘Having a Website’

If you own a physical therapy practice and already have a website, it’s a good start but only the first step. Being available on the Internet makes it much easier for potential patients to find you, because it’s the first place most people turn when they are looking for any business. When it comes to searching for businesses, some people will use a “yellow pages” type website, but most prefer a traditional search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo. If your website can’t be found by these, or any other smaller, search engine, people are going to have a hard time finding it, and, again, you might as well not exist. It’s important to ensure that your business has high rankings on search engines, because people will tend to look at the first few search results and ignore anything else.

Physical therapy websites are unique in the way they are set up and how they need to be marketed on the Internet. If you have a physical therapy website, or are in need of the creation of one, it is best to turn to a professional company to help you. There are plenty of companies on the Internet that will help you with setting up your website, and many will help with optimizing your search. But with physical therapy companies, it is best to look to a company that knows something about physical therapy and how to market that particular type of business.

So how do you improve your physical therapy search marketing? The first thing is to have a good website that is search engine optimized (SEO). But really, turning to a professional to help you with improving your search engine ranking is the ray to go. E-rehab.com is an ideal solution for physical therapy websites to improve their search rankings. They are set up specifically for helping physical therapy and rehabilitation companies get up and running on the Internet, and that includes improving search marketing for your website.

If you have a physical therapy website, or are in need of setting up physical therapy website, turn to the experts at E-rehab.com. We know what it takes to make sure that a physical therapy company that is looking to get established on the Internet is found in the search results of the major search engines. We know what goes on “behind the scenes” at the search engines, and how to optimize a website to be found by the search engines and let people find your business on the Internet.

The Internet is a big place with millions of websites vying for people’s attention. How do you get your physical therapy website out there for people to see and access? You turn to the professionals so that your physical therapy search marketing is successful. E-rehab.com has the necessary capabilities to make your marketing strategy successful, and make your business found on the Internet.

If you are interested in seeing how much more successful your physical therapy business can be, contact us, we would be happy to help you get started.

Physical Therapy Newsletters Can Help You Earn Loyal Patients

physical therapy newsletters

If you’re not already creating and distributing effective physical therapy newsletters, it’s high time that you start. Newsletters have the power to transform new and possibly reluctant patients into loyalists that support your physical therapy practice with their repeat business and spread the good word regarding their positive experiences with you.

Establish Your Expertise

Using newsletters, especially when they are coupled with a strong online presence, will make you look like an authoritative expert in the field of physical therapy. The more you build this sort of presence, the more patients will come to you to learn about the latest treatments and solutions to their physical problems.

[highlight4]Newsletters are one easiest and most effective ways to establish your expertise. [/highlight4]The average web user is bombarded with advertisements and white noise on a constant basis, but you can break away from this buzz by utilizing effective and engaging newsletters on your blog or website. Newsletters are not only a means to encourage patients to come back to your clinic, but they are also an opportunity to educate, inform and advise. Here are some tips to help you implement attractive physical therapy newsletters to keep your patients engaged:

Many Recipients Open Emails Because of Catchy Headlines

Emailing effective newsletters does not have to be complicated or obtrusive as a busy physical therapist. Action words, verbs, and catchy headline can bring about positive results. Try to incorporate these in each of your headlines and ask yourself if it sounds like an email you’d want to open if it arrived in your inbox. If the answer is “no,” you should change the headline to something more appealing.

It’s All in the Name

Email marketing agencies and software allows you to create highly-personalized emails with each patient’s name and information. Studies have shown that click-through rates are actually much higher when your patient’s name is in the subject line. This sort of lead generation is a powerful way to keep patients coming back in the long term, which is much easier to do than reeling in new patients. As a form of lead generation, email newsletters are a highly effective form of patient retention.

Newsletters Allow You to Segment and Maintain Relationships with Your Patients

Segmenting is the process of breaking up your subscribers into smaller subgroups, creating highly engaging newsletters with a relevant call to action. Email marketing agencies can help you build and create sign-up forms that allow you to monitor who signed up to your newsletters, which can effectively track their interests. You can use segmenting and specialized subgroups to create highly appealing emails pertaining to recent news, upcoming events or the impact that you have in the local community.

[pullquote2 textColor=”#000000″]You don’t want to be the type of business that reaches out to patients only in times of need; instead, you want to bet he omnipresent physical therapist that is willing to advise and is the go-to person for the latest in your medical community.[/pullquote2] As a physical therapist, your focus should always be on maintaining relationships and underlining the importance of physical health. You don’t want to be the type of business that reaches out to patients only in times of need; instead, you want to bet he omnipresent physical therapist that is willing to advise and is the go-to person for the latest in your medical community. The key is to providing email newsletters that are valuable and different than other written content. Newsletters should be unique and related but a separate identity from your blog and website.

Importance of Mobile-Optimized Email Physical Therapy Newsletters

The amount of emails opened on smartphones has jumped from 8% in 2011 to 53% in 2014, and that ratio increases every year. It’s important to consider the mobile friendliness of your newsletters. Email-responsive designs will future-proof the promotional aspect of your career. With only 19% of marketers utilizing a responsive email design, it’s integral that you utilize this sort of technology. Make sure to work with an agency that understands the importance of using mobile-friendly newsletters to distribute informative content.

[info_box]To learn more about how E-Rehab can jump-start your website SEO, physical therapy newsletters and social media marketing, contact us or follow us @erehab.[/info_box]

Three Tactics for Physical Therapy Online Marketing

physical therapy online marketing

Creating a comprehensive marketing strategy is easy when you have a big budget. But when you’re a small private practice and just getting started in the online space, you need a strategy that costs time, not money to boost your physical therapy online marketing.

By learning how to produce the right content and where to publish it, you can better position your practice on the search engine results pages, which will help you capture more web traffic.

Here are three physical therapy online marketing tactics that will catapult your web presence:

1. Link Build with Other Sites

Whenever a credible outside source links to one of your web pages, Google counts it as a vote of confidence for the content on that page. The more links to your website’s content, the more credible your website appears to Google, which subsequently leads to a higher search engine results page rank. [pullquote1 align=”left” textColor=”#000000″]The more links to your website’s content, the more credible your website appears to Google, which subsequently leads to a higher search engine results page rank [/pullquote1] But how do you get other sites to link to yours?

When you’re just getting started online, finding an audience can be difficult, especially when it’s as niche of a field as physical therapy. Luckily, you’re not the only one trying to build an online presence in this space. Start by contacting your service providers and business partners and ask for them to link to your site. Many businesses are happy to display work they’ve done for past clients on their website in order to attract new business. Linking to each others’ websites in this manner creates a great opportunity to link build.

Another way to build links is to search for any mentions of your practice that are not directly linked to your website. A quick email to the author of the post can score you another link back to your site.

2. Utilize Blog Writing

When you’re asking for links to your website from partners, you’re going to need something for them to link to. Hosting a blog on your website is a great solution for finding a place to publish more content. While this is definitely a time-consuming task, it’s actually quite vital to your overall physical therapy online marketing strategy.

Publishing more content to your website using a blog will help you capture some of that all-important search traffic. [pullquote1 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]Publishing more content to your website using a blog will help you capture some of that all-important search traffic [/pullquote1] A good place to start blogging for a physical therapy clinic is to produce content that answers some of the most common questions your patients have about your practice. How-to blogs, reviews and top tip lists can answer those questions in a timeless fashion so they are always relevant to your readers.

Another way to leverage blogging as a tool to drive traffic to your website is to be a guest blogger for a blog that’s already established in the online space. If you’re an expert in the field of physical therapy, this can be a great opportunity to show what you know while also earning a link back to your website. In a similar way, you can ask someone else to guest blog on your site and promote it through their online channels.

3. Produce Engaging Content to Improve Your Physical Therapy Online Marketing

When you’re just starting out with your physical therapy online marketing strategy, you need to produce content that sets you apart from the rest of the crowd[pullquote1 align=”left” textColor=”#000000″]Focus your efforts on producing content that sets you apart from the rest of the crowd[/pullquote1]. One way to accomplish this is to publish certain pages that are more engaging to your audience than straightforward text posts.

Infographics, pictures and videos are great examples of engaging content, but they can be intimidating to make for new users. Lucky for you, creating engaging content doesn’t have to be difficult. Start by looking through your existing online content, specifically the evergreen posts that are always relevant. You can recycle those posts into more creative ways of displaying the same information.

[squeeze_box3]Learning how to market your practice online can be intimidating if you don’t have any experience in the field. For more information about how your clinic can benefit from physical therapy online marketing, contact us today, and we can help you every step of the way.[/squeeze_box3]

Physical Therapy Clinic Marketing: Using Social Media to Learn About Prospective Patients

physical therapy clinic marketing

If you haven’t already noticed, we’ve reached a point where the process of physical therapy clinic marketing now has to include social media, almost by default. While this should hopefully be clear to you, what it means may be a little different from what you might expect.

Why You Need Two Accounts in Physical Therapy Clinic Marketing

Many experts are now recommending that if you own a physical therapy practice, you should create two separate accounts. One is a personal account for yourself that connects to another account, which is designed specifically for your clinic. You can see the logic in this, even if places like LinkedIn consolidate both of these onto one page. [pullquote3 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]Nurturing relationships online is a growing way to generate leads on social media so you have a more targeted audience for your later marketing content.[/pullquote3] Nevertheless, you give yourself an advantage by having a personal account because it’s there where you can start conversations with prospective patients. Nurturing relationships online is a growing way to generate leads on social media so you have a more targeted audience for your later marketing content.

But when you start conversations on places like Twitter, how do you approach talking to someone? Instead of trying to hard-sell your physical therapy practice, the best approach should be a more natural conversation that simply proves your expertise in the field of physical therapy. At the same time, you can use these social media conversations as a way to create a patient persona so you understand what they’re looking for in doctors providing the best physical therapy techniques.

Where Should You Start Your Social Media Conversations?

Conversations can take place on any social media platform, though Twitter is one of the best places to search for discussions and join in. Through a simple hashtag search, you can find conversations underway related to physical therapy.

Because Twitter has discussions underway about virtually everything, you likely won’t have trouble finding numerous people discussing physical therapy issues. When you join in on a conversation, make it a natural progression without mentioning how you’re a physical therapist or own a clinic. Any hint that you’re trying to sell yourself could risk you being blocked.

This is why it’s important to write a compelling Twitter bio so those who click on your profile can see that you already have credibility. As you start a conversation, you can start to learn some things about the type of patients you want to connect with. Here’s some things to find out about prospective patients so you can further target your marketing toward them.

What You Can Determine from General Information

Once you become friends with the above people on Twitter, they’ll start following you. Don’t let the conversations end, though, because you’ll be surprised at how much you’ll get to know about them as you continue talking with one another.

You’ll want to know a few things outside of general points like their age and what they do for a living. Here are some areas to focus on:

1. Pain Points

Finding out the pain points of a prospective patient is essential because you determine exactly what kind of physical pain they’re experiencing and how you can help solve it. Once you get to know your followers, you can find out what kind of physical pain they’re having and how it affects them during their work day.

2. Is Pain Stopping Them from Reaching a Goal?

As an adjunct to pain points, is the physical pain in any person above preventing them from accomplishing something? Find out what that pain is, because your marketing content can hone in on this to prove your techniques. You can do this later by showing past examples of solving pain problems so patients could function physically again in their careers.

3. What They Expect from Physical Therapy

Try to find out what physical therapy techniques these prospective patients are looking for in particular. Can they wrap their busy schedules around yours? Finding out what they expect can help you tweak things further in your physical therapy clinic marketing content so you attract like-minded people to your social media accounts without seeking them first.

[info_box]If this is a new pursuit for you and your practice, it may sound a bit daunting at first. This response is normal, but that’s exactly where we can come in to help. Contact E-Rehab once you’re ready to take control of your physical therapy clinic marketing, so we can assist you by finding unique social media marketing tactics for your physical therapy practice.[/info_box]