I know you are looking for SEO tips for ranking your website on Google’s 1st page. Yes, today’s article is about SEO for Massage therapists.
You might be running a Massage Therapist business and your website is not ranking well on Google. No problem. Here I’m going to share step by step guide to SEO for a Massage Therapist.
What Exactly is SEO for Massage Therapists?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It works for making easy for search engines to make out what your website is about. When one searches for something online the search engine crawls over web pages only to gather the information that he or she is looking for. In this way, your website could reach higher in ranking on search engines like Google.
In many cases, it’s apparently seen that despite having a website even a well-designed or well-executed one, a massage therapist struggles to get enough clients. Obviously, it hurts the business interest. This bad thing happens to you only because your site could not appear on the top of the search results as people tend to go through the top pages only looking for their needs. An SEO is the best strategy that you can adopt only to ensure that your business could appear on the top of the SERP and people could easily catch you when they are searching for a massage therapist in your area.
Why is SEO Important for Massage Therapists?
Today, we are living in a time when people mostly take the help of the internet when are looking for something to buy or to get any services. A recent study reveals that almost 97% of consumers who use to search for something necessary never go past the first page of results. It means that if you can’t manage to appear on the first page of the results it’ll be tough for potential clients to find you. Only an expert SEO can optimize your website to the desired level that gives your name much-needed popularity among the clients of your locality and that can flourish your business for sure.
But you should remember that SEO is an ongoing process and the landscape and algorithms constantly change with time. It means to maintain a high ranking you have to keep your website updated with the latest trends as the market demands.
On-Page SEO
An SEO is to strategize for keeping a focus on ranking as high as possible in the search engines. To make this possible you need to create the kind of content that search engines like Google and the visitors want to see. But this is not an easy task to cut. Here you need on-page SEO.
On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO is a practice that helps to optimize the elements on a website to earn more and more traffic on your web pages and also to rank higher in search engines. Apart from that, on-page SEO helps visitors to understand clearly what the page is about as well as helps the search engines to identify if the page is relevant to the search queries and also to find out if the page is worthy enough for ranking higher. But the subject is not as simple as it is seen. Many factors are involved to make the whole affair possible. All you need to go through this for better understanding. Here we go-
1. Keyword Research
Keywords are words that visitors type into the search bar when they are looking for something. Your massage therapist SEO requires relevant and catchy keywords that must appear on your website if you want to rank. If you have selected the right keywords, you’ll get more and more organic website traffic on your website from the search engines. Otherwise, you’ll be lagged behind your competitors no matter how brilliantly your website is executed or designed. While selecting the keywords for your massage therapy business there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. They are-
- Avoid using short keyword as these keywords are very difficult to rank as a new site. Always start targeting long tail keywords. Like if business in Denver and Short keyword is “Sports Massage Denver” then you can target “Denver Sports Massage Therapy” long tail keyword which will be very easy to rank. Once you rank this long tail keyword then you can easily rank for short keyword.
- Overly generic keywords are also not a better idea for your web pages as they might generate a lot of impressions and make the search engines as well as the visitors confused and no result would come out even after a lot of clicks.
Optimizing your massage therapist website with some exciting SEO keywords leads to your business to be taken notice by potential as well as progressive visitors and that’ll be certainly good news for you. Here are some of the keywords that already have earned a good response for a massage therapist-
- Deep Tissue Massage
- Body Massage near You
- Reflexology
- Foot Massage
- Hot Stone Massage
Using The Main Keywords in Home Page
The homepage is the name of the main page of a website where a visitor can find hyperlinks to other pages on the site. A homepage may also be called a front page that helps to create the first impression in the visitors mind and obviously, that should be equipped with some of the main keywords so that the visitors can identify the content of the page and encourage them to go through it. The main keywords are mostly those keywords that follow the terms people are using to find what they are looking for. Therefore, you have to select keywords that are popular among your target audiences whom you may wish to convert into potential clients of your massage therapy business.
Using LSI and Secondary Keywords
Latent Semantic Indexing [LSI] keywords are some kind of words and phrase those theoretically related to the main or primary keywords with a few adjustments. These are used by search engines to understand the content of a website. For example “reflexologist” is a semantic keyword that is often used to refer to “massage therapist”. These semantic keywords are frequently seen in well-written content only to help the page rank higher in search engines.
Secondary keywords play a supporting role to the main keywords and bring out some additional information related to the topic of your content. If these are used in the subheaders and the text, it means you’re covering all the major factors of a topic and this could help the search engines to understand your content better. These have much SEO value like the main keywords, they will help to outrank your competitors. For example, if your main keyword is “massage therapist”, then there would be several secondary keywords such as- “massage therapist near me”, “foot massage expert”, “best head massage therapist”, etc. This certainly helps the visitors to find you in no time.
Maintaining Keywords Ratio
Although keywords play the leading role for a website to get a higher rank in search engines. But it doesn’t mean your web pages would be stuffed with keywords and many of them are found irrelevant to the topic of your content. There is a set of limitations between keywords and total words according to the rules of search engines. The rule defines [2~3 to 4~4.5]% keywords of content is good for a page. If you can respect this rule, your website will be appreciated by visitors. Otherwise, your website would be considered thin content and it would lose visitors only to ruin the chances of your massage therapist business.
Publish Blog Keywords
Blog SEO is the process and optimizing blog content that precisely includes keyword research along with a few other things. It is commonly seen that search engine traffic tends to be most stable and consistent if you can provide them with the kind of keywords that people are searching for. This’ll attract the targeted audiences from the search engines. You can define those keywords as blog keywords. The blog post that you’re going to write should be optimized for one main keyword that people are actually searching for a long period. There would be a ‘seed’ keyword related to your blog post and then try to find the matching keywords of it only to your website. For instance, ‘massage’ is a seed keyword that can take you to the most related keyword “massage therapist near me” and it will help prospective clients to catch you easily.
Using H tags in Best Ways
H tags or header tags are used to define HTML [Hyper Text Mark-up Language] headings and subheadings that help to organize your website. H tags exist from H1 [most important] to H6 [least important] and all of them are equally useful especially when you’re writing longer articles. Generally, blog viewers don’t like to go through content thoroughly. Different H tags help them to find particularly what they’re looking for. In this way, H tags improve the readability and SEO of a web page. Simultaneously, H tags need to be used properly so that people could relate to your content easily.
- H1 – It’s the title tag of a blog. This keyword-centric tag highlights the main intention of the web page which is used to grab the attention of the viewers.
- H2 – These are the subheaders closely related to the title that classify the main points of the separate sections. These help the viewers to find the specific section they want to read.
- H3 – When you want to clarify some points individually of a section, then you can use these tags to extract the point to elaborate precisely.
- H4 – Again if you find something in a subsection that should be defined separately, then these can be used to do so.
Use Google Search Console
Undoubtedly, Google is the most popular and the best among the search engines working for internet services. Getting Google by your side means you’re ahead of most of your competitors. Google always provides you with some fresh and exciting ideas using all the technology that Google inherits for your betterment.
Google Search Console is a kind of free tool provided by Google that helps you to monitor and maintain the presence of your website in SERPs. It also makes you aware of any issues that may be affecting your rankings. And if there would be any problem with your website, Google Search Console allows you to change the content and also to optimize keywords, and make your site shine again as before in Google Search Results.
SSL Certificate
Privacy and Security-the necessity of these two things are not unknown to anybody. No matter for what purpose, but you cannot think to continue either your job or your private life smoothly. The same can be applied to a website too. But don’t worry. Here you have SSL or Secure Sockets Layer Certificates, a small data file cryptographically established as an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between these two ends remain secure as well as private. It also helps by verifying the ownership of a website and preventing attackers from creating a false version of the site.
Robot Txt File
A Robot txt file is a text file that tells search engine robots how to crawl pages on their websites. Even it regulates robots which URLs can be accessed on your site. It means a robot txt file tells search engines where they can go and can’t go on your site. It is used precisely to avoid overloading your site with so many requests. Besides, it works to enlist all the content you want to lock away from search engines like Google. You also can tell search engines other than Google how they can crawl allowed content.
Submit a Sitemap
A sitemap is a file where you keep enlisted all the information about the pages, videos, and images on your website, and the relationships between them. The search engines follow this and can crawl your site better. A sitemap tells search engines about the files On the site seems vital TO you, and even it provides valuable information about particular types of content on your pages, including videos, images, etc. In this way, a sitemap benefits your SEO efforts. Following the ways of work, there are four types of sitemaps-
- Normal XML Sitemap: This is for linking to different pages on your website.
- Video Sitemap: It helps search engines understand the video content on your page.
- News Sitemap: Used to support search engines to find content on your site approved by Google news.
- Image Sitemap: This helps Google to find all the images posted on your site.
The benefits of having a sitemap cannot be denied. It gives your website immense support to rank higher in search engines that bring more and more traffic and improve your business for sure.
A sitemap helps the pages of your site properly link only to be discovered by the crawlers in no time. Besides, if you’ve launched your website recently and have only a handful of external backlinks, then sitemap helps search engines to find the pages on your site. Moreover, if you’ve got an e-commerce site with a huge number of pages, then it’ll be difficult to find the right pages through any search engine. That’s where a sitemap comes to rescue and help to find those pages quite smoothly.
Check The Content Quality
Already a lot has been said about the power of content for a website, no matter about what topic it has been written about or for what business purpose it has been designed. There is one key factor that can make or break the success of your online marketing strategy and that is content quality.
Quality content refers to the kind of content that is well written, with a clear concept, enriched with all relevant information, and also some necessary visual images, even some essential videos. It goes beyond information and includes readability and grammatical correctness. Quality content majorly influences ranks in search engines, drives traffic, and engages the audience to follow your product or services as the perfect thing that they have been searching for so far. Without quality content,. No online business can get potential customers and that is also in a good number.
Now you need to know how to check the content quality. Few factors determine if your content has a quality to be accepted by the search engines as well as the readers. Here they are-
- Does it help the readers to find what they’re looking for?
- Does it earn much-needed traffic or potential clients?
- Does your client forward your content to others to convince them to follow your content?
- Are the viewers consuming what you do want to elaborate through your content?
If your content covers all those written above then definitely your content would be judged as quality content.
Image Optimization
Words have a lot of power but sometimes they don’t speak everything. In some cases, you need to provide relevant images along with the written documents to make others understand your content. Images give the viewers a clear idea about the product or services that you want to offer them. Therefore, image optimization is one of the most necessary things that can bring your content to life and that also contribute to your website’s SEO.
Image optimization is a unique way to create and deliver high-quality images in the ideal format, size, and resolution, and that helps increase traffic to your site. Image optimization is a process where the images are chosen relevant to the topic of your content, then they are reduced to a proper size [if necessary], and finally, those images are placed near the relevant text. Again if an image that reflects the main intention of your content should be placed near the top of the page so that the viewers could understand better the content at the very first sight. And this makes your site ranks high in search engines.
Inbound and Outbound Links
Inbound links are referred to the backlinks pointing from others websites of different domains to your website, while outbound links are those hyperlinks pointing from your website to other websites. Search engines like Google consider inbound links as an indication of your high-quality content and on the other hand, outbound links are taken as endorsements for other vital content. Now you must be curious enough to know how these two kinds of links matter for your website. First, let’s begin with inbound links.
- If your website receives a good number of backlinks from some high-quality and relevant web page, then it significantly improves your website’s SERP ranking.
- Finding the increasing of authenticated backlinks to your website, search engines won’t hesitate to improve the credibility of your website.
- A high number of authentic inbound links will help the crawler to find your web page faster.
- Having a good number of inbound links from top-notch websites by your side, the chances of receiving potential clients will increase for sure.
There are several reasons why outbound links should be included on your website.
- The inclusion of outbound links helps the visitors to learn more about the topic that is noted in your content. In this way, the chances of satisfying the search intent of different users might be increased. This improves the readability of content.
- Through outbound links when your site is linked with other sites, it means you give them a backlink and that improves their SEO in turn. This may start a conversation that can lead to a positive partnership where you and the other webmasters can help each other in future in the digital marketing.
- Outbound links determine the popularity of your website. The more your site links with other sites no matter what domains they are in, the more traffic your page may earn in return. This sends positive signals to the search engines and this helps to boost your rank in SERPs.
Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions
Meta tags are snippets of code that provide the search engine with specific and important information regarding your web page, and also suggest how that information should be displayed in search results. All the web pages have meta tags but can only be seen in the HTML code.
On the other hand, the meta description is an HTML element that gives the visitors a short description of your web page. It provides the visitors with an idea about the content on the web page and how it relates to their queries.
Meta tags are used to indicate to search engines whether the pages should be indexed or not. Apart from that, meta tags with good writing and configuration, help search engine robots to understand the content well so that the pages are more likely to rank higher in SERPs. Meta descriptions help to convince people to click on your results in the organic listings. Although both of them have a little difference, they are still integral parts of the higher ranking of your web pages.
Website Loading Speed
Speed matters most in every field. No matter in which profession you’re in. Especially if you’re in digital marketing then you cannot achieve the desired rank until your web page is faster enough to reach your potential clients ahead of your competitors. Faster means how quickly your website can load a page or able to transfer content from the webmaster to its visitors. Generally, it’s recommended that websites have a load time of 2-3 seconds or less. The loading speed is a vital factor when it comes to designing and optimizing your website. Some factors influence the loading speed of a website. They are-
- The reasonable size of files and images
- Editing JavaScript code
- Better response time of the server
- Optimizing database queries
- Minimizing HTML requests
- Improving network structure
User-Friendly Website
A user-friendly website is a web page that looks professional and is easy for anyone who visits your website to navigate. This can be called usability which means the website should be easy to browse and provide the visitors with their required information as smoothly as possible, without considering the device being used. A user-friendly website enhances the positive user experience to convert prospective visitors to potential clients. Besides, it improves organic traffic as well as ranking on SERPs. Usability that is referred to as user-friendly depends upon a few factors such as-
- Effective navigation is one of the most vital characteristics of a user-friendly website. It should allow visitors to get what and where they want to be effortless.
- Mobile compatibility is another thing that can make a website user-friendly. This allows progressive visitors to access your website via Smartphone as this helps them to keep in touch with you anytime, anywhere.
- Simple forms while collecting information from the visitors of your site make your website user-friendly as they are easy to understand for the users.
- Clear Call-to-Action is another good that can be seen in a user-friendly website where the visitors can easily and identify the next steps. It makes them stick to your site for a longer period.
- Web-Design can help to improve the website usability. The kind of visual aspect is essential for a website. But if visitors do not face any issues finding them only then your website can be considered user-friendly.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is about the SEO tactics that do not happen on your site directly but creates a good impact for improving your search engine ranking. The tactics include link building, social media marketing, guest posting, and more. This is one of the essential parts of a successful SEO strategy that makes your site trustworthy and authoritative.
Off-page SEO is important for building your website’s reputation and your website will rank better in search engines. Besides, off-page SEO can generate traffic to your site making your business like a real deal it is. Few factors can make off-page SEO essential for the benefit of this website.
Do Follow Link
Do follow link is a type of backlink that points back to your website for search engines to crawl. Do follow link direct search engines to crawl the link and pass the Page Rank authority of your site to the destination site. These links work for the website to earn confidence in the quality and authoritativeness of the content. Besides search engine algorithms use these links to measure the importance and popularity of web pages for indexing and ranking purposes. Do follow link is important for SEO as it helps increase your website ranking in SERPs.
No Follow Links
A no follow link is a hyperlink or tag inside the HTML of the link that suggests search engines not to allow them to click the link, and not to count it towards your site’s backlink profile. In this way, you’ll pass a complete no-link authority to the website you link to. No follow links have any impact on your ranking as by using these links you’re directing search engines not to count the link as a vote to vouch for the page. As spam can cause a lot of issues to your website. Using no follow links will help you to prevent spam from your site. Besides, if you find that your site is connected with multiple sites and you want to avoid most of them, you can do this using no follow links. Sometimes it is found that you are linked to competitors or unverified sources. You can use a no follow link to reserve the SEO benefit of your site.
Google My Business
As we all know that Google is the most preferred, and popular among all search engines. Google has a reputation for providing websites with a new height in the business world and takes their respective brands and business as household names. Now Google offers you a free web application Google My Business that allows you to publicize your business profile on Google Search and Google Maps. If you have an idea about the Facebook pages, you may find many similarities between them.
Google My Business [GMB] is a tool that enables you to manage and optimize your business profile in Google search as well as Google maps, which is one of many vital business directory listings. Having this application by your side, you can connect with your clients, update your business profile, and also you can watch if the clients are following your profile or not. If that is so you’ll get a chance to optimize your page keeping in mind their requirements. All that Google needs is your business name, location, and category. Once Google confirms the information you provide is not false, then they’ll create a business profile for you. All these help you to boost your business visibility and effectiveness in search engines. Once your business profile is set up, it becomes easier for customers to find and engage with your business, which can significantly increase your online presence. Moreover, by encouraging satisfied customers to leave feedback, you can get more Google reviews quickly, further boosting your credibility and helping potential clients make informed decisions. Timely responses to reviews and regular profile updates will ensure you maintain strong customer relationships and stay competitive in local search rankings.
Social Signals for SEO
These days, nobody is unaware of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. All these are referred to as social media. These are the most popular and stronger platforms for people all around not only to share news but also to express their opinion on a particular thing. Therefore, it can be said that digital marketing doesn’t entirely depend on a website. But if your service or product is being reviewed by and shared by a huge number of people under a large circumference, it means you’ve reached the masses and this would definitely help your business interest.
That’s why you can go with social signals. It refers to the engagement-likes, shares, and comments- your content receives on social media platforms that precisely have a direct or indirect impact on organic search ranking. Therefore, many webmasters focus on social signals as a part of their SEO strategy and it helps the content to promote on social media.
Final Thoughts
A day before perhaps you have had an idea that having a website for you is probably the best thing to earn a reputation as well as a good business as a massage therapist. But after following the entire article, I suppose you’ll have no other way but to change your mind. It is SEO that not only provides a new dimension to your website by optimizing the entire things of your web pages following the criteria of the market but also takes a leading role to flourish your business. Sometimes, it may seem that SEO is a kind of process that can be managed all by yourself.
NO!! this is far from the truth. SEO is a technical thing that can be handled by an expert only. Only an expert can strategize the matter sensibly and provide your web page with all much-needed higher ranking and simultaneously a very good business only to give you the name and fame as a massage therapist.
Finally, all I can say, is if you have confidence in your skill and you believe you can take care of your job very well, then please don’t spoil the party, Just go and hire an SEO agency and let them do the best for you. Good Luck!!!
