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Keyword research is the process of looking for keywords for which we will optimise our website, Google Business Profile, and our overall web presence.
When choosing keywords we take into account relevance, popularity and competition when deciding what to target.
For example, let’s say you are a physiotherapist just starting out in private practice in London. You find that “Physio London” is a very popular term but there is a lot of competition, whereas “Physio Hackney” is relevant to you and has less competition, so you decide to optimise for that. However, you also have specific expertise in physiotherapy for cyclists and find that “cycling physio London” is not as competitive as “physio London” and something you have a good chance of hitting, so you optimise for that term also.
Keyword research and choosing keywords and keyphrases to target is an art as much as a science. It requires knowing how to use the tools at your disposal, an intelligent interpretation of the data – preferably based on experience, and some creativity.
If your clinic is quite standard in what you do, you may not need to use a tool like SEMRush, as we have already published keyword volume data for many popular therapies. You can also see our guide to choosing your keywords, which covers choosing locations, services and treatment keywords.
SEMRush is the leading platform for search engine marketing, and has versatile and powerful tools for keyword research.
It is not cheap, but you can get a free week’s trial, which should be enough to do the research you need for your clinic. Other, less expensive tools are also available, all of which work in more or less the same way.
Even the keyword research section of SEMRush alone is a vast topic, so this isn’t an exhaustive guide on how to use it, but a guide on how to use the parts most relevant to finding useful keyword information for clinics.
If we type a search term into SEMRush and find that it gets 14.4k UK searches a month, how accurate is that? Does it get exactly that, every month? How do they know?
The answer is that they don’t, particularly at low search volumes. Keyword research tools are notoriously unreliable at giving exact measures of number of searches made.
Does this make them useless? Well no, it doesn’t. They are broadly accurate, so if your tool says that one term gets 1000 searches a month and another gets 2000 searches, it’s probably right to say one gets double the other, even if the exact figures may not be correct. This means we can reliably use them to prioritise content and optimisations, whilst balancing their data with our intuition and real-world experience.
We’re going to use the SEMRush keyword magic tool to help us see what people are searching for. This tool is halfway down the SEMRush menu on the left-hand side of the screen.
We’re going to start with a list of possible terms for a counsellor which we have brainstormed in advance. Just think of anything your patients are likely to type into Google, and this will be your starting point for reseearch.
We’re going to start with the biggest, service-describing terms such as counsellor, counselling, pyschotherapist, talking therapy, to see what words patients are using to describe the service, before drilling down into individual conditions.
We’re going to start by typing in the name of our first term, counselling, and add near me.
So why near me and not simply counselling?
Because what we are looking for is the searchers who have a purchasing intent to their search. Someone typing in simply counselling may just be interested in what counselling involves with no intent of seeking it out right now. They may be looking for counselling courses or jobs, or just general information about counselling.
Similarly, not everyone looking for a local counselling service will be typing in near me. They might type in simply the name of the service, or possibly the name of their town or city, or maybe local or around here.
There’s no way of sifting through all these terms and doing the mathematics involved to try and cover every possibility (believe me, I’ve tried) and the search data we’re dealing with is not necessarily accurate anyway (see above), so using near me gives us a quick and relatively accurate way of gauging the relative volume of people searching Google for a particular local service.
You can understand location searches better with our guide to search types.
Immediately we see above that results appear for both counselling and counseling.
In this particular case, one is correct (counselling in the UK, counseling in the US). But it highlights a problem for services which have more than one way of referring to them, such as physio, physiotherapy, physiotherapist.
Whilst we would hope for Google to be smart enough to know that they are all the same thing, it will actually return different results for each spelling variation (and not necessarily pages or business profiles optimised for that particular spelling).
In this case we will go with the correct spelling since there’s a definite right and wrong. With pseudonymous terms where there is no right or wrong term, such as dentist, dental clinic and dentistry, check the search volumes for each and optimise for the largest.
We now have to decide how we’re going to record the number of searches for that particular term.
Why? Well, we could simply note down that counselling near me gets 9,900 searches per month and move on. Or we could say that the misspelling counseling gets 4,400 but is essentially the same search, add them together and get 14,300, which is probably more relevant when comparing against other names such as therapy, psychotherapist etc.
Or, we could look at the total number of results which contain the phrase counselling near me, which is 75,180.
However, many of these results will not be relevant to us. They might be people looking for counselling jobs or counselling courses. If we did the same for therapy it would be even less relevant, as it might include people looking for massage therapy, sound therapy, or all sorts of things.
For consistency and ease of comparison with other terms such as psychotherapist, I think we’ll go with 14,300 as our search volume. We’ll see how to further filter down this total number below when we look further at the searches within the search.
Another column we have on the information is KD%, or keyword difficulty.
This column allows us to see the relative difficulty in ranking for various terms, as calculated by SEMRush. In simple terms this means the amount and quality of competition for that particular term.
In reality for our purposes, we have to remember that the local business offering counselling is not competing with every other counsellor in the UK for a near me search, so the very high keyword difficulty of 73 or 76% is highly inflated. However if we saw that a similar term like psychotherapist near me had the same kind of search volume but less keyword difficulty, this would indicate that fewer people were optimising for it even though it had a similar volume, so would be a better term to target.
We can see an example of this kind of insight from marriage counselling and couples counselling. They have similar search volumes but couples has a much lower difficulty, implying it is a better optimisation.
When we do our initial brainstorming for terms that our potential patients might be typing into Google, it’s likely we won’t think of some of the terms they might use. This is where SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool really comes into its own.
We can already see from the results above that just from typing in counselling near me SEMRush has given us lots of ideas of sub-searches that people are making. It would be handy to know how many people are typing in these sub-searches in various formats, for example how many of the searches for counselling near me include the word children.
We can create a new search, but as a quick idea and to note down new ideas, we can use the sub-searches section on the left-hand side of the screen.
By default this section is set to “by number”. This tells us how many sub-searches exist for each term. The first line tells us that there are 254 different sub-searches of counselling near me which contain the word marriage, or a related term.
What is more useful to us is to know the total volume of searches containing the sub-term, so we click on By Volume at the top of the window to get this information, and this is what we see:
This gives us some useful information. For example, couple counselling is a far bigger search term than relationship counselling. Family is bigger than child is bigger than teenage is bigger than any related terms like adolescent. Drug is bigger than addiction. All these will give us clues in what we should be optimising our website for, as well as indicating other useful searches we can look into.
As you’ll quickly start seeing when you get into keyword research, it’s not an exact science. You have to use logic and intuition to decide which figures to use and what is relevant to you.
There are also many pitfalls. For example when we first started putting together physio information and tried to correlate it to areas, we found disproportionately high searches for physio in certain areas such as Liverpool, Manchester, Tottenham and Chelsea. On closer examination, we saw that these searches were inflated by people interested in the physio teams of the respective Premier League football clubs! This is also just one reason why it’s safer to get general search data from near me terms.
If you’re interested in keyword research, then go ahead and get a free trial of SEMRush and dive in. It’s a fascinating area and will give you a great understanding of how people search the internet.
Because it can be tricky, that’s also why we do it for you. You can download our search volume guides to a range of popular therapies – the same we use to optimise our clients’ sites – completely free.
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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