7 Things Your PT Clinic Website Needs (But Probably Doesn’t Have)

Your clinic website is perhaps your most important marketing tool. Not only does it help potential patients learn about your business and services—it also typically gives those patients their first impression of your practice. Like all aspects of your marketing strategy, your website should serve one ultimate goal: getting patients to book an appointment. Unfortunately, many clinic sites aren’t optimized with that goal in mind. To that end, here are seven physical therapy website ideas for 2021 to help you get more patients:

1. Appointment Scheduling

One of the most effective ways to get new patients on the books is allowing them to book an appointment directly from your website. After all, removing even the smallest barrier (i.e., picking up the phone to book an appointment) can mean the difference between a new appointment on the books and a patient lost forever.

Luckily, adding an appointment scheduling feature to your website is super simple. For example, if you used WordPress to build your website, you can select from various plugins that allow you to embed a scheduling feature. Alternatively, some scheduling software solutions integrate directly with clinic websites, thus allowing online visitors to find open time slots and book their appointments directly.

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2. Complete List of Services 

This one may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised at the number of providers whose websites talk all about the conditions they treat and how to contact them, but fail to mention which services they provide. This is super important for a couple of reasons:

• It instills trust by letting patients know how you plan to treat them and what kind of options they have.
• It adds important keywords to your website that make it more visible to patients seeking specific services.

In fact, keywords are vitally important. As we explain in our guide to building a PT clinic website, “Keywords are the phrases searchers type into a search engine (like Google or Bing) that ultimately pull up a list of relevant websites. With a program like Google Search Console (or Ubersuggest), you can see which keywords drive the most traffic to your website.” This is invaluable when you’re trying to influence where your site appears on a search engine results page—and for whom.

3. Consistent and Prevalent NAP

Next, let’s talk about your NAP, which stands for, “Name. Address. Phone number.” Your NAP needs to appear anywhere your clinic has a presence on the Internet—and it also needs to be consistent and accurate in all of those places. 

Why is consistency so important? Well, as Dr. Heidi Jannenga explains in this founder letter, “keeping your NAP identical across all corners of the Internet can actually boost your search engine rankings. That’s because search engines want to give their users results with high degrees of confidence.” If, for example, your clinic is called Awesome Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine, but it appears as “Awesome PT” on some pages, search engines will be less confident that the information associated with the name is accurate. As a result, sites like Google and Bing will bump down your clinic ranking when people run searches like “physical therapy near me.”

In the resource above, Jannenga also lists a few NAP best practices:

• “Put it in the same spot on every page of your website—ideally at both the top of the page and the footer.
• Make sure it’s the same—and that it’s up to date—on every site, from Google to Yelp.
• Use your company’s full name and always write it the same way (e.g., ‘Targaryen Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine’ versus ‘Targaryen PT’).
• Decide how you want to write your address, and write it the exact same way across all of your website pages, social media profiles, and online listings (e.g., ‘123 N First St, #13’ versus ‘123 North First Street, Suite 13’).
• Make sure your phone number is also written consistently across all platforms and sites (e.g., ‘123.456.7890’ versus ‘123-456-7890’).”

Pro tip: A tool like WebPT Local can actually help you keep track of your NAP and ensure it appears consistently across the Internet—thus improving your website ranking on search engines. Learn more about WebPT Local.

4. Properly-Worded, Well-Placed CTAs

As I already mentioned, the overarching purpose of your website is to convince potential patients to book their first appointment—but people are less likely to book an appointment if you don’t directly tell them to do so. Therefore, the single most important thing you need to include on your website is a call to action (CTA) button that tells patients to “Book an Appointment” or “Book Now.” This button needs to be clearly visible on every single page, and ideally, it’ll direct visitors to an appointment-booking form.

5. List of Accepted Insurances and Payment Options

In addition to the list of services you offer, be sure to include a list of your in-network insurances as well as any alternative payment options you offer (i.e., cash-pay services or payment plans). Often, knowing whether or not you work with a particular insurance is the deciding factor for folks considering booking an appointment. In fact, if a patient is unsure whether to come to you or your other highly-rated competitor down the road, they’re far more likely to come to you if they know you’ll accept their insurance.

6. Page Descriptions

Your page descriptions are small chunks of text (ideally under 150 characters) that appear on Google and describe the content on the linked page. Take a look at the following example:

The gray text is the site’s page description. Be sure to edit these on every single one of your website pages, and—as with your page titles—don’t duplicate your descriptions! Your pages should contain enough unique information that they need unique descriptions.

7. Accessibility

Because PTs often work with individuals with physical disabilities, it’s absolutely crucial that PT clinic websites accommodate those patients’ needs. That’s because:

• it’ll ensure those patients can access information about you and your clinic online;
• it’ll earn you their trust by showing you’ve created your website with their needs in mind; and
• it can keep you out of legal hot water.

That last part is a lesser known fact, but no less important. As this article from Digital Authority Partners explains, in 2010, the Americans with Disabilities Act issued a series of regulations regarding website accessibility. “In doing so, it opened the gates for lawsuits from both individuals and companies representing individuals who cannot process the information on a website due to failure to create user experiences that live up to minimum standards of accessibility.”

To ensure your website is ADA compliant, it’s best practice to consider the needs of individuals who are:

• visually impaired (i.e., by using large font, contrasting colors, and alt text under images for screen readers),
• hearing impaired (i.e., by incorporating subtitles), and
• motor imparied (i.e., ensuring your site is navigable by keyboard shortcuts and commands).

So, there you have it: seven often-overlooked things your PT clinic website absolutely needs. Looking for more help with building a better website? Give us your questions in the comment section below!