Your keywords are the most important words we want to tell Google to rank you for. You will use these in places like:
The goal here is to identify our most important keywords (primary keywords) and lesser but still important keywords (secondary keywords) and add them to our clinic marketing guide.
There are 3 types of keyword:
Let’s look at each in turn.
Look at the terms people are typing into Google who are looking for your service. You can either do this through a keyword research exercise using SEMRush or other SERP tools, or you can use our free guides to show what people are searching for in your industry. For example, here is a graph from our search data for physical therapy.
We produce search data information and guides for:
If you’re one of these services and don’t have our guides, download it now.
Your primary keyword is simple; it will typically be your main service. For an MSK physio that might be “physiotherapy” (there is a slight SEO benefit to optimising for “physiotherapy” over “physiotherapist” or “physio”) or “private physiotherapist” or “sports physiotherapist”.
Your secondary keywords will be other SEO-rich terms that you want to target that are still services. For a physiotherapist this might be things like shockwave, dry needling, ACL rehab, and for a dentist might be whitening, straightening, Invisalign, etc. Use our guide to see what people are searching for and cross-reference that with what you do and the type of patients you want to create your secondary service keywords.
Choosing your primary location keyword depends on the size of your clinic and your niche, and your website authority.
London has 9 million people and is a hugely competitive market. Even searches for south London, north London, etc., are too competitive to rank for a clinic just starting out but in range of the bigger players.
If you are a long-established clinic with good website authority you could target London or one of its geographical modifiers (south, east, etc.) but if you’re smaller, you’re better off targeting the town where you are and the towns around you in order to rank. Same applies if you’re in Manchester, Glasgow, Belfast, etc.
So if I’m a big, well established clinic already ranking on Google I’ll choose “London” or “South London”. If I’m just starting out I’ll choose “Clapham” and target people in my town where there’s less competition.
If you’re in a town or city of up to 500k people, use the town name as your keyword. It may take some time for you to rank, but in 10 years time you could be on page one for “dentist coventry” and be reaping the benefits, even if it takes you time to get there.
Alternatively if you want to go for the lower hanging fruit, pick the town name where you are (if you’re not in the town centre). You will rank quicker for that search, but know that it’s a much smaller search and if you want to go after a bigger audience in future you’ll have to change, which will mean not exactly starting from zero again but some time to build up Google authority for that search.
If you’re just outside of town then you’re in a difficult SEO position, but it doesn’t mean you can’t succeed, as many clinics do. Set your primary location keyword as the town you want to get patients from but know that you’re going to find it extremely hard, if not impossible, to beat the inner-city clinics on rankings. Google Ads, social media or outreach marketing may well be a better strategy for you, but right now we’re just picking keywords.
If you’re in a rural area then set your primary location keyword as the county or whatever people call your region e.g. “East Sussex” or “North Norfolk”. Just like the example above, SEO is going to be a tricky one for you and you will probably focus more on outbound marketing.
Most people when making a search will go to a business that appears in the “local pack”. Local pack results are highly proximity-weighted, so if I make a search in the city, businesses which are close to me will appear over clinics outside the city, even if those clinics are demonstrably better in every metric, both SEO and clinical.
If you’re in a big/busy location then setting your location keyword to the name of that location will help you target the many people who type in service+city name. If you’re outside then searches for county or other wide area are vastly fewer, so you’re left with fewer searches and only the luck of being near (proximity) to your searcher, when really you want to cast your net wider.
For that reason, some basic SEO then outbound marketing is better for the rural clinic than trying to pursue a pure SEO strategy, whilst the inner-city clinic can, in time, thrive on SEO alone.
You can read more about different types of location search in our guide to understanding search types.
Most people type into Google the service that they need e.g.
However, a significant amount of people will do a “condition search” e.g.
We will later see how to create content and optimise for condition searches, but first we have to pick the ones we want to target.
Again you can do this by either using SERP tools that tell you the volume of searches people are making, or download our free guides and get this information for free, shown in easy-to-read graphs.
Just like we did with services, think about what you do and the sort of patients you want and cross-reference this with the SEO data to create your condition optimisations. “Back pain” might be a huge search term, but if you’re tired of treating it and want more interesting chronic pain cases then it’s irrelevant. On the other hand you might be dying to treat people with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, but if no-one is searching for it then using it as a primary keyword isn’t going to get us any traffic. It’s all a question of balance and choice.
Once you’ve identified your keywords, you should have something like this example (for a sports physio) which you can add to your clinic marketing guide.
Treatments
Conditions
Locations
If you have more questions about SEO, we’ll be happy to help. Feel free to reach out, come and ask a question in Free Webinar Friday, or book a free strategy call.
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