Therapist Marketing
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The Ultimate Guide to Therapist Marketing
51Blocks specializes in working with professionals in clinical therapy by providing authoritative digital marketing solutions for new patient generation.
- Private Practice Psychologists
- Group Therapy Clinics
- Marriage & Family Counselors
- Clinical Social Workers
- Psychiatrists
- Outpatient Therapists
Psychologists, like other service providers, face one major challenge-acquiring new clients.
While word of mouth remains an essential source of new leads, prospects are increasingly turning to Google to search for their mental health needs and end up calling the first psychologist or two on the search results.
To build your client list, you need to be on the first page of Google search results.
- Your content marketing strategy should attract qualified traffic, demonstrate your company's expertise, show how your services can help, and highlight past successes such as testimonials.
- Content marketing is done using various content formats such as blogs, infographics, memes, podcasts, images, videos, GIFs, Slideshare decks, white papers, and case studies.
- To attract an audience, turn them into leads, and make sales in content marketing, make sure you tailor your content to your target customers and choose proper channels for distributing content.
SEO for Therapists
Search engine optimization is one of the most effective digital marketing channels for local therapists to invest in because most individuals looking for therapists spend time online searching for and learning about counseling services.
How does Google work?
Generally, Google is an index of content. Although they’ve added different products to their system throughout the years, their primary service and source of revenue is the search engine. Google looks to deliver the best search result possible for a user’s query. SEO creates and optimizes the best search result for keywords that your ideal target audience is searching for.
Bots
When you create a web page, you create content for two audiences; potential clients and search engines.
When a potential client enters a keyword on search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, Google deploys bots or spiders that crawl the search engine’s massive index. These bots crawl the text and code of pages, assessing the pages on multiple content marketing factors such as;
- The technical performance of your page
- Quality of your content
- Number of backlinks to a page
- The mobile-friendliness of your business site
The bots sort all the relevant results through Google’s algorithm in order from best to worst.
Think like Google…
SEO for psychologists can be quite complex, but when you feel stuck, think like Google. Google is not in a position to verify your therapy practice unless they are to contact you, schedule a session, sit down with you, and probably pay for your service. Instead, they consider hundreds of ranking factors for content marketing to verify that your brand is real and trustworthy. You should optimize your website for these ranking factors.
SEO narrows down to two main things: content and backlinks. But first, let’s talk about the core of SEO, keywords…
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Keywords for Therapist Marketing
Keywords are the bread and butter of SEO for counselors and psychologists.
The first step in your efforts to climb SEO ranks and increase your brand visibility is to identify your dream customers’ keywords in their search queries.
Long-tail keywords, which are typically longer and more specific, have a greater impact on search results. Given that the search is specific, the person searches using those long-tail keywords as their search questions know what they are looking for precisely and are ready to take action now.
For example, the phrase “therapist” is not a long-tail keyword for SEO. When you search “therapist” on Google, you’ll get a mixture of search results; how to become a therapist, how do therapists get clients, the average salary for therapists, and other results. From the mixed results, it is clear that Google isn’t confident in what the searcher is looking for.
However, if you search “therapist for anxiety in Arizona,” the search results will be all websites of anxiety therapists practicing in Arizona.
Your target audience knows exactly what they are looking for and want mental health services as soon as possible. This audience is also more like to convert.
Long-tail keyword phrases are also easier to rank for in search results.
Finding the right keywords
Keyword research is essential for an effective therapist SEO strategy for any business. It helps you establish the need for SEO and compelling content for your therapist’s website.
Target keyword phrases should be a few words that convey your web page’s or blog post’s message or main topic. But, how do you determine the right SEO keywords? It’s simple you can use a keyword planner or use the information about your private practice to;
Check out the competition
Visit the sites of your top three competitors or other practices in the same field as you. Read through their website’s content and note the topics they focus on and the SEO keywords they use.
Search those SEO keyword phrases on major engines like Google and observe whether their websites come up on the first page of search results. Suppose they are ranking high, that’s a clear implication that the terms they use are working. Use this chance to jot down some keyword phrases you could use as well for your SEO.
Conduct keyword research
Do your homework on keyword research to find therapist page SEO keyword phrases that are;
- Searched often
- Supported by your content
- Relevant to your website, search terms like " family counseling", "anxiety therapist" or "couples therapy" don't make sense if your counseling practice provides child therapist services or you are a child psychologist
Generating more patients for your practice through strategic digital marketing!
Content Strategy for Therapists
After gathering your keyword list, create content for those specific keyword phrases. Ensure that different keyword phrases have dedicated pages in your web pages.
You have to generate quality content to beat the serious competition you face, with 4 million blog posts estimated to be published per day.
Here are a few SEO tips for creating amazing content to get page one rankings;
- Sprinkle keywords throughout your content.
- Answer every question and cover every topic possible; the more topics you touch on, the better your content will be.
- Add images and ensure that the file names and alt text of the images are keyword phrases that attract website visitors.
- Include natural variants of your keywords.
- Add keywords to your meta tags and title tags.
Choosing title tags
A title tag helps Google algorithms understand what each page on your website is about.
Title tags play a significant role in your page SEO strategy.
Here are some tips on Title tags;
- Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces.
- Keep it relevant to your private practice.
- Don’t duplicate headline tags.
- Place keywords in order of importance, from most to least.
Backlinks
Links back to your website from another website area give a significant authority signal. The more backlinks you have, the more search algorithms will trust your site.
When building links for your website, they should be high quality and essentially be one or all of the following;
- Local- if you can get a link from a local business organization or directory, that helps verify your services.
- Authoritative- your website needs backlinks from a website with a lot of authority. Authoritative sites are ideally older and have domain extensions like a .org.
- Tropical- build links from websites relating to therapy and counseling. Consider listings on therapy directories like Psychology Today.
It’s hard to acquire dynamite links that incorporate all these qualities, but you can start by building links with any of these qualities and climb the ranks in therapy pages.
Remember, the anchor text and surrounding words you use when linking to your website help establish context. Incorporate the appropriate keywords for your specialty in the URL of your website.
Let’s take a look at why local SEO is critical for psychologists.
Therapist Marketing Strategy
Brand Awareness
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Local SEO
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Lead Generation
For over a decade we have served clients from across many verticals.
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Reasons psychologists should invest in local SEO strategies
- The yellow pages are dead- previously, therapists could place a yellow page ad and wait for the clients to call. Today, thanks to Google, 97% of people search for local businesses online.
- Fast results- national and international companies have to wait for an average of 6 to 12 months to see results from a new SEO campaign. Investing in local SEO gives you a significant advantage since you are competing only with other therapists in your geographical area, not those on the other side of the country. Remember, most of your therapist competitors are not using SEO yet. This means that with a targeted campaign for your website, you can reach the top page of local Google listings in 30 days or even less.
- Free traffic- although the business industry is gradually evolving, advertising is one major expense for small businesses. If you boost your SEO rankings, you are guaranteed a constant flow of free traffic for your private practice that your only job is to convert into paying customers.
How Do Psychologists Get Clients?
Search engine optimization for therapists is the process of driving quality traffic to your site with the intent of converting that traffic into a new client lead.
The SEO tactics used by every other mental health therapist aren’t that different from other industries. But, there are a few differences.
Generating Reviews
Reviews on Google and other third-party review sites are great indicators of your local mental health therapist practice. However, unlike other local services, asking for client reviews is a little less natural, and in most cases, therapists prefer not to ask for reviews entirely.
The trick to asking for honest feedback from clients without explicitly asking or inciting is to be outstanding in delivering your services. Understand client’s expectations and make sure that you go above and beyond them. This will increase your chances of generating quality reviews for effective SEO for therapists.
Testimonial Limitations
It is similar to reviews, finding a client who’s willing to share a story about your counseling services in a blog post or video testimonial on your therapist website. Client case studies can be powerful but have limitations in most cases. Even if you are lucky enough to find someone willing to offer a testimonial or case study for your site, they often won’t disclose enough detail about their mental health to be useful for your site’s SEO.
Most therapists understand the importance of search engine optimization when driving the right kind of website traffic to their therapy site.
But with the multiple factors that affect SEO for your private practice website, it can be quite confusing and daunting to get your therapy website rank well for keyword phrases related to your brand.
With these different factors, it’s easy to feel like your customers will never find you in search engines. However, if the website content is created well, with search engines and target clients in mind, you can see success with your SEO efforts.
