How to add keywords to your website for SEO

Pick the words patients use, not the ones you use

Clinicians and patients describe the same thing differently. Google's own SEO starter guide says to think about the words someone would search for to find your content. For a practice, that usually means the condition or result, plus a town:

Where to find the words

• Google itself: start typing your service and town and note the suggestions, then look at the People also ask questions.
• Search Console: the Performance report shows the searches your site already appears for. Phrases where you appear but sit low on the page are good candidates.
• Your Business Profile: its performance view shows some of the searches people used to find you.
• Google Keyword Planner: free with a Google Ads account, and gives rough search volumes.
• Your patients: ask new patients what they typed before they found you. It is the most honest research you'll get.

One main phrase per page

Give each page one main phrase and a few close variations. Your sports injury page targets "sports injury physio" and your town. Your shockwave page targets shockwave therapy. Trying to make one page rank for everything means it ranks for nothing.

Only target words that are accurate. Dietitian is a protected title, so use it only if you are HCPC registered as one. Don't target a condition you can't treat or a result you can't promise.

Where to add SEO keywords in your website

Using a physio page as the example, here is where the main phrase goes and how it should read.

Two things don't matter as much as people think. Google's starter guide says it doesn't use the keywords meta tag at all, and that keywords in a domain or web address have hardly any effect on ranking. Keep the slug readable, but don't rename your whole site for it.

Give each service its own page

This is the change that makes the biggest difference on most practice sites. A single Services page with twelve treatments listed in a line each can't rank for any of them. A page per main service, each with a few hundred useful words, gives Google something to match. Our guide to improving your practice website covers the rest of the page, and our physiotherapy websites page shows how we structure service pages for a clinic.

How to add keywords to your website on Wix, Squarespace and WordPress

Menus checked against each platform's help pages in October 2026. Labels shift between editor versions, so if yours look slightly different, the field names are the thing to look for.

Wix

1. Open the editor and go to Pages & Menu on the left (just Pages in Wix Studio).
2. Click the More Actions icon next to the page, then SEO basics.
3. Fill in Title tag, Meta description and URL slug, and check Let search engines index this page is on.
4. For headings, select the text, click Edit Text, open SEO & accessibility and pick the level from Choose HTML tag. Use H1 once, for the main heading, and keep it out of the site header, where it would repeat on every page.
5. For alt text, select an image, click the Settings icon and fill in What's in the image?
6. Publish. Nothing changes in Google until you do.

Wix's own help on page SEO settings has screenshots if you get stuck.

Squarespace

1. Open the Pages panel, hover over the page and click the gear icon.
2. In the General tab, edit the URL Slug.
3. In the SEO tab, fill in SEO Title and SEO Description. Your home page uses the site-wide SEO settings instead.
4. Check Hide page from search results is off.
5. For alt text, edit the image block and fill in Image alt text in the Content tab.
6. Click Save.

Squarespace documents the tabs in its page settings help. On some newer sites the SEO panel is labelled slightly differently.

WordPress

1. WordPress has no built-in field for the SEO title or meta description, so most sites use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, Rank Math or All in One SEO.
2. With Yoast, open the page, click the Yoast icon at the top right of the editor, and edit the SEO title, Slug and Meta description in the search appearance preview.
3. Use a Heading block for subheadings and set the level to H2 or H3. Your page title is usually the H1.
4. For alt text, select the image and fill in Alternative text in the block settings sidebar.
5. Under Settings, then Reading, check that Discourage search engines from indexing this site is unticked.

Yoast's traffic lights are a guide, not a target. A green light doesn't mean the page will rank, and chasing one often leads to awkward copy.

Keywords in your Google Business Profile

Your Business Profile drives the map results, so it deserves the same thought. Add each service you offer, write a description that says what you treat and where in plain words, and choose the most accurate primary category.

One place keywords must not go is your business name. Google's guidelines don't allow extra words in the name, so your real practice name is fine and the same name with "Sports Injury Back Pain Leeds" added can get the profile suspended. Categories are for what you are, not a list of keywords either.

How to tell when you've overdone it

Google's spam policies define keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords to manipulate rankings. Its examples include repeating the same phrase so often it sounds unnatural, and blocks of text listing the towns a page is trying to rank for. That second one catches a lot of practice sites, with a footer reading "serving Leeds, Bradford, Harrogate, Wakefield, York".

Here's what stuffing looks like on a dental page:

And the same idea written for a person: "If you're in pain, call us before 10am and we'll aim to see you the same day at our practice in Didsbury." It is clearer, more useful and more likely to get the call.

A simple test: read the page out loud. If it sounds like no one would say it, rewrite it. If you want to rank in several towns, the honest route is a genuine page for each location you work from, not a list.

Health pages carry one more risk. Phrases like "cure" or "guaranteed results" may match what people search, but they are claims the ASA expects you to back up with evidence. Eva on our team is an Associate Nutritionist and checks health claims on the pages we write, because the wording that ranks still has to be wording you can stand behind.

Checking whether it worked

Changes take time to show. Google has to recrawl the page first, and rankings usually settle over weeks rather than days. Give it at least a month or two before you judge, and change one page at a time so you can tell what helped.

Use Search Console's Performance report, filtered to the page, to see which searches it now appears for and whether its average position is moving. If the page isn't in Google at all, that is an indexing issue rather than a keyword one, and our guide to a website not showing on Google covers the checks.