What’s important for a therapy website?
There is only one thing of importance on a therapy website: and that is how many prospective clients see your website, and out of those how many book with you.
Many therapists believe that it is important for the website to look aesthetically pleasing, whereas this is important it is way down on the list of priorities. There are far more important things to consider when designing a website.
- Search engine friendly
- Quality interesting content
- Choice of keyword phrases
- Direct visitor to contact page
- Ease of navigation
- Professional look and feel
When we design a website these are the key priorities that we use. This helps us to build-in high search engine rankings from the start, which means you get more quality potential clients looking at your website. See our search engine optimisation page. So let’s look at each point in turn.
Search engine friendly
Making your website search engine friendly means being very careful about the design. There are quite a lot of fancy features within website design that can severely hamper search engines like Google from indexing your site properly. We work on the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) principle. Our website designs avoid these traps.
Quality interesting content
Interesting content of your website is crucial to attract the interest of the search engines. They will rank websites with interesting content higher than those without it. This is even more important with the “Panda” and “Fresh” Google updates in 2011. These new updates put more importance on both the look and the quality of the content. So make sure your website has lots of original, well written and interesting content.
Choice of keyword phrases
The keyword phrases you select will determine what clients will visit your site. You have to think how your prospective clients will search for a therapist in your area. But you can’t just fill your content with lots of the keywords you think are relevant to you. You have to build it in to the content in a natural and relevant way.
Direct visitor to contact page
Building a relationship with the site visitor is the primary role of any website. Having built that relationship with the prospective client, you want to be guiding them to making contact with you either by phone or email, with the ultimate goal of them making an appointment with you.
Ease of navigation
It is used just to be important to make navigating around your site as easy as possible. But after the “Panda” Google update in 2011 it is now essential because the sites that are easy to navigate and intuitive will now rank higher on Google. Also you need to be aware that a lot people are not very computer literate, especially the older generation. We ensure a simple navigation structure allowing your visitors to find the information that they are looking for.
Professional look and feel
Your website should look and feel professional but it should also be fast; nothing drives visitors away from a site faster than waiting for pictures to load and display. Speed is king.