Happy New Year and hopefully everyone is ready for a bigger and better 2021. Yes, the world is still in turmoil but now more than ever before there are millions of people worldwide who need therapists to help them overcome their worries and fears. The question is how are you going to do this when increasingly the world has moved online?
Very few therapists are now seeing clients for face to face sessions because of the virus concerns and because their insurers are not happy to cover them for work that might be risky. This is hardly surprising given that in the UK 1 in 50 people currently have the virus.
So what are you going to do instead? How are you going to attract your clients and do therapy advertising when the world has moved online?
Marketing Strategies for Therapists
I have always talked about how your website should always be one of the most important things that you concentrate on when you are starting your therapy practice. It is the foundation for any business you are planning to do in the future. If you don’t get this right then you are going to have problems from the start. You can find out more about how to create a good therapy website in my online course Turn Your Therapy Website Into a Client Magnet.
Your therapy website is your shop window to showcase what you can do but there is also another important part of your website that is often overlooked and that is the blog section. This is usually put in as an afterthought by most therapists. In fact, I have never seen a good one in any of the ten years that I have been reviewing my client’s marketing efforts. This is madness because whilst your website is your shop window your blog demonstrates your individual products and expertise.
Marketing strategies for therapists need to include blogging and if you haven’t put this on your list of things to do this year then fix it fast. Therapy advertising and product sales by blogging is big business and you are missing out! The big guns have already started to dominate the search engines with their extensive blogging efforts. Do an online search for any therapy problem now and look at the first page of the search results and you are going to see in-depth articles written by big health companies wanting a slice of the therapy market.
Creating a Good Therapy Blog
So what exactly can a good therapy blog do for you? Well, it can get you a ton of visitors and those people viewing your website can become buyers of your products and services. It really is that simple. The more in-depth, well-written articles you create the more chance you have of more people finding you.
The big health companies are well aware of this and write a huge amount of blogs to attract those visitors. In fact, bigger blogs will get millions of visitors each month. Now whilst you can’t compete with a team of writers you can start to follow their lead and start creating a blog that lets a bigger audience know about you and your work.
Creating a Therapist Blog
Now before you rush off to your website and start writing you need to know that not all blogs are equal and will get you the results you need. You actually have to structure them correctly and use the right words to get found and this is where most therapist blogging efforts fall down.
Therapy advertising through blogging only works if your potential customers are able to find you in the search engines. If they search for a term and you don’t show up then your blog is just one big waste of time. This is what most therapists do. They write some online ramblings and wonder why they haven’t had their phone ringing off the hook.
In order to get found you have to use the right words in the right place in your article to even get a chance of someone actually learning about what you can offer.
On an online Facebook group before Christmas, this very subject came up as a group of therapists tried to work out what words they should use on their websites to get found. They picked what they thought were great keywords because they were popular and everyone was looking for them. As they were congratulating themselves on their work they had overlooked one massive problem. Popular words are so highly competitive that they didn’t have a chance in hell of ever ranking for them.
I can tell you know that if you want to write a blog about anxiety or weight loss and expect to be able to compete with the likes of people like Weight Watchers or WebMD you need to think again. There are 348,000,000 search results for the term anxiety alone! As you can imagine a small therapy blog is never going to be able to get on the first million pages never mind the top of Google page one.
Yet with the right tips and strategies, it is possible to get found but it takes some work.
Ranking a Therapy Website and Blogging
I started a new website from scratch when the lockdowns started. It was a website I had been planning to create for ages but never had the time for before. UK lockdowns gave me the perfect time and space to concentrate on getting a new website started and ranking.
To date, that website has received 49,000 page views alone and it has only really begun to get started. What would you think if you had that many potential customers were seeing your products and services? An average well established local business website gets around 1,000 visitors a month or 12,000 visitors a year. So far my blogging methods have blown those statistics out of the window and the website is well under a year old.
If you weren’t aware it can take six to eight months for Google to even trust and rank a website. That means that the traffic I am seeing now is only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, since Christmas, my traffic has risen by 50% and continues to go on an upward trajectory. The more articles I add to the site the higher my numbers will go as well as my profits. I’m currently on track for 200,000 page views this coming year and that is without factoring in future growth. How’s that for some neat therapy advertising?
Knock-On Advertising Benefits
My blog on this website had another hidden benefit as it also got discovered in December by one of the major newspapers in the UK The Daily Telegraph. A reporter rang me asking if I could help her with an article on fears and phobias related to the Coronavirus vaccine and just a few hours later her article with a backlink to my website was up online. Newspapers are working fast these days!
The Daily Telegraph is one of the highest regarded news websites in the UK today. It gets around 100 million monthly visitors to its news site. This means in Google’s eyes it is a big deal and as such it has a domain authority of 94 out of 100. The Telegraph linked to my website as an authoritative source on vaccination phobias and therefore my brand new website with a tiny domain authority got a boost in the web rankings because I was now seen as more legitimate in Google’s eyes.
This was the icing on the cake for the website I had been planning for ages and its success was down to blogging well and publicising those blogs in the right places.
You Can Do the Same
With the right knowledge and strategies, you can do the same. You just need to know what to do which is why I have created my online course Blogging for Therapists. The course shows you how to make more money for your business through blogging. It gives you the tools and strategies to find the right keywords and to create a passive income from your blog so you don’t have to continually hunt for new clients. It can even help you to dominate the local search engine results in your area.
Just head on over to my online store to start plotting how you can earn significantly more with your blog this new year.
