Guest Blog From | Sophie Wood | Pocket Site (https://pocketsite.co.uk) – The Website Builder Designed For The Busy Therapist
Getting clients via your website is one of the basic business building blocks for your private practice. However, many private practitioners build a website to look good or have one made for them without considering how the website is going to be found by your customers online.
Getting your website found online is controlled and managed by Google these days. There are other companies in the mix – Yahoo, Bing but these own a small percentage of the market compared to Google. Getting your website dressed to impress Google is very important. How you get your website dressed to impress is known as search engine optimisation (SEO).
However, before we look closer at SEO let’s spend a moment to cover a few terms and concepts that you may come across along the way in caring for your website.
When we refer to being found by Google, we mean being found online by the Google search engine and our websites displayed in search results. OK, so what is a search engine and what are search results?
A search engine is a massive website that holds vast volumes of information on websites that it has discovered across the internet. A search engine ‘discovers’ websites by automated robots that it sends out to continually crawl the internet looking for new information/websites. When something new is found the robot attempts to understand what the website is all about by reading every web page, it can find and then sends all this information back to the search engine to be indexed and stored away.
When we go and search for something on the internet – we type in our search term – e.g., CBT Therapist London. At this point we’re essentially asking the Google search engine to show all the ‘best’ information it can found in everything it’s discovered and display it to us in what Google thinks is the ‘best’ order. Google will calculate what it thinks is the most relevant information to the search term you entered. What Google then shows to you are known as search results. Usually displayed across many pages, that we can move between.
Ok, so how does all this relate to me and my website and getting more customers?
Well, there are 3 takeaways here:
- Your website needs to be set up to be found by Google robots when crawling the internet.
- Your website needs to be understandable to Google robots.
- Your website needs to be considered a website that will offer a good experience for Google’s searching customers.
These 3 points are what search engine optimisation (SEO) is all about. Optimising your website for the search engines, to be found and displayed in search results for your customers to click on and visit your website and hopefully if they like what they see contact you.
There is a lot of black art and myth surrounding SEO, that is nonsense. Very often a small private practice can do the SEO basics and see a significant increase in visitor traffic to their website.
6 Top Tips That Will Help You Get Some Google Love‘In
- The Website – ensure your website is using modern technology – make sure your website is mobile responsive. If you’ve not touched your website in over two years, then contact your supplier and ask if your website is using anything that may mean your Google ranking is being impacted.
- Select The Right Keywords/ Search Terms – It’s important to decide what search terms you want to rank for and check people are using these search terms.
- Content, Content, Content – Google loves regular content; if a website hasn’t been updated in 12 months then this will impact your Google ranking – you are effectively offline.
- Use Your Search Terms In Your Web Page Title – Make sure your page title uses the search terms you’ve selected.
- Images, Photos and Videos – often overlooked but essential for improving your Google ranking is naming your images or photos appropriately with your search terms. Don’t call it ‘photo1’ use one of the selected search terms within the name.
- Get Other Websites Pointing To You – by far the hardest, but one of the most important is to get other websites pointing to your website – known as external links.
If this article has piqued your interest in ensuring your website is maximised to bring you more clients, then CBT Psychotherapist Briefings are running an in-depth Beginners SEO Workshop webinar on 28th March 2019. Join Us. Don’t worry if you can’t make the date replays are available to all those registering.
To book a place on the webinar, click on the link below:
>> Register For The Beginners SEO Workshop Webinar
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