How To Attract More Of Your Ideal Patients To Your Speech-Language Pathology Clinic

NOTE: This article originally appeared on the Speechfully blog, a blog about how to grow your speech therapy clinic. You can find it here: How To Attract More Of Your Ideal Patients To Your Speech-Language Pathology Clinic

It's important to keep a steady flow of patients to your speech therapy practice.

But, like most SLPs, you probably have some areas of clinical focus you prefer to work with.

Maybe you prefer to work with autistic children, or kids with tongue thrust, or helping adults with traumatic brain injury recover their speech, language and swallowing abilities.

If you’re like most SLPs, you have at least several areas of clinical focus, but you’ll work with most populations.

But that runs you into a bit of a paradox.

The more you work with other populations, the less time you have to work with your ideal patients.

But you might not have enough ideal patients coming into your practice to justify declining some people.

That’s where Speechfully can help.

Speechfully is a digital marketing agency for speech therapists.

We work to help speech-language pathology clinics just like yours to build a steady stream of new patients and grow.

But it’s just as important to make sure we’re delivering the right kind of new patients to you.

Let’s take a look at how you can attract more of your ideal patients to your speech therapy practice.

First, Start With What Your Ideal Patient Looks Like

Before you can build a strategy around attracting your ideal patients, it’s important to recognize what they might look like.

And that’s different for everybody.

Of course, you might have an idea of what conditions you prefer to treat.

But it’s about more than just what interests you.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when deciding how to identify your ideal patient:

• What types of conditions do you find most interesting to treat?
• What conditions are you absolutely not interested in dealing with?
• What conditions is insurance most likely to cover (if you’re in network)?
• How much demand is there for the conditions you’re interested in?
• What types of people might be more likely to refer other patients to you?
• What types of patients are least likely to speak poorly about your speech therapy practice online?

RELATED: How To Deal With Unhappy Speech Therapy Clients

For most speech therapists, your ideal patients will be a healthy mix of the above points.

Build Your Brand Around Them

So you’ve got a good idea of who your ideal patients are, what conditions they might have, and how you can help.

But how can you speak to that population in an effective way?

And should you even focus on speaking to those people in the first place?

For example, if you’re dealing with pediatric or elderly conditions, in many cases the people reaching out to book with you won’t be the patients themselves, but their caregivers.

How might the best way be to appeal to a parent whose child is experiencing developmental delays, or an adult whose parent just had a stroke?

What can you do with your branding, and the writing on your marketing material, to soothe their concerns?

Is it best to use long, drawn out sentences full of technical language and jargon?

Or might you be more effective by speaking to them in language they understand?

Most speech therapists have the greatest experience in academic writing.

That’s true whether you last wrote in school, or whether you’ve done some research work since then.

But the average person won’t relate to things the way they’re written in a peer reviewed journal.

And that’s just from a written perspective.

What about visuals?

What sort of colors, fonts, images, and concepts might be more appealing to the populations you’re working with?

If you’re focused on pediatrics, you might want to be more playful here.

If you work with mostly adults, it’s important to convey a sense of trust and calmness in your brand.

And if you work with both, it’s important to blend the two.

These subtle little nuances can go a long way toward making people feel more confident in you before they even reach out.

Use SEO To Promote It

One of the great things about SEO for speech therapists is its focus on targeting different keywords for your practice.

And when it comes to keywords, there are broad ones, like “speech therapy clinic in [your city]”.

But there are also more specific ones, like “speech therapy goals for stroke recovery in [your city]”.

By taking a close look at the keywords in your area, we can find out how to best target your ideal patients.

What’s more, we can help you get a better idea of how valuable your ideal patients might be.

For example, we can take a look at how many searches there are in your area for a variety of different conditions.

It might be that your absolute favorite condition isn’t terribly common in your area, but other conditions that also interest you are.

Here at Speechfully, we can help you understand roughly how much traffic you might expect to get for certain conditions.

Based on that number, as well as your average value per patient and closing rate, that can put a specific dollar amount on your potential per condition.

By helping you recognize how valuable each condition can be, from a financial perspective, we can build an expectation of how successful your clinic can expect to be.

But if you’re very much interested in a certain uncommon condition, that’s okay too.

We can still target that condition, as well as other, more common ones.

This can give you the maximum amount of your ideal patients, while helping you meet your financial goals as well.

RELATED: Why SEO For Speech Therapy Clinics Is So Effective

Blog About It, A Lot

There are two main reasons why blogging is valuable.

It’s great for displaying your expertise, and for SEO.

Let’s look at each of them separately.

Blogging To Show Off Your Expertise

Are there some common questions people ask you about the conditions you treat?

Perhaps some myths out there about them that you’d like to debunk?

Some things you wish patients knew before they sought treatment?

Blogging is a great way to communicate all of these, and more.

But what’s more, it’s also a great way to show that you know what you’re talking about.

After all, if you answer somebody’s questions on a topic before they even ask them, they’re more likely to trust you and reach out.

Even if they don’t necessarily read them, if your blog has several articles on articulation disorders (for example), it will help make you look like more of an expert.

Blogging To Improve Your SEO

“Nobody ever reads those things!” you might be thinking.

And that’s not true.

You’re reading this right now, after all, aren’t you?

But even if nobody does read your blog, it’s still beneficial to have them, from an SEO perspective.

This topic is complex enough to write dozens of articles about though, and we only have one paragraph here.

So here’s the ultra simplified version.

Among the hundreds of different factors Google considers when deciding who to rank, blogging helps with several.

Let’s take a look.

How Big Your Site Is

By how big, we mean how many pages are on your site.

If your website has 50 pages, for example, and the clinic across the street has 12, Google will rank you higher (everything else being equal).

That’s because Google assumes the more pages you have, the more like you are to have the information somebody’s looking for.

After all, you have more information period.

The more blog articles you’ve published, the more pages you have on your site.

How Often Your Site Is Updated

Next is how often your site is updated.

If you updated your site a couple weeks ago, and the clinic across the street hasn’t for a year, that’s a point in your favor from Google as well.

Google will assume you’re putting more effort into your website, and are giving people more up to date information.

Regular blogging can help you make sure you’re regularly updating your site.

How Many Internal Links You Have

By this one, we mean how many links you have from one page on your site to another.

The more of these you have, the easier it is for Google to understand what your webpages are about.

This helps them decide how and where to organize your site in their search rankings.

The more articles you write, the more links you can build to important pages on your site.

Ready To Grow Your Speech Therapy Clinic? Get In Touch With Speechfully Today

All of the above might feel stressful and overwhelming to you.

After all, you trained as a speech-language pathologist, not a blogger or a designer.

That’s okay, and that’s totally normal to feel.

After all, it’s not realistic to expect you to be an expert in all different aspects of digital marketing, on top of being an SLP.

That’s where Speechfully comes in.

We take all the hassle out of running the digital marketing for your speech therapy clinic.

That way, you can focus on what you do best – practicing speech therapy.

Get in touch with us at Speechfully today, and let’s grow your speech therapy practice.