Local Search For PTs – Internal Link Building

What’s internal link building for your website and why should you care? The same way Internal Marketing in your PT clinic connects patients to more services, internal link building connects search engines to more pages on your website.

Two key reasons internal link building helps your clinic rank higher for many local search results:

  1. Internal link building improves the site visitor’s experience by helping them learn more and find information more easily.
  2. Search engines like Google use your internal linking structure to decide how specific page(s) on your site answer search queries.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say a searcher types in (or speaks) to their device and asks, “Which chiropractor or physical therapist near me is better for my back pain?” Google will choose the best search results to display. So, when Google compares local search results for websites with back pain treatment information, it will select based on the quality of the content. Websites that show more structure for a particular topic will rank higher than ones with nothing more than simple phrases or short paragraphs.

Internal linking is a roadmap search engines follow to determine why your site offers better information for the query than your competitors.

Checking your site for internal linking opportunities is easy. A good place to begin is your services page. Does each service link to another page on your site? If not, you can create new pages and posts and make sure to link them. Make sure to provide quality content on those pages; ask yourself, will visitors find them educational, helpful, and appealing?

Then, of course, any new page should get internal links as well! This leads to repeating the internal link building process and building powerful SEO authority that your local competitors will find hard to beat.

If you want help with local search for PTs and creating an internal linking structure, we have a couple of ways to get you started.

Free SEO Site Analysis or our popular online SEO and Local Search Event.

Here’s are two great articles about internal linking and how search engines use them:

Yoast: Internal Linking Why And How

Raven: Internal Links Are Vital