How to DIY your therapy website

Navigating the intricacies of marketing your healthcare services within your local community can feel like a daunting task. This challenge is even larger for specialized practitioners such as occupational therapists (OTs), physical therapists (PTs), speech-language pathologists (SLPs), holistic doctors, and health coaches. Balancing patient care, paperwork, credentialing, and managing your business leaves little room to execute your marketing strategies.

Yet, in today's digital world, having a standout website with top-notch SEO is the crucial foundation of your marketing and brand strategy. This powerful combination not only propels you to the forefront of local healthcare providers but also lays the groundwork for future marketing endeavors as your practice grows.

This is a practical guide to building your website and SEO foundation, crafted specifically for OTs, PTs, SLPs, and holistic doctors. I’m giving away every step of the process that I use to help you DIY your therapy service or clinic website. Then I’ll show you how to optimize it for local search results, ensuring your practice gets more referrals than ever.

First, let’s prepare your content

Before we dive in, I want to see you up for success. Building a website isn’t easy. You have hundreds of choices to make as you build the site, making it daunting. Taking some time to prepare your site content will save you countless hours and a ton of frustration when you start building your website. Let’s get started!

Now let’s prepare an outline of your new website. After that, we’re going to optimize it so it performs well in local search. Then we’ll grab all of your assets, and think about elements of your brand, your logo, and professional photos of you. Once these two steps are complete, we’ll have everything we need to start building your new site!

Create a content outline

1. Define your ideal customer and their problems

2. Outline your site Now the fun begins, this outline will serve as the place to go to pull all of your content to build out your entire website. What we want to do is take a look at the whole website at a high level. We need to understand what pages you want. The content of the individual pages will help you build out your homepage. Think of this as a tool to help you avoid the inevitable challenge of starting with a blank page. The questions I’m going to ask next will form the building blocks of your new site. It’s possible that many of these content blocks will contribute to your homepage. Let’s dig in:

   In a sentence or two, describe your business

   1. What services do you provide? (repeat for each service)

      1. What problem does your service help solve?

      2. What benefits does this service provide?

      3. What certifications do you have to support your work and make you stand out as an expert?

      4. What does treatment look like?

   2. What is your evaluation process?

      1. How does someone get an evaluation?

      2. How do you use evaluations to better understand the needs of the person you’re providing services for?

      3. Do you offer a free phone consult to make sure an evaluation is the right fit?

   3. Do you take insurance?

      1. If yes, what’s that process like?

      2. If no, what’s your pricing structure? Do you offer superbills?

   4. What’s unique about you, your services, or your business?

      1. Go a level deeper and connect a personal story to create a more relatable way to get to know you

   5. What success stories or even reviews do you have that you could use to help build trust and show your expertise?

   6. What important information does someone need to know to setup and evaluation, or meet you at your clinic for the first time, or refer you a potential patient.

   7. How can someone contact you to setup an evaluation, or send you a referral?

3. Collect your assets (pictures, logo, reviews, content that could be given out for free as a lead magnet) The goal with building out a huge repository of assets is that again, you have one place to pull everything from.

Second, the build-out

1. Buy your domain

2. Create a Squarespace account