What is SEO and Why Is It Important?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of making your website more visible on search engines like Google. In doing so, it greatly increases your chance to get more therapy clients.
When potential clients/customers search online for therapy, services or information related to your practice, you want your website to appear as high up in the search results as possible – and that’s where SEO comes in.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines like Google use complex algorithms to decide which websites to show at the top of their results. SEO helps you tweak your website to meet these algorithms’ preferences, so your site has a better chance of ranking higher helping you to get more therapy clients.
This involves:
- Using the right keywords – words or phrases potential therapy clients are likely to search for.
- Improving the structure of your site – making it easy to navigate.
- Optimising for mobile devices – ensuring your site works well on phones and tablets.
- Creating high-quality content – offering valuable information to your potential therapy clients.
Why Is SEO Important?
- More Visibility, More Traffic: Most people don’t look past the first page of search results. If your site ranks higher, more people will see it, and you’re likely to get more therapy clients.
- Better User Experience: A key part of SEO is making your website user-friendly. When your site is easy to use, potential clients are more likely to stay longer and explore your services, which can lead to more business.
- Cost-Effective Marketing: Unlike paid ads, SEO helps you attract visitors naturally (or “organically”). It’s a long-term investment that continues to bring in traffic without the ongoing costs of advertising.
- Builds Trust and Credibility: Websites that appear higher in search results are often seen as more trustworthy and credible. A well-optimised website helps establish your business as a reliable authority in your field.
In short, SEO is crucial for helping potential clients/customers find your practice online and ensuring your website provides a better experience. Without SEO, even the best-looking website can go unnoticed. Investing in SEO means investing in your practice’s future growth.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” search results, not paid for advertising. There are just a few simple things that you need to do to achieve this and by doing so you can increase your chances to get more therapy clients.
It used to be that the the earlier a site is presented in the search results, the higher it “ranks” the more searchers will visit that site.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a therapy website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding, to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
So what do I do?
We give you all the information you need to do this yourself, we can do it for you if you prefer, or you can pass it on to your web developer. However there are a few main aspects of SEO that are critical to any therapy website in fact any website that wants to get more therapy clients needs to rank well on the search engines.
- Good articles with great content i.e. relevant content about the subject that your keywords relate to.
- Therapy related (preferably) inbound links to your site.
- Easy on the eye i.e. not too cluttered and don’t go mad on colours and fonts.
- Easy to navigate with inter-site links.
- Headings, titles and meta descriptions, make sure they contain your keywords.
The above can be done by our team but that costs you money and is something that, if you know your therapy and what it means,you should be more than capable of doing yourself. Below is an explanation of what they are.
About the Therapy Marketing SEO Team
The mission of Therapy Marketing’s SEO team is to give your therapy practice the opportunity to harness the power of search engines as a marketing medium to get more therapy clients. When properly utilised, search engine optimisation gives your practice an opportunity to compete at a higher level than your local competitors. Regardless of the size of your practice, you can rely on the SEO services provided by our search engine optimisation team to get your practice in front of prospective clients at the precise moment when they are looking for your help.
“search engine optimisation gives your practice an opportunity to compete at a higher level than your local competitors and get more therapy clients”
We believe in you making your mind up based on the evidence. So below is a few of the websites we supply SEO services to. Search on Google for yourself and make up your own mind.
Good relevant content – What do we mean?
By good quality, relevant content. We mean original written content in your own words explaining exactly what your therapy and all the aspects of it and how it can benefit a prospective client. If you do this yourself all of your skills and passions can come through and the prospective client can start to build a relationship with you. The more you relate to the prospective client the more likely they are to become a real client. The words that you write must include the key words that you want Google to return your website to in response to a search.
For example say you run an acupuncture clinic in Birmingham. If you wanted to be on the first page of Google on the search term (keyword phrase) “acupuncture in Birmingham”. In your webpage you might use phrases like “We have been practising acupuncture in Birmingham for 3 years” and “We have been using acupuncture in Birmingham to treat issues like x, y and z”. These keyword insertions need to be natural and relevant to the page subject. At Therapy Marketing we can help you by identifying keyword phrases that are worth targeting to give you the maximum amount of traffic.
Inbound links from quality sites
Any website that wants to rank well needs inbound links from quality sites. The better the site the higher the value of the link. These links can be achieved easily but it takes effort. All you have to do is find discussion groups, blogs, professional associations and forums that are related to your therapy and start to comment on the discussions. When you start to comment and add value and content to the discussion you are usually allowed to add a link to your website in your signature. At Therapy Marketing we can help you by identifying which sites it is worth you targeting to get the most from the links.
Some example of what you can achieve with good SEO
The Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy
The Surrey Institute of Clinical Hypnotherapy receives over 2500 unique hits every month. 100% of those come from the organic listings (i.e. not paid for) on the search engines.
Top 3 positions on Google on the following search terms (keywords).
Hypnotherapy Surrey
Hypnosis Surrey
Hypnotherapy Croydon
Hypnosis Croydon
Hypnotherapy Wallington
Hypnosis Wallington
Hypnotherapy Carshalton
Plus over 120 page 1 keywords
Avenue Osteopathic Practice Sutton Surrey
Avenue Osteopathic Practice receives over 1800 unique hits every month. 84% of those come from the organic listings on the search engines.
Top 3 positions on Google on the following search terms (keywords).
osteopath Surrey
osteopath Sutton
back pain Surrey
back pain Sutton
neck pain Sutton
frozen shoulder Surrey
osteopathy new mums
Plus over 80 page 1 keywords
These positions were correct at the time of publishing. However Google rankings change by the day so positions change all the time. See also some of our other sites we have created and performed SEO services on our website examples.