What Do You Put For Key Words On A Home Page?

[gray0620]

Hello,

I am a physical therapist and own the company Back In Motion Physical Therapy. We specialize in orthopedic, sport, and spine injuries in Fort Myers, FL. My question is for your home page do you put the keywords of the surrounding city and cities such as Fort Myers, Cape Coral, etc? Secondly, should I have a keyword of physical therapist and physical therapy as well?

Lastly, do I need to use those words on my home page for it to become relevant from google?

Check out my site here: www.backinmotionsspt.com

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There!

Good question. Basically, what you are embarking on here is the optimization of a local business website. The term for this is Local SEO (local search engine optimization).

At the outset of your work, there is one very important concept for you to understand about how Google views local businesses like your physical therapy office:

Google views local businesses as being relevant to local users. So, if you are physically located in Fort Myers, the bulk of your efforts will go towards ranking in Google's local search engine results (local packs) for users who are either physically located in Fort Myers, or for users who include the term "Fort Myers" in their search phrase. You are highly unlikely to rank in the local results for Cape Coral or any other city, regardless of what keywords you use on your website.

Because of Google's historic bias towards physical location, some businesses are frustrated because they cannot rank in the local packs for any city other than their city of location. This is especially so for service area businesses, like plumbers or house painters, who travel from a single city to a variety of other cities to serve customers. But, your business is not a service area business, if your patients all come to your office in Fort Myers for treatment. Typically, your only relationship to Cape Coral or any other nearby city is that some patients may live there and come to you, but this is unlikely to be a good enough reason to mention these additional cities on your website. If you were a house painter, you could authentically create a page on your website about the houses you've painted in Cape Coral, and you could attempt to gain some organic (not local pack) rankings based on the optimization of this type of landing page. But in your case, you likely don't have anything to say about Cape Coral that would make it sensible or authentic to create such a page.

Are there any exceptions to this? Can brick-and-mortar businesses ever optimize for cities beyond their city of location and can it do any good? The answer is: sometimes. If it's essential for you to build brand awareness in cities beyond your city of location, you have to determine if you can build a real relationship between your business and these satellite cities. For example, a doctor could mention his hospital privileges in Cities B,C and D. He could host a sports medicine seminar in city B, attend a conference in City C, and volunteer at a yoga weekend in City D. He could then write about his involvement in these communities and promote himself socially. He could also sponsor teams, organizations, and events in neighboring cities and earn links and mentions from these activities. So, yes, there are some cases in which a brick-and-mortar business in City A can build content and awareness around additional cities, but it should never just come down to putting a list of cities in a chunk on his homepage. This isn't good SEO, and is actually frowned on by Google.

Summing up: as a local business, you'll be focusing the bulk of your efforts on your city of location in hopes of gaining local rankings for it. If you need to build brand awareness in additional cities, strategies exist where real-world relationships exist, and the goal of this work would be organic, rather than local, rankings. The alternative is to invest in PPC campaigns that target neighboring communities.

Hope this helps!

[Libra_Photographic]

Firstly If you read your introduction here you have already put your keywords in that sentence. Being genuine on your homepage and speaking to the user of your site rather than the bot is always preferable. The algorithm (more accurately AI) is getting so much better at spotting keyword stuffing so be careful how you word it.

Having your address visible will definitely help you in the geographic search for your service and having a description of your service is relevant to your company.

I'd recommend a separate page targeted at each speciality rather than a one for all home page so that the search will give relevant results.

If I was in your position I'd look at the size of the homepage, it's very long, especially on a mobile device. It is also 'heavy' using page speed insights you only score 47/100. Pagespeed is a ranking factor not to be ignored

One other factor to consider is the fact you are not secure yet. Initial an SSL certificate for your site asap as that will stop users on Chrome actually viewing your site completely! Soon it will be browser wide. whether is is a ranking signal yet I'm unsure but it will be in the future for definite.

I hope that helps.