Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses

20. How to Use Digital Marketing to Get More Clients With Craig Alsup

February 23, 2023 Season 2 Episode 20
Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses
20. How to Use Digital Marketing to Get More Clients With Craig Alsup
Show Notes Transcript

None of us starts out in private practice with a ton of clients, much less an army of followers on our social media, blogs, or podcast. In fact, even getting people to give our content a chance is a challenge in the beginning.

In this episode, Craig Alsup of Live Beyond Counseling and Coaching explains why every counselor needs to use digital marketing in their private practice to get more clients AND he gives us tactics that actually make a difference.

Today, Alsup teaches us his technique for using social media and SEO for counselors. This is the same method he uses with his consulting clients to create posts that get viewed by thousands of new followers and podcast listeners by leveraging the power of great content.

This is a masterclass in digital marketing, but the tips apply to all forms of content. Listen in, and be sure to go to  for the resources Craig mentions in this episode.

Craig has been my guest on my Expert Interviews series on my You Tube channel and I love highlighting his amazing work with his coaching clients.

When I have experts share their expertise, I know the content will be insanely valuable—this session is a perfect example of that!

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

[00:00:00]

Kate Walker:       Alright, tell us about you.

Craig Alsup:         Got it, we are recording, I like it. So I am Craig Alsup, I am a practice owner, a group practice owner, in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. We have four locations now. We’ve been in business five years and have 14 therapists right now. A few years ago, a lady in a group, because I was just spilling the beans on everything I knew about marketing, a lady in the group from Florida messaged me and said, “I don’t know how to do any of this stuff. Can you help me?” And I said, sure, and she said, “I’ll pay you,” and I was like, whoa, wait a minute. I can get paid to do this? And that’s sort of how I started coaching and helping people.

                           I jumped in with this lady, I had no idea what to charge her, so I just threw out a random number and apparently it was really low. She hired me to do all of the things, to do SEO on her website, to help her with Google Business, to do some coaching with her, and we just started to see her practice blow up, and she started to tell friends, and here I am. So over the last few years, I’ve gotten the opportunity to coach therapy practice owners not only in Texas, but all throughout the United States as well as Canada. I’ve gotten some pretty cool opportunities to not only help people grow practices and a couple of people that were pretty close to retirement age and they got to grow their practice enough to sell it. 

                           One of the ladies was from Greek heritage and she always wanted to move to Florida, there’s a big Greek community there. She lived in Ohio at the time and after working with her and getting her website tuned up and getting her practice going, she actually made the leap based upon her income increasing a whole lot. She made the leap down to Florida, plugged in with the network there, and is now doing counseling in Florida and Ohio virtually with the people that she wants to see and is making a whole lot more money than she was.

                           So that’s kind of a brief bio of me. I’ve done some Google Business optimization stuff for people, search engine optimization of websites, particularly I like to work with WordPress and Square Space, I’ve also done some with Wix and a few others. I really just sort of taught myself, learned by watching a whole lot of videos on YouTube, listening to a whole lot of podcasts – you guys might be doing some of this as well – and then taking some courses on websites like SkillShare and New To Me. And really just sort of filling in the gaps from experience and trying things and seeing how it works.

                           The other great thing about coaching and working with therapists all over the country is sometimes I see things on their websites that I’m like, oh wow, that’s great. I should totally implement that. And so I get two for the price of one when I’m doing coaching sometimes because I realize, hey, wait a minute, I’m not even doing that for my practice. Or I’ll say something in a coaching session and I’m like, wait a minute, I’m not doing that either. It’s all about continuing to learn as we go.

                           But I wanted to just talk with y’all today a little bit about search engine optimization, which is what SEO stands for, also a little bit about Google Business because it is the number one way to get found as a local business, as a business that’s based in XYZ community, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, wherever. It’s the number one way to get found by people within a ten-mile radius of you, and really, as that radius gets closer, it gets a heck of a lot easier for people to find you if your Google Business profile is claimed, first step, and optimized. So we’ll talk a little bit about that as well.

                           Is that a good intro for us, Kate?

Kate Walker:       Yes, that’s a wonderful intro. You said that and I immediately thought back to the homework assignment I gave everybody, right? Claim your Google My Business. And there were a lot of folks that didn’t know what that meant, so yeah, I’m glad you’re going to cover that.

Craig Alsup:         Show of hands, did everybody do it? No, I’m just kidding. Too many people are here to look at everybody’s hands anyway, so if you don’t raise your hand, nobody will notice.

                           Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about – hopefully you did claim that profile, especially if you have a brick and mortar office. There is no reason not to claim a profile, honestly, if you’ve got an office, especially if you want clients. I mean, if you don’t want clients, you probably shouldn’t claim it, but I’m guessing since you’re here, you probably want some clients.

                           I actually don’t do therapy anymore, I just do coaching, so you might be like me, at least one of these days. I see some people clapping and smiling at that, so maybe I’m not the only one who had dreams of getting out of the office. Here I am, yay! Look mom, I made it!

                           So search engine optimization, let’s talk about that for a minute, because I see in a lot of the different groups that I’m in, therapists, practice owner groups, I see a lot where people don’t even sort of know the definition or know what sort of search engine optimization equals. So let me give you the Craig sort of basic version of that. Search engine optimization is basically all of the things that you can do on and off of your website to make Google like you, to make Google look at your site, look at your business, and say hey, this is a business that I want to show to other people. It’s important because Google is the number one search engine on the planet, it’s the number one search engine for getting found for counseling or therapy services. It’s the place where most people jump on their phone, they open up their Google app, and they search for “therapists near me,” or they search for “marriage counseling in Dallas.” They’re searching for those specific types of services and keywords, which gives you a huge opportunity, gives us a huge opportunity, to basically tailor our website, tailor what we say on our website and what we say throughout the web, to use those types of words, those types of keywords that people would be searching.

                           As therapists, we get into therapy speak sometimes where we use words that people would never search, and so we need to be careful with that. There are a few types of trainings and stuff like that that are popular enough in sort of pop culture that people know them, like Gottman relationship stuff. People are searching that a little bit. EMDR, people are searching that a little bit. Cognitive behavioral therapy, people are searching that. But then there’s some pretty random stuff out there that’s like, okay, there’s a small niche of people that might know what that means, but it’s not big enough for us to really focus a whole lot of our time and effort around trying to rank for those keywords or trying to work for those types of things.

Kate Walker:       So one of the things I want to do in this is add, for supervisors, if you’re a supervisor and you’re supervising LPC associates, this is really important for you to know because if your LPC associate is using SEO to market themselves, which they should be if they’re self-employed, you can help them tailor these things to their website in an ethical way. So, Craig, what’s an example of a search term that’s very therapy-ish? I mean, I’ve got one, but do you have one that people wouldn’t search for it but every therapist knows that this is a thing? I know, I put you on the spot.

Craig Alsup:         Gestalt therapy. Nobody knows what that means.

Kate Walker:       Trauma informed. Believe it or not, the general public is not looking for trauma informed therapy, right, SEO, but it doesn’t mean that that’s not what we’ll do. So maybe that’s part of this too, is understanding the mismatch. If somebody is looking for depression, you can still do trauma informed therapy with them if that’s something you’re trained in.

Craig Alsup:         Yeah, exactly. So it’s those things that people aren’t necessarily searching that you might have on your website, you might use a little bit of that language, but you don’t want to build an entire webpage around trauma informed therapy because virtually nobody is searching it. So you might want to build your page around trauma therapy, around EMDR, around couples counseling or marriage counseling, those types of things that people would actually be searching in your area. Anxiety or stress, counseling for stress, things like that. That’s what people are going to be searching.

                           I noticed a couple of people said Google declined your business because you’re practicing online only. Yeah, technically Google wants you to have an office space. There are ways you can get around that that are sort of crafty but it’s probably not going to help you necessarily near as much to use sort of these crafty ways to get your Google business. You can potentially use your home address and then hide it. But the problem is, Google now is often wanting pictures of signage. I tried to get one approved the other day and they wanted a video of the location with signage and all of that stuff to prove that it was an actual business. So for online people, really difficult. Virtual offices don’t work that well. You might get it approved but then Google will eventually find it out and it will be a sad day if you spend a whole bunch of money to make that happen. So I would say people with physical addresses, it’s going to work for you best. Those are the only ones that I would really focus in on: okay, you’ve got to get this done. 

                           That would kind of be what I would say about Google business. You really need a physical address; it is really built for people with a physical address. If you have a crafty way of doing that and you want to try to test the waters and do that, it’s not like Google is going to complain to the board or something. They’re not going to cause problems for you, they’re just going to shut down the listing.

Kate Walker:       So not an ethical issue. And everybody has to make sure their address is always updated with that board because that is an issue with the board. Make sure that you change your address, you let the board know. I will say when I moved and I went to all virtual, I just put in a change of address. Now I don’t want to tell you where that is because Google is always listening, and they might want a picture of the signage.

Craig Alsup:         Exactly, exactly. Don’t do that. Okay, so back to SEO stuff, someone asked, do you just randomly put these terms somewhere on your site or is there a place that we need to put them? Yeah, we’re going to jump into that. The short answer of it is yes. You want to have the search terms that people would be searching throughout your site in some strategic places. The first place that I would say you want to focus is when you are naming the name of what the URL of your page is going to be. So if I’ve got a page that’s going to be about marriage counseling, my page is going to be LiveBeyondCounseling.com/Marriage-Counseling. Sometimes you’ll see I’ll go to websites and it’s LiveBeyondCounseling.com/32 and you’re like, that doesn’t have anything to do with marriage counseling, right? Or it’ll say, /marriage. That’s better, you’re moving in the right direction. 

                           But if you can have the terms that people are likely to search when they’re searching that – so if somebody is searching for marriage counseling, they’re probably going to search for “marriage counseling near me,” right? Or “couples counseling.” Marriage counseling is probably more appropriate. So if you can make that the actual URL of those service pages, so /marriage-counseling, /anxiety-therapy, /emdr-therapy. You really want to have those sort of key words within the URL itself. That’s sort of the very basic starting point. 

                           I should mention if all of y’all get excited about this thing in particular and you jump off this webinar and you want to go change all of your URLs, don’t change them until you figure out how to forward them, how to redirect what you’ve got currently to the new URL. It’s called a “301 redirect” and so you might have to go down a rabbit hole on YouTube to figure out how to do that.

Kate Walker:       If you have a WordPress with Yoast, Yoast will give you a redirect. So, there. That’s all I know.

Craig Alsup:         Yeah, Yoast on WordPress will automatically give you a redirect if you change it once you’ve downloaded Yoast. It’s the SEO plugin on WordPress that I recommend. If you do it on SquareSpace, it’s a more difficult process. If you’ve got somebody that does your website for you, they should know how to change the URLs and redirect those for you as a 301 Redirect so that it doesn’t get messed up. So don’t go and start changing URLs because you’ll screw your whole site up. Don’t do that.

                           So that’s the first place. The second place I would say is in the title of the page. So when you post a new page, when you create a new page on WordPress, on SquareSpace, on Wix, whatever. It asks you for a page title. Your page title should be the closest sort of service-based keyword that you can think of. So if it’s marriage counseling, again, your title of that page could be “Marriage Counseling in Texas” or with the line break (it looks like a really tall L). You put that in and then the name of your practice and you should be good. 

                           So Marriage Counseling in Texas/Live Beyond Counseling would be a good page title. That gets the name of your practice, it gets the location, and it gets that primary keyword in there, and those are the three things that you want in your titles. The primary keyword or keywords, the location, and the name of your practice. 

                           So your URL has the keyword, your title has the keyword, and then you’ll have the option to put a meta description in there. Your meta description, guess what? You want it to have the same information as your title, just in a longer format and sentences. So Live Beyond Counseling provides marriage counseling for couples in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Reach out today if you are interested in scheduling. Give us a call. Whatever. That’s kind of off the cuff. But your meta description is basically just two or three sentences that tell who you are, what you do, where you’re located and challenge people to get in touch.

                           So working on the page now. When you get on your website page and you’re writing – I do have some materials and stuff like that that I can give you if you message me afterwards. I have a little bit of info. If you reach out to me, I can talk you through some of this, too.

                           The next thing is on your page, on your actual website pages, you want to have headings. Those headings, within SquareSpace, within WordPress, within whatever website builder you use, you’ll have the option to create paragraph text, which is just your regular font, regular sized text. You’ll have the option to create H1, 3, 4, and so on headings. Your H1 heading there should be one of on your page. Easy to remember: H1, you need one. Your H1 is alsothe number one important thing on your page; it’s the number one most important keyword. So again, if we’re using the marriage counseling idea on your page, you want, right at the top of the page, probably over the photo at the top of the page, you want something that says marriage counseling in Texas or marriage counseling in San Antonio; that should be your H1 heading. 

                           As you work your way down the page, you can do H2 headings. Those will be like supporting type headings. So if an H1 is marriage counseling in San Antonio, an H2 might be Gottman-trained therapists, and then you talk about your therapists being Gottman-trained. Another example of an H2 might be counseling for couples struggling with infidelity or something like that.

Kate Walker:       Craig, is it okay if I show the back office on mine, that way we can see the H1, H2? Because I know that can be confusing for people, what that looks like. This is the back office of a blog that I did last week. So there’s the URL with the keyword, my H2 heading is here – these are all H2 headings. H2 heading. And then because I use Yoast, I can put in my focused key phrase here and I get a little green smiley face that says hey, good job, your topic is SEO optimized. So I know if people put in this exact phrase, client found me on social media, and then I put in a second one – or did I? Nope, I did not, so just one key phrase. And that key phrase is in the URL, it’s in my very, very first paragraph. And by the way y’all, I did this by listening to Craig’s stuff. This is how I learned how to do this, where to put this stuff, and then there’s some other stuff you can do like tags. But that’s what it looks like in the back office. This is your key phrase. This is what you hope people are searching for. And so if you search for it, wouldn’t it be funny if mine showed up? Well, look at there. 

Craig Alsup:         It works.

Kate Walker:       And that’s what you want, right? You want people to be searching for anxiety, garland, therapists, and find you, or farmer’s branch, or Dallas, or whatever.

Craig Alsup:         Go back to your post page. Scroll up to the text and highlight one of those headings. When you highlight a heading, you see up at the top, just above where she’s got highlighted, it says heading two? So this is how you would change that in WordPress or SquareSpace or really any builder usually, is you highlight the heading and then you switch it to a one, a two, three, four, five, six. Basically, you just change which type of heading it is and when you change that type of heading, it’s going to change the font size and all of that stuff according to your preset stuff within your builder, but that’s what you want to have happen, is you want those texts to be a little different sized according to which one is the most important on the page and working your way down to the less important things. 

                           For example, a good H3 on this page, if I was going to add one to this blog post, there might be some kind of bullet pointed list that you put down at the bottom, next steps to start supervision with me, and that could be an H3 title and you could have a bulleted list underneath that.

Kate Walker:       Let me talk about ethics because I want to make sure that everybody gets an ethics and a supervision CE from this. The way that I came up with these headings is kind of sneaky. So I might just put in something like client counseling digital social media. And then Google is going to be super friendly and it’s going to give me these things here, and that is like the CliffNotes version. It tells me what people are looking for. So I don’t have to choose all of these, I don’t have to choose any of them.

                           But here’s where the ethics comes in, especially for you supervisors. If your associates are just going for SEO and they’re like oh, well, I’m going to advertise my marriage counseling and everybody is searching for Gottman, so I’m going to make sure that I make my H2 headings Gottman, you’ve got to be really careful that you’re also within your scope of practice. It’s not just about we’re all going fishing and we’re all going to use the same bait and catch big fish and then let them down gently when we read the email. “Hey, I’m so glad you read my blog post. Actually, I have no idea who Gottman is or what they do.” It’s a new frontier with advertising making sure that you’re being ethical and staying within your scope.

                           And then for those of you who are supervising self-employed associates, you get to make sure that they are staying within their scope. And no, you don’t have to know how to do the back office, you really, really don’t, because you guys could see very plainly, hey, this is what it looks like. You can just ask your associates to meet with you once a month and show you what they’re doing as far as building content.

                           Back to you, Craig.

Craig Alsup:         Okay, running with the same types of ideas, since we’ve got our titles locked down, which our title has what, the main keyword that we’re talking about, marriage counseling, it also has our location, it also has our name. So marriage counseling in Texas/Live Beyond Counseling. Since we have that, you can add basically the same thing to your photo titles and alternate text. You’ve got pictures right there on that blog post. So your photo titles. You’ve got images on your website pages, right? On the right side, underneath that image, there’s a little thing that says “alt text” and then there’s one that says “title.” I always suggest that your alt text has something to do with the photo, obviously, but say it’s a couple looking at each other or it’s somebody on social media, somebody is on a computer, you could say, “client found me on social media, what do I do?” as your alt text. I always say it’s good to have the same type of information on your alt text as you do in your title and your meta description. You want to have your primary keyword for the page, you want to have the location, you want to have the name of your business within the alt text. 

                           So Kate, you could put “the client found me on social media, Kate Walker Training, Texas,” or you wouldn’t necessarily have to put a location there. And then under the title, you want to put the name of your business. So nine times out of ten, I get on a website to work on someone’s SEO and they don’t have anything for their alt text or their title. And basically what you’re doing there is you’re giving up the opportunity to give Google a little bit more information about who you are, what you do, and where you’re located, and every possible place we can have who we are, what we do, where we’re located is going to help us with our search engine optimization, it’s going to help us get found by Google and by people searching Google. So alt text titles are a big thing with photos. A lot of searches pull up photos now, so if you search for pretty much anything, Google has got a photo of it. So anything you can do to help Google understand exactly what your photo is about, exactly what it is connected with, and where you are is going to help you out as well.

Kate Walker:       I want to say one thing about size. There are lots of places where you can get cool photos but pay attention to the size. And this is the compression because nobody uses computers anymore, apparently, so everybody is on their phone and if your site takes longer than three seconds to load, people are moving, they’re going. So this WordPress allows me to set the compression to high, and there’s another way to do it globally throughout my website. Those of you who don’t have access to your back office, just talk to your web designer and tell them to go through and just make sure your photos are compressed and they’re the correct size. I had to go through and change a lot of my photos on my website, I probably still do, because they just take so doggone long to load. And you can do something called a speed test to see if they’re doing that.

Craig Alsup:         So actually I was about to jump into speed stuff, so you spoke at the perfect time about that. Somebody asked, have things changed a lot in the website and SEO world since 2013? Yes, technology is constantly growing and changing and if you’re not updating your website probably every month, you’ve probably got plugins and all kinds of stuff that’s outdated on there. So you need somebody on your website every month to update things. If you’re hybrid, which I guess means you still have an office out there somewhere, you can still do Google Business, but it will help you most for that business location.

                           What location keywords would you suggest for virtual and virtual multistate practices? As far as location keywords, I would have a blog post that talks about the locations you work in a little bit. We do a lot of marriage counseling, so I may have a blog post that talks about five date night ideas in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It’s not directly selling counseling, but it is helping the people that come to us. For you, it might be date night ideas in downtown Jersey City. It may be in New York City. It may be wherever your secondary address is. 

                           The other thing you can do is you can create a page on your website that is specifically talking about each state that you work in. So on your home page, it could say something like, we serve clients in Florida, Texas, and Alabama. But then you’ll want to have a specific page for each of those states on your website that talks more in depth about that, what services are offered there, which of your staff works in each of those places, or serves clients in each of those places. Then you might also mention if you have a blog post that talks about date night ideas in San Antonio and then you also write a blog post for date night ideas in New York City, on the New York page, you would want to link to the blog post about date night ideas in New York City. So make it not the same content. 

                           You can pay me to analyze your website, click on the little QR that Kate has and we can talk about it. I don’t charge a whole lot but it will go a long way and it will help you basically forever, so that’s the good thing.

                           You can talk about how you work in Canada, but again, I would make a separate webpage for talking about Canada and the services you do there and maybe some blog posts that you can link to that you’ve written about Canada-specific stuff. I don’t know, Therapy for Mounties, that would be fun. Just my weird humor. 

                           So let’s jump on speed real quick. So speed on your website is super important: Google likes fast website pages. I actually did a coaching call with a lady earlier today from Canada and the lady’s website, when we were looking at it as we talked on the coaching call, I did a little test to see how fast it was, and I think it took 18 seconds or something to load her homepage fully. Basically, Google does not like you if it takes more than three seconds to load your page, and so she had a little ways to go. Yeah, so Google Speed Test, it’s page speed test is probably what you want to search for. Go to page speed insights right there at the top and you can search for your website.

Kate Walker:       I want to do mine, let’s see.

Craig Alsup:         Don’t be scared.

Kate Walker:       I’m so scared, I’ve worked so hard.

Craig Alsup:         So you can analyze it and Google will basically tell you, hey, your website is super-fast, or it’s not super-fast at all and you need to work on it.

Kate Walker:       And this is why I have a web expert. This is where my expertise absolutely ends. It’s going to give me information that I need help with.

Craig Alsup:         Yeah. So it’ll take a minute to do that because it’s got to go through your whole page and let it load and do its thing.

Kate Walker:       It’s actually gotten better.

Craig Alsup:         It’s currently a 31. Google, I’ve never seen on that’s a 100, so don’t cry too much if yours is not super great. But scroll down just a little bit, and scroll down a little bit more, and I’ll tell you a little bit about why. To reduce unused JavaScript, to reduce unused DSS, defer off-screen images and eliminate render-blocking resources. There are some plugins a little bit down deep in the jungle of things for us to talk about too much today, but there are some speed plugins on WordPress that you can add to your site that will clean all that up for you. There’s a few different ones. One of the ones that I use is WP Rocket and it helps to minimize and shrink down a bunch of stuff that slows down your website.

                           Kate mentioned a minute ago about images, making sure that they’re sized correctly so you’re not using a big, massive image for something that most people are pulling up on their cell phone.

Kate Walker:       Yeah, do you y’all notice this at the top? This is for old people like me. This is where everybody is.

Craig Alsup:         That’s where everybody else is. But that’s not terrible because yours is what? 3.7 seconds or something to load. Well, time to interactive is 13.7, the lady’s today was about 18. So, you know, you’ve got a little ways to go on that. For SquareSpace, there’s not a whole lot. There’s not a plugin that you can use to improve speed. One of the best things you can do to improve speed on SquareSpace is to not load massive images on there and to not have stuff that is moving and shifting on your screen as it loads.

Kate Walker:       So no videos?

Craig Alsup:         A lot of people will do a video sort of background picture at the top of their page, waves crashing on the shore or whatever, and I usually recommend against that. I usually just say put a still picture up there of the type of clients you want to serve. So for me, it’s mostly couples at our practice, so we have a picture of a couple. Yeah, there you go. It’s going to pull up my coaching consultation thing – go to my homepage.

                           Boom, there’s a couple. So that’s what the top of my website looks like, it’s meant to be a little Instagram-y. But yeah, the idea there is to just have a static picture up there. This picture, believe it or not, I downloaded it as a very big photo and I shrunk it to the size that it would need to be to work best on a computer or a phone or whatever but not slow my website down super bad.

                           Okay, so on your speed stuff, images that are the correct size, images that don’t wiggle and move and do a whole bunch of stuff. Some people will have words that change and fade in and fade out, stuff like that on their website. For the most part, your clients are not going to sit on your website and look and watch all of those words fade in and fade out, so I usually tell people, don’t do that, just boom, give them the goods, give them what they need.

                           The other thing is within those apps is you can minify and compress images and text and it’s specific apps that do that. I can talk more with you about that, but it’s WP Rocket is a big one, and there’s some other ones, Imagify. WP Rocket is the plugin that I’m talking about most. It does a whole lot of things to speed up your website, basically. If you’re using WordPress, you want to use it.

Kate Walker:       I want to point out one thing because we’re talking about a lot of back office stuff and I know a lot of people got on this call because they want to talk about marketing. This is marketing, y’all. Remember, anxiety goes up, cognition goes down, so folks who are looking for us can’t sort through all of the words you guys have on your website. So I just want to point something out that Craig does. I mean, any doubt what’s happening here, you can make a change starting today. These are called pain points. So he has the pain points and this is what you will get. Very, very simple, and I’m sure that looks on a phone just very, very even font, not fancy fonts. Then you get into the tinier print, once folks have already seen, okay, couple, yes. Keywords: location, pain, yep. Okay, this person is for me, now I can dig into the stuff. And then at the bottom, schedule. 

                           So you take them through a nice funnel to get to the space where they’ll actually press click. But they’ll never do that if it took 13.1 seconds to load their freaking homepage, right? Or they might.

Craig Alsup:         Some people. Some people make it through, obviously.

Kate Walker:       If they’re patient.

Craig Alsup:         So anything you can do to speed your website up will help you in the long-run. Okay, if you do have a Google My Business or a Google Business listing, link to it from your website. At the bottom of my website, I’ve got these little map imbeds in there in the very bottom footer. Each one of those, if you click into it, goes to one of my Google Business profiles for my different locations. That way, it is very simple for somebody to click and know exactly where I’m located. It also is a signal to Google to know exactly where I’m located and what I do and who we are. If you can link to your Google business from your address on your contact page or if you can drop in your footer one of those little maps for where your offices are located, that’s going to help you, connect you further with Google Business, with your website, letting Google know this is the same business, this is a legitimate business, you should send people there.

Kate Walker:       And I notice right here, location, keywords, it’s all over the place. 

Craig Alsup:         Google Ads. Somebody asked about Google Ads, I’ll mention that quickly. Google Ads are great. Google Ads are a way that you can find a lot of clients, you can get seen, you can get eyeballs on your website by more people if you’re running Google Ads. The danger in Google Ads is if you don’t know how to do them, don’t do them. I talk to people all of the time and they’re like, I’m spending $300 a month in Google Ads and not getting anything out of it. And I tell them, go shut it down and pay somebody $500 a month to do them and then spend $300 a month and you’ll spend $800 but you’ll get back way more than trying to do it yourself, doing it wrong, and losing $300, if that makes sense. It’s all about return on investment and if you’re just throwing $300 out the window hoping your Google Ads are going to stick to something, it’s probably not going to work unless you go down a big, deep rabbit hole to learn all of the ins and outs of that. It’s not something I’m great at; I do it a little bit. But RevKey is good. A lot of people know more about it than I do.

                           Google Ads is something that I can do, that I used to do for people, that I try not to do for people because it is just time and labor intensive.

Kate Walker:       Well, Craig, just another thing, too. For small practices, like if you’re watching this and you’re a solo practitioner and you’re just starting out, you want to market, get the most return on your investment, you don’t need the whole metroplex, perhaps, to see your ad. And that’s the other thing with Facebook ads too, you talked about that before. You need people within about a ten mile radius or a twenty mile radius of the closest school or the closest church or the closest whatever because you’re not going to see 800 people, you’re going to see 20.

Craig Alsup:         And I’d say for most of us, we can probably do other marketing stuff that’s cheaper than Google Ads to fill a solo practice. When you start building like Amanda Esquivel has, when you start building a practice, growing it, and adding a whole bunch of practitioners – I think her practice is bigger than mine now, but she started taking insurance, I didn’t. I just threw her under the bus.

Kate Walker:       Yeah, this is not a competition, Craig.

Craig Alsup:         I’m watching, I’m watching Amanda. It’s whatever. But she needed to fill a whole bunch of practitioners, so it’s like, okay, let’s do Google Ads and we’ll make that work. For me, we do a little bit of Google Ads. For you, it might not make sense. So it depends – really, really depends on your practice and what you need.

                           So, guys and girls, links to your website. You want to have somebody linking to your website, again because it’s another way to tell Google that somebody likes you and Google should like you if somebody likes you. The links can be things like local links – join the Chamber of Commerce in your area, that provides you a link that’s very, very localized. If you’re in San Antonio and you’re a member of the Chamber of Commerce in San Antonio, Google is going to go, hey, they must be in San Antonio, really. Like, really. They’re not one of the scammers that’s from Albania or something. So it helps Google to know who you are and where you are.

                           The other things we’ve done a little bit is we’ve contacted school counseling offices all around us and we’ve gotten listed on some of their websites. We actually did a grant for a school teacher at the school across from one of our offices so that we could get a link on their website – well, so that we could help the teacher too, but let’s be honest, so that we could get a link on their website so that people would know where to find us and also so Google would see that link coming to us and go, hey, they’re right across the road. Cool, they really are here.

                           Other ideas for local listings, local nonprofits that you give to if you give through your practice or something like that. We sponsor women’s groups in our community that are doing great work and helping women. So we sponsor I think three of those and all of those give us links back to our website saying hey, these people are really in this community, investing here. Sometimes people find us on their websites, but honestly, for me, it’s more about the link that Google finds because Google is the place where most of my clients are finding us. 

                           There are listing sites out there. Yahoo has a listing site, Bing, Google Business is a way to have a listing link to your website.

Kate Walker:       I just wanted to show Yoast again telling me good job on a lot of things, but that’s one of the things I didn’t put in here were outbound links, so it’s telling me to add some. And there’s a way in Yoast also to link to myself, the internal linking, and it’ll give me ideas of what I can link to within the website.

Craig Alsup:         Exactly. Be careful linking out to things. A lot of times people will link to things like their Psychology Today profile from their website. The problem with that is that once somebody clicks on that and goes away from their website, they land on Psychology Today where there’s 300 other therapists listed in their area, and just as easy as they found you, they could find somebody else on there, right? And so I always say, don’t link to Psychology Today – I’m going to pick on them directly – or Good Therapy or any of those because it’s a listing site with so many therapists that you almost don’t want your people to jump over there. You want your people to stay on your website. 

                           So the biggest thing is, within your website, is to have internal linking to other pages on your website. So you have a blog post about marriage counseling but you have other blog posts that talk about couples’ counseling and infidelity and stuff like that also, so you can put those at the bottom of your post and say hey, if you like this post, check out these. And then boom, boom, boom, link to three of them or one of them or whatever. So that is really helpful. Links like if you’ve got a YouTube page and you post videos over there of you introducing yourself or talking about a specific type of therapy you do, post those on YouTube and then put a link in your YouTube bio that says hey, if you want to find out more about what I do, jump over to my website at LiveBeyondCounseling.com. That gives you a link from YouTube to your page that tells Google and other people that you’re important, they should check you out.

Kate Walker:       Alright, Craig, I’m going to stop you to see if people have questions.