Why every therapist needs to use social media to improve their SEO

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. Today I am changing my tune! I have decided to go back on some of the advice that I have given over the years about social media and the importance of it to the average private practice. I hope that this will be a really helpful episode for you if you are somebody who is feeling the social media fatigue, doesn't feel naturally like it's a good home for you, and it doesn't form a cornerstone of your marketing strategy, and you've listened to my previous podcast episode and come to the conclusion that this is not the way that you need to be winning clients. I hope this will be a useful episode for you because it still isn't, it still doesn't need to be something that takes up a lot of time in your week, and it shouldn't do if your ideal client personas are not people who are going to search for a therapist on social media, and therapy is the main thing that you are selling in your practice. If that’s the case, then I absolutely stand by my previous advice that social media is not something that should take up lots of your time, week in and week out. But I am going to caveat it slightly, and that's because I have been on some training recently about how social media is an important part of optimizing our websites and our digital presence so that we will continue to be found by people on search engines and through AI recommendations. These things are becoming really important, and it just wouldn't be right of me to not bring this to your attention if it's not something that you've been thinking about yet.

Full show notes for this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

The Directory Profile Template

Business of Psychology Episode 111: How to create a great directory site profile

Summer School Lesson 5: Directory sites

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Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@drrosiegilderthorp

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Why every therapist needs to use social media to improve their SEO

There have been big changes already, and there are more coming, to the way that search engines like Google and Yahoo and all of them really, recommend websites to people searching. They are now using AI in the way that they search our websites to try and work out who we are and to generate AI advice for people who type in questions to their search bars. You'll have seen this if you are using your smartphone to look for help. You will get a load of normal looking search results, but you'll also get an AI generated answer to your question at the top, which will cite various expert sources to give you an answer to your question. I'm sure you'll have noticed like I have, that most people are not going beyond that AI answer because it is generally quite helpful and now, certainly on mine through Google, it's telling me where it's getting its advice from, and I find it much easier to trust than I used to. I think that's the direction of travel and eventually I think we're going to end up in a world where people just ask a question verbally to their AI, whether it’s Gemini, Chat GPT, Claude, whatever they're using, and they'll just take the answer that it gives rather than bothering to look through a page of search results. So we really need to understand how we make sure that we are the expert source that these AI models are using, because if we're not, then we're going to find that traffic to our websites from search starts to decline, if it hasn't already.

The good news, because I know that probably sounds a bit scary, is I actually think it's a good thing for us because now AI is so much cleverer than the previous technology that the search engines were using, it's able to piece together our digital presence from wherever we are to understand who we are and the services we offer in a much deeper and better way. We just need to do a few things to make that really easy for the AI to do, and social media is an important piece of that puzzle, because social media can give you a digital footprint which gives AI a really clear indication of who you are, who you help, and what you stand for, so that it understands better, in combination with your website, who to recommend you to when they're searching for help. So I'll talk you through a little bit about how that works and a few really simple things you can do to start helping the AI bots to understand who you are a little bit better so that you're future proofing your search engine optimization.

EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

The first thing we need to understand is that search engines already look for EEAT when they're deciding who to serve up as a recommendation to somebody who's searching. That acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are the four things that an AI is assessing on your digital footprint before it decides whether to serve you up or to serve someone else up as an answer to a question that somebody's asking. AI search tools like Perplexity, Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, are crawling the web to find answers to questions. And if your social media or your website has a clear niche specific keyword like 'birth trauma psychologist in Plymouth', and you've got high levels of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, then the AI is more likely to recommend you than somebody generic when a user asks for a therapist for birth trauma in Plymouth, for example.

The five things we can do to improve our digital discoverability to AI and demonstrate that we have the EEAT it's looking for:

1. The first thing is to have one bio that you use everywhere that contains a primary keyword that you want to be discoverable for. If you think of your bio as a bit like a sticky label that you might put on the front of an old fashioned filing cabinet; it needs to really clearly tell AI what it is that you have inside your cabinet, and it's really important to get that key word right. That key word might be 'birth trauma psychologist in Plymouth' (it doesn't need to be a single word, it can be a phrase), it could be 'neurodiversity specialist', it could be 'CBT therapist specialising in OCD', but it just needs to be really clear and contain the key words that you would like people searching for to get your name associated with.
2. The second thing you need to do is make sure that the bio you've created is everywhere that you are mentioned. You'll have to create a few versions of it, but they should be as similar to each other as possible. You can have a long version of it for the about page on your website - use that same copy exactly for LinkedIn and Psychology Today. Then you'll need to create a much shorter version of it for social media, but it should have the same keywords in it and be as similar as humanly possible, so that bio that follows you around gives you a really clear digital footprint that the AI can understand. Within that bio you want to show off your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And if you are following my framework for crafting a good Psychology Today profile (I'll link to the freebie that I have that's going to support you to do that in the show notes of this episode, as well as the podcast episode on the Business of Psychology) you will be demonstrating the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness that AI is looking for. So make sure that your bio covers those areas and use my framework, because I think that will help you to do that.
3. The next thing that you need to make sure that you're discoverable in this new world is captions that are easy to understand on your social media posts for those bots that are crawling, looking to try and make sense of who you are. We need to think of captions as a bit similar to how we used to think about blogs. We want a title that has your keywords in it that people would be searching for. Then we want to use bullet points, clear headings, everything we can to make it easy for an AI tool to understand 'this is who this caption is for', so naming the client group, and 'this is the question that it is answering', so rewording your captions to make that super clear, and using headings within the captions is now super helpful.
4. The fourth thing that we need to be thinking about, that we might not have considered before, is making sure that we are properly filling out the alternative text or alt text on our images, and using those as spaces to describe what's in the image, using our keywords where applicable and possible. That really helps visually impaired users to have a good experience of interacting with our social media and our websites, but it also helps search engines to see our content better. So really helpful to do that. There are business mentors out there that would advise you to shoehorn in your personal keywords to every image, but I think we have to balance it with the fact that visually impaired people are using these to try and understand what's on your webpage. So do be mindful of that and make sure that you are only using the appropriate keywords, without disrupting the experience for somebody using a screen reader. But in most cases it is possible to do that without making it a difficult experience for somebody using screen readers.
5. The final thing that you need to be doing if you're not doing it already, is using video transcription, having captions on any video that you create, because tools like TikTok and reels on Instagram, they now pass the spoken words in your videos. So when you say your keywords out loud, that actually helps you to get seen by these AI bots crawling to try and index you for search engines. Everything you say now counts, which is wonderful for people like me that say a lot more than I write, and I think is overall really useful to all of us, because I think a lot of you put out a lot of content that previously has been really useful thought leadership content, but hasn't necessarily helped your website to get more visible. And now all of that hard work that you've been putting in, guesting on podcasts, creating social media content, all of that will now go towards getting the right people onto your website.

I think overall this is really positive, but at this point it probably sounds like a lot of work, and I am not suggesting that just because of these things, you now need to be posting every week on social media. If that is not part of your strategy, it doesn't need to be. What I would suggest instead is creating a shop front on social media where you have a few clear posts that follow this guidance and you have an optimized bio (if you follow my framework for creating a good Psychology Today profile, you will not go far wrong). If you have an optimized bio and just a few posts that have your keywords in, really good images that also have a good reason to link to your keywords, then that will be enough for AI to understand who you are and for you to get this benefit without you necessarily needing to post all the time. Of course, if you do have a reason to be posting on social media anyway, that is going to be nothing but helpful so long as you follow these principles.

I hope that that has given you some food for thought and potentially some optimism that we might be able to use the changes that are happening in search to be found more than we have been before, to show off our expertise in different ways and in ways that I think feel quite exciting and will hopefully help us to rise above some of the AI generated junk that is out there, that will not be able to demonstrate that experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, because it's not real. It also fits well with another trend that we've been talking about on social media, which is this trend towards authenticity. If you are thinking about putting out some talking head videos, for example, to really demonstrate your EEAT and to make use of the fact that will now be transcribed and used to help you rank, then you can take heart in the fact that those videos do not need to look good. They don't need to be super well edited or polished because actually people are getting the best results with videos that look like you've taken them in your front room and just kind of gone for it without a script, because that's the thing that AI can't do. AI can't do the human touch, the real talk, the unscripted bits, that we can do really well. So this doesn't need to be a big and arduous thing in your life. It's something you could spend an afternoon on and then forget about for a while and maybe revisit once every three months, once every six months to keep those posts up to date. But it's something that I really think could help us to be more visible in this slightly scary digital world that we're entering.

I'd love to know what you think about this. You can reach out to me. I'll be posting about this stuff over on @rosiegilderthorp on Instagram, or if you want to keep in touch with what I'm doing on the SEND Parenting Side of life, then you can find me @drrosiegilderthorp on Instagram.

Hello and welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast, and today I am changing my tune. I have decided to go back on some of the advice that I have given over the years about social media and the importance of it to the average private practice.

And I hope that this will be a really helpful episode for you if you are somebody who is really feeling the social media fatigue, doesn't feel naturally like it's a good home for you, it doesn't form a cornerstone of your marketing strategy. And maybe you've listened to my previous podcast episode and come to the conclusion that this is not the way that you need to be winning clients. I hope this will be a useful episode for you because it still isn't, it still doesn't need to be something that takes up a lot of time in your week, and it shouldn't if your ideal client personas are not people who are gonna search for a therapist on social media, and therapy is the main thing that you are selling in your practice, then I absolutely stand by my previous advice that social media is not something that should take up lots of your time, week in and week out. But I am going to caveat it slightly and that's because I have been on some training recently about how social media is an important part of optimizing our websites and our digital presence so that we will continue to be found by people on search engines and also through AI recommendations. And these things are becoming really important, and it just wouldn't be right of me to not bring this to your attention if it's not something that you've been thinking about yet.

So essentially there have been big changes already, and there are more changes coming, to the way that search engines like Google and Yahoo and all of them really, recommend websites to people searching. And they are now using AI in the way that they search our websites to try and work out who we are and also to generate AI advice for people, who type in questions to their search bars. And you'll have seen this, if you are using your smartphone to look for help, you'll get a load of normal looking search results, but you'll also get an AI generated answer to your question at the top, which will cite various kind of expert sources to give you an answer to your question, and I'm sure you'll have noticed like I have, that most people are not going beyond that AI answer because it is generally quite helpful and now, certainly on mine through Google, it's telling me where it's getting its advice from, I find it much easier to trust than I used to. So I think that's the direction of travel and eventually I think we're gonna end up in a world where people just ask a question verbally to their AI, whether it's, you know, Gemini, Chat GPT, Claude, whatever they're using, and they'll just take the answer that it gives rather than bothering to look through a page of search results.

So we really need to understand how we make sure that we are the expert source that these AI models are using, because if we're not, then we're, you know, we're gonna find that our traffic to our websites from search starts to decline, if it hasn't already.

So the good news, because I know that probably sounds a bit scary, I actually think it's a good thing for us because the good news is that now because AI is so much cleverer than the previous technology that the search engines we're using, it's able to piece together our digital presence from wherever we are to understand who we are and the services we offer in a much deeper and better way.

We just need to do a few things to make that really easy for the AI to do, and social media is an important piece of that puzzle, because social media can give you a digital footprint which gives AI a really clear indication of who you are, who you help, and what you stand for, so that it understands better, in combination with your website, who to recommend you to when they're searching for help. So I'll talk you through a little bit about how that works and just a few really simple things you can do to start helping the AI bots to understand who you are a little bit better so that you're kind of future proofing your search engine optimization.

So the first thing we need to understand is that search engines already look for EEAT when they're deciding who to serve up as a recommendation to somebody who's searching. That acronym, and I am terrible with acronyms, but that acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are the four things that an AI is assessing on your digital footprint before it decides whether to serve you up or to serve someone else up as an answer to a question that somebody's asking. So AI search tools like Perplexity, Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, those tools are crawling the web to find answers to questions. And if your social media or your website has a clear niche specific keyword like 'birth trauma psychologist in Plymouth', and you've got high levels of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, then the AI is more likely to recommend you, than somebody generic when a user asks for a therapist for birth trauma in Plymouth, for example.

So there are five things that we can do to improve our digital discoverability to AI and demonstrate that we have that EEAT that it's looking for.

So the first thing is to have one bio that you use everywhere that contains a primary keyword that you want to be discoverable for. So if you think of your bio as a bit like a sticky label that you might put on the front of an old fashioned filing cabinet, it needs to really clearly tell AI what it is that you have inside your cabinet. And it's really important to get that key word right. So that key word might be 'birth trauma psychologist in Plymouth'. It doesn't need to be a single word, it can be a phrase. It could be 'neurodiversity specialist', it could be 'CBT therapist specializing in OCD', but it just needs to be really clear and contain the key words that you would like people searching for to get your name associated with.

The second thing you need to do is make sure that that bio that you've created is everywhere that you are mentioned. So you'll have to create a few versions of it, but they should be as similar to each other as possible. So you can have a long version of it for the about page on your website. Use that same copy exactly for LinkedIn, Psychology Today, and then you'll need to create a much shorter version of it for social media, but it should have the same keywords in it and be as similar as humanly possible, so that bio that follows you around gives you a really clear digital footprint that the AI can understand. And within that bio you want to show off your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And if you are following my framework for crafting a good Psychology Today profile, and I'll link to the freebie that I have that's gonna support you to do that in the show notes of this episode, but we've also got a podcast episode on the business of Psychology, all about it, if you are following that framework, you will be demonstrating the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness that AI is looking for. So make sure that your bio covers those areas and, yeah, use my framework, because I think that will help you to do that.

The next thing that you need to make sure that you've got to be discoverable in this new world is captions that are easy to understand on your social media posts for those bots that are crawling, looking to try and make sense of who you are. So captions, we need to think of those a bit similar to how we used to think about blogs. So we want a title that has your keywords in it that people would be searching for. Then we want to use bullet points, clear headings, everything we can to make it easy for an AI tool to understand 'this is who this caption is for', so naming the client group, and 'this is the question that it is answering'. So just rewording your captions to make that super, super clear. And using headings within the captions is now super, super helpful.

The fourth thing that we need to be thinking about, that we might not have considered before, is making sure that we are properly filling out the alternative text or alt text on our images, and using those as spaces to describe what's in the image, using our keywords where applicable and possible. That really helps visually impaired users to have a good experience of interacting with our social media and our websites, but it also helps search engines to see our content better. So really, really helpful to do that. There are business mentors out there that would advise you to sort of shoehorn in your personal keywords to every image, I think we have to balance it with the fact that visually impaired people are using these to try and understand what's on your webpage. So do be mindful of that and make sure that you are only using the appropriate keywords, without disrupting the experience for somebody using a screen reader. But in most cases it is possible to do that without making it really a difficult experience for somebody using screen readers.

The final thing that you need to be doing if you're not doing it already, is using video transcription, having captions on any video that you create, because tools like TikTok and reels on Instagram, they now pass the spoken words in your videos. So when you say your keywords out loud, that actually helps you to get seen by these AI bots crawling to try and index you for search engines. So everything you say now counts, which is wonderful for people like me that say a lot more than I write, and I think is overall really useful to all of us, because I think a lot of you put out a lot of content that previously has been really useful thought leadership content, but hasn't necessarily helped your website to get more visible. And now all of that hard work that you've been putting in, you know, guesting on podcasts, creating social media content, all of that will now go towards getting people onto your website, getting the right people onto your website.

So I think overall this is really positive, but it probably at this point sounds like a lot of work, and I am not suggesting that just because of these things, you need to now be posting every week on social media. If that is not part of your strategy, it doesn't need to be. What I would suggest instead is creating a shop front on social media where you have a few clear posts that follow this guidance, you have an optimized bio and like I said, I will make sure that my freebie on how to create a good Psychology Today profile is in the show notes for this episode because if you follow that framework, you will not go far wrong. And if you have an optimized bio and just a few posts that have your keywords in, really good images that also have a good reason to link to your keywords, then that will be enough for AI to understand who you are and for you to get this benefit without you necessarily needing to post all the time. Of course, if you do have a reason to be posting on social media anyway, that is going to be nothing but helpful so long as you follow these principles.

So I hope that that has given you some food for thought and potentially some optimism that we might be able to use the changes that are happening in search to be found more than we have been before, to show off our expertise in different ways and in ways that I think feel quite exciting and will hopefully help us to rise above some of the AI generated junk that is out there that will not be able to demonstrate that experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, because it's not real. So, I mean, it fits as well with another trend that we've been talking about on social media, which is this trend towards authenticity. So if you are thinking about putting out some talking head videos, for example, to really demonstrate your EEAT and to make use of the fact that that will now be transcribed and used to help you rank, then you can take heart in the fact that those videos do not need to look good. They don't need to be super well edited or polished because actually people are getting the best results with videos that look like you've taken them in your front room and just kind of gone for it without a script. Because that's the thing that AI can't do. AI can't do the kind of human touch, the real talk, the unscripted bits, that we can do really well. So this doesn't need to be a big and arduous thing in your life. It's something you could spend an afternoon on and then forget about for a while and maybe revisit once every three months, once every six months to keep those posts up to date. But it's something that I really think could help us to be more visible in this slightly scary digital world that we're entering.

So I'd love to know what you think about this. You can reach out to me. I'll be posting about this stuff over on @ Rosie Gilderthorp on Instagram, or if you want to keep in touch with what I'm doing on the SEND Parenting Side of life, then you can find me at Dr Rosie Gilderthorp on Instagram too.