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.
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