A 15-Point Checklist to Make Sure Your Physical Therapy Website is Converting Visitors to Patients

There’s a saying in marketing: “People judge what they can’t see based on what they can see.”

With new patient acquisition becoming more difficult, it’s critical that your physical therapy website be a reflection of the high-quality service you provide.

Moreover, it’s a lot easier to convert viewers that are visiting your website right now into patients than trying to drive new traffic (which is expensive and time consuming).

Here’s a 15-point checklist that will help you make sure your website isn’t turning visitors off and causing them to choose the competition.

1. Check Your Images & Staff Page – the staff page is one that often needs updating. Are the headshots consistent and high quality? What about the images on the home page? Do they entice people to choose your practice?

2. Check Your Spelling and Grammar – You can utilize a web-based service like W3C Spell checker at https://www.w3.org/2002/01/spellchecker

to scan pages. If you have questions about grammar, then grammarly.com is your best resource.

3. Cross-Browser Testing – your physical therapy site might look great in Google Chrome but does it look great in other browsers and devices? Make sure your site looks great in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Microsoft Edge. Rather than paying for a service to test this, I’d recommend just downloading the browsers and scanning through your website.

4. Test Your Website on Smartphones – with about half of your traffic coming from smartphone users, it has to look great on mobile devices. I recommend blisk.com for this. If you are serious about it, Sizzy is my favorite tool for testing. Try the 14-day trial, install it, and make sure your site looks awesome on lots of devices…both mobile and desktop.

5. Check for Broken Links – Screaming Frog is a tool that visits all the webpages on your site and reports back to you if there are any broken links.

6. Page Titles and Descriptions – As mentioned above, Screaming Frog is again a good tool for this. You should keep your page titles about 50-60 characters long.

7. Check Image Alt Descriptions – the alt tag helps tell Google and other spiders what an image is about. Use Screaming Frog spider to check and ensure you have images optimized.

8. Check Your Webforms – Manually check each form by inputting test data and make sure that you receive the data/the data is being used correctly. Of course, appointment requests are super important.

9. Check Your Brand Favicon – look at the browser tab at the top of the computer screen. In the tab of a web page you should see an image then a title. This is your favicon. Make sure that it is your logo.

10. Codes and Scripts – Make sure your web analytics and any other tracking codes for things like the Facebook pixel are set up properly and functioning.

11. Check NAP with Schema – verify that your name, address and other contact data is proper and properly formatted with Schema code. Google has a free tool for this: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data

12. Check Your 404 Pages – Type in a web address that doesn’t exist on your website. This will display a 404 error. For best results, utilize a customized page for this that has an error message that’s better than the default page error.

13. Check Your Site Map – your site map should be up-to-date and have all of the pages listed on it. A WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO is a good tool for this.

14. Test Social Links – Click on all of the social media icons on your website. Make sure they go to the appropriate social media page. Also, make sure that your content on your social property is up-to-date. If it isn’t, consider updating it or closing down that social property.

15. Check Your Addresses & Hours of Operation – go through the various pages and your footer to make sure that your name, address, phone number, and hours of operation are consistent. Consistency not only communicates the proper information to viewers but helps give the Google algorithm confidence and can help with SEO.

Go through this list with your website developer. Any fixes should be fast and easy. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

David Straight, DPT is the co-owner of E-rehab.com, a physical therapy private practice website design, development, and online marketing company that has been helping PT private practices get their online marketing right since 2003.

For more information about how we can help you out, click the button above to request an appointment.