One problem that most physical therapy practice owners have (especially those located in the , area) is that there aren’t any step-by-step physical therapy marketing blueprints like this one that shows you how to get more physical therapy clients.

Without a solid physical therapy marketing plan, most professionals end up doing what everybody else does: print advertising. They create a basic ad (or pay someone to do it for them) and rent out advertising space in newspapers and the Yellow Pages.

But there’s a huge problem with traditional print advertising that everyone knows but refuses to admit: it’s continuing to decline in effectiveness by the day.

The 2009 comScore study, “Targeting Consumers In A Diverse Media Landscape” points out a few very interesting facts in this white paper. Let’s take a few of the shocking facts and how it specifically applies to your physical therapy practice:

• Usage of Yellow Pages and newspapers have been on a steady decline since 2006

• Only 27% of adults between 35-44 use the Yellow Pages and newspapers as their primary source of business information (it’s even lower for 25-34 year-olds, with only 15% relying on print mediums)

• An astounding 69% of adults are using the Internet to find merchants (it’s even bigger for the 25-34 year-olds, with 78% of them relying on online methods)

So if you’ve been running advertising on the Yellow Pages and have a sneaky feeling that they’re not as effective as they used to be — don’t worry, it’s not just you. You are absolutely correct: print advertising in general has been losing effectiveness and is continuing to decline. Think about it: when was the last time YOU used the Yellow Pages to look for a service provider?

Another reason why physical therapists like yourself cannot rely on print advertising is because prospects are more likely to use print in instances when they’re looking for a specific business they’ve already heard about. If you’re a relatively small practice that’s looking to generate business from new clients that haven’t heard about you yet, chances are they won’t be using the Yellow Pages (or flyers, or any other print advertisements) to be looking for you.

With that said, what’s a physical therapist like you to do in today’s day and age?

Physical Therapy Marketing On The Internet Is Your Best Bet To Attract New Clients Today

In most cases, the Internet is used during the research and discovery phase, which is when the consumer is looking for a new businesses to avail services from.

After helping plenty of clients in a wide range of industries take advantage of the Internet to attract more patients every month and grow their businesses, there is no doubt that you will see a great return on your investment by concentrating your efforts online when marketing your physical therapy services. Plain and simple:

• Hundreds of your potential clients are looking for your services everyday on the Internet — and you can gain thousands of dollars from new business every month if they can find you online

• A successful website can and will generate a ton of new prospects who are already looking for your services (the best kind of clients!) on a regular basis

• Physical therapy advertising on the Internet is most likely the marketing activity that will give you the highest return on your dollar investment

As great as this might sounds, the BIG PROBLEM is that there are hundreds of other physical therapists all competing for your prospect’s attention in your local area, and chances are they’ve been doing this much longer than you have. You can’t just simply set up JaneSmithPhysicalTherapy.com and expect to get a flood of calls from people dying to get service from you… Unfortunately, that’s not the way online physical therapy marketing works.

So What Can A Physical Therapist Like You Do To Take Advantage Of The Internet THE RIGHT WAY?

There’s a right way and a wrong way to approach your Internet physical therapy marketing strategy, and fortunately, it’s not all that difficult to carve out your own space on the Internet in no time at all.

Our 100% free report will show you a proven step-by-step process on how you can virtually double the amount of physical therapy patients you get from your website in as little as 24 hours.

A Complete Course On How To Market Your Physical Therapy Practice On The Internet… 100% FREE

Inside our “PhysioMaximizer” report, you will discover our step-by-step strategy on how to virtually double the patients that you can generate from your website in as little as 24 hours… And this report can be yours ABSOLUTELY FREE.

You will discover:

• The exact step-by-step process we use to discover “money keywords” that are potentially worth thousands of dollars in new business every single month

• How to leave your competitors blaming the bad economy for their lack of new business, while you quietly laugh as you build a steady stream of new patients using new media marketing strategies

• The number one mistake that 90% of physical therapy practice owners are making with their websites, and what you should be doing instead (this can literally double the calls your website generates)

• The fundamental activities that every physical therapy website owner should do (but probably isn’t) that will lead to higher rankings in the search engines

• How to drastically improve referrals and word-of-mouth with this one marketing strategy that most websites for physical therapy clinics are completely missing and neglecting to implement

• How to ensure that your website is giving you a positive return on your investment with these advanced (yet simple) tools that most physical therapists don’t even know exist

…And much more!

To get your hands on this free report, simply take a couple of minutes to answer the survey below, and we will rush the report to your inbox at no charge to you!

Physical therapy practice owners finally realized that having a website is essential to running their business. As a matter of fact, it has become customary for every small business (not just physical therapy practices) to get a website when they start up. But while the physical therapy practice owner’s embrace of the Internet is a good thing, you should realize that simply having a website in existence will not automatically translate to more patients if you don’t get visitors. And not just any visitors — we’re talking about targeted traffic from people that are actually searching the Internet for physical therapy services. This is where search engine optimization and physical therapy marketing on the Internet comes into place.

Do not make the mistake that most physical therapy owners make and try to make your website rank for the general keyword of “physical therapy” — that keyphrase is very competitive and is unlikely to deliver you with patients that you can service. Instead, focus on the “local” long tail (or the LocalTail, as we like to call it) — effective physical therapy marketing involves targeting keywords like “physical therapy ” which are more likely to be from prospects within your area who you can provide your services for.

As soon as you have identified one or two primary keywords, there are two factors to effective search engine optimization: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. If you focus on the fundamentals of each, then it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to rank for your terms. The former is very simple: just be sure that your homepage http://www.physicaltherapymarketing.net/physical-therapy-marketing-optimizing-for-google-local-listings/ http://www.physicaltherapymarketing.net/physical-therapy-marketing-optimizing-for-google-local-listings/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:49:26 +0000 Carlo @ LocalTail http://www.physicaltherapymarketing.net/?p=92

Seeing how dominant Google is when it comes to our own personal lives, it is no surprise that the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing definitely play a huge part in marketing for physical therapists. More and more people (including ourselves) are using Google to find merchants and service businesses in our local area, which we use to evaluate their services before we make a purchase. Thus it is absolutely crucial to optimize your website to make sure you appear on top of the search engines for local search queries. However, last year was the mark of a trend that will change the landscape of local search, and this is the widespread inclusion of Google local listings.

What’s happening is that the Google organic search now automatically includes local business results from Google Maps whenever a user searches for something related to a particular city or area. The local listings (or the Google 7-pack as people in the search industry call it) now dominate a large portion of the screen real estate. This is very critical when it comes to marketing for physical therapists because what this does is take away a large portion of potential clicks from the websites in the #1 position of the organic results since there are 7 additional listings to click through before they even reach the first result of the organic searches. Instead of just 10 results in the regular search, in effect the searcher now has 17 total listings. Thus, it is absolutely crucial that you optimize your website for both the organic results and the local listings. In order to maximize the potential visitors you will get.

One of the most important factors in making sure your website appears in the local listing is to first sign up for an account on Google’s Local Business Center and claiming your listing. After you have done that, optimizing for the local listings is pretty much the same as optimizing for organic search, except a huge part of ranking is getting citations from various websites related to your industry and your local area. Citations would be references to your business that mention your business name, phone number and address. Plenty of times you don’t even need a link; a casual mention of those three things will be enough to count as a reference to your business which will boost your rankings on the local listings.

When marketing your physical therapy practice online, it is crucial that you maximize the potential visitors that will find you on major search engines by optimizing your website to get the highest rankings possible. While it is impossible to guarantee #1 results for searches, you can definitely do the work needed to assure that you will rank somewhere within the top 5 of the local listings as well as the organic results. If you want to discover the exact process of doing this, visit this page and find out how you can qualify to receive free training on Internet marketing for you physical therapy practice.

So you’ve taken the steps necessary to ensure that your website is ranking for your desired keywords on Google’s organic results as well as its local listings. That’s great! The next thing that you need to work on when it comes to physical therapy marketing online is making sure that your website converts your visitors into booked appointments, and this is where the skill of copywriting comes into play.

What exactly is copywriting? In general, copywriting is writing text that is meant to persuade the reader to take a specific desired action. In your case, the action that you want your prospects to take is to pick up the phone and book an appointment with you. How do you do that? We will discuss the basics of copywriting in the physical therapy marketing setting here.

Before you begin, here’s an exercise that I think is critical to your copywriting success. Open up the Yellow Pages directory and go to any random section — for instance, dentists. Take a look at the ads that are showing and read every single one of them. Try to ignore the identifying information with each ad (business name, telephone number, address). After going through the whole bunch, try naming five clinics and what exactly makes them different from the others.

Chances are, you’ll find it very difficult to tell the difference between each clinic. Each one of them does general dentistry, a few will do cosmetic dentistry, and you’ll see pediatric dentistry on there too. But essentially, they’re all saying the same things and the prospect has absolutely no idea why he should choose one particular clinic over the other. So what becomes the differentiating factor? Price.

If you want to get more patients booking appointments with you at the rates you want to charge, your physical therapy website has to do much better than simply naming the services you perform and generic About Us pages. Namely, your website has to inform your prospect as to exactly WHY they should choose you over your competitors. It is essential that you know what their problems are, and you state the benefits that your particular solution will give them.

People don’t buy drills; they buy 1/4 inch holes on their wall. Nor do they buy dresses but rather they are buying the admiration of the opposite sex. In the same way, your patients aren’t buying physical therapy services, but rather the chance to play sports again. They’re not looking for electrical muscle stimulation; they want to be free from the pain of muscle spasms in their back.

So when creating your physical therapy website, make sure that you know what the ultimate benefit your prospects are after. Your service is only the means to a specific end, and your website’s job is to tell them that you can help them achieve that end. If you want to learn how to write persuasive websites that get your visitors to book appointments with you, visit this page to find out how to receive a comprehensive training program for physical therapy marketing.

When you’re running your own physical therapy practice, it’s often a struggle for most practice owners to keep the pipelines full of new patients. Many times, they rely on walk-in traffic which is a result of being in a premium location. While walk-in visitors are great, not every practice have the option of moving to a location where it’s possible to maximize the number of people who see the clinic and hope that they visit come the time that they need physical therapy services. Getting the word out about your physical therapy practice is even more essential for smaller firms that may have just opened up shop recently. If you find that this is the case for you, that’s when physical therapy marketing on the Internet can really benefit your practice.

Why should you look into Internet marketing for physical therapy? It’s absolutely essential for your practice to get a strong foothold on the online web space today because more and more consumers are relying on the Internet to find local products and services. Usage of the Yellow Pages have been on a decline for several years now, and using search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing have been becoming more and more popular. While you shouldn’t completely ignore traditional print mediums to advertise, it’s absolutely crucial that you pay attention to your online physical therapy marketing campaigns as well.

Internet marketing for physical therapy simply involves two major steps. The first step is to get set up with your own website that conveys to your prospects why they should choose your clinic to provide them with the physical therapy services they need. Instead of spending your website’s real estate telling them how qualified your therapists are, you should list the benefits of choosing you over your competitors. The second step involves getting traffic for your website from the people who are using search engines with keywords related to you. Optimize your website for keywords such as “physical therapy ” and other related keywords so that you show up among the top listings whenever someone does a search in Google.

When you pay attention to your online physical therapist marketing campaigns, you will find that the process of filling your pipeline with new patients will become easier. There’s no time to waste — you should get started as early as today!