After another day of reviewing websites for people on my Facebook page – Massage Practice Builder – there seems to be a few themes appearing so I just thought I would address them here.
If your website is not at the top of the first page of search results for your keyword – massage your city – you are toast! Don’t even bother with the website really if you are not going to put the time into it to make it happen either really. Yes that may seem a little harsh.
When you do put the time into your site to get to the top of the search engines and get people to click on your site AND make the call for the appointment you cut your marketing in half or reduce it to nothing. I don’t do anything but use my website to get new clients. So when you do get to the top of the search engines and get found for your main keyword – you are attracting your ideal client – someone who already is looking for massage! It doesn’t get much easier than that. But once you get to the top you then have to get people to click on the site and call. That is were the metatags come in and then what you say on your home page!
Take the time to learn about metatags – these tags are a hidden part of the website that search engines look at. While Google says that they don’t use it for ranking a site, they do show up in the text that shows up on your listing. So when you do get listed at the top of Google you will want to make sure people are clicking on the listing. If they aren’t it could be your meta tags. Use your main keyword – massage your city – in the first words of each of the tags – title, description and keywords. Also use it in the file name of the page! It is simple really once you get the hang of it. Site Build it! will teach you how and even provide a system that analyzes your use of the tags and keywords.
Your home page should be about the client! Put yourself in the clients shoes…what would you want to see first on someones page? Get to the point. You have about 3 seconds to get someone’s attention. Create a headline that tells people exactly what you do – what solution do you provide? Then talk a little about how your massage works to do that. Tell how you are different from all of the others out there.
Be careful with text and color of pages. Make it easy to read and navigate. Keep the music off! I can’t stress that enough!
People don’t care about the benefits of massage like increasing circulation and lymph. All they care about is whether or not they will be out of pain or less stressed. You have to break down each so called benefit of massage and keep asking the question “So What?” until you get to the real benefit. How will it change someones life or body or health?
Write as much content as you can to educate people. Some massage therapists may think that it can be too much but I don’t think it can ever be too much. When you have a lot of content you can also get a lot of other traffic to your website. You can then find affiliate products to promote that will make you additional money or you can create your own products like ebooks or books about back pain and massage or stretching and working at the computer or couples massage classes or whatever!
Beware of pictures of yourself! Make sure they are professional and appropriate! No shots down the shirt or in less than ideal situations. Put yourself in a perverts shoes! Some words also conjure up less than ideal images – like deep relief, full release, full body massage,
I have so much written on websites for massage therapists:
here is the general overview of massage websites
How to choose a domain name
What to say on your home page
What other content to write about
More on this site on massage websites
Related posts:
Thanks for sharing this. I’ve been strugging (and paying for!) my website for four years and have not gotten a single client from it. And I’m not listed on the first page of Google, either. Since I don’t have the income to pay someone to do that work for me, I have to figure it out and do the work on my own, and it’s a struggle. I appreciate your tips.
Just use Site Build it! You can do it yourself and they teach you how to do everything step by step. It takes a lot of reading and learning but is well worth it in my opinion (of course!) I use it for my clinic site and I am creating a few others. Wait until around Christmas- they usually have a sale. Thanks! Julie