How to make a website for your massage business

June 5, 2009 Julie Onofrio Massage Websites

If you are a massage therapist one of the most important things you can learn is how to make a website for your massage business. For a website to be successful and get you new clients every week it has to be at the top of the search engines when people type in the words ‘massage, yourcity’. When it does get that kind of result you are doing what is called targeted advertising. People are already looking for massage in your city so you won’t have to ‘sell’ them much on your services.

What you will have to do is tell them enough about your massage business that so they can know if you will be able to handle the problem that they are having which is most likely some sort of pain or stress. Writing content is how you do that. It is just a matter of taking what you would tell people in person and probably tell most of your clients and putting it down on paper. It actually needs to be written just like you talk too because people really have a short attention span on line and what information quickly and without all of the hype. Writing about how massage can help various conditions will be a process that you work on all of the time adding one article a week or so until you are booked for 3-6 months.

There are also many online resources that can help you in writing this kind of article. You will want to write about things like fibromyalgia, stress and massage, tendinitis, car accidents, what touch can do, your philosophy on healing and massage, arthritis and massage. My favorite sources of information are www.massagetherapy.com and www.massagetoday.com . They have many articles on all of these topics. I also have a list of various conditions in the pathology section on my website with a list of links to articles on the various conditions to help you.

To get a website to get you new clients every week it has to be at the top of the search engines and have a lot of information but the information has to be carefully presented in a way that the search engines like to see. First it is in the way you choose your domain name. Your domain name should be a combination of the main keywords that someone would use to find you which are usually some variation of “Massage, yourcity”. If you are in a small city/town just having the keywords in your name may be all it takes to get to the top of the search engines. The next thing is that you want to get people to click on your listing. The listing that the search engines create are a combination of the metatags that you use on your site and also the title and how you use the keywords in your pages. Metatags are unseen parts of the page that are created to tell the search engines more about your site. You will have to find out how to create them in whatever software or system you are using. The keyword will be the first word in each section of the metatag and in the title of your page, the headline of your page and the start of your first sentence. It will also be used throughout the page a few times and in a text link. This formula is basic search engine optimization that most massage therapists don’t know about.

After you get your basic website set up it is time to get the search engines spidering your site to see what is on there and scanning your keywords. The best way to let SE know your site is there is to create an xml sitemap. You can do it by using the free online software that is out there. Just do a search for it and then let it create an xml sitemap that you can download to your computer and upload to your site. Then you can submit your xml site map to the various search engines. A xml sitemap is really a list of all of the pages in your site and it needs to be updated every time you add info or change a page. It triggers the search engines to find you.

If your site still isn’t being found on the first page of Google you can also get a few sites to link to you which also makes the search engines help find you. It isn’t so much that people will click on your link – it is more about creating an online presence.

An effective website will also have a newsletter function that will allow you to collect people’s names and send out a newsletter to get people interested in massage and also let them know about special offers and sell gift certificates for holidays. You can also make additional income from your website by selling other people’s products on your site. You can refer people to products on sites like amazon.com or other health products and get paid a referral fee for doing so. I promote books and massage tools through amazon.com. You have to sign up with their associate program through a link at the bottom of their site. Find other products that have an a affiliate program or if you are into network marketing you can also just promote your products there instead of having to be like a used car sales person and talking the ear off of all of your clients.

If all of this seems overwhelming you may need to hire a web designer. The things to ask your potential designer is if they know how to optimize for search engines and will they let you write about 50 pages to put up over time. They usually don’t know much about optimization and focus on design but what good is a site if it doesn’t get found.

You can do it all yourself. I recommend two different ways. Start your own blog (which is really just a website with special software) using WordPress or use Site Build it! which will teach you how to do everything that I just talked about and more. I recommend wordpress because you can set it up with an xml sitemap very easily and it is the easiest way to set one up that updates its self automatically. Site Build it! is where I actually learned everything I know about getting websites found. They have a complete action guide that will take you through the process step by step and also if you don’t have time and the energy to learn all of this you can hire someone there to do it for you or hire a coach to at least help you. You can also take an online class in how to do it all that takes 12 weeks to go through if you have that much time.

Whatever way you choose the best time to start is now. It is one more step in taking responsibility for your success as a massage therapist and breaking through the programming that says you can’t make $100,000 a year as a massage therapist.