This Tuesday Q&A is bringing you information on SEO and copywriting!
This is a great question asked this week, thank you Kim!
Kim asked, “A person with her own practice talked about doubling her practice from 4 to 8 clients in 2 weeks due to having better SEO and coming up on local search engine searches. Can you educate us further on exactly what this means?”
Well this question got me to thinking. Did I know all that I needed to know about SEO? How many other Counselor Entrepreneurs could benefit from this information? How many other Counselor Entrepreneurs are probably missing out on helping people because they don’t have a clue about SEO?
Did you know that your website could be causing you to miss out on the chance to work with clients in your private practice? That means clients are missing out on the skills you have and you are missing the opportunity to operate in your gift as a counselor. Poor website copy and SEO could be costing you!
A few terms to know first:
SEO – search engine optimization. The process of increasing website or webpage “visibility” on different search engines so that it might be found in search results.
Copywriting – these are the words, a.k.a “copy”, that you use on your website or webpage to advertise a service or product, needed by others.
Search Engines – Programs designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Examples are Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, etc.
Keywords – a single word or a string of words that describes the content on a website or webpage. This is what the search engine recognizes when people go online looking for services. The closer you get your words to the words others are typing into search engines the better. For example, marriage counseling in Baltimore, counseling for teenagers with depression, help with anxiety.
So is it possible to double your client numbers with the right SEO copywriting? MAYBE and MAYBE not. Here are some things to keep in mind:
LOCATION. If you are in a location where the service you provide is not as common, then optimizing your website with certain keywords may give you a higher likelihood of showing up on search results because not many people are doing what you do or have a web prescence in your area.
TIME. This is not a “set it and forget it” type of activity, search engines are really smart. They know that people like you and me are doing these things to get more traffic, so they switch up the game rules on us. SEO keywords are also getting longer and longer these days and you have to keep up with the ever changing rules to be effective.
USER EXPERIENCE. Even if you have the right keywords, if potential clients can’t get around your website because it’s cluttered or information is hard to find they won’t stay long. You want to have a website that makes it easy for people to find the content they are looking for.
PAGE UPLOAD. This goes along with user experience. Does your page take several seconds to upload? You might be thinking “Did she just say seconds?! That’s not long at all.” Well it is long in internet land! Approximately 55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on a page. That’s according to Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, a data analytics company that counts Time.com as one of its many clients.
Take home message: SEO copywriting is very important but don’t put all your eggs into one basket! You should have a multi-layered marketing and networking strategy
When it comes to copywriting, remember your copy is not about YOU it’s about your client. I gave this tip on our Facebook business page, for our new “Monday Marketing Tip”
ALL the best!!
Even with what I learned a couple weeks ago, this was useful to help a new clinician that joined AP4M who has just started her journey into marketing for herself. It helped me explain what I am not technically-savvy enough to do on my own :o) THANKS!
AWESOME! It makes us feel great when we know how to locate a much needed resource to someone else.
Great information about SELF I didn’t even know what this was. Thanks for the feedback and I will keep this in mind.
Hi Annmarie! Glad this Tuesday Q&A was helpful!