Two important internet marketing issues for therapists doing counseling for individuals and couples in Chicago and elsewhere are as follows:
1) the preference for blogs by search engines which I describe in my post on the marketing advantages of using blogs instead of traditional websites.
and 2) use of keywords.
Search engines are getting more sophisticated and can tell when someone is deliberately overusing a keyword, and may penalize the site. However, when we write multiple posts with information about psychotherapy and related issues, search engines begin to like our sites.
In my work helping therapists here in Chicago, I find therapists using a lot of creative titles and URLs, but not ones often searched on the internet.
After I introduce them to the “keyword tool”, they can see immediately, their blog or website name may be so cool, no one has heard of it and there are few or no searches including any of their names.
Here is the link to the free Google “keyword tool” for you to see how it works:
Just type in KEYwords from your website name, or other important terms you use and see how many total and local monthly searches there are for those terms.
Obviously, the posts I write about couples counseling use that term frequently. If you have many posts, the term is going to used enough to attract search engines.
I just checked and couples counseling gets 246,000 local searches every month. So, yes, it’s a good keyword to use.
If you have someone else managing your site, you may have problems maximizing your visibility on the internet.
It’s always a good idea to search for your site using different searches to see what keywords are the most helpful