Website Content Archives

What’s Your PT Company’s Story?

“For a football fan, there might be nothing better than watching a playoff game at Lambeau Field – and seeing it decided, dramatically, in overtime. ”Cris Collinsworth - Sunday Night Football

One of the human brain’s most fascinating qualities is its ability to remember narratives…like a playoff game at Lambeau Field. You may not remember what time your mail carrier comes or recall your Netflix password instantly, but I bet you can talk about a sporting event, like Sunday Night Football, or a movie you love even if it happened weeks or even months ago.

Do You Recognize the Power of Story Almost Every Monday Morning?

If your practice is anything like ours, you probably have no shortage of team members arriving on Monday mornings eager to discuss the previous night’s episode of “Sunday Night Football!” Even if you don’t know all of the players on each side of the ball, I’m sure you can share some of the exciting plays and names of superstars like Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson…that happened days or even weeks ago. This simply demonstrates just how impactful stories, like an exciting football game, can be.

Make Sure You Tell a Memorable Story About Your PT Practice

Leveraging the power of narrative is a great way to make current and prospective patients remember you. Think about the brands you most admire. Odds are that in addition to having great products and excellent customer service, these brands convey their identity and their purpose in a lasting way.

Have You Thought About Your Story?

Despite this truism, many practice owners I speak to haven’t thought about the story of their practice. Maybe that’s because telling this story in a succinct way can be difficult. One tool I’ve found immensely helpful is the BrandScript model created by Donald Miller of Building A StoryBrand.

Miller, an accomplished fiction author turned marketing guru, created a formula that allows all types of business owners to quickly articulate their core principles and message in a way that compels readers to action.

He achieves this feat by making the customer — in your case, the patient — the main character of the story. Generating a BrandScript involves zeroing in on the core aspects of your story, so you can quickly define who you are and what you can do for a patient.

You’re Not the Hero…Your Patient is the Hero and You’re the Expert Guide

We’ll call that patient a character for the purposes of this exercise. The character, like all protagonists at the beginning of a tale, has a problem they need to solve. After meeting a guide (the PT at your clinic), the character now has an action plan to solve their problem.

Your plan needs to compel them to that action (treatment), help them avoid failure, and lead them down a successful path. If you can convince the character that you are the guide they need, you’ve just earned a new patient.

The details of your story will vary depending on the size and nature of your practice. Nobody is a better fit to tell that story than you, and you should be an integral part of the message you convey anytime somebody logs onto your website. After all, somebody on your site is already looking for a guide. You need to demonstrate to them you are the right one, and there’s no better way to do that than through a story.

Formula = Hero, Problem, Guide, Plan, Call to Action, Avoid Failures, Achieve Success

In closing, I ask you one simple question: What is your story? If you need a little help defining it, I recommend buying the book Building a StoryBrand and then visiting MyStoryBrand.com and giving the BrandScript tool a shot. You can create one for free, and it will help you control the story you’re telling.

If You Want Help Writing Your Story for Your Practice Website, Give Us a Call

Reference: Image is from Donald Miller’s Building a StoryBrand book.

Physical Therapy Website Accessibility – ADA Compliance in the Digital World

Physical therapists understand the importance of creating an accessible environment better than most professionals. Working with people who are injured or struggling with pain often involves meeting them on their level, and the same is true for creating a space that’s welcoming for people with physical disabilities.

When it comes to creating accessible spaces, we usually think first about entryways, bathrooms, and other concrete obstacles that may present challenges for those with limited function or mobility. Tackling these areas is essential, but it’s also important to ask yourself whether or not your website is as welcoming as it could be.

Does the Americans with Disabilities Act Apply to PT Website Design & Development?

When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, the idea that being able to use a business’s website would be essential to engaging with their business didn’t exist. As such, the bill has few guidelines for accessible website design. In the 30 years since, though, online commerce and interaction has become a much more integral part of our lives.

This year, the idea that a website is an essential part of a business was debated on the floor of the Supreme Court. Early in October, 2019, the Supreme Court upheld the right of blind people to sue Domino’s for failing to make their website and app accessible.

According to the LA Times, the court’s decision was based on the idea that the ADA “protects access not just to restaurants and stores but also to the websites and apps of those businesses.” The ruling doesn’t mean the plaintiffs will win their suit; it simply means they have a right to bring it. Legal precedence on the matter is still far from established, but that won’t stop lawyers from finding as many businesses as possible to bring suits against.

E-rehab has accessibility tools for your website that might help you to avoid the hassle of a lawsuit.

Contact Us today at (760) 585-9097 or request a free consultation by clicking here.

To learn more about accessible digital design, visit W3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility.

Design & Development of Your Physical Therapy Home Page

We get a lot of questions from our clients about what should be on a physical therapy website home page.

Your physical therapy website first and foremost should be responsive – a website that adapts to or changes its shape and presentation in response to the screen that the viewer is looking for at your website on. A physical therapy website that’s responsive looks different on the smartphone versus a tablet versus a desktop.

Starting from the Top of the Home Page and Working Down

At the top of a physical therapy web site you can include what is called a “hello bar”. It’s a thin row across the top and is typically a different color from the rest of the website. It usually has an appointment request link and a link to your payment page where patients can pay their bills online.

Next is the main banner. In the banner on the left-hand side is where your logo is located and on the right-hand side you usually have your address with your phone number.

Moving down the home page, there is commonly a slider or a “hero photo”. A slider is a series of images that are slide across the home page and are very popular in a modern web design. It’s a graphic feature that is very pleasing and makes a great first impression…especially if you use photos of you, the practice owner. I recommend you have a picture of your team as one of the slider images. Then a photo you or your staff performing special neuromuscular reeducation exercises with your patients. Don’t put a picture of a clinician stretching someone’s hamstrings. Personal trainers do that.

Next consider having a picture of you educating a patient a about a condition. You can be holding a model like a spine or the shoulder, or the knee and talking to a patient about that body part. Another good photo to include is a picture of you performing hands on treatment. People like to go to physical therapy and receive hands on treatment and frankly, manual therapy is one of the things a physical therapist do best. Why not include it on the homepage slider?

It’s important when you have these slider slighter images moving across the page that you also have key messages or text overlying the pictures. You first of all want to get their attention. Include phrases about where you are located, your reputation, your clinical expertise. These should be short 3-4-word phrases on top of the slide images, that encourage people to choose you.

Next, moving down the page, I would suggest you have a row of patient reviews. Today, patient ratings or reviews, in the form of star ratings and testimonial reviews are very common. I recommend you have a row of these across your page. Use slider controls to enable viewers horizontally scroll through a number of these; have perhaps ten, twelve, or fifteen of them.

Below your ratings and review is where you want to have your primary message.

Your “welcome to the practice message” and additional content text goes here. I recommend you have a video that perhaps floats in the right portion of your text. This video should share information about who you are, your expertise, why people should use you, and should be presented by the owner or one of the partners. Make sure you have a call the action at the end of the video. Use YouTube to host this video for you, and of course this video should be on your YouTube channel as well. Use lightbox plugin to allow physical therapy website viewers to click on the thumbnail picture of the video and have it “pop up” over the top of your website’s home page.

Then, I recommend including your location(s) information. Make the photos or city names clickable links that go to the specific location(s) page(s) on your website.

Moving down the page, have a list include a graphic list of your services. Have web cards (squares or circle images) that people can click on to go to individual service pages where they’re described in detail.
Then you might consider including a row of blog excerpts. A blog excerpt is the title of a blog post and then the first two or three sentences.

In the next row on your website you might consider having a link to your store so people can easily clic over to it and buy physical therapy products.

Below the link to the store, you might have the badges of any awards that you’ve received from companies like the BBB, ZocDoc, local top ten awards, etc.

Next, you might have links to your lead magnet pages. Lead magnets are pages that require people to enter their name and email address and in turn you give them a white paper or some information about why they should come to your physical therapy practice.

Then, have a link(s) to your workshop landing pages where people can sign up to attend one of your presentations.

Finally, have a mega footer built for you at the bottom of your home page. Include your PT practice name, your address, and your phone number exactly as it appears on Google (this is called your NAP [name, address, phone number]). If you have just one location, then include your office hours, an embedded Google map, and then links to your social media business pages. If you have multiple locations, then consider linking the locations in the footer over to specific locations like we have done in this example.

A Word on the Text or Copy on Your Home Page

Before I end this post, I want to go into some detail about the text or the words that you should have on your home page. Since the words are present to inspire the viewer to take the action of calling you, we will call this your home page web “copy”.

As people are scanning down your website and most other websites these days, it’s very visual. Therea are lots of graphics and image. But, we ultimately need to have some good text or copy on the home page.

What you want to do first is get their attention. Use text that stops them from scanning down the page. A common question I like to use is, “Did you know that not all physical therapy practices are the same?” That’s going to get their attention.

Then the next thing you want to do is arouse some desire in the viewer to choose you. Talk about the fact that your expert physical therapy services

1. Saves them money,
2. It’s fast and easy to get an appointment with you right now,
3. that your treatment is conservative, natural, hands-on, personalized, and customized treatment for them.

Tell Patients Exactly What They Want to Hear

The next section of the copy should pique the reader’s interest by addressing four important factors that patients are looking for when choosing a PT practice.
These four factors are:

A. Clinical excellence – your board certifications, your doctoral degree, fellowships, and areas of specialization.

B. Empathy – write about your caring staff and the fact that you’re a family-oriented practice and that exceptional customer services is one of your corporate values.

C. No Long Waits – mention that patients are not going to have long waits to get into your practice for their first visit or long waits when they come into your practice for treatment. Patients are busy and they don’t want to wait around for treatment.

D. Shared Decision Making & Treatment – share some information on the page about your treatment approach. Patients want to be involved in the treatment and decision process. they want to know what their problem is, how you are going to help them, how long it is going to take, an estimate of how much it is going to cost, and what their role is going to be in the recovery process.

Money always matters. Have a brief section on your website that might say something like, “We accept a variety of insurance plans, click here for details.” Then link over to a comprehensive list.

End Your Page Content with a Clear Call to Action

Finally, make sure you have a clear call action and don’t just put your phone number at the bottom of the page. Side note, for goodness sakes, don’t ask them to sign up for an e-book. The call the action on your home page should be clear and should be in a large heading, known to web coders as H1 or H2 tags. Consider using some language before the phone number to inspire a viewer to call you now.

Use were phrases like, “Don’t wait, call now.” Talk about a delay in starting physical therapy care may cost them more money. Perhaps indicate that getting into your clinic fast will allow them to alleviate the pain sooner. You might want to create a sense of scarcity by saying something like, “We are now accepting new patients.”

Make sure you give anyone that is browsing your website multiple ways to contact you. What I mean by this is don’t just put your phone on the bottom of the page, but also include an online appointment request form too.

There’s a lot to Consider on Your Physical Therapy Website Home Page

Above we discussed some ideas about layout, graphics, and copy that you might be included on your physical therapy practice home page. It’s important to have a good designer that can create a clean design and layout with responsive technology. Following the above concepts can go a long way to converting patients that are visiting your website.

If you want more information want about how E-rehab.com can help you with your physical therapy give us a call. We’ve been helping PT practices market their business online longer than Facebook or Yelp have been around.

We have the experience, the passion, and great customer care to serve you. Just check out our ratings and reviews and give us a call if you have any questions. You can reach us at (760) 585-9097.

What the Best Physical Therapy Websites Have to Offer

physical therapy websites

When it comes to building a website for your business, there are a few basic practices that are standard in any industry. The following are often considered essentials:

An eye-catching display
Easy navigation
A clear sense of what your business is and what it has to offer

But when it comes to physical therapy websites, there are a few additional factors to keep in mind that will make your website stand out from your competitors. You want to convince new patients to come to your clinic, while also offering your current patients the information they need without getting bogged down in a marketing campaign. With that in mind, here are some features that the best physical therapy websites offer their visitors:

Valuable—and Free—Health Information

Because so many physical therapy patients are referred by their doctors, your website needs to do more than just attract business. It should stand out as a leader in the field of physical therapy by providing valuable information that patients and other site visitors may be searching for. [blockquote align=”left”]According to Pew Research, up to 80% of e-patients turn to the Internet to find out about an illness or injury. [/blockquote]

Based on this, your website should offer e-patients a credible resources with credible and useful information. There are several possible ways to accomplish this:

Host a blog where you write about a different physical therapy topic every week
Ask site visitors to sign up for a weekly email newsletter that will contain more in-depth research and columns from various physical therapists; make sure your sources are current, reliable and credible
Provide links to articles, and make sure to check facts before posting them

The time you invest in making your website informative will pay off when you are seen as a thoughtful and experienced leader in the field.

A Practice Run of the First Appointment

Keep in mind that physical therapy is new for many patients, and as a result, it can be a little intimidating. Give site visitors a feel for what they should expect during their first appointment. Offer a video or picture tour of the facility and include photos and bios of all the physical therapists. Give new patients a rundown of what to expect from the moment they walk in the door and answer some of these questions:

How long is the typical wait time?
What should I wear to the first appointment?
How long will it last?
What types of insurance do you accept?

Your visitors should leave your website with the confidence of knowing exactly what is waiting for them when they step through the door for their first appointment.

Online Scheduling

The ease and convenience of the Internet means that many patients are online at most hours, including hours your clinic isn’t open. Allowing patients to schedule, reschedule or cancel appointments online gives them freedom to consider their appointments during off-business hours.

Mobile access

This one goes hand-in-hand with online scheduling. More and more consumers are conducting business on-the-go through cell phones and tablets, so make sure your website is mobile-compatible. [pullquote4 align=”right” textColor=”#2aec3f”]People are using mobile devices 60% of the time compared with only 40% of time being spent on computers[/pullquote4]A recent report from comScore shows that people are using mobile devices 60% of the time compared with only 40% of time being spent on computers. Most of that mobile time is being used on apps, so it’s worth considering whether or not you can make an app for your physical therapy clinic that allows patients to track their progress, their payments and their appointments.

E-Rehab Creates and Improves Physical Therapy Websites

[highlight2]There are clearly many elements that go into building physical therapy websites that will attract new patients and still be a useful tool for returning patients. Fortunately, you don’t need to build your website on your own. Contact us to see how E-Rehab can create the perfect website for your physical therapy clinic.[/highlight2]

Tips for Writing SEO Friendly Blog Posts to Boost Web Traffic

Are you keeping your search engine optimization (SEO) in mind with each post on your website and making sure that all of your content is “SEO friendly?” If not, it’s time to make some changes: SEO friendly blog posts increase the chances of your posts being indexed and ranked by the search engines, which is essential for attracting new visitors.

To do this, you need to first focus on writing helpful and informative blog posts. However, it’s also important to write for the web crawlers used by the search engines. In order for readers to find your blog posts, your posts need to rank well in the search engine results. Even if you’re not an expert in SEO, there are some things you can do right away to optimize your blog.

Here are some useful tips on how to optimize your physical therapy blog for the search engines:

Include Keywords in Your Title

The title of your post is one of the first things that search engines will crawl on a page. It is also the first [pullquote1 align=”right” textColor=”#000000″]It’s important to include keywords that are commonly searched for in your blog titles. When coming up with your titles, consider what a user may type into the search engine. [/pullquote1] thing web users will read after typing in their search terms in a browser and receiving their search results. Therefore, it’s important to include keywords that are commonly searched for in your blog titles. When coming up with your titles, consider what a user may type into the search engine. A good example for physical therapy blogging would be a topic like chronic neck pain. Someone with chronic neck pain may search for information related to whiplash. A title such as “How to Treat Chronic Neck Pain From Whiplash” is an effective blog title in this case.

The key is to include the keywords without it reading awkward to human readers. Also avoid keyword-stuffing your titles. Stay on topic with one search term and try to make it sound natural.

Write Compelling Meta Descriptions

Another major component of creating SEO friendly blog posts is to focus on your meta descriptions. A meta description is an brief snippet that describes a web page’s content. When you read the search results page from a search engine, the preview text located underneath the titles are meta descriptions. Although it’s important to include keywords in your meta descriptions, their main purpose is to get the web user to click-through to your page. They serve as advertising copy to promote your page. By writing compelling descriptions, you can help improve the click-through rate to your page.

Optimize Your Post Content

It is also essential to include the keywords you wish to rank for within your post’s content. Search engines use keywords within each page of content as a ranking signal. However, it’s important to be cautious about how often you include them within the text. It’s better to write naturally for your blog audience and to avoid writing strictly for the search engines. Over-optimizing your content with multiple occurrences of keywords is known as keyword-stuffing. If a search engine detects keyword-stuffing, your page will likely be penalized and drop in ranking.

Optimize Post Images

Optimizing the images of your blog posts is something that’s often overlooked in making SEO friendly blog posts. It’s a good idea to include titles and descriptions in your images that feature keywords and are SEO-friendly. The use of image search has also increased in recent times, so it is yet another way for users to land on your website if they see something relevant to what they’re looking for.

URL Structure

Check that your blog’s URL structure is set-up to use your blog post titles. Avoid URL extensions that use the date of the post or the post’s ID number. Web users are more likely to click through to your page if they see that the URL extension is the same as the blog title.

[highlight2 bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#000000″]Optimizing your website so that you have SEO friendly blog posts takes some extra effort. But it’s well worth it in the long term for improving your search engine rankings. By writing regularly updated content that helps to inform the readers of your website, you increase the chances of gaining new patients for your practice. Remember to write for people first and search engines second.[/highlight2] [squeeze_box2]If you need more assistance with the process of optimizing your practice’s website and don’t know where to go, contact E-Rehab today. We specialize in physical therapy website development and online marketing, and we can help guide you every step of the way when it comes to mastering SEO and reaping the rewards of more new patients.[/squeeze_box2]

How To Begin Your Keyword Research for Physical Therapy SEO

Good Physical Therapy SEO Starts with Some Simple Planning

New doctors and physical therapists building their practices websites can greatly improve their reach by targeting physical therapy SEO keywords. But how do you know what words to target? Here are the steps to keyword research you’ll need to implement in order to start your SEO marketing strategy, specified for physical therapists and their work.

Brainstorm First

To start, it’s important to brainstorm a list of keywords that you know will pertain to your office. This list would include (but is not limited to):

your name/your brand (Ex. Dr. Edward Smith Therapy/First Coast Physical Therapy)
physical therapy + your location
typical injuries your office treats (whiplash/car accident injuries, sports injuries, back pain)
therapy modalities you implement

Once You Pick Keywords, Then Put Them Through This Test

There are four factors to consider when choosing keywords that you will include on your website.

Relevant Keywords – this is pretty simple to understand. Relevant keywords are those keywords that your market niche will use to search for you. A PT practice owner in Cleveland might have the thought that he/she should try to rank for a term like “low back pain treatment in Cleveland”. However, you have to ask yourself this question, “If I rank, will people click on the link and actually call my office?” Based on search engine rankings and the traffic that these terms (e.g. low back pain treatment in Cleveland) generate, I would argue that in most cases, there are some higher priority marketing efforts you should invest in first. Physical therapists are not thought of as a primary care providers the healthcare system…yet. If you are going to try to rank for terms like “low back pain treatment in Cleveland”, you will need to rank for a large number of these terms to generate enough traffic to convert website visitors to patients.
Competition – if you are a new practice with a new website, and you are in a big city like NYC, there’s little chance you will rank in the next 6-12 months. Google ranks website that have domain authority and lots of backlinks. It takes time and a lot of effort from a good SEO company to rank in major markets. It can be done but it is a long-term strategy.
High Traffic Keywords – during your keyword analysis, you should use a tool like the Google Keyword Planner to estimate the number of searches that are done for a given keyword. This is closely related to the concept of relevance. If your target audience rarely searches for a given keyword, or isn’t likely to click on the Google link, of you do rank, it’s not worth the effort. On the other hand, if there is an acceptable amount of traffic and the market isn’t too competitive, then you should add this keyword to your list.
Commerciality – after you determined that a keyword is a relevant term, there isn’t too much competition, and there is enough people searching for the term, then you want to think about commerciality. This term describes the likelihood that someone will click on your keyword and call your office. It’s best illustrated with an example. Let’s say that you are considering ranking for the keyword “physical therapy Cleveland”. The other keyword you are considering is “physical therapist Cleveland”. Both are relevant to your practice. Neither are too competitive (i.e. with reasonable time and effort you could rank on page 1 of Google). Both have a significant number of searches (high traffic). Physical therapy is know to the public as a service and not a profession (this too is changing IMHO). Therefore, the search “physical therapy Cleveland” is a better term to rank for. If you had to choose a keyword term to spend your time and money to try to rank for, then you would choose “physical therapy Cleveland”. Ranking for this term is more likely to generate traffic that will call your office and schedule for an appointment. Here’s a link to a video that describes this term.

Use a Couple Free Tools

As you categorize your terms, you should use research tools to help you narrow down your list. If you’re on a budget, free tools like Buzzsumo or Moz.com can help you find websites similar to yours, and will allow you to study what makes these sites work. These tools allow you to see how well your website is doing, as well as how it compares to other competitors. By studying your competitors, you can get a better sense of how to optimize your website.

DO NOT Keyword Stuff Your Blog Posts or Pages

Lastly, after all your research, implement your keywords strategically. In order to improve your search rankings, you want to use your list of keywords effectively. It’s not enough to just copy and paste them in a list on your website, or heavily use them in your blog posts to push spammy messages hoping you will rank on page one. In fact, those strategies could hurt your ranking. Instead, create unique and valuable content that uses your keywords at part of a theme. For example, let’s say one of your keywords is “Physical therapy Nashville.” A blog post about staying injury-free before you take advantage of outdoor recreational activities in one of Nashville’s many parks, can generate more relevance than a generic blog post on physical therapy in Nashville.

By picking and choosing your keywords based on your own knowledge and some simple analysis, you’ll be more likely to create a successful web presence for your business. To learn more about SEO research, contact us.

3 Ideas for Local Physical Therapy Blogging

For any website, a blog plays an important role in developing physical therapy blogging. But sometimes it’s hard to find a fresh topic to write about, especially if you’re writing consistently. Here are three ways to incorporate your keywords in a refreshing way, to help you with your blogging roadblocks.

1. Address local needs.

You already know a lot about the community you work in, and what their needs are: you can learn a lot from your current pool of individuals seeking your help. Do you get a lot of student-athletes, since you work by a university? Do your demographics reflect a large population of individuals working in construction, and therefore share similar back or body aches? Or maybe you’re settled in a tech hub, and seeing people come in for rehabilitation after painful days and nights sitting at a computer. Knowing this, you can easily provide advice or tips for your local population, drawing more people to your blog. If you need help, look up statistics on the top worked jobs in your city, and apply your knowledge of that group to your work. As you address your local needs, you’ll be able to provide valuable, local, SEO content that will help your blog.

2. Apply national research to your area–with your own twist.

Staying on top of trends and news on physical therapy, and reporting on them, is another great way to boost the relevant content in your blog. For example, a recent study on Harvard’s Medical School site showed that physical therapy worked just as well as surgery to alleviate pain due to lumbar spinal stenosis, a type of lower back pain. This type of pain is typically seen among aging patients (usually over 50 years old), as the spine degenerates over time.

The challenge here, however, is differentiating your content from others that simply “pile on” to the trend. Just sharing the news isn’t enough. You should add-on a unique angle in order to create a unique post about the report. For example, with the above research, you can report on how your office can take care of this lower back pain if you’ve had patients with this problem, or know that your community might face this problem over time (e.g. your community is made up of middle-age patients that might see this problem over time). You can add local statistics of how your community might in-time, face this issue, or even add a few tips and advice on how to take care of their bodies as they age. By adding your expertise and knowledge, you can better differentiate yourself among other physical therapy blogs and results.

3. Share your community involvement.

Are you active in your community? Do you co-sponsor events, or have worked with a local non-profit to teach the public about health? Your blog is the perfect platform to share that type of news! One of the best ways to improve your search results through your blog is to report on your relationships with the community. By being able to situate yourself among other local businesses, your webpages will receive a better ranking, as it validates your local influence.

Building those connections not only adds value in your community, but also virtually among SEO results. In order to build a successful reputation online, you also have to build it among your community physically. If your office is brand new, consider working with businesses or organizations that could use your expertise or services. That relationship helps build your reputation among the community, as well as online, when other businesses, organizations, or new patients, can vouch for your local validity.

With these three different strategies, you can continue to build a successful blog for your business.

[note_box]Looking for a blogger for your physical therapy practice? We can help. Not only do we write on topics relevant for your practice, we can also SEO optimize the posts to greatly increase the likelihood your practice will rank for keywords that are important to you. For help with finding the right keywords and improving your online marketing strategy, contact us.[/note_box]

How to Choose Physical Therapy Website Developer

There are certain things that everyone is looking for in a physical therapy website developer. Some of these are pretty basic things.

You want a functional website that’s going to generate more traffic for your business.
You want your website to be a patient education tool.
You want your website to help with operational efficiency.
You want your website to communicate your expertise, etc., etc.

The tone of your website is generally considered to be important. Given that most of your traffic to your website will be prospects (potential patients), you want your website so be easy to navigate and to clearly represent the quality of service you provide. What I often state is, “In a service business, people judge what they can’t see based on what they can see.” Make sure your website is very attractive.

These are all important things to keep in mind when you’re looking for a physical therapy web developer. However, it’s also important to communicate exactly what you’re hoping to achieve. You’ll have to work hand-in-hand with them to get the types of results you want.

What Are You Trying to Achieve?

It’s always a good idea to be really clear about what you’re trying to achieve with your website. Do you want to attract new patients? This is often what many physical therapists want to do with their online presence. But for some, new patients may not matter that much. Instead, they may want to improve their online image. Maybe they want to become thought leaders in their field. For them, the quality of viewers attracted may be more important than the quantity. It’s important to convey your aims to your web developer so that you can see the types of results you want.

Design Secret: Look at a Lot of Websites but Only Spend 5 Seconds on Each PT Website

It’s a great idea to look at websites of companies within the physical therapy profession. Once you know what your competitors are going for, you can compete with them more easily. Forbes magazine agrees with this idea, adding, “Most designers are not experts in your field of business. Having a list of competitor websites and doing your own research about those competitors and similar businesses can help you articulate ideas for the new website.” Here’s a tip though. You could waste hours of time looking at other physical therapy websites. Don’t! Do a search for physical therapy in various cities. Click on links the to each PT website but only look at it for 5 seconds. You will know within that timeframe if you like the look and feel of the website or not. If you do, write it down and communicate it to your developer.

What Does Your Web Developer Specialize In?

Before you start working with a web developer, you might want to check out their previous work and see what they specialize in. If you’re a physical therapist working with E-rehab, you don’t need to worry because we specialize in building websites for physical therapy private practices. You can feel free to point to our previous work and tell us what you liked and what you didn’t.

We bring a certain type of expertise to the task while you bring another. We’re experts in web development while you know the services you provide. It’s important for you to stay involved in the process, overseeing the content and design to make sure that it portrays your practice accurately. At E-Rehab, we’ll be happy to keep you as involved in the process as you’d like to be.

An article from Huffington Post also suggests that you should check out the “back-end” of websites your web developer has built. This will give you an idea of what it will be like to later edit your website on your own. Is it going to be a simple, easy process or will it be too complicated for you? We build our websites on the most popular website development platform on the web-WordPress. This means it is easy to update your website on your own. We even provide personalized training, videos, and phone and email support 5 days a week for you.

[note_box]Take home message: Your website should generate business, communicate your brand image and expertise, improve efficiency, and should be a patient education tool. It can also be a place where you sell product, appointment requests are taken, paperwork is filled out, where a video story about your practice is communicated, where outcomes are presented, and more. Take the time to invest in a good physical therapy website. It will certainly pay dividends on a daily basis.[/note_box]

Why Video Marketing for Physical Therapists Is A Good Idea

Video marketing is one of the most popular marketing tools because it is a great way to promote your business. But it’s not just for retail businesses. Video marketing for physical therapists is also an affordable marketing channel to reach your local community. Consider these stats when it comes to video, consumers, health care information, and the Internet:

87% of adults use the Internet. Pew Internet
72% of internet users say they looked online for health information within the past year. Pew Internet
52 percent of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions. Invodo
75% of smartphone owners watch videos on their phones; 26% at least once per day. B2Community

Want a couple more reasons why you should use video marketing? How about these: not only are videos inexpensive to make, but once you post them on the Internet, they are there forever. Just think, a video you post today could still send traffic to your Website and growth to your business years from now. Also, we all know that social media is obviously here to stay; so make it work for you. Video has quickly become a must-have on social media networks. How many viral videos have you seen this week?

Here are three tips to make it easier for you to add videos to your marketing plan.

Define your goals and metrics.

You have to make sure everyone expects the same things from the video you are producing. For example, let’s say that the practice owner wants a straight-forward advertisement that the value of seeing a physical therapist first, but the video developer doesn’t have any idea what physical therapy is like (e.g. PT is like massage, or chiropractic, or personal training). Now you have a problem. Make sure everyone has the same expectations by asking questions like:

Should you make several short videos on a specific topic?
Will the tone of the videos be funny and entertaining or more formal?
Is the goal to promote your company and services or to include other things like industry news or interviews with recognized experts?

Your team has to define the metrics that will tell you whether or not the video is a success. These metrics are things such as the number of views, number of shares, number of likes, whether it goes viral, how much traffic increases on your company Website, or any increase in sales.

Include a call to action.

It is easy to have a call to action (CTA) in print. In most cases, with a service business like physical therapy, the CTA is your phone number. With a video, you need a clearly defined CTA that people can see (such as putting a phone number or URL on the bottom of the screen) and hear (such as saying, “Call 888-555-1234 now to schedule.”). Add an end-screen or outro to your video that shows your company name, logo, phone number, Website, and any other necessary information.

Here’s an Example of a Video with a Call to Action

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFhA_X8Kr0s

Share your video across social media.

According to Entrepreneur, “In 2014, YouTube officially became the second-largest search engine, with over 300 hours of content uploaded every minute, and those billion unique visitors watch more than six billion hours of video every month.” Now that’s the power of social media in action!

There are so many ways to use social media to your advantage. Post your video to YouTube and to your company Website. Then tweet and retweet the URLs again and again on Twitter. Upload the video to your company LinkedIn page, and invite people to comment on it. Ask your employees to promote the video to their social media network. That one video has made its way across four platforms in no time at all.

If you are going to be on the Web and use social media, then you also have to think about how people might search for your video (Video Search Engine Optimization or VSEO). Make a list of the keywords to use to get your video at the top of every major search engine’s results page. Plan the content of your video around these keywords. You might be surprised to see your video rank like this one.

If you have questions about how video can help your practice, give us a call at 760-585-9097 . We look forward to speaking with you to see how we can help.

Physical Therapy Blogging – Simpler Than You Think

There are many ways to start your own physical therapy blogging regimen. If we have put the cart before the horse and you are still considering whether or not you need a blog, well…take a look at these stats here.

Success Stories

These stories can be from your own experience or you can research them. You can use stories of popular celebrities if you are trying to reach a certain demographic, then you can pick the celebrity accordingly. If you want to reach people interested in sports you could choose a popular athlete.

Stories that come from the public will work, as well. People can easily place themselves inside the stories and learn about the numerous benefits of physical therapy.

Training and Education

Another blog idea is to blog about the training and educational process that it takes to become a physical therapist. You can cover the guidelines of the American Physical Therapy Association. These can help assure potential clients of the legitimacy of your business and its staff.

Another idea related to education is to simply educate people about physical therapy. You can get into the specifics of treatment with them. If people know more about the topic of physical therapy they can become more comfortable with it.

Interviews

You can do simple interviews with people in the physical therapy sector to achieve more prestige for your blog. An interview with a professor of physical therapy can help add an educational spin to your blog. A practicing physical therapist can be interviewed to humanize themselves and their profession.

Explain Who Needs Physical Therapy

This can be done in a variety of ways. It can combine the success stories and interviews above, so that you can let people know how they can benefit from seeking physical therapy themselves. Statistics and charts could also be used explaining all of the different benefits of physical therapy.

Interact with Readers

Some blog posts can simply exist to interact with your own reader segment. If your readers see that you care enough to respond to their comments or questions they will definitely feel valued enough to keep coming back to your blog.

Establish Your Audience

There are many audiences you can target in your physical therapy blog. You can target physical therapists themselves. You could write blogs about how to best run your practice and tips on interacting with and retaining clients. You can also target people who are simply interested in physical therapy. They could be interested in becoming a physical therapist or seeking treatment themselves.

There are many audiences out there. Once you establish which audience you are seeking; you will be able to write your blogs around this particular audience.

Establish Your Tone

The tone for your blog depends on who you are writing it for. If you are writing a blog for a physical therapy office you should likely keep it professional. However, if it is for physical therapists themselves you could let loose a bit and use some work humor. Tone really depends on your audience and the purpose of your blog.

What do you want your blog to accomplish?

The final consideration and perhaps the most important is to have a goal for your blog. Whether you want more traffic to your website, to inform people, or simply to discuss topics in physical therapy: there are many ways to do each of these things.

Feel free to contact us at E-Rehab for more technical tips and tricks.

Video Marketing Services for Physical Therapy Private Practices

E-rehab.com is now offering video marketing services for physical therapy private practices.

Other than a direct referral from a doctor or a patient, there aren’t many better ways to market to your community than with the video endorsement of the quality of your physical therapy services.

What would a prospect think if they searched for you and saw videos similar to these with your name on them?

Ratings and Reviews are Quickly Becoming a Highly Trusted Marketing Channel

Use the Power of Video Marketing

There are some very effective ways to achieve top Google positioning and beat your competition

Back in 2006, when Google paid $1.6+ billion for a tiny business above a pizza parlour, many wondered if the management at Google had lost it!

However, that tiny business was YouTube and in just a few years later it has officially become the number 2 search engine (second only to Google itself).

The growth of video is crazy. It already accounts for 70% of the search engine results on Google with text trailing in third behind images. In fact Cisco Systems, the world wide leaders in networking and the way we connect on the Internet, predict that by the end of 2015, video will drive 90% of web traffic.

If you are marketing your local business online and haven’t started to use video marketing yet, it’s time to get started.

Generate more Physical Therapy Referrals and Improve Customers Service with Video

They say that ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’. If that is true, imagine how much more effective video can be. It is a scientific fact that humans make a decision based on emotions. Motion pictures have the power to tap directly into the emotions of a viewer with a combination of video, words, voice over and music in a way that words simply can never achieve.

Business surveys have proven that videos convert visitors into buyers three times better than a normal sales letter. With a sales letter the viewer can scroll down the page very quickly and not read the benefits of your rehab services or the reasons why they should should choose you.

With a video on the other hand, you control the whole sales sequence, unfolding your presentation in the way that shows your office, your services, your clinical expertise in the best possible light and only revealing the call to action at the precise ‘magic moment’ when your viewer is primed with the benefits your service will provide them.

The result is more happy patients and more calls from prospects that are comparison shopping.

However, that is only the beginning. For example, imagine trying to learn how to tie your shoelaces using just written instructions. But when you show visitors how to do it, with video, they understand instantly.

Improve Your Chances of Ranking High on Google

Google unveils ‘universal search’.

In an effort to better accommodate users, Google now provides universal search results. What this means is that search results are now a mix of text, news, graphics…and yes, video.

It now takes less effort to rank your video on YouTube and it’s a wonderful opportunity to show up on the first page of Google’s search results. Imagine how many your visitors your website would receive from ranking high on the largest and second largest search engines in the world, simultaneously.

You too can rank your videos on YouTube and Google for the most common search patients do when looking for you…your business name (we blogged on this months ago).

Follow this simple rule – include your business name and the city your practice location is in in the title, the description and the tags of your YouTube video. In most cases, this will do it. That’s it!

Just Do It!

There is no doubt that creating videos for your business will attract more visitors and potential patients to your website but we also know that it might all sound rather daunting.

The worst thing you can do is ignore the video revolution that is happening all around. Video really is here to stay.

The good news is that E-rehab.com is here to help you to take advantage of the easy and affordable opportunity.

Contact us today to learn more about our video marketing services and how we can create an affordable video marketing strategy that will help establish you as the market leader.

Call us at 800-468-5161 x 1101 for more information.

PS: here’s another example:

5 Scary Website Mistakes Your Private Practice Should Avoid

Website Great news: somebody has visited your website. Hurrah! Perhaps they might look around and decide to schedule an appointment for treatment…but wait…oh no! Now they are leaving. “What? They only stayed for five seconds.” Yes, it’s very possible that they stayed long enough to be appalled by your website and then made a quick exit to one of your competitors. If your site is not converting visitors into patients, then you might be committing one of these deadly website mistakes:

Flash-Driven Design

Search engines hate Flash-driven design. In fact they hate them so much that they will completely ignore your site no matter how pretty you think it looks. So what if it is clever and it contains beautiful, state-of-the-art design? Nobody is ever going to see it. Google is just going to skip right past your site as if you are the invisible man. And those millions of iPhone and iPad users who use their mobile devices instead of their desktops certainly won’t see it because they can’t see Flash on their phones. It’s pointless to annoy Google to the point where they choose to ignore you. You’re your site that won’t get any visitors. Just because you can add whistles and bells doesn’t mean that you should.
The Annoying “Welcome to our Website”

How long do you think you have to grab your visitor’s attention? Here’s a hint: It isn’t 2 minutes, 1 minute or even 30 seconds. It is more like 10 seconds. That is all the time you have, so don’t waste it with a boring introduction. Most people don’t like to read much online, so when they first visit your website, they are probably just going to quickly scan it to see if anything catches their eye. Why would you want to squander an already-tiny attention span by reminding people which site they are visiting? Instead, use an attention-grabbing headline. People should already know where they are just from glancing at the top of your site, where they should see your logo and a snappy tagline, or a short description of your site, so there is absolutely no need for stating the obvious with a banal “welcome to our website” message. Yawn!
“We…. We… We… We… We…zzzzzzzz”

“We have a team of…” “We plan to…” “We have been in business for…” Sorry to sound blunt but…NOBODY CARES! Visitors to your website are only interested in one thing: “What is in it for me?” If your site doesn’t answer this question pretty quickly, they will probably leave. Instead of just talking about you and your site or your business, imagine that you are talking one to one with one of your typical customers and ‘speak’ to them as an individual. Tell them how your product or service is going to benefit them.
Tech Speak

Every industry and business sector has its own tech speak and industry-only words that nobody else understands. Try talking to friends and family about autoresponders, SEO and long-tail keywords and you’ll see their eyes glaze over as they slip into a coma. If you use words, terms and phrases that mean something to you but go straight over your visitors’ heads, then you are going to lose them. We’ve already said visitors are going to scan over much of the content on your website anyway, so you should try to make it as easy as possible for them to be able to pick out and understand the main points from the bits that they do read.
No Clear Call to Action

As well as telling your visitors “what’s in it for them,” your next job is to tell them what they need to do now. It is absolutely pointless to give them great reasons why they should come to your practice for treatment, and then not tell them what they need to do next to in order to schedule an appointment. You need to have a clear call to action and make it blatantly obvious how they can make it happen. Do you want them to call you if they have any additional questions or if they’re ready to book an appointment? Then tell them. However, telling them to call you and then hiding your number somewhere on your website is another big fail. If your call to action is telling them to “call us now,” then make sure you put your telephone number right next to it. Never assume that your visitors will know what to do next. Spell it out for them. Tell them what you want them to do. If you make it difficult for them, they will leave. Yes, they probably could figure it out, but sometimes they won’t. They will move on to the next site in the blink of an eye.

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You invest a lot of time and money encouraging people to visit your website, so why scare them off by making one of these fatal mistakes?

For more information on protecting your website from common pitfalls and encouraging potential patients to stick around and come to you for treatment, contact E-Rehab and we’ll be glad to offer you our assistance.[/colored_box]