Working on technical SEO is important for every website since it acts as the backbone for the success of an entire website. You might have created the most relevant content for your website, but when you miss out on technical SEO, your website might not show up on google’s search engine result page.
Every physical therapy marketer should perform an SEO audit for their website and fix those technical SEO mistakes so that they won’t hurt the physical therapy practice.
First, we can have a small discussion on what is Technical SEO and how is it important for a website.
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website and server in terms of crawling, indexing and site architecture so that the search engines can effectively find your website, understand its content and index the web pages for better ranking.
A winning technical SEO can improve your website’s visibility, drives more traffic and increase the conversion rate.
SEMRush conducted a study on 100000 websites and 450 million pages and identified the most common technical SEO mistakes that negatively affect the performance of websites. In this article, we have listed some of the most common mistakes that might stand as a barrier for your physical therapy website to rank top on Google.
1) Bad Site Architecture
Search engines look for user-friendliness in your website. It is most important to design your website in the perfect way that the patients find it easy to navigate through all the content and information they are looking for.
You may have articles that are linked to other sites and your own web pages. A study says that 30% of websites consists of broken internal links. That links should be checked often. An SEO Audit tool will help you to fix those broken internal and external links.
Don’t ignore the HTTP status issues that include Error 404 – Page not found. Problem with your server might lead to a decrease in the traffic to your website.
2) Ignoring Meta Descriptions
A meta description is the meta tag of one of your web page. It briefly describes and summarizes the content of your web page thereby helping the visitors to know what the web page contains without clicking the link.
Many physical therapy websites fail to work on the meta descriptions that urge their visitors to click on their site. This reduces the traffic to your website and fails to generate leads. A study says that 63% of website owners do not pay attention to add meta descriptions.
The meta description should contain the most appropriate primary keyword and should be of the correct length. Also, look for duplicate meta descriptions that are bad for your SEO.
3) Forgetting Site Loading Speed
Site speed is the most important factor of a well-optimized website. It is found that more than 20% of websites have low page speed. Site speed can affect the user-friendliness of your website.
It is important to provide contentment to the patients who visit your site. They might be suffering from some sort of pain and are looking for a solution on your site. When the page speed is low, it irritates the visitors who are in need of certain information.
Ensure that the large media files in your site are compressed. Perform website caching and optimize the size of images on your site.
4) Missing on an Optimized Mobile Site (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
It is a known fact that most of the traffic for your website comes from a mobile device. Hence it is necessary to optimize your physical therapy website for mobile friendliness.
When your patients visit your website from their mobile device they must find it easy to navigate through your website. Follow the guidelines set by google for accelerated mobile pages(AMP).
Run a site audit and fix your website for pages with AMP errors. Check your AMP pages often so that search engines find it easy to index those web pages.
5) Avoiding Structured Data
The most common technical issue in physical therapy websites is the lack of structured data.
Structured data or schema markup is a type of code that makes it easier for search engines to crawl, understand and analyse your website pages.
Schema markup can attract the visitor’s attention through rich snippets and carousel results which increase the click-through rate and page ranking for your physical therapy website.
Final Thoughts
There are some other common technical SEO mistakes which include overstuffing keywords and jargons, targeting the wrong keywords, not optimizing for long-tail keywords and failing to include the correct landing pages. These mistakes can affect the SEO of your physical therapy practice. Invest in a site audit tool to check your website often so that your website gets ranked on top of the search engine results pages.
