Brand Your Practice Podcast

all the internet's going up

hey everybody welcome in I

have my uh good friend

chris moran here from

moonraker we are in part

two of our uh six part

series of from clicks into

clients this is all about

sales funnels and if you

know I love sales funnel

and chris is a sales

funnels expert and we're

diving into part two here

on strategies for

purposeful traffic generation

I am actually in my house today.

If you could tell,

I have my radio voice on

because my family has been dealing with,

I believe,

influenza A. So we have been

dealing with about six days

worth of fevers in our house,

including myself.

This is the first day I've

been fever free.

And if you're fever free,

you got to do a webinar.

so that's what we're doing

uh today so without further

ado let's jump in I'll turn

it over to you chris I'll

have you uh I'll share your

screen also keep in mind

we'll be sending out an

email for part three here

that's going to be in april

we're doing one of these

once a month so thank you

chris for taking the time

to create these wonderful

slides and teaching us how

you think about sales

funnel because I know it's

going to help a lot of

practice owners thank you

so much brent I'm excited

to get into it so as brent mentioned

This is part two of our six-part series,

How to Attract the Right Client.

Strategies for Purposeful

Traffic Generation.

In the previous webinar,

we had gone over the entire

client funnel from turning

a complete stranger into a

long-term client.

This is a deeper dive into stage one,

which is how to generate

traffic from the internet.

Very briefly,

why should you attend this webinar?

Well,

the biggest reason is that your

practice is invisible.

So potential clients are

struggling to discover you,

either your website or your

Google listing because

you're buried way down on page five.

We like to say in SEO land

that page two is the best

place to hide a body

because no one ever goes there.

So if you're not on page one,

especially at the top of page...

search results then you're

practically invisible and

it upsets me when I hear

people say that they spend

a lot of money on a brand

new site but nobody can

find it because having a

really great site is one

piece of this puzzle and it

doesn't automatically

guarantee visibility so

we're going to talk about

ways to reinforce the site

turn it into a stronger

platform for rankings and

then how to do content

creation to really move the

needle and the other big reason is that

Things are going well,

but you want more attention.

So we're going to go through

some proven SEO strategies

that will help you to

attract your ideal clients,

outrank local competitors,

and basically turn your

site and your listing into

a client generating machine

that works for you.

again this is the entire

sales funnel for a

therapist and we are

covering stage one which is

traffic generation so how

many prospects visit your

website our goal is to

maximize the amount of

qualified prospects that

visit your site these are

people that are looking for

services right now and so

The point of this webinar is

to talk about ways that we

can maximize the likelihood

that you're going to rank

as high as possible,

both in the website results

and also the maps results,

so that qualified prospects

will find you either

through your website or

your Google listing and

click through and then book

a consultation with you.

So a little bit about me, I'm Chris Moran.

So I've been in the wellness

space for half of my life.

I was a massage therapist

and I met a lot of people

that are very similar to therapists,

like highly compassionate

people that love what they

do and they just don't have

a ton of knowledge about

marketing digital stuff in general.

And my goal is to help

people like that to succeed

because the last thing I

want is for somebody to

have to go back to waiting

tables because they don't

know how to show up online.

And I have almost twenty

years of marketing experience.

I also worked in a totally

almost the opposite industry.

My family business,

we manufacture components

for pharmaceutical

companies and I was doing

sales and marketing for them for ages and

we had a really amazing year

last year and largely

contributed to ongoing

marketing efforts over that

time and when it comes to

generating traffic this is

the core of what we do and

I'm not going to spend a

ton of time on these slides

they were in the previous

presentation as well but

these are all real client

slides we also got some

clients to show up on chat

tpt that is one thing that

I will briefly mention now

Whether it's Google,

which is the main focus of this webinar,

or ChatGPT, or Grok, or DeepSeek,

or Cloud,

or whatever the next device or

platform or AI happens to be,

there will always be some

algorithmic determination

of who should show up on top.

And it's going to be based

on the quality of

information that they share,

their authority in that space,

and their trustworthiness.

And so I don't see that the

landscape is changing all that much.

It's nice to see

confirmation right here

that a client of ours in

California actually showed

up for one of her core

modalities for somebody

that knows her in New York State.

Good validation that there's

some future proofness to

what it is that we're doing.

This works for solo practitioners,

small group practices,

large group practices,

and other alternative site

types in this space like an

EMDR training program as well.

What are some common

challenges that practice

owners face when trying to

improve their visibility online?

Well,

number one is you don't have a

content strategy.

So you're missing dedicated service pages.

Do you have a page for every

single individual thing, modality,

issue that you treat,

group of people that you treat?

Or is it all kind of squashed together on,

well,

this is our services and we have

twenty things listed on one page.

do you have an ongoing

content creation strategy

where you're going to

demonstrate your expertise

on a regular basis

technical problems are

another big reason that

sites don't rank so is

there a bunch of coding

problems stuff that is kind

of hidden in the background

these are the page titles

and descriptions of search

results and the alternate

text of images and link

titles and all of those little details

That's out of the scope of

this presentation here

because I want to talk

about content creation

especially because that's

really the one that's most

accessible to most people

and can move the needle the most.

Another big problem about

the site is that it's slow

and provides a frustrating

user experience.

And when Google determines

that a site is slow or it's

broken or people are

bouncing from the first

page that they land on,

they're probably going to

get a bad impression of the

quality of your site and

encourage people to search elsewhere.

Another big problem is a

lack of authority.

So does your site have very

few links to other

reputable and high traffic

websites within your space?

This is another big ranking factor.

and also low trust signals.

So if you lack reviews or testimonials,

then Google doesn't have a

lot of information that

they can use to determine

if you're a trustworthy

provider in your area.

So you'll notice that these

four questions here align

very closely with this

really helpful little infographic.

So a bit about EEAT.

This is Google's algorithm in a nutshell.

And I don't want to come

across as if the algorithm

is literally this simple.

It's a thousand systems that

run in sequence and it

happens in a millisecond.

it's hard to even comprehend

how advanced the system is

but there's a lot of

brilliant people in the seo

space that have been

boiling this down for a

long time and also

constantly trying to pry

little bits of of insight

from people and

representatives at google

about how they actually

come up with search results

so we've boiled it down to

these four details

experience expertise authority and trust

And I'm going to break down

what each one of those

means and how we can

maximize these signals for

your site and your Google

listing so that you're

basically telling Google

when someone search for

something that I provide,

you have a lot of really

good reasons to show me at

the top of search results.

So the first two,

we can kind of lump together.

Experience and expertise is

really all about content.

And the differentiation

between experience and

expertise is experiences,

does it come across when

you write about content on

your website or in your

blog that you have

firsthand experience

actually practicing these things?

Google's algorithm is

absolutely brilliant.

It understands the semantics of language,

and it can determine if

somebody is legitimate or not.

And it's just based on the

way that they write.

Again,

it's really hard to even comprehend

how advanced the system is

at determining the

authenticity of content.

Expertise is about you saying,

I am a subject matter expert.

Here's my credentials.

Here's the

technical terminology that I

am demonstrating through

what I'm writing about.

And so one of the most

important things in order

to demonstrate your

experience and expertise is

to make sure that you have

comprehensive and valuable service pages.

So a detail about this

service is just one of the pieces.

What I mean service pages is

the static pages on your

site that provide

information about distinct topics.

So a simple way to imagine

the goal here is to just

imagine every different

thing that you want to

potentially rank for.

It should have its own page.

And I want to just pull out of this

presentation for a second to

use an example of a client site.

This is a site that I built

about five years ago, right before COVID.

And you'll notice that in

the navigation we have,

this is a client that does

intensive EMDR retreats.

We have this little retreats

information section.

We have a section for the

main issues that they help

people work on.

There is a section for the

main modalities that

they're using to treat those issues.

and there's also a section

about all the locations

that these services take

place so not only from a

human navigating the site

perspective but from a

google crawling the site

and learning what it's

about perspective we want

to be extra clear that

google sees what it is that

you do what it's for who it

helps and where it happens

and when you can

distinctly map out all of

that by having a page for

each of those topics,

then you're much more

likely to show up in search

results for those things.

And a simple example,

if you have a services page

and it's talking about we do EMDR,

we do IFS, we do ART, we do CBT,

Google is going to read

that page and think, well,

it mentions EMDR and this

person searched for EMDR,

but it also mentions a lot

of other stuff.

And there's a bunch of other

web pages that are just about EMDR.

So we think that that's a

better fit for their,

their requests.

So we're going to direct

them to those pages instead.

So it's really that simple.

Any different concept that

you want to potentially rank for,

you really need to break it

out as its own page.

And that includes locations.

You cannot just have your

location buried in the footer.

Google doesn't even really

read this stuff down here.

So you need to break it out

as a separate page.

I do have a question.

So

this is my gripe with google

when it comes to eat you

know how they uh what's

experience and expertise so

we have we have it we're at

the end we have we are at

the advent of the

cannibalization of content

right so people could jump

on chat gpt and pump out

you know some pretty decent

articles around right and

they can add their own

voices to it so you already

have competition there furthermore

There is let's say, OK,

so those are like service based,

which I think is agree like

it's like table stakes now.

Right.

You have you almost like you

have to have those service

pages well optimized for

those keywords for SEO.

Well,

let's say the Cleveland Clinic comes

along and writes a simple blog article.

It may not be that in-depth,

it might just be five

hundred words and you put

together a six thousand word

blog posts, detailed images,

a hundred percent,

they're going to rank

Cleveland Clinic over your

website all day because of

that domain and the

perceived authority that they have.

They might even have, they may not,

someone on their staff may

not even written that article.

You know what I'm saying?

So what I'm seeing is, as SEO is expanding,

and I've seen this even

with my own SEO work,

with my own business,

with Brand Your Practice, is that Google,

like you do your best,

But at some point, if the Mayo Clinic,

if the CDC, if whatever,

if they write something,

and it may not be as

in-depth or even as good as your content,

there's a good chance

you'll be pushed down.

And the same will go even

with psychology today and

some of these other directions.

That's their plan.

And the little independent publishers like

though you might be experts and have,

when I say independent publishers,

I'm thinking about practice

owners who might be EMDR experts.

It's going to be extremely

difficult to rank if other

people who have better perceived,

experienced and authority

by Google's algorithm to

actually rank that.

So why I'm saying is,

The stuff that you're

presenting here is really important.

Like you do need to have

these things just to be

able to start to show up.

But there's bigger companies

moving into this content play now.

And Google's just going to

rank them because they have

way more domain authority

or perceived expertise, you know.

Yeah,

and I actually want to show an

example right here in just a second.

But one of the things that we've noticed,

and I used to work doing

SEO for restaurants and

other local marketing for

restaurants and other

service businesses for a

while before I focused on mental health.

the the same thing happened

to them with ubereats and

doordash and all those

other platforms where they

had this huge amount of

investment capital and they

just gobbled up almost all

of the real estate and so

it pushed restaurants to

the point where they

couldn't even get their own

local listings it's like

they were getting orders

from from people through

these services and they

didn't even sign up for it

it was pretty crazy and

there's a similar

phenomenon happening now with

sites like Alma, Talkspace, BetterHelp,

et cetera,

where they have massive influence,

massive budgets,

and they can run these

enormous marketing

campaigns and crowd out a

lot of the local providers, as you said.

Same with Psych Today.

The good news is,

and I think there's a few,

there's some safe havens,

at least right now.

And surprisingly,

Google is actually helping

to protect that,

which is often pretty unlikely.

But the safe haven is the local results,

because a company like

BetterHelp is not going to

show up in local results, at least now.

And Google was pretty clear that

I have seen examples of like

directory sites moving into Google biz,

like thrive works or something I saw.

Yeah.

They're trying to game it a little bit.

They're starting to show up for sure.

Yeah.

And they're always trying to

work it because Google was

very clear before COVID.

If you want a local listing,

you have to have a physical address.

And then because so many people,

especially in the mental health space,

they switched to being

online only during the pandemic.

they kind of opened it up and they said,

well,

if you were a physical provider that

saw people in person,

either at your

establishment or at their locations,

then we'll allow you to go

online only for the foreseeable future.

But they couldn't say that

that was acceptable

overall,

because then you'd have like

e-commerce sites that would

have local listings and

that wouldn't make any sense.

And so there's still this

gray area and there's

definitely organizations

that are trying to game it.

They're trying to get

physical locations so that

they can pretend that they are there.

And this is one of the

reasons why it's

increasingly more difficult

to actually verify a local

listing for actual practitioners.

That's the best that Google

has found to address the

need to block basically

millions of fake listings

being created every month.

It's really hard to

comprehend how many spammy

and scammy listings are created.

But setting this aside for a second,

one of the other things

that will help us is that

when we're focusing on SEO

to really move the needle

and get someone booked out,

we're thinking of priorities.

And the number one priority

for right now is those

bottom of funnel search terms, which is

If we break it down into top of funnel,

middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel.

Top of funnel is like people

that don't necessarily know

what's going on for them.

They're trying to learn the

language to describe their issues.

Like, what is anxiety?

Middle of funnel is like,

is CBT or EMDR better to

treat this issue?

They're in the deliberation phase.

And then bottom of funnel is

like EMDR therapists near me.

They know what they need,

and they're looking for the one for them.

And so when you have a term

like this example,

I just pulled this on Google.

therapists in sacramento we

can see better help look at

them sponsored posts thrive

works sponsored posts the

good news is that and I'm

not saying it's good news

all the time because we

also run paid ads in

certain situations too and

they do work but the vast

majority of people they zip

past the sponsored posts

they either go to the local

listings and there can be

sponsored local listings as well

But if you go beyond that,

we can see Psych Today.

They're a unique one because

they're a massive website,

but they do get local

traffic because it's a

directory site that's

broken into all these different places.

So there's a very good

chance you're going to see

Psych Today first.

But then we see somebody

that's actually what it

looks like a real practice

in Sacramento in the third

organic search space.

So that makes me happy because

That's the way that it should be.

The Sacramento Counselor Group,

Love Heal Grow.

And then we have Yelp down below that.

So it's nice to see that

there are actually real

providers in amongst the top of page one.

And I think that's going to

last for a while.

But again,

these huge companies are always

looking for ways to work that system.

They have practically endless budgets.

And so this will continue to

be a challenge.

and I just want to apologize

in advance to anybody that

does not have a local

listing that has tried to

get one and they can't

actually manage to verify

one that's a really tough

spot to be in because it is

important so some of the

additional content of this

presentation will go over that and the

Just continue to try.

It's going to be really

important because as you see here,

and especially on mobile devices,

the map results are going

to show up first.

And at least fifty percent, if not more,

people are going to be

searching for your practice

on their phone.

So this is important.

Not to belabor,

we had a question that came

in that was filled out through the form.

And I think this is

important around Google ads,

because first of all,

let me just caveat saying this,

going back to experience and expertise,

you want to gear your content,

not just for search engines,

but for the consumer, right?

They will find your website.

And if they're interested in

CBT or trauma or EMDR intensives,

whatever it might be,

they will read that information.

And so that's all part of it now.

having kind of a

comprehensive marketing plan.

Now this, uh,

this person who wrote in says, uh,

I've tried Google ads using

various companies,

including one that

specialize in ads for therapists.

And I've lived literally

zero calls landing page and copy of good.

I think our Google ads dead

for therapists.

No, they are not.

They work.

There's a thousand different

moving parts to Google Ads,

so it's impossible for me

to say without doing a deep

dive and audit of your ad

campaign and your whole ad

system why it's not working.

And to be honest,

that wouldn't even be me.

I'd send my agency partner, Mike,

because he's managed like a

quarter billion in Google ads.

And so he's got the magic

touch when it comes to ads.

They are not dead.

We run them for group practices a lot.

We do a combination of SEO and ads.

And they are...

Yeah,

they're very effective when you have

a decent budget and you can

absorb a lot of new clients

rather quickly and you want

to be surgical about

targeting specific zip codes.

When it comes to a solo practitioner,

it's not necessarily the best choice,

but again,

It's impossible for me to say why,

but I would never say that

any of these channels are dead.

And you're going to see a

lot of content if you learn

about marketing on YouTube and elsewhere,

very clickbaity titles that say, oh,

email is dead and SEO is

dead because it's all garbage.

It's to get clicks.

It's sensationalizing the

idea that things evolve over time.

But ads still work.

SEO still works.

I focus my efforts on SEO

because the quality of

traffic generated by SEO

generally converts higher

because when people see an ad,

they know that anybody can run the ad.

They might click the ad,

but they still are like,

when they see that you're

in the number one spot organically,

they think there must be a

good reason for that.

So there's this built-in

trust that comes with

ranking at the top of search results.

And also there's longevity,

as I said before,

whether it's chat TPT or

something altogether different,

there will always be an SEO type process.

There's always gonna be

search results and there's

always gonna be a

determination of who's at the top.

And I'm sure there will

always be a strategy to

influence that in one way or the other.

And we're gonna figure out what it is,

wherever it happens to be.

So ads are not dead,

but this presentation is

not focused on ads.

So I'm going to get back to it.

So some other things.

No, no problem.

So another important thing

about demonstrating

experience and expertise,

if you have certifications, education,

specialized trainings,

if any of these things have

cool logos and badges,

affiliations that you're part of,

then portray them through the website.

If you have an MDREA certified badge,

then put it somewhere

prominent because not only

is Google going to like that,

but people that come to

your site are going to like that as well.

And again,

I'll go back to my favorite site

to show off, NPR, IPI, MDREA,

Psych Today.

This might not mean much to

you because of course I'm on Psych Today.

Of course I'm in MDREA.

I'm an EMDR therapist or

whatever it happens to be.

But from a lay person's perspective,

they're going to see this is

going to check a box

subconsciously and it's

going to give them a little

bit more motivation to move

forward so all these things

do mean something

especially if they're

attached to other

information about your

credentials programming

stuff like that if you have

a linkedin profile psych

today profile all those

links are good because it

helps to demonstrate your credibility

And in terms of actually producing content,

my suggestion would be if

you decide to pursue a

content creation strategy,

publish at least one blog

on your website weekly.

This should be long form content,

two to three thousand words,

and it should go in depth

to address a variety of questions,

treatment approaches,

topics related to your modalities,

the issues you treat, etc.

This is the kind of thing

that your potential clients

are searching for.

So when you write about that

content over and over again,

month after month,

you're going to essentially

build out this resource of

content that is telling

Google this is what they're

focused on all the time.

They're continuing to produce unique,

valuable content about it.

We believe that they're a good resource,

or at least they're saying

that they're a good resource.

And a note about this,

your blog must be linked in

the top navigation.

Do not eliminate this.

It doesn't have to be completely visible.

It can be buried in a like

the sub menu under like

about us or something like that.

But it needs to be there.

And we have seen disastrous

results when a client

inadvertently or otherwise.

To be honest, I don't know what happened,

but we started to see very

poor results and we were

trying to troubleshoot everything.

And then eventually it was

revealed months later that

they had just deleted their blog page.

And that's basically telling

Google all the content that lives here,

it doesn't really matter.

Don't even look at it.

And so you could see that

they lost about half their

traffic in the space of one

month and it has yet to recover.

So it can be disastrous.

Leave your blog at the top

if you're going to fill it with content.

And in addition to content

on your website and your blog,

we can also take similar

content and repurpose it

for your Google listing.

So if you do have a Google listing,

I wanted to show you here, let me just...

Jump over to Maps.

I'll continue to use ITR as

an example here.

So there are two most

important forms of content

that we want to put on the

Google listing.

And this is much more

straightforward than blogs.

They don't have to be nearly as long.

We have this from the owner section.

A lot of people don't even

know that this exists.

We have posts,

kind of like a Facebook post,

but it lives on your Google listing.

So these are places where we can add

two to three hundred words

worth of information.

We can talk about our services, modalities,

et cetera.

There's a call to action.

And it's just another place

that we can put information.

We also have the ability to do Q&As,

questions and answers.

A lot of people don't

realize you can ask

questions about your own

listing and then answer them.

So you don't have to wait

for somebody to put these here.

You can write them and then answer them.

So again,

just think of it like a little

pre-configured interview

where you just want to

explain what flexible

options are available at ITR, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah.

So more places to utilize

Google's tools and

platforms to put relevant

information about your

practice and your core services.

These are all really good things.

And the goal is to do this

on a weekly basis.

So let's talk about controversial stuff.

I know everyone's doing it.

Not everybody feels good about it.

But how do we properly

create content with AI?

AI, generative AI, as they call it,

that generates all sorts of

different types of content

for us is brilliant.

But a huge caveat about that,

it needs to be utilized

properly or else your

content will get literally

zero credit from Google at all,

or it might hurt your site.

So one of my concerns is that a client,

they play around with ChatGPT, they say,

write me a blog post on CBT.

and they get this awesome

content piece they posted

on their website but a big

portion of that has been

directly plagiarized from a

variety of other sites so

there's there's a

responsible sequence of

events that needs to happen

I'm not going to go into a

ton of detail about this

this is more of a resource for later

But we really want to

consider this like a real campaign.

We want to do a keyword

research prompt first.

You are a keyword research expert.

I run a therapy practice.

I need help doing keyword

research to create a content plan.

Here's my website.

Here's our ideal client and

issues we treat.

Here's our location.

And then just have it run

through and come up with a plan for you.

Competitor analysis is

another extremely important

preliminary step before

using any AI to generate content,

because what we're

basically doing is getting

a lay of the land.

So you're an SEO competitor

analysis expert,

please do an analysis of

the top ten ranking content

pieces about topic,

whatever the topic happens to be,

which ideally you would

have generated from this

keyword research step where

you created a content strategy.

So you're telling it it's in

the preparation for a new blog post.

It's going to analyze this.

Another note, whatever AI you use,

there's some that are better than others,

but it needs access to the

Internet because if it's

just using stored data from

a test like a test database,

it's not going to be relevant.

You need to have

the ability to access the internet.

So you can use paid chat GPT for this.

Use what we call the O three mini high.

Use the greatest one because

it's gonna give you the best,

most detailed results.

And then there's the content

creation piece.

Again, we're just telling you what it is.

You're an SEO content creation expert.

I need you to create a blog

post based on your previous findings.

So you would hit it one and then two.

without playtracing any content.

So it's reading all of the

most prominent articles in the space,

creating something new and unique.

It's making sure that it's

not pulling any huge chunks from them.

And then the purpose is to

ensure that we achieve all

seven of the goals listed below.

I'm very specific about

putting numbers and then

giving it a numbered list

because AI is notorious,

especially ChatGPT,

about doing some of the

stuff that you tell it

really well and then just

completely forgetting about

everything else.

So no direct comparisons.

What's the point of having a

blog if it directs someone elsewhere?

This is a part where you can

adjust it based on what we

call the negative keywords.

What are things you don't

want to talk about?

I don't want people to think

that I'm going to give them discounts.

I don't want to do residential.

We don't do suicide prevention, et cetera.

Whatever you think is appropriate.

I generally tell AI,

don't ever fabricate

testimonials because

sometimes it's pretty funny.

It'll put in quotes from

pretend people about how

great you are and it just

looks cheesy and it's not cool.

Personalize nature of care.

Don't mention anything that

we don't actually do.

Don't mention pricing details.

Just tell people to reach

out and then content should

be between two and three thousand words.

This is another thing that's

highly unreliable because

These systems are brilliant,

but it's like they can't count,

which is probably the same

reason they can't draw

hands because they don't

know what five fingers actually means.

So the important thing to

note is that when using these systems,

they need to be used with care.

they need to be managed by

someone that actually is a

content and subject matter

expert so if you're going

to do it don't have just

like your intern do it if

you're going to write about

emdr make sure that someone

that's doing it actually knows about emdr

Obviously,

we are an exception because we

are an agency that does

content for people.

And that's why we use like

five different layers of AI.

So what you see here is one

very small piece of the

protocol that we go through

to make sure the content

actually provides unique

and comprehensive value for our clients,

despite the fact that we

are not experts in any of

the modalities or services

that they directly provide.

So

This is something you could

copy and paste this,

put in your own information,

play around with it,

see how it generates results.

And this will potentially be

better than doing nothing

as long as you make sure

that it's not just pulling

other people's blocks.

Kelly wrote, Ouch, I hate using it,

but it's so convenient and

serves my purpose for

getting content out there.

I use Claude and I feed the

majority of what I wanted to say,

but let it write the content.

This is great info.

I hadn't considered giving

it more direction on what not to do.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you, Kelly.

Yeah.

The other thing I would say

is don't use words or

phrases like actionable

insights or other AI sounding, you know,

phrases.

The things that drive me nuts,

like what's another one like efficient or,

you know,

there's like you see this stuff

that shows up over and over again.

These fluff words.

Another thing that AI of all

different brands does,

and I don't know why AI loves it so much.

They do the long hyphen

where the word before and

after is connected to it

instead of a comma or a semicolon.

I don't know any human that

actually writes like that.

So if you Google doesn't

care if if content is written by AI,

they have explicitly stated

that it doesn't matter if a

dog with thumbs writes your

content as long as it's good.

But if you don't want people

reading it to think it was written by AI,

then get rid of the long hyphens,

read through it yourself

and consider updating it as you go,

because it's never going to

be perfectly aligned with

your brand voice.

No one's going to speak as

passionately about what you

do as you could.

And again, this is an important step.

It's going to get you moving

in the right direction.

It's better than nothing.

And it's just something that

needs to happen if you

really want to move the

needle on rankings.

Can I jump to a quick question here?

I believe Jan wrote this.

Keywords for AI.

Is Google still king?

I actually have a graph for

this that I want to share

because a lot of times people are like,

oh, AI, AI.

Let me see here.

Let me pop this up and I'll share it.

Actually, go ahead.

Say what you're going to say.

I've got to find it again,

but I want to share it.

so creating content with ai

is super fun and it's nice

to get some stuff populated

on your website and your

google listing oh one other

quick note once you create

a full blog post you can

ask ask as a follow-up

prompt hey turn this into a

three hundred word google

post for my listing

turn this into a question

and answer and so you can

put out additional content

related to that the the

concern about plagiarism

and uniqueness on the

google listing in my

experience is much lower

than when you are actually

writing long form content

on your blog so I don't

think that needs nearly as

much scrutiny as the blog post too

got it.

So the most important thing

about any content creation

strategy or any strategy

and marketing in general is

that you need to analyze

what you're doing to see if it works.

And so in order to monitor

the progress of your efforts,

we need to use the appropriate tools.

And so for this purpose,

we're going to install Google Tag Manager,

Google Analytics and Google

Search Console.

And I've linked some videos here.

These are literally training

videos that I use for my

team to get our clients up

and running in the beginning.

if they lack any of these properties.

I'm not going to go into a

full walkthrough of how to

do this because these are

resources that will be here for you.

These are links that go

directly over to the

websites as well so that

you can get started if you don't.

The reason that we listed in

this order is because once

you have Google Tag Manager installed,

you can drop Google

Analytics inside of that,

and you can also register

Google Search Console much

easier if you already have

an analytics property.

It just streamlines the process.

But you don't need this or

this to have a Google Search Console.

I imagine a lot of you have

Search Console and none of

this other stuff.

But this is just a more

comprehensive way of doing it.

And for the scope of this presentation,

we're not even going to get

into analytics.

I'm going to focus on Search

Console because Search

Console is all about how

traffic comes from search

results and then ends up on your website.

Analytics is more about what

happened here.

We've got spinning wheels.

Analytics is all about how

people navigate once they're on your site,

different events that they

perform once they're on your site.

It's also extremely important.

But again,

for the scope of this presentation,

I want to focus on how to

use Google Search Console.

So let's jump into that.

So again, let me show this image.

This is from Spark.

So is Google still king?

Yes, it is.

This is the number of

searches each day in twenty twenty four.

This is some research.

So you can see Google wins.

And chat GPT is down very less,

even less than DuckDuckGo.

So this is why I think it's

important what what Chris

is talking about.

That's why we got to focus on Google,

because that is where the

searches are still.

That's where people are going.

So Google is still king.

Google is still king.

Yeah, and almost every device in the world,

if you just use the

built-in search feature,

it's going to go through Google.

And so a lot of people that

don't know anything about

how to select where they're searching,

they just do the search bar

on their phone.

It's going through Google by default.

So there's always going to

be a ton of traffic until

something about the device

manufacturers and how they

interact with these

platforms fundamentally changes.

And I don't see that happening.

anytime soon.

So here we are.

This is Google Search Console.

And when you first show up,

you're probably going to be

on the overview tab.

You can tap full report

right here or performance on the side.

This is where all the fun stuff happens.

And let me just jump back over here.

I want to talk about some of

the main features of Google

Search Console so that you

know how to use it to

actually gain insights

about what's going on with

your content and how it's

influencing your search

rankings for different keywords.

So

The most important thing to

note is that it has a date

range functionality.

You can measure different

time periods and you can

also compare two different

time periods together,

like how was last month

doing compared to the previous month?

Or how was last year doing

compared to the previous year?

The visual trend analysis, this graph here,

it's super helpful at

visualizing how things are going.

You can see that up here,

there's already a few that

are broken out as I suppose

the most common that people are using.

so if we're on twenty eight

days we can see some stuff

like oh okay this purple

line here this is

impressions I'll get into

what these mean in just a

second with the performance

metrics but we can see oh

this is going up that's

good if we pan out to three

months now we can see more

oh okay that's really going

up that feels that feels a

little better let's go back

to sixteen months

Oh wow, okay,

this is very clear now that

things are trending in a

positive direction.

And it's hard to see that

when you're zoomed way in.

So having the ability to

switch between these

different ranges can be

very helpful to help you

isolate the effectiveness

of your campaign.

So let me back up for one second here,

talk about the performance metrics.

So the main four,

you will see them right here,

is the total clicks,

the total impressions so the

difference between clicks

and impressions clicks are

the amount of times that

somebody finds you in

search results clicks on it

and goes to your website

impressions are how often

your site appears in search

results but it doesn't mean

that it's at a good ranking

position you could get an

impression and still be on

page ten and so when we

start an seo campaign we

usually see impressions

come up first because google registers

your content, it's indexed now,

and so they're seeing you

write about stuff and they think, okay,

well, this is filed under EMDR,

so let's put them in the search results,

but we're gonna put them in

position seventy-two.

And so it takes a while to

get the impressions to generate clicks,

and that takes consistent

effort where your rankings

start to improve to the

point that people find you

high enough up that they

click through to your website.

click through rate is

basically that if you show

up a hundred times and

someone clicks on your

search results one time,

that's a one percent click through rate.

So it's a metric of how

often do you show up versus

how many clicks you have.

And then the average position is

across all of the different

search results that brought

people to your website,

what was the ranking that

you showed up for those keywords?

And so if we look here,

the default is impressions and clicks.

You can isolate one versus the other.

You always have to have one.

So it's nice to see impressions.

It's nice to see clicks.

Obviously clicks is more important.

We wanna see these spikes

getting higher and higher.

Click through rate.

Interesting note about click through rate.

As you start an SEO campaign,

you might see that this

drops down quite a bit.

And that's because you start

showing up in more search

results at a much lower level.

Same thing can happen with

your average position where

it might take a hit for a

while because you're filing

under more search results

at a very low position.

But that doesn't mean that

all of a sudden everything

is dropping down.

It just means that if you

average everything together,

it's become diluted by a

lot of the new places that

you're showing up at a much lower level.

And the goal is that if time passes,

we want to see that this bar is going up.

Click-through rate may never really change,

but average position,

our goal is to help that

creep up as well.

Are you able to single out a keyword?

So you can see a query,

like single out a query.

Yeah, so they call them queries.

You can call them keywords.

Like these are the things

that people are searching for online.

And so we can tap one of these,

like let's say EMDR intensives.

And now we can see this is

the specific clicks and

impressions related to that

one term alone.

And so there's a lot of information.

You can get very granular about this.

You'll see that there's

these different filters that get applied.

You can tap on stuff, it'll add a filter,

then you can just remove it

right there and it goes

back to what you had before.

Another really important thing,

let me just slip to the next slide.

Search queries,

you can see what's driving

the most traffic and you can filter them.

Here's the example, I can add a filter,

I can say I want to do a

search query filter, query is containing,

queries not containing.

So for example, we have some clients,

they have massive sites.

They're getting hundreds of

thousands of clicks a month,

but it's for a lot of top

of funnel terms like love language quiz,

trauma quiz,

but they're trying to drive

results for CBT therapists near me,

et cetera.

And so we can apply a filter here,

because there's just so

many terms showing up that

are top of funnel.

We don't really wanna see them.

We can do a query.

And you can get really specific.

We can say queries containing therapy,

for example.

And now it'll eliminate

everything except for

actual search queries where

people included the word

therapy in there.

We can do that with pages as well.

So maybe you have all of your pages,

forward slash services,

forward slash EMDR, CBT, et cetera,

et cetera.

if you just want to see how

your service pages are

going you can come up here

add a filter do a page

filter urls containing and

then you just do like

forward slash services or

something like that so you

can get really specific

that's a lot more helpful

for much larger websites

but generally for solo

practitioners and smaller

sites there's not a ton of

information here but this

is a good example of

what we want to see.

Like this was a client they

signed up about September,

the beginning of September last year.

They did not have an actual

page for EMDR intensives.

And as I mentioned before,

I don't want to scroll back to it,

but I said

you should have a separate

page for every single one

of your main modalities and

main focuses is so they did

not have an emdr intensive

page that's what they

wanted to rank for so we

built a new page for that

you can see how it kind of

burst into google's

awareness on september of last year

And the impressions have

been bouncing around.

Traffic, there's a lot of one-click days.

And then, oh, we got a two.

Now we have more twos.

And then we got a four.

And so if we draw a line

going to the right,

the goal is this is going

upwards as time passes.

And we can see the average

position as well.

Started quite low, eighty, sixty,

bounced up to thirty,

then came back down.

But it's trending in a

positive direction and just

this past week was like the

mid-thirties and that's a

lot better than eighty.

So we can get very,

very specific with how we

look at these things.

We can look at the countries

that they're coming from.

I don't think that these

will be super applicable in

this situation.

So I'm always focused on

queries and pages and

making sure like the goal of

using Search Console is can

we prove that the content

that we're writing about is

actually having an effect

and that we're generating

impressions from it and

then people are actually

clicking through related to

the services that we're offering.

So in this case,

we have some good

validation like EMDR intensives,

intensive NYC, therapy NYC,

therapy intensive.

So these are all

the exact types of things

that she is trying to rank for.

And so it's good validation

that the pages we created,

the content that we are

putting on the blog and the

Google listing is

generating the right signal.

So we're starting to get

impressions and traffic for

those specific services.

So let's jump over to the local listing.

So very similar functionality.

It's not as comprehensive as

Google Search Console,

but there are the core

performance metrics and

date range functionality.

So I'll go over here.

So if you're logged into your,

your Google listing,

you would basically go to

business.google.com.

And if you're logged into

the correct Google account,

you're going to see however

many listings you have.

This is what it looks like

when you're in the admin section.

And there's this performance

tab right here.

And we can see that similar

time picker at the top,

you can go one month or up to six months.

And now we have this

historical data shows us

how many overall interactions happen.

Interactions include calls, website clicks,

directions.

This is when somebody

basically taps the

directions button to map

out the distance to your location.

Bookings is a certain feature.

It doesn't really apply to therapists.

So these are pretty much always zero.

but we want to see like okay

cool calls it's moving up

directions okay unless

people are hitting that but

there's a lot of people

doing website clicks that's

great and so this

information is not directly

filtered into google search

console so we can consider

this like an additional

source of traffic so this

is also really good to see

so if we're on the overview

we can scroll down

we can see a breakdown of

where the traffic is coming from.

So most people are coming

through Google search on

mobile and desktop.

You'll see,

sixty three percent of people

are finding this listing

doing a regular Google search on mobile.

And if you do a Google

search on a mobile device,

it automatically shows you

the map results on the top

because it knows you're on a phone.

Then there's twenty eight

percent of people using a

desktop computer.

They're getting the regular

desktop search results and

then Google Maps.

This is people that go to

the maps app or the maps

website and then do a search.

So most people are just

doing a standard Google search,

but then it's serving up

the map results because it

knows that they're on a

device that wants to see it like that.

And this part over here,

very similar to Search Console,

but kind of a,

it's like Search Console

Lite for your listing.

And so this shows all of the

different search,

let's use the same language,

the queries that people use

on their mobile device that

brought them to your listing.

And the goal here, once again, is to see

Do we have alignment between

the things that we are offering,

the things that we're writing about,

and the way that people are

actually finding us?

Once again, this client provides EMDR.

I'm very happy to see that

the top two search queries

are related to that core modality.

It's also really good to see

that the name of the

practice is down here.

Because what you see very

often when people have not

conducted any formal

marketing is that you're

going to have direct searches.

We call it direct when it's

the exact name or very

close to the exact name of the provider.

Because the only people that

are going to the listing,

they already know that you exist.

They're just lazy.

They don't want to go right

to your website.

They just type your name

into Google and they tap on

the top search result.

And so we want to see that

the majority of traffic is

coming from people that

don't know that you exist.

Therapists near me,

they're just looking for somebody,

and they found this listing.

That's good.

And so this is another tool

that can help you see if

the posts on the Google listing, the Q&As,

all of the other content

that lives in the website

is having the effect.

And a quick note about the

connection of these two properties,

the website and the Google listing.

Having a well-ranking

website with a robust blog

where you're posting on a

regular basis will affect

the rankings of the local listing.

Not so much the other way around,

but having a good ranking

website will absolutely

help bolster the rankings

of the local listing.

So you want to make sure

that it's connected to the website.

And even better,

if you have a location page

on the website and you can

connect the local listing

right to that location page.

Google seems to like that quite a bit.

And the reason that is,

is because Google always

wants to pair great websites with

keyword searches.

So if you have a great

website and Google sees

that people are clicking

around when they say EMDR intensive,

they spend time in your website,

they're reading your content,

they're clicking you around.

They're going to also boost

your Google business profile page.

I think it all works

together because those are

going to be like Google

sees these people are seem

like they're having a good

time on these websites for

these keywords.

So we're going to,

we're going to reward both.

So yeah,

that's why I think it works together.

absolutely so let's move on

to another really important

thing so we talked a bit

about technology and then I

wonder if google's like oh

they must be an expert or

expertise or experience you

know I'm saying like I'm

like those are all those

little algorithm signals

that you know I'm saying

like I you know who knows

how google's out of the

room always works but we

all know click-through

rates and people spending

time on your website are

all signals to google

Absolutely.

Positive signal.

That's one of the reasons I

would tell somebody like if

you have resources for existing clients,

put it on your website so

that they just hang out

there and spend time

reading it because it's

going to help send good signals.

The average time on site is

going to go up because you

have a handful of clients

that are just dwelling on

your site consuming content.

And that's going to improve

the overall metric there.

And that's going to be a

good signal to Google that

your site has good

resources that people should consume.

And one of the best ways to

get traffic is to already have traffic.

I know that sounds kind of annoying,

but I think of it kind of

like the old days when the old airplanes,

you had to spin the

propeller and then it would get going.

So if you can get people to

your website any way

possible and keep them there,

then it's definitely going

to help get things moving

in the right direction.

That's right.

So let's talk about some technical stuff.

So site speed is super

important because if

somebody goes to a website

and it takes longer than

three seconds to load,

they're probably gonna leave.

We're in the TikTok generation.

People are goldfish.

It's nothing personal.

We've just been trained that

way because we have these

incredible devices with

super satisfying and fast

loading apps that give us

the impulses that we're looking for.

And so if your site takes a

long time to load,

there's a good chance that

people are gonna leave

And if they do stick around,

they're going to be less engaged.

And so as a result,

Google places a lot of

value on especially the

mobile friendliness of a site.

And I don't just mean how

well that it looks on a mobile device,

but also how quickly it loads.

And it's extremely important

that it loads very fast,

especially on mobile.

And Google's fancy term for

this is the core web vitals.

And I'll show you a tool

that will help us to

measure the core web vitals.

Basically,

if you have a terrible

performance score for your website,

it's going to potentially

hurt your rankings because

Google wants to send people

to very information dense, comprehensive,

unique, valuable, fast loading,

secure and technically sound websites.

If your site is broken and

slow and doesn't offer good information,

then why do you expect that

it would show up in search results?

There's going to be someone else that

checks all those boxes and

that's who's going to get

the traffic instead and so

the first step to determine

the situation with site

speed is to use a couple

tools you can use one of

these or the other we use

google page speed and

another tool called gt

metrics and so page speed

is a tool that's offered by

google let's um let's do

this let's see therapist.com

So we're just running this analysis.

We're just going to let it go.

Big money, big money.

Here we go.

Yeah, let's hope it's good.

We can do the same thing over here.

And these have similar...

like crawling mechanisms,

but the scores are

portrayed in slightly different ways.

Obviously,

we want to use the one straight

from Google because they're

going to tell us straight from the source,

like this is your problem.

Here's some things that you

should look at addressing.

Let's see,

this one might be a little bit faster.

I've been doing this for a while.

There's also things like you

can't always control either, right?

You'll have things that are

depending on your website builder.

So TheraSAS is built on the

TheraSAS website builder.

A lot of WordPress sites.

I just told my web developer, I'm like,

hey,

what does it take for us to load the

WordPress sites faster?

so he did a back end and

it's going to cost a little

bit more money but website

speed load time is so

important so yeah and when

I see something like this

like it's saying on mobile

your site's loading in

seven point nine seconds I

think that that's a little

artificially slow and if

that happens consider just

doing a reanalysis because

this will change each time

maybe the site cache was

just uh emptied and it's still refreshing

So give it a few shots over here.

We have, this is GT metrics.

We've got an overall grade

of B a funny little, yeah.

A funny little note about

the grading system on GT metrics.

They have a grade of E as well,

which is kind of funny

because it doesn't really exist.

Pretty good.

Also like anecdotally,

like bring out your own,

get your own cell phone out

and test it yourself.

excuse me totally get your

friends out and just see

what the experience is like

um you know get your

friend's cell phone out

have them load it and just

see uh because you have

some of this this data here

but there's also the experiential side

Mm-hmm when we see here, there's some,

there's some similar, uh,

factors on both sides.

This one, the LCP,

the largest contentful paint,

if you've ever been waiting

for a site to load and then

pretty much the whole page

flashed up all at once,

that's the largest contentful thing.

It's how long does it take

for the majority of,

of visible elements on the

site to suddenly appear?

And so it's showing here for

Therasas on desktop,

it takes about two and a half seconds.

mobile it's saying it takes

sixteen point seven seconds

I think that this might be

an error if it's incredibly

heinous then consider using

multiple tools this is why

we use multiple tools

because I don't think that

that's true so over here we

can see the largest

contentful pane this is

kind of a hybrid on gt

metrics of both and we can

see this is seven hundred

forty seven milliseconds so

it's pretty good and

Total blocking time.

This is how long it takes

before you can actually

scroll and interact with the site.

So this is a little long.

They want to see that as low as possible.

Over here,

it's showing less than a second.

I know they want it to be

like almost nothing.

Yeah, super low.

This CLS as we call it,

the cumulative layout shift.

This is super annoying if

it's ever happened to you.

The site has appeared,

you finally get to interact

with it and you go to tap a

button and then it's like

site and then it jumps and

it's in a totally different position.

They want to keep this as low as possible.

There's certain things that

will happen with certain

site builders if they're

not optimized where as

things get loaded and

different elements appear,

then it will jump and it

will push things around and

it's a very poor user

experience and it's very

frustrating so the the goal

of of launching new pages

is to do it as quickly as

possible and in a way that

you know does not provide

any surprises we want to

keep it as consistent as

possible so the cumulative

layout shift is very low

it's usually very low on

modern site builders but

sometimes it's pretty bad

And these are all things

that we want to get as low as possible.

So the faster the site loads,

the better the performance

score from Google,

the better the user experience.

It's going to make everybody happy,

especially Google.

And so.

This is another thing I'm

not going to get into a ton of details,

but we use a particular

plugin and optimization

plugin for WordPress sites

called WP Rocket.

This is a paid plugin.

There's a ton.

There's Nitro Pack.

There's a million.

But we like this one because

it provides really great

results and it's pretty

easy for everybody to configure.

But I don't want to leave

out the Squarespace people

or the Wix people.

And this is one of the

biggest issues is that we

were able to do a lot of

stuff on WordPress.

But what are we going to do

for Squarespace sites?

They're generally pretty

fast out of the box,

but there's always improvements.

And so

This is a relatively new piece of tech,

probably six months old.

It's called Navigation AI.

I absolutely love this.

The idea of this tech is

that it's using AI,

it's monitoring users'

behavior on your site,

and then it's predicting

the next link that they're

going to click.

And it's preloading that new

page on their browser so

that it's ready to go.

So if they do click that link,

it loads instantly.

So it's it's the fastest

user experience imaginable

because it literally

flashes in an instant.

And so Google loves it.

The users love it.

It's not going to affect the

very first page that you

navigate to because that's

going to load just like normal.

But once they're on your site,

if they navigate to other pages,

especially very common pages,

after it's gotten a few

weeks or months to analyze

your site and normal browsing habits,

there's like sixty to

seventy percent of the time

they're going to get like

instant page loads.

And it's going to make

people very happy because whether it's

fair or not,

when there's a good user experience,

people think that the

quality of our services is better.

And on the flip side,

if you have a really busted site,

they might think that

you're not very good at what you do.

And that's just the

unfortunate truth of how

people are affected by all

of these things.

So this is great.

It's platform agnostic.

It'll work on Squarespace, Wix.

It'll work on

You know, the Therasas platform, Brent,

so it can work for Therasas as well.

It'll work for anything.

I'd love to have this for

our Squarespace site since

we have that for now.

Will we have access to get this info?

I'd like to have that.

This is a button right here.

So once this presentation is

over and you have access to this actual,

this slide deck,

you can just go and tap

this link right here and

it'll take you to their

homepage and you can sign

up for it and install it yourself.

It's very simple.

It's about as simple as can be.

There's almost no configuration.

Just drop it in there and get it running.

And in a matter of,

we saw with some client sites,

like a week or so,

it was already optimizing

the page loading time.

Here, let me just show you.

Let me just,

I'll pull back the curtain a

little bit more here.

That'd be great because

we're also at time here.

Oh, shoot.

We're at time.

Oh my gosh.

Here's an example, a quick example.

So, fifty percent of the time, let's see,

twenty-two percent of the

time it's truly instant,

thirteen and a half, semi-instant.

User impact, let's see,

the previous score is three

and a half seconds and then

it dropped the average

score down to one point two

seconds page load times.

And on some of the most

important pages like insurance building,

find a therapist, services,

dropped it down like a second,

half a second, half a second.

So these represent really

massive improvements that

I've done caching plugins

for a long time and I've

never seen anything nearly

as good as that.

Brent, let me jump ahead real quick.

I just want to see what

we're missing here.

Okay, there's three slides left.

Do you have the ability to

push it a little longer?

Yeah, yeah, we can do a few more minutes.

It's recorded, so people get it.

Okay, cool.

Cool.

So we talked about content creation,

how to analyze content creation,

how to improve some

technical aspects of the

website to move the needle.

Let's talk about the other

piece of the EEAT.

So this is authority.

So authority,

if you think of expertise as

the way that you describe

that you're an expert,

authority is the way that

the community says that you're an expert.

And this is all about links

that are pointing to your

site from other sites.

So a lot of people have

heard of backlinks.

They still make a difference.

It used to be more about

quantity than quality.

Like if you get a thousand backlinks,

you're going to win.

Now it's much more about the

quality of the backlink.

It needs to come from a

legitimate site that has

good traffic and good authority.

And if there's a site like

that pointing to your site,

Google sees that connection

and they think, well,

we send a lot of traffic to this site.

They're pointing to your practice site.

Well,

maybe we should consider giving your

practice site more traffic as well.

And so as you accumulate

backlinks over time from

high authority sites,

it helps to basically lift

the authority of your whole site.

As you continue to produce content,

it will get ranked more

quickly and eventually it

will help improve your

rankings for just about

everything that you're focused on.

And you can get a little specific.

You can focus more on one

service page if you want to.

There is a difference in the

authority of certain pages

versus the whole site.

But generally speaking,

we're directing most

backlinks to the homepage,

and that has an effect on the whole site.

And so I wanted to share

four platforms where you

can go and do the work of

securing your own backlinks.

And these are all generally

the same concept.

There are reporters,

and I'm using that term loosely here,

that work for brands, large websites.

Imagine Yahoo Health and Wellness,

for example.

They put out a request to the world,

to all of the other experts

that are looking to get

content featured on their website.

They say, hey,

we need an article about

EMDR therapy and how it

affects folks with PTSD.

And then I come out and I say, hey,

we have Brent here.

This is his LinkedIn bio.

This is his headshot.

And this is an article that

we prepared for you about

this exact topic.

We'd love to consider it for placement.

And depending on how persistent you are,

a small percentage of the time,

you can secure a backlink.

And that will show up on another website,

usually in the form of a guest post,

which is a blog that lives

somewhere else.

And one of the links in that

guest post is going to

point back to your website.

and this is how if you see

for example here's another

prominent site so these

sliders women's health well

and good time mom help

guide she got backlinks

from all of these sites and

it's totally legitimate to

claim oh look I'm

affiliated with them and

again five seconds here

we're dealing with goldfish

they come over here they

say oh I want this okay

that's what I need to do oh

wow she's really well

connected I'm going to hit this button

So not only does it give you

the authority to increase your rankings,

but then you have the

opportunity to talk about

those sites on your website,

and that can give you more

conversion power as well.

So let's move on quickly.

So let's talk about trust.

Trust is the final pillar,

the final signal of the

Google EEAT formula here.

And I break trust into two main categories,

how to ethically generate reviews,

and then also how to be legitimate.

So let's talk about reviews first.

There's a few things that you can do.

We are in an ethical conundrum.

as therapists because you're

not allowed to ask your clients.

I completely understand the

need to preserve the

integrity of that beautiful

therapeutic relationship,

but it puts us at a

disadvantage because the

amount of reviews you can

get on your Google listing

have a big effect on the rankings,

especially in the local area.

And this applies to

testimonials you have on

your site as well.

I generally shoot for Google

reviews because then you

can always copy and paste

them to the website yourself.

So it's almost like this stands for both.

And so simple tactics that you can use.

Get a QR code that goes

directly to your Google reviews.

So if you're in your local listing,

there's a section right here,

ask for reviews.

This is a link, it's a very ugly link,

but they also have this QR

code right here as well.

So you can right click this and save it.

And you can stick that on a business card.

You can put it on one of

those fancy little acrylic

stands on your front desk.

You can put it just about

anywhere you want and it

makes it much easier for

people to review you.

And you can take your

business card and you can

go into the community when

you're doing actual

community events and you

can hand it to people and say, hey,

would you like to swap some reviews?

Because I'm trying to move forward.

You're trying to move forward.

Let's do it.

So in that same vein,

you can ask friends and family.

You can ask your professional network.

I want to make a note.

This is technically against

Google's terms of service.

And so is SEO.

And millions of people do SEO.

That doesn't seem to be a problem.

I've never seen anybody get

seriously whacked by this.

But just don't be totally

obvious and cheesy about it.

If someone's going to leave

a review for you and you've

asked them to do it,

here's a template that you can use.

So and so is an incredible

and compassionate therapist

and expert in put your core

modality in EMDR.

If you're in the Sacramento

area and need support for

PTSD and anxiety,

I highly recommend you reach out.

Perfect review.

You've got five stars.

You've got your core service.

You've got the place that it happens.

And you've got some issues

that it helps with.

So this is the kind of thing

that sends the signal to Google, OK,

they said they were an expert.

They said they had experience.

Everybody is linking to their website.

They're producing good content.

And now the community is

reporting that they're

experiencing the services

that they mentioned and

getting good results from it.

I believe that this is a

reputable practice and I

feel comfortable directing

more traffic to it.

And it's really that simple.

The more signals that you

can get like that,

the more likely you are to win.

And the good news is that

most therapy practices

don't have any reviews or

just very few reviews because of this

unique challenge.

And so if you can actually

manage to get some,

then it's going to help you

to rank throughout your

local area rather quickly.

I'm talking in a period of

just a few months.

If you can get five or ten

reviews in three months,

then you're going to notice

an uptick in local

attention on your listing.

So one other piece here about trust.

So how do you position your

website as legitimate?

And this has to do with some

other trust signals like

the accessibility of contact information.

You need to have a visible contact page.

It needs to say, contact us.

You need to put as many

different contact options as you have.

Give people an idea of how

long it will take you to get back.

If you have a live chat or

some widget like that,

even better because you're

basically telling Google,

we're not trying to hide.

We're a real site.

We're not scammers.

This is everything about us.

If you have an address in a

physical location that people can visit,

then put it somewhere prominent.

You want Google to be very

clear you exist and you're

not trying to hide.

Site security is also a

really important trust signal.

simple things like make sure

that you have SSL.

That means you have this little,

I don't even know where it is on Brave.

Maybe it doesn't show up

because I'm using a

slightly different browser than Chrome,

but you should see a little lock symbol.

Maybe right here?

Connection is secure.

Here it is.

We can see we've got the lock.

We can see HTTPS, that stands for secure.

This is almost a no-brainer

for pretty much every site,

but if this is broken,

it will demote you.

You will not rank if it just says HTTP,

and it's going to flag your

site on a lot of browsers where it's like,

this is an insecure site.

Are you sure you want to travel here?

That's a simple thing.

You've got to have your SSL.

This is something that your

webmaster can take care of.

It should be automatic when

you set things up.

especially for Squarespace and Wix, etc.

You want to keep your plugins.

If you're using a site like WordPress,

you want to make sure that

the plugins and themes are

updated because there's

vulnerabilities that are

exposed and then hackers

will attempt to exploit them.

We want to keep them updated

to patch for all that.

Google knows what's the

latest version of

everything and so they want

to see that you're using

up-to-date technology.

Same with security plugins.

This is especially

applicable for WordPress.

We install one called

WordFence on all of our

clients WordPress sites if

they don't have one.

This is free.

They offer a paid version,

but I don't feel the need

to use that because the

basic stuff is pretty good.

We're going to just install a firewall.

We're going to keep bots

from trying to do what they

call brute force attacks,

which is just type in a

thousand different

combinations of name and

password on your website.

So simple stuff that will

secure your website as well.

and additional trust

elements that you might

want to know about.

Make sure that you have a

privacy policy and a terms

of service page.

It doesn't need to be prominent.

You can put it down at the bottom.

This is the kind of place

that that stuff lives,

but it needs to exist and

it needs to have a whole

bunch of information.

Feel free to take a

boilerplate and then tweak

it out to be specific for your site.

It just needs to be there.

If you have industry

certifications and badges,

not only are they good from

conversion and an expertise

perspective but it also

helps to send trust signals

as well and also getting

into some more details

about your team having bios

headshots etc that helps to

convey the fact that you

are real people and if

they're connected to

linkedin bios or psych

today profiles or whatever

that helps to signal to

google you are actually you

exist within this greater

space and so you are actual

therapists and again it's

all about just helping them

understand that you're legitimate and

that's that's all we got so

I know we're over time but

I I welcome any questions

that you have yeah um if

there's any please put it

in I will put in the chat

here this is our next one

is going to be april

One month from now.

And what was the topic?

It's going to be optimizing

your website to book more.

Yeah.

Stage two of the funnel.

How to make sure that the

people that show up

actually follow through

with your call to action

and get on your calendar.

Yeah.

So I'll be also sending an

email out for you to register for that.

But yeah, thank you so much, Chris.

Yeah, man.

It's been my pleasure.

Yeah, that was a lot of good information.

It was a master class

drilling down on that.

I think the big takeaway really is,

I think the Google Search

Console tool is really important.

If there's like one tool for

them to be able to use, that's free.

I think that's gonna be

really helpful to kind of

dig in and see how Google sees you,

right?

Like what are the eyeballs of Google?

What do they look like as

far as your website goes?

Yeah, there's a lot of other tools.

You know, people know about SEMRest, Moz,

Ahrefs, like they're all good,

but I find that especially

for lay people that are

just trying to do this to

move their own practice forwards,

they can be very overwhelming.

And Google Search Console,

surprisingly does a good job

as a free tool of finding

the balance between a lot of good data.

It's actionable,

but not being too complex.

Appreciate you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Michael.

Thank you, Kelly, for joining.

Thanks for the chat, for the questions.

I think we got most of the

questions from the registration.

reaching my ideal client and

bringing into my practice.

That might be the first one as well.

You know, someone had a question,

reaching my ideal client

and bringing them into my practice.

That might also be with the

website optimization as well.

We'll be talking about that.

And I think we kind of always, you know,

that's always kind of like

what we've been talking about, right?

When it comes to content

that we talked about today,

that's a huge part as well

as the content that

attracts your ideal client.

Yeah,

and I'll add a little note about that

when it comes to ideal clients.

When it comes to SEO,

the only information we

have about traffic that

comes to the website is the

query that they used to

search and then find you.

And so the thing is that

people don't usually

self-report their identity

unless there's a specific situation.

Like people will search for

couples counseling,

so then you know it's a partnership.

They will search for child therapy,

teen therapy.

But most people don't search

for individual therapy when

they're looking for

something for themselves.

They don't say,

I want an LGBTQIA therapist.

They are who they are.

And they look for the common

terms like therapist near me,

modality that they want to

use to work through their problems.

And they also will report

the issues that they're facing.

Anxiety therapist near me,

depression counseling, et cetera.

And so

that's why it's important to

really to not only have

those distinct pages on

your site so you can

generate that traffic that

mimics the way that people

tend to search for these

things but when you think

about how to create your

copy on the home page for

example that's why that

emotionally impactful why statement

is so valuable because not

only does it move people

forward and compel action,

but it helps to filter out

the wrong types of people.

So if you only provide

services to women with high

functioning anxiety,

then you probably want to

say that at the top of your home page.

And then somebody like me

that shows up would be like, OK,

this isn't the one for me.

But if the person that sees

the website fits into that demographic,

then they're going to feel

extra compelled to move forward.

So as far as actually honing

in on the ideal client themselves, that's,

I'd say,

a combination of the pages that

we write about,

but also the way that we

speak to the ideal client

in the language that we use

on the website.

yeah yeah really good well

thank you so much chris and

we'll see you in oh less

than a month's time now and

grateful for taking the

time and sharing your

expertise and uh joining us

so all right everyone uh if

you're on the youtube

channel make sure you like

subscribe reach out to

chris at moonraker as well

if you're interested in

working with him getting

some content going some seo

going he's your guy

So thank you so much.

And yeah,

we'll see you all in the next webinar.

Thank you.

Thanks, Brent.

See you.