Why SEO is Important for Private Practice Websites
Guest post written by
Jeanine Wilson
SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation, can seem mysterious and complicated. But it really doesn’t have to be.
Every time you perform a search on Google, whether it’s to find a quick recipe for dinner or ask a question, you’re seeing SEO at work.
With just a little basic SEO knowledge, you can increase the credibility of your private practice, and attract new clients for free.
I’ll be explaining SEO in simple terms, so you can easily understand what it is and how you can use it in a blogging strategy to grow your private practice.
I’ll also share with you my favourite (free!) tools for SEO and keyword research.
While there are several search engines out there, Google has the overwhelming majority of market share (93% in Europe, 88% in the USA) so for this article, I’ll refer exclusively to Google.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of how Google indexes the trillions of pages on the web.
If you think of the Internet as one big library, and Google as the librarian, the librarian needs a quick and efficient way to find you the exact information you’re looking for within all the books.
Google finds what you are looking for through a complex mathematical formula called an algorithm.
You don’t need to know how the algorithm works, all you need to know is that the better your answer is to the user’s question, or the more relevant the term, the higher that Google’s algorithm will rank your website in the search results.
I’ll be covering organic SEO in this article - which are the unpaid search results that Google ranks when you perform a search. These organic search results are different to the paid ads which you may notice at the top or on the right side of the search results page.
Interestingly, the organic results on the first page of Google account for just over 70% of all of the clicks from that search.
This means that even though others may be paying for those ad slots, you can get even better results than them for free.
How SEO helps your Private Practice
If you can get your website to rank on the first page of Google, that will be a powerful (and completely free!) source of website traffic for your Private Practice.
A powerful boost…
Having your content appear on the first page of Google gives your practice a huge credibility boost. It demonstrates to your target audience that you are the expert on the given topic that they are searching for and you can help them with their problem.
Having high-quality traffic from SEO also means that you are attracting the exact kind of client you want to work with. Rather than pay for ads that may or may not reach your ideal audience, with SEO you have the opportunity to bring in the exact kind of client you want to work with by providing them with helpful content.
Keywords
To have an effective SEO strategy, you must know exactly what your target audience is searching for on Google. This is where keywords come in.
A keyword is any word, or typically a few words (also known as a long-tailed keyword), that you search in Google.
The best strategy with keywords is to choose ones made up of at least 3 words. The more words in the keyword (which is really more of a phrase) the less competition there will be for that keyword, and the easier it will be for your site to move up the rankings in Google.
For example, you wouldn’t want to try to rank for just the word “therapist”. But a more specific keyword, such as “private therapist specialising in OCD” will be much less competitive.
Especially if you have a new website, you want to target keywords that are not too difficult to rank for. Google gives more authority and a higher ranking to websites that have been around for longer, so it’s best to start small and keep your keywords specific when you’re first starting out.
Later on in the article, I’ll share some free tools that you can use to research keywords.
Blogging
Blogging is a crucial component of your SEO strategy, because the more content you have on your site about your area of expertise, the more Google will see as an authority on that topic.
Content Strategy
Blog posts that answer some of your target audience’s most frequently asked questions is an excellent way for them to find out about your practice.
Once they discover you, having other articles they can get lost in will build that know, like and trust factor and make you seem like the better option compared to another private practice website without helpful content.
If adding blogging to your to-do list seems overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be.
Once you have written a few blog posts and have seen what your audience responds well to, you can create a template with space to fill in the different sections of the post, including the headings and images. Once you have the template set up, each blog post shouldn’t take longer than a couple of hours to write.
Outsourcing writing your blog posts is another option.
But what should I write about?
The key here is to make your blog posts all about the reader - avoid any journal-like posts or personal stories that don’t address your target audience’s problems or pain points.
The best way to find topics to write about is through using an incredible free website called answer the public.
You can search for a given topic and it will return the who, what, why, and how of what people are searching for in Google on that topic.
This is an absolute goldmine for deciding on a topic for a blog post. You want to make your content as close as you can to what others are searching for on Google.
Once you have your topic, type it into Google and have a look at the content that is already there. Have a read through, and think about how you can make your content ten times better than what’s already there, especially if the current content only provides a surface-level solution.
Each blog post should start with a clear introduction to what the reader will walk away with. Then the body of the post should be broken up into clear sections, and use bolding along with italicising within the paragraphs, to make the post skimmable. Wrap everything up with a conclusion that summarises the main points.
Aim to make your blog posts 1000 - 3000 words long, so you can really dive deep into a topic and give your reader some immediately actionable tips so they can walk away with a quick win.
Note that you will want to use the keywords in a natural way. Google can tell when you’re keyword-stuffing (abnormally distributing keywords) and will penalise you for it, so write for your readers, not Google.
How to research keywords
Now that you have your topic for the blog, it’s time to research the keywords that you will be including in the title of your post, names of your sections, post’s meta description, and throughout the article.
Say you want to write a blog post on the topic of “how to help someone with OCD”. You need to find those terms (keywords) that the people you want to help with are typing into Google so that your post can rank for those keywords.
A great place to start is with Google itself.
Type your keyword or phrase into Google, and scroll down to see the “related searches” at the bottom of the page.
It should look something like this:
The related searches are a treasure trove of data because these are real searches that Google is bringing up.
Another strategy you can try using Google is to type in your keyword into the search box and add every letter of the alphabet to the end of it, to see what Google autocompletes it with. For instance, you could type into Google “ocd a” “ocd b” etc. You may find a keyword that you hadn’t thought of!
Once you have a list of possible keywords, you then want to find out the difficulty and search volume of those keywords. Ideally, you’re looking for that sweet spot between being not too competitive but still having at least 20 searches or so a month.
While 20 searches a month might seem low, it is definitely worth it to target those lower volume keywords because you have a much better likelihood of ranking for them, especially if your website is new.
Some useful tools that are either free or have a free trial period to help research keywords and their difficulty are:
Keywords on your website
In addition to the blog posts, you’ll also need to decide what keywords you want your overall website to rank for.
Going back to the OCD therapist example, you may want to research long-tailed keywords such as “OCD therapist north London” or “London OCD clinic” to use across your entire website.
Choose 5-10 keywords to place both in the content of your website pages, in what’s known as on-page SEO.
Some places to include your website keywords are:
Title of your website
Meta tags
Alt-image text of your pictures
URLs
Conclusion
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy - it can take 4-6 months of consistent blogging and website optimisation to start seeing results.
But once you do, that’s free traffic (and leads!) that is flowing straight to your private practice, so it’s definitely worth the initial effort.
With some basic knowledge of SEO, keyword research, and how to use blogging to generate leads, you’ve already taken the first step.
However, if you’d like some support with the SEO of your current website, or designing a new website, click here to schedule your free Complimentary Consultation & Website Audit, where we will cover SEO, how to increase conversions on the site, as well as any technical issues you may be having.
