Why I Changed the Way We Build Physical Therapy Websites

This summer, I blocked two full months out of my calendar. No meetings.

Business hadn’t slowed down, and I wasn’t taking a vacation. I simply wanted uninterrupted time to think.

Like a lot of agency owners, I’d ended up on the hamster wheel. Client work. Emails. Meetings. Repeat. For years I’d had ideas rattling around in my head that never got the attention they deserved — every time I started pulling on one thread, another project or another meeting pulled me away. This summer I decided to change that, and to go back to first principles with a single question: if I were starting Direct Response PT today, knowing everything I’ve learnt over the last ten years, how would I build physical therapy websites?

The turning point came in a meeting with the marketing assistant at a physical therapy clinic. We’d met to discuss a new website, and before the call she’d done exactly what most people would do — searched for local physical therapy websites, found a handful she liked, and brought them along as inspiration.

There was nothing wrong with them. They were modern, professional, well designed. But they could easily have swapped logos with one another.

I kept thinking about that meeting long after the call ended. It took me a while to work out what had bothered me so much — because it wasn’t the websites, and it wasn’t the marketing assistant, who’d approached the project exactly as anyone would. It was the starting point. We’d started by looking at websites. Not by understanding the clinic.

The Wrong Starting Point

For years I’d already taken a fairly opinionated approach to design. I used to tell clients we weren’t trying to win design awards — we had a framework that worked, and every new website started from that foundation rather than a blank canvas. That was a step in the right direction. It just wasn’t enough.

Because the more I sat with it, the more I realised I wasn’t questioning website design anymore. I was questioning the whole process. Where should a website project actually begin? What should happen before anyone writes a headline, chooses a photograph, or thinks about colours and layouts?

We’d been asking copywriters to solve a problem that was never really a copywriting problem. No copywriter, however talented, can authentically write about a clinic they don’t fully understand. The problem was never the writing. It was everything that happened before the writing.

Starting Again

Once I’d accepted that, there was no point improving the old process. I needed to start again.

Understanding a clinic properly takes far more than a questionnaire and a one-hour briefing call. I wanted to understand how the clinicians think. Who they most enjoy helping. What patients thank them for again and again. How they explain complex problems in plain language. What they believe, and how they make decisions.

And that raised a question I couldn’t unask: if we could understand a clinic at that level, why would we squeeze all of it into half a dozen web pages?

The Knowledge Base

That question changed everything. The answer wasn’t a bigger website. It was a Knowledge Base.

I don’t mean a medical library, or hundreds of research papers. I mean a carefully organised collection of genuinely helpful articles that answer the questions prospective patients are already asking — the conversations clinicians have every day, the explanations they give every day, the reassurance they offer every day. Published, organised, and easy to understand.

Instead of asking visitors to trust the clinic’s expertise, the Knowledge Base gives them the opportunity to experience it. The website no longer has to carry the whole burden. It becomes a guide rather than a salesperson: it introduces the clinic, shows visitors how it thinks, and when someone wants to go deeper, the Knowledge Base is there — quietly answering questions and building confidence long before anyone decides to make contact.

That felt like a far more honest way to build trust.

Expertise Discovery

Once I’d got there, the final piece fell into place. If the Knowledge Base was going to be the foundation of the whole website, we needed a much better way of understanding a clinic before writing a single article.

That’s what became our Expertise Discovery process — a structured conversation designed to uncover the expertise a clinic already has. Not to invent a marketing story. Not to write clever copy. Simply to understand the clinic deeply enough that everything we create genuinely reflects the people behind it.

Only then do we start writing.

An Unexpected Consequence

Around the same time, my inbox and LinkedIn feed filled up with people asking why AI wasn’t recommending their business. I’ll admit I rolled my eyes — not because AI doesn’t matter. It does. But because most of them were asking the wrong question. They wanted the trick. The tactic. The thing to bolt on that would make the machine pick them.

But AI isn’t looking for marketing tricks. It’s looking for information that’s worth understanding — clear, helpful, trustworthy. It reads the web much the way a careful patient would: it trusts the source that actually explains things, not the one that shouts loudest. Which means the way to be recommended by AI isn’t to game it. It’s to genuinely be the most helpful, most authoritative answer to the question being asked.

That stopped me short, because it was the exact thing I’d spent the summer building — without AI anywhere in mind. I hadn’t set out to optimise for it. I’d set out to build something genuinely useful. It turns out those two things are barely different at all.

Looking Forward

When I blocked out those two months, I thought I was redesigning our website. In reality, I was redesigning the thinking behind it.

We still build physical therapy websites. We just no longer start with the website. We start by understanding the clinic. We uncover its expertise. We organise that expertise into a genuinely helpful Knowledge Base. And then we build the website around it.

And it doesn’t stop at the website. Once a clinic’s expertise is properly understood and organised, it becomes the source for everything the clinic says — the emails, the campaigns, the posts, wherever the clinic chooses to reach people. Not separate projects bolted on afterwards. The same understanding, turning up everywhere a patient meets the clinic.

Looking back, it feels obvious. I just needed two uninterrupted months to see it.