Building a website for your practice should be the first step in establishing an internet presence. But it’s far from the last. Many counselors find themselves confused when their brand-new website fails to pull in the traffic and new clientele they were hoping for.
Is your new website broken? Or did you just miss something?
It could be both. It could be neither.
The truth is, there are a lot of reasons why your website isn’t getting healthy traffic, and most of them can be summed up with this:
Your website isn’t showing up in relevant places.
Virtually no one outside of your practice is going to know the URL of your website, which means they’ll have to find your website through an external source. This will likely be done through a search engine (probably Google) or an online platform like Torrch.
Showing up on Torrch is easy. All you need to do is create a free profile, and people in need can get connected with your practice.
Showing up in relevant search results takes a little more work, but it can be a very effective way of driving relevant traffic to your website. You’ve probably heard the term Search Engine Optimization or SEO before.
This is the process of increasing your rankings in search engines like Google.
How do I optimize my counseling website for search engines?
That’s a pretty heavy question, but allow us to give you the cliff notes version.
Essentially, you need to decide what keywords or phrases are relevant for your business, and then you want to create relevant content based around those.
Keywords are common terms or phrases that people type into search engines to find things. For instance, if someone is trying to find a marriage counselor in Minneapolis, they’d type “marriage counselor Minneapolis” or maybe “marriage counselor Twin Cities”.
The thing with keywords is, you want to hone in on a select few that are the most relevant to what you do. Ranking for any keyword takes time and effort. If you’re trying to target too many of them, you’ll spread your efforts too thin, and you won’t rank for any of them.
photo by Nikita Vantorin
Once you have your keywords chosen, you’ll need to create individual pages on your website that are optimized for each keyword. With those in place, you can start blogging and creating articles that link back to these keyword pages.
Confused yet? Like I said, it’s a heavy subject.
If you’re really serious about optimizing your website, we’d recommend digging into this guide written by one of the leading authorities on SEO. Also, if you’re going to start blogging on your website, we’d highly recommend checking out our blog posts about blogging for a counseling practice.
Alternatively, you hire a company to optimize your site and even create on-going content for you. Just make to choose a reputable one. There are many shady companies out there that claim to do SEO but really don’t do much of anything.
Before you start digging into SEO at all, you should first make sure search engines can see your website at all.
Can search engines see you?
In order for a website to appear in search engines like Google, it needs to be crawlable and indexable.
Don’t let the terms scare you. It’s actually pretty simple. Search engines have scripts (little programs) that go through the pages of your website and see what’s there. These are called crawlers. The crawlers take the information, figure out what it says, and places it in the appropriate search results.
This is called indexing.
If your website isn’t crawlable, it won’t be indexed, and therefore, it won’t show up in search engines no matter what you do.
How do you know if this is happening to your website? You can try searching for yourself in Google. If the different pages of your website are appearing, then it’s being indexed.
If your website isn’t being crawled, it may be outdated, broken, or not properly setup. Additionally, if your website isn’t responsive (mobile friendly), it’s appearance in search engines can be greatly hindered.
In need of a modern, responsive, beautiful, affordable, search-engine friendly website designed specifically for counselors and psychologists? We can help with that.
Not only will we create your website, but we can host and maintain it for you. Here are just a few examples of what we offer:
To learn more about our website capabilities, contact us today. And if you haven’t yet, make sure to register on Torrch!