How Therapists Can Get More Patients For Their Practice

97% of all consumers go online to find a local business. Perhaps even more shocking is that 75% of people judge a business' credibility based on the design of their website. Your therapy practice's website strategy needs to reflect the quality treatment your practice gives.

In today's post, we will discuss a few of the most valuable marketing strategies for therapists that positions your private practice for long-term success and improves your potential patient's experience so that they choose you for care.

Professionally Designed Website

The first principle of a great website strategy is how the aesthetics. Your psychologist website needs to look great. Here are some tips to building a great looking website:

1. Review your competitors in your city. If you're a psychologist in Miami, type into Google "psychologist Miami" to see the top ranking websites. You can also type in other cities to get an idea how great your competitor's websites are across multiple cities.
2. Hire a company that is capable of building a beautiful website - Ask to see a few of their designs
3. Hire a company that builds websites for medical professionals - Ask to see they have worked with a few medical professionals

Clear and Concisely Stated Website

Once a potential patient gets to your website, your website needs to reflect exactly what you offer to help them with their problem. If the patient needs a foot doctor, they better understand that you're a foot doctor.

Here are a few things you can do to make sure that your website is clear and concise:

1. Make sure that the above the fold, or area first seen on your home page, has an image that reflects your main service, as well as a title that reflects how you help patients. You should also have a call to action in this section to drive action, such as a "contact us" button.
2. Create valuable content, such as blog content, that helps educate and answer questions your potential patients may have
3. Use language that reflects the tone of the subject you work with, as well as lingo that reflects a professional practice

Easily Navigable Website

Creating a website that is easily navigable is extremely important for both potential patients and for Google when ranking your website. It is best practice to create a "shallow" structural hierarchy when creating your website sitemap.

You should organize your services in "buckets" if possible, and keep these buckets as easily understandable as possible. For a psychologist, he or she may have 3 main buckets: Anxiety Treatment, Depression Treatment, and Eating Disorder Treatment.

Another tip is to create a URL structure that matches your hierarchy so that a user can understand where they are on your website.

For example: your-website.com/services/eating-disorder-treatment/anorexia-nervosa/ may be a great structured URL to help a user understand how "deep" they are in a website.

In general, it's best to keep these pages as close to the home page as possible, don't create pages that fall down a rabbit hole: they are difficult for users to find and difficult for Google to find.

Making Your Website Searchable

Speaking of getting found, your website needs to be able to be found by both potential patients and search engines. For therapists, SEO is a powerful marketing strategy. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process that helps rank a website's pages on Google Search and Google Map results.

In the competitive medical industry, it's important to choose internet marketing company that knows what they are doing and cares about what they do and who they are helping.

We highly recommend not hiring a company based on pricing, as all SEO is not created the same. The level of service of someone who charges $500.00 per month is most likely going to be drastically different from a company that charges $1500.00 per month.

We highly recommend hiring a company that can show you case studies of proven results, as well as giving you those company's contact information so that you can have a discussion with them.

Here are some services that a successful SEO company may offer you:

1. SEO Audit - An audit is necessary to see how well your website is optimized, how your local competitors are doing, as well as the best keywords to target in a strategy. If a company does not offer this service, they probably won't be very effective in their strategies.
2. Website optimization - This includes both a technical optimization and an on-page SEO optimization.
3. Written Content - Creating written content is a core principle of SEO; Both service page copy and blog copy.
4. Map Optimization - Map optimization is important for local medical practices because Google typically places 3 map locations at the very top of their results. In additional, maps is a feature used heavily on mobile devices.
5. Off page SEO - This includes creating guest posts, backlinks, and other strategies to get your pages ranked highly.
6. Social Media - Social media is typically an add-on service from SEO, but it can help your SEO rank better if done properly.

Trackable Analytics to Measure Success

The next strategy your website needs is trackable analytics. Once you start building different marketing strategies out, such as email, SEO, online ads, and social media, you'll need to know which efforts are directly driving leads and revenue to your medical practice.

We highly recommend getting Google Analytics and setting up "Goals" to track leads and phone calls to your practice.

Easily Contactable

Once your patient lands on your site, they decide that your therapy practice looks credible, and that you offer the services that they need, they'll probably start looking for a way to contact you.

We advise our medical clients to have multiple ways for clients to contact them. Some of these ways include:

Contact Form Online

At a minimum, your practice should have an online contact form with multiple buttons sending a person there.

Phone Number

Like an online contact form, at minimum, your medical practice should have a phone number listed in multiple places.

Live Chat

We strongly suggest having managed live chat on your website so that those who don't want to fill out a form or call have an easy option to get in touch with you.

Get More Information

BartX Digital works with therapists and psychologists to build custom internet marketing strategies to beat out their competitors and get more patients. Contact us to see how we can help your practice.

Anthony Bart is the President and Founder of BartX Digital, TherapistX, and TherapyByPro, a mental health professionals directory.