SEO For Physiotherapy Clinics: A Guide To Attract Local Patients

Lowering the patient acquisition cost and increasing the ROI is one of the best things an owner can make in terms of healthcare marketing. 

But the main problem is that most of the owners who own any type of clinics don’t rely on SEO as their main marketing channel and keep spending on paid ads.

Just to let you know, 77% of patients use search engines before booking an appointment, isn’t it insane? and if you are a physiotherapy clinic owner who have just launched your new website and are in a state of dilemma about what channel to choose to acquire more local patients, this blog is specially for you to make you understand why SEO is the best marketing channel for your physiotherapy services website and how you can use it attract more local patients to your website.

What is SEO for physiotherapy clinics?

SEO or search engine optimization for physiotherapy clinics basically means optimizing the physiotherapy clinic websites to appear high in the SERP so that potential patients can find the physiotherapists near them and book appointments easily via search.

3 Reasons Why SEO Should Be The Top Priority For Physiotherapy Clinic Owners

1. More Brand Visibility = More Appointment Bookings

• Optimizing your website and GMB for local search can help you get more walk-ins and call appointments
• Appearing up in the SERP for local keywords improve brand visibility which improves brand reputation and trust among the potential patients

2. Lower Acquisition Cost With Improved Visibility

• As compared to paid ads, doing SEO for physiotherapy clinics can offer lower patient acquisition cost by promoting long term visibility which keeps on attracting potential patients without any ongoing cost
• Results stop when you stop spending on ads, whereas this is not in case of SEO

3. Builds Authority In Your Domain

• When you are appearing in first page of the SERP and answering every question related to physiotherapy, you will become a trusted source of information which improves brand authority and trust among the searchers
• Being a credible source of information in a medical domain is of utmost importance, and by being visible up in the SERP, strong signals are sent to Google which improves your further rankings

6-Ways To Attract Local Potential Patients By Doing SEO For Physiotherapy Clinics

1. Understanding Keywords/Terms That Your Potential Patients Use

Understanding what your target audience is searching is the basic and the most important step in curating a SEO strategy for any business.

While doing SEO for a  physiotherapy clinic you should have a detailed study of what your potential patients might be searching online to find clinics. For example, “physiotherapists in Amritsar”, “physiotherapy clinics in Amritsar” etc might be the most common terms your potential patients might search. 

Once you have this understanding, it will get very easy for you to find more keywords like these in Keyword Research Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, etc. 

Make sure you target long term phrases that can directly add commercial value to your business at the initial stages of your website. (Hire a SEO agency if you don’t know how to)

2. Optimizing Google My Business Listing To Attract Local Patients

If you don’t have a GMB listing as of now, the first thing you need to do is create one.

Having a fully optimized GMB listing offers great brand visibility to the audience that is searching nearby to your location.

Suppose I’m looking for a physiotherapy clinic near [LOCATION NAME], I will be entering (physiotherapists near <Location Name> or physiotherapy clinics near <Location name> in Google Search and the SERP will display the physiotherapy clinics as per location I shared. 

Then I can analyze the clinics as per the reviews and other details and can schedule a direct appointment with them via their GMB profile.

The question is how to optimize the Google My Business profile? Here are some ways in brief to help you with the start:

• Use your real business name that you have in front of your brick and mortar store
• Add actual and working contact details and address
• Choose the categories carefully under which your business falls
• Keep the working hours of your business up-to-date
• Ensure that your business description if true and optimized
• Use keywords you want your listing to appear on in your description
• Add real photos and videos of your business for better trust and visbility
• Ensure that the call and chat feature is working
• Carefully select all the attributes for detailed business info
• Ask your patients to leave review on your listing
• Keep everyone informed of the working days
• Post about promotions, events, or offers available in your store to keep profile active

3. Optimize Your Physiotherapy Clinic Website For Local SEO

Optimizing your physiotherapy website for local SEO is one of the other ways to attract local patients searching for the services online.

While creating content for your website, you need to ensure that you are using location based terms in your meta tags, titles, and body of the content to help crawlers understand that you are creating the content for a particular location.

If I’m a physiotherapy clinic owner in Amritsar, this is what I would do:

• Target “physiotherapy clinic in Amritsar” as my primary keyword and “physiotherapists in amritsar” as my secondary keyword for the homepage
• For multiple branches across Amritsar or even other city, I will ensure that complete address, contact details, and Google Maps for each location are mentioned on the website
• Create different pages for each service I would be providing like “back pain treatment in <Location>”, “knee pain treatment in <Location>, etc.
• Ensure that the contact us page is fully optimized with all the actual details
• Create an about us page that displays the info of the business with the owner and other staff details
• Build topical authority by targeting almost all the topics on Physiotherapy

These best practices need to be implemented while doing local SEO for a physiotherapy clinic so that it starts appearing when a patient searches for “knee pain treatment services near XYZ location.”

4. Relevant Content = Relevant Users

Attracting the right audience requires right content on the website, and to create the right content, a robust website content strategy needs to be in place.

For local businesses like Physiotherapy Clinics, choosing the right keywords to create content on is the most critical step while building a SEO content plan for the physiotherapy website.

The common goal of almost all the local medical businesses is to increase the nearby patient footfall, and to make that happen local keywords with local language (sometimes) needs to be targeted.

For businesses like yours, the audience already knows what issues they are facing and they are searching for you to relieve them of their pain and not to teach them with the things they need to do at home to cure their problem.

You need to create content on the topics from where they can find you easily, like:

• Top Physiotherapy Clinics Near [Your Colony]
• Best Physiotherapists In [Your City]
• Physiotherapy Treatment For Knee Pain
• How We Helped [X Patient Type] Walk Without Pain Again in Just [Timeframe]
• Cost of Physiotherapy in [Your City]

By building content on topics like these you won’t only build authority in the local audience but also generate revenue.

5. Gaining Backlinks From Relevant Health Websites

Those who tell you that backlinks are not that important now don’t truly understand the power of backlinks.

Backlinks were important, are important, and will be important, at least for next few years. 

Getting backlinks on relevant phrases from health domains that are directly or indirectly related to physical fitness will be one of the best best practices while doing SEO for physiotherapy clinics in order to get keywords ranked.

But just to let you know, links alone are not the only factor to make your keywords rank. You need to sort your on-page and technical part before that and your content should be matching the search intent only then you should go for link building.

Before outreaching relevant websites asking them to place your link on their website you should be aware of what metrics you are targeting. For example, my website has a DR of 40 and organic traffic of 10k, I won’t be outreaching websites having metrics lower than this.

To filter out the websites for getting the link inserted, you need to take care of these things:

• Websites having higher relevancy and low metrics are way better than websites having high metrics and low relevancy
• Domain rating of the website should be higher than your website
• The page score of the URL you are getting link from should be higher than your target URL
• The organic traffic of website should be higher than yours
• The organic traffic curve of the website should not be showing a continuous dip over time
• The top countries the website is getting the traffic from should be relevant to yours
• The referring domains of the website should have high number than yours
• The website should have spam score less than 5
• The page should have relevant content as per your industry and the website should be allowing some content edits

6. Getting Your Business Included In the Listicles/Business Listing Websites

To make your brand appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs, your brand needs to have enormous visibility across all channels.

Before outreaching websites having listicles on “Top Physiotherapy Clinics In Amritsar” or “Top Physios In Amritsar or Punjab”, you need to target all the keywords that have a search intent of a listicle.

For example, keywords like “best physiotherapy clinics in punjab”, “best physiotherapists in amritsar”, etc have a search intent of a listicle. You need to create listicles on these keywords and publish them on your website with proper research and ensuring that no false data is being published.

After this outreach all the websites have listicles that directly relate to your services and ask them to include your brand in the listing by providing them some benefit in return.

After this you need to ensure that your business is listed on healthcare business listing websites like Practo, 1mg, Just Dial, Mfine, etc to provide you more brand visibility.

Get real reviews and ratings across these listings from real patients, publish video case studies of your patients, do podcasts, post reels, build your visibility across all channels and not just search. This way you can make your business appear in the results and recommendations of LLMs.

Make sure, these best practices will only work if your physiotherapy website is fully optimized for SEO and have a good topical authority.

Wrapping Up

From above, you might have got a brief idea on how to start the SEO part for your physiotherapy services website and how beneficial that can be in order to achieve your business goals.

We know it’s a lot to consume and implement these all SEO best practices for physiotherapy clinics, that’s why we are here.

GetSetRank will help you with all this stuff from keyword research to content strategy to backlink generation, all you gotta do is fill out the form on our website and schedule a meeting with us and discuss the project.