4 Ways You Can Improve Your Online Presence

Make it easy for patients to find your deets. 

If you want patients to come to your practice, they probably need to know some of the basic facts about it, like where you’re located, what your hours are, that sort of thing. And you want that information to be the same everywhere; online searches give patients plenty of options, and if they run into any friction—like different addresses for the same clinic or inconsistent hours of operation—they’ll just move on to the next practice. 

You want to build a complete online profile for your practice that offers every bit of information a potential patient might want to know about you and make that uniform across every platform and listing available. In the marketing game, we say that NAP—name, address, and phone number—is the absolute bare minimum. In truth, you want to have links to your website, pictures of your practice, patient reviews (more on that later), and other details about your practice’s accessibility and frequently asked questions. A Google Business Profile is an absolute must, and a really well-maintained and comprehensive one is going to make your practice that much more appealing.

Stay on top of your social media. 

I’ll go against conventional wisdom and say that, at least in terms of engaging with your audience, PTs should spend more time on social media. Social media companies have tried to engineer their platforms to be a source for anything you need—which means that more and more patients are treating your Facebook page as they would your website. Plus, people can use social media to message questions, leave comments, or otherwise boost your clinic’s presence to others. 

What and how often you should post on social media is a bigger question for another day, but one thing that is absolutely certain is that you should be consistent about checking your comments and DMs to answer any questions that may be coming in or just acknowledging the folks who took the time to engage with your posts. 

Get those online reviews. 

You can leave a review for just about everything these days; I wouldn't be shocked if you could go online and leave a review for this very blog somewhere. (Five stars, please; writers need validation.) And there’s a good reason for that: people look at reviews when it comes time to make a purchase or other buying decisions—like getting medical care, for instance. You may offer five-star service at your practice, but if that’s not reflected online, patients have no way of knowing how good you are. 

Collecting and managing online reviews has to be an important part of your marketing efforts. You want quantity and quality—it’d be oversimplifying to say that the practice with the most five-star reviews wins, but it’s not far off, given that Google factors reviews into its search rankings. Don’t be afraid to ask patients to leave a positive review; if you’ve provided great care and helped them get back to a healthier, pain-free life, they’ll probably be more than happy to take a minute and share their feelings. And be responsive to all of your online reviews, not just the good ones; if someone has genuinely had a bad experience at your clinic, you want to know about it so you can fix the issue and make things right with that patient.  

Keywords are your friend. 

If you’re not familiar with keywords, they’re…kind of what the name suggests: the words or phrases that people are most often searching in Google. Obviously, context matters; while it’d probably be great for your website traffic if you were ranking for NCAA Tournament results, it’s not going to be useful to find more patients. In your case, you want to see what people are searching for in your area in rehab therapy-specific terms, like “Physical therapy (your city here).” 

The more relevant keywords you can work into the copy of your website, the better you’re going to do in the Google search results. There is an art to it, however; you can’t just spam keywords on your site in the hopes of rocketing up to number one overnight. When Google is crawling your page, it’s accounting for things like readability and the number of instances a keyword is used relative to similar sites. But that doesn't mean there isn’t an opportunity for you to work some keywords into your copy where they make sense and climb a few spots in the local rankings.

We can make it easy. 

Did someone say local? Ok, yes, that was me, but I’d be remiss not to mention our new, improved WebPT Local. You can manage all of the things I discussed above manually, or you can use Local to help you build and maintain that online profile, manage your online reviews, and track your search results and keywords using automation and new, AI-powered features. If you’re short on time for marketing—and I’m guessing that you are—let WebPT simplify things for you.