Building Your Ideal Private Practice: A Guide for Therapists and Other Healing Professionals by Lynn Grodzki

Author:Lynn Grodzki [Grodzki, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393709490
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2015-03-30T04:00:00+00:00

GETTING FOUND

A website functions like a brochure floating in cyberspace. It exists, but no one may see it unless you direct them to it. You can direct people to your website in one of four ways:

• Advertise in print: You can and should promote your website via a brochure, business card, print ad, or other piece of marketing material that contains your website address.

• Optimize: If you want to boost your chance of having people find your site when they search the Internet for certain terms, you can follow some steps to position your site via a search engine results page (such as Google or Yahoo!) by understanding how to use keywords.

• Advertise online: Some therapists find that traffic is driven to their website when they pay for advertising, such as pay-per-click advertising, most often with Google AdWords.

• Link: Linking, also called off-page optimization, makes your website more competitive by having other sites refer back to your site. The more competitive your market, the more it helps to have good links.

The first method of website advertising, advertising in print, is self-explanatory, so let me explain the other three: optimizing, online advertising, and links. After reading this, you may decide that the suggestions are too time-consuming or difficult and hire a company to help you achieve these goals. Even if you hire someone, I still want you to understand what it all means. This chapter may be too technical for those readers who know little about websites and the Internet, but remember, this is part of your future entrepreneurial skill set. So stick with this and read on!

Glossary for Websites

First a short list of definitions to help you understand this section.

Conversion: This refers to the process by which a website viewer becomes an actual client by taking your preferred action step: contacting you, making an appointment, purchasing a product. You can have micro-conversions (you want a visitor to go to the next page on your site or sign up for a newsletter) and major conversions (book a session, make a purchase, or contact you for more information).

Keyword: A word or phrase of words determined by you, that reflect what people search for when looking for a therapist. Keywords are those common terms (depression, couples counseling, therapy, treatment, etc.) that need to show up frequently and in the right way on your site, so that those doing searches for your services, and the search engines themselves, can quickly locate you. Google searches millions of sites in seconds, using robots, and the robots are searching to match keywords to your site. Since keywords are so important, you need to do some research to determine the best target keywords and key phrases. Online sites that help you determine good keywords/phrases come and go, but a few that are available as I write this include:

• Google Keywords Planner. To use this free tool, create an AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com. Click the Tools and Analysis drop-down menu and select Keyword Planner.

• Firefox Search Engine Rank Checker, http://tools.

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