How to find your ideal clients in 2025: SEO for psychologists and therapists with Chris Morin

Welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast. The first episode of this brand new season of The Business of Psychology is a recording of the free webinar that I held with Chris Morin from Moonraker. Chris is an online marketing expert with tons of experience and a particular passion for helping psychologists and therapists get found by the right clients. I chose this to be our first episode because the trends I see as most threatening to independent practice in the short term are changes to the way that search engines work. This workshop with Chris is all about the simple strategies and steps that we can take now to make sure that we are the people that get found by the people that need us, rather than the generic platforms.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Episode Links:

Episode 103: Why you should specialise – old gold that is still important

Episode 128: Who are you helping? Three ways to specialise your psychology or therapy practice

Links for Chris:

LinkedIn: moonraker-ai

Website: moonraker.ai

Tools mentioned by Chris:

Google Search Console

Google Analytics

Superhuman

Website Optimizer

Pathmonk

Acuity

Therasaas

Links for Rosie:

Substack: substack.com/@drrosie

This week’s questions: 

1. If you have a website how many enquiries do you get through it each month?
2. If you don't have a website what stops you from creating one?
3. Have you noticed a drop in referrals recently?
4. If so what do you think is behind it?

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The highlights

• I introduce the episode 00:00
• Chris introduces the Webinar 03:13
• Chris talks about common marketing challenges that therapists face 04:09
• Chris tells us a little bit about him 07:58
• Chris talks about traffic generation: turning strangers into people that know that we exist 11:36
• Chris looks at SEO, starting with the technical aspects of a website 15:34
• Chris talks about page optimisation 17:15
• Chris talks about directory listings management, including Google business profiles 18:15
• Chris look at blogs and backlinks 28:44
• Chris takes us through some useful tools for analysing SEO 32:50
• Chris talks about PCC - paid ads 35:03
• Chris looks at referral outreach 39:16
• Chris talks about website conversion 47:48
• Chris looks at encouraging consultation attendance 54:45

SPEAKERS

Rosie Gilderthorp, Chris Morin

Hello and welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast. The first episode of this brand new season of The Business of Psychology is actually a recording of the free webinar that I held with Chris Morin from Moonraker. Now Chris is an online marketing expert with tons of experience and a particular passion for helping psychologists and therapists get found by the right clients. And I chose this to be our first episode because the trends I see as most threatening to independent practice in the short term are changes to the way that search engines work. So there's now a lot less space for us to show up organically in search due to those helpful AI summaries that are taking up half the screen. There's also a big rise in venture capital backed online therapy platforms (you know, which ones I mean) and they use the money that they should be using to pay therapists properly, to make sure that their ads absolutely dominate every mental health related search term, even some bonkers ones, which I think we talked about a little bit in the in the workshop. But those trends are Combined with a trend towards private insurers cutting their fees and using in house therapists or favorable contracts with very large organisations generally means a lot of people that I know have started to struggle to get enough clients for their practice, even people that have been well established for a long time. And these things are affecting us differently in different postcodes at the moment, but when I take a broad look at it, I can see that these are trends that are probably not going to go back in the other direction. So even if we're okay at the moment, we need to be addressing them and getting ahead of the game. And as this season is all about building resilience into your practice, really taking control of your online marketing presence is a great way of ensuring that you have that resilience as these trends continue. So, the first step to dealing with this has to be making sure that the people that are searching for your specialism in your area are finding you, and not one of these generic online platforms. So, this workshop with Chris is all about the simple strategies and steps that we can take now to make sure that we are the people that get found by the people that need us, rather than the generic platforms. So you may be able to tell from what I've said so far that it would be beneficial for you to also listen to my podcast episode on specialising, because all of this is a lot easier if you do have a specialism. So if you haven't heard that one yet, then do go back to that episode and have a listen before you dive into this one. So I know that this webinar was great because 200 people signed up for it and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. So I'm pretty confident that this one is going to be very useful to you. So I will let you dive in and enjoy the workshop with Chris.

Thank you so much, Rosie. Hello everybody. My name is Chris Morin. I'm the owner of Moonraker. We are an SEO and marketing agency focused on therapists, and I'm just going to jump right in, I'll get to the intro in the presentation in just a minute. So from clicks to clients, how does this happen? This is a marketing masterclass for scaling your practice in 2025. And so there's two main reasons why somebody would want to attend this webinar.

Number one, you're feeling stuck. You're overwhelmed by marketing. You consider yourself a technophobe. You're, you're lost in all of the different things you've tried. Things haven't really panned out for you. And you're looking for something conclusive that actually drives results. And the second big reason would be that you're doing well, but you want to take things to the next level. So what we're going to go through here is a proven framework that we use in our agency to help our clients scale their practices. And the key here is not just to attract anybody, but to attract the right types of prospects so that you can work with more of your ideal clients.

So common challenges that therapists face, the number one is low visibility. So are you struggling to stand out online? You're not really showing up in search results at all throughout your area for the modalities that you offer or the issues that you're addressing. And some of the more glaring issues, you don't actually have listings or you don't even have a website at all. These are obviously huge problems that need to be addressed if you want to show up online. The second biggest problem would be that you have a website, but there's really nobody showing up. And so it's not converting any visitors into booked consultations for you. Another one would be that you have a good website, you seem to get decent traffic, but people are coming to the site and then they're leaving without booking a call with you or without filling out the contact form. And so what can we do to encourage more people to follow through with that call to action, to make contact with you? And the last one is high client turn. So. How can we deliver lasting value and maintain clients for the long run in a way that maximizes the care that we provide to them and also helps you to optimize your operation so that you can basically give the same care in the most efficient way possible.

So this is what I call the client journey. Now, this is something that we all exist within. This is something that I exist within. This is something that all of your clients have gone through. And this is an extremely important framework because it helps us understand the different stages that somebody goes through when they go from being a complete stranger that doesn't know that you exist to being a client and sticking around, hopefully for quite a while and doing good work with you. And so I'm going to go through these very briefly, and then we're going to get into each of them in more detail. So the number one step is traffic generation. We need to bring people into the practice. And this is usually from a Google search, but more and more it's starting to shift to AI. So Chat GPT, other similar tools.

The principle is pretty much the same. These tools are, you know, these platforms are using algorithms to decide who has the most valuable, most relevant information. And they're placing them at the top of results so that when people visit those sites or those listings, they get a lot of value from that. So how can we maximize our website or our Google listing or the content that we create to send signals to Google or to Chat GPT and others to send more people our way.

The next step is website conversion. So people find your website, they get onto your site. How do we encourage more of them to fill out your contact form or to book a consultation on your calendar?

The third step is actually making sure that people who do get on your calendar show up to the call, because I've talked to a lot of people and they say, I'm getting consultations booked, but then I'm getting a ton of no shows as well. So how can we minimize no shows as much as possible to give you more opportunities to connect with new clients?

The fourth step is actually converting prospects on consultation calls into new clients. And this is as important for the fit of the therapist as it is for the fit of the client. We need to make sure that this is good in both directions. And the best way to help you come to these calls from a relaxed and calm place is to make sure that you have a good steady stream of new opportunities so that you can be more specific about the people that you choose to work with.

And finally, maximising client care. So how can we provide ongoing value? And this would be things like we're going to offer a group that is the next step. You've done a bunch of work. You don't need one on ones anymore. Well, we have this group once a week and maybe this will work for you, or this client wants to do a lot more work, and so we're going to offer them an intensive for a day or two or something like that. So when it's appropriate to continue working with somebody, how can we offer them opportunities to continue that relationship and help you to generate more revenue and give them better care?

So a little bit about me. I'm Chris Morin. So I've been a massage therapist for decades. And through that work, I've been exposed to a ton of different wellness providers. And I would say in a general sense, these are extremely thoughtful and compassionate people who often don't know a ton about tech. And I'm just one of those weirdos that for whatever reason, I'm kind of in the middle where this is the combination of, of what I love and care about and what I'm good at. And I have about 19 years of marketing experience. So I started back in the wild west when things were extremely different and helped my family manufacturing facility to start ranking. And we just had an amazing year last year and closed at over 8 million in sales. So very different industry, but similar principles. And we've been continuing to learn how to do things along the way.

So that's cool, but why should you care about what I have to say? So I want to give you just some very brief case studies here. This is, this is actual data from somebody's Google search console, which I will talk about in more detail in a minute. This is a solo therapist. This shows the work that we've done for them in the past six months. So the most important thing is traffic. So this is comparing the past six months to the previous period, the six months prior. So we can see this client just gained another 300 or so clicks in the past six months. This is actually them showing up on Chat GPT as well. This was a post in their Facebook group. Somebody, a therapist in New York, was searching for accelerated resolution therapy, and she showed up all the way in California. So that was pretty cool to see. This is a small group practice and in the past six months, they gained about another 300 clicks compared to the previous six months. A large group practice almost tripled their traffic from 127K to 366,000 clicks in the past six months, this was in the Bay Area. And then finally an EMDR training program. So I wanted to show a few different case reports because this is the type of strategy that works to generate traffic for just about any type of business in this space.

So here's some big thoughts and they might be a little controversial as well, and that's good.

So my belief is that charging what feels right for you is an act of self love and it's a service to your clients. And my belief is that if you are grounded in your value, then that creates a safe space for clients to invest in themselves. And it's really hard to hold a firm boundary in regards to your chosen rates if you're feeling scarce about leads coming in, and if you don't have anybody showing up, you're more likely to give away a lot in a way that doesn't feel right for you and ultimately doesn't contribute to the the success of the relationship. And practice growth is a sign of your expanding impact. And the reason that I want to bring these things up is because this isn't all about financial success. The byproduct of helping more people is that you become more financially secure. But when we focus our intention on helping more people in a way that's ethical and it's good, then success is generally the end result. And that's great. And we need people to be able to eat and to thrive because I know a lot of therapists that would turn themselves to dust in the service of their clients, but they can only do that for so long. And I want you to do this as long as you decide to, for decades and decades. And for most therapists, you need more than word of mouth to grow. So referrals are extremely valuable, but relying only on word of mouth may limit the growth potential of your practice. And so having a more strategic approach, including referrals, of course, but also SEO, possibly paid ads, as I'll describe later, that can help to generate more leads from a more diverse range of places and ensure consistent growth, if that's what your goal is.

So let's jump into stage one of the funnel; traffic generation. So this is how you turn strangers into people that know that you exist. And this is mostly about Google, but as I said before, people can come in through Chat GPT. There's all sorts of AIs out there that will provide search results. So whichever AI it is, this is another opportunity to show your brand to clients. So why should you care about this? Well, the more people that come to your site, the more opportunity you have to get client inquiries and ultimately grow your practice. And the most effective methods that we have identified are SEO, which I will get into in just a minute, PPC, which is paid advertising, and also referral outreach. And I want to be specific that I do not include posting on social media as part of our winning strategy. And I'll explain why in a minute. And we're also going to look at some specific tools that we use to analyze the progress and the results of each method.

So getting into a bit more detail about the traffic generation methods.

So SEO is all about organic search. So if you go on Google and you say therapist near me, you're going to see some listings with a map. You're going to see a bunch of websites below that, there's going to be paid ads as well. But we're talking about the actual results that show up, not the paid ads. So if you can rank in a number one spot for your most important modality throughout a large area around your practice, there's a good chance you're going to generate a lot of qualified leads from that. And that's the goal of SEO is to get your practice ranking as high as possible in Google search results for the widest range of search terms that people would be using to find services related to what you offer. And so that's the main focus of my agency is SEO and my agency partner, he is the PPC expert. This is specifically Google ads, but we're lumping in for just the sake of brevity here, social media ads, and that would be Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. And the idea of PPC is that we can reach a wider audience and we can drive more immediate results because we can be very specific in how we target people, where we target them, et cetera. And there's some caveats about when PPC is appropriate and I'll explain that shortly.

Now, one of the most important ones that I hear a lot of people talking about is, well, I get referrals. I have some partnerships and, and that generates a lot of really great clientele for me, but this is about being more intentional about expanding your outreach and actually turning that into its own marketing channel and complete transparency, that's how I got on this call. I did this exact thing. I reached out to Rosie and said, Hey, I'm a person that works in this field, and I think that we should collaborate on some content. And so that's how those things happen, and I'll teach you a little bit about how we keep track of all that so that we can drive real results.

And so why not social media posting? And I just want to state that this is extremely successful for some people. And with those people, from what I've learned from them, it's more like a part time or full time job. They become their brand. They become their posts. They're doing this all the time. And when you're just going to post a few times on Instagram every week or TikTok, it's really not going to move the needle and the likelihood of you gaining a big following that turns into clientele is very, very low. It's not really guaranteed. That said, social media is a very powerful tool for creating and building relationships. And when it comes to doing referral outreach, hitting people on as many different platforms as possible, email, LinkedIn, Instagram, if you can find them, et cetera, trying to bug them from as many different angles as you can is really very helpful to get attention. And there's also a ton of groups, referral groups, but also communities. Obviously there's a huge Facebook group behind this webinar. So there's really valuable components of social media. But if you're worried about growing a following, I would say, don't worry about that. There's many more important things that you can do.

I want to share a bit about SEO. So the point of this is not really a deep dive. This is a very superficial look at SEO, but it's to just help you understand the whole breadth of what goes into this, because SEO really is a holistic practice. And when we conduct SEO for clients, there's a series of foundational steps that we're looking at and then ongoing content creation as well. So the first thing to look at is the technical aspects of the website. And this is all of the, what I would consider like under the hood, like, do your pages have good titles? And do you have, you know, a good description that shows up in search results, is the schema, which is like the matrix, running in the background of a page, teaching Google what it's about is all of that stuff dialed in. There's usually hundreds of small errors. I consider them opportunities that you can get your site in better alignment and rank better in search results when we fix just this foundational technical stuff. On top of that is speed and security because Google does not want to send people to sites that are slow and broken and insecure, they want to send people to very fast sites, especially on mobile that provide amazing information that pertains to what they're searching for. So this is a little tough if we're talking about Squarespace, Wix, certain platforms, this is mostly, this point is mostly about WordPress sites because there's a lot that we can do to improve the speed of a WordPress site and the security of a WordPress site. And we want to make sure that it's loading absolutely as quickly as possible, especially on a mobile device. And that's going to improve the performance SEO rating so that Google is more likely to send people to that page and that could potentially boost the rankings.

Page optimization. This would be about the structure of the site. So making sure that you have a distinct and separate page for each modality that you offer. Well, think of it like this. Every topic that you want to rank for, it needs its own page. So maybe you say we do CBT, we do DBT, we do EMDR. That's three pages. We also work with folks that experience depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. That's four more pages as well. So we want a separate page for every single focus, because that's another page that has an opportunity to rank in search results. And it sends a very clear signal to Google, that's all that this page is about, it's obvious that you should put me in the search results for this type of term. Versus I have a modalities page and it says we do 10 things. Google is like, well, I see EMDR mentioned there, but it's really not the main focus, so I don't know if I'm going to put this page in the search results because it's not really about that. So clear separate pages for each thing that you want to rank for. Also having a clear separate location page. This is something that I see missing a lot of times, and it's pretty common. Like the address is kind of buried in like the footer of a page or the contact page only. We want to see a distinct location page that says, I am Rosie, I offer these modalities in Tunbridge Wells. And that's the formula that we found sends the right signals to Google to especially get you to rank better throughout your local area, because they see, here's all the things that they do, all clearly explained in different pages, and here's where it happens.

Directory listings management. This is an interesting one because there's this whole, what I would call the directory ecosystem. These are the Yelps and the TripAdvisors of the world. The Google listing is the most important single directory, but as Google crawls all content on the website in their ubiquity, they're seeing all the information listed on all of them and it's very common for information to be inconsistent. There's a little change or discrepancy in the address from here to there and the phone number is wrong or something was updated here and not over there. And this is, these are all little opportunities where we could establish more reputability that go missed. And so again, this is a small thing, but when we accumulate many small things together, the end result is a very congruent picture of a practice that knows what they're doing. They have a clear signal and Google rewards you with rankings. And so one of the things that we want to do is go and make sure that the information that's on the Google listing is exactly the same everywhere else. And that's Apple maps, Bing maps Dun & Bradstreet, data aggregators, which are basically services that push that information to thousands of other directories and voice search, and the built in car navigation search and all those different places. We want it to be consistent.

Now the Google business profile needs to be optimized as well. That would be your Google listing. And it's not a particularly hard thing to do, but we want to make sure that every single field that is available is filled out with relevant information. And a note about reviews, reviews are a tricky one. I don't exactly know what it's like in the UK, but in the U.S. it's unethical for therapists to request reviews. They can get them, they have to be careful how they respond to them, and the challenge of that is that reviews are such a big ranking factor for local search results that Google doesn't really care that it's unethical for therapists, they just want to see that you get good feedback from customers. And so this is a tricky one where I tell people, at the very least, and I want to be clear about this, this is technically against Google's terms of service, but so is SEO as a practice in general, and there's millions of websites that do it. You know, if you have zero reviews on your Google listing, ask your family and friends or your professional network and just have them speak to your character.

‘Oh, Rosie is a great therapist in Tunbridge Wells. And if you're in the area, you should reach out.’ That's a great review. It says who it is, maybe it mentions the modality, it mentions the location. That's the formula that we need for a review. You get a nice five star and you also get a little bit more information that helps to send a signal to Google ‘This is what I do and this is where I do it.’ So however you want to do that, you know, it's up to you to decide how ethical that feels for you. I don't personally have a license to lose, but I'm just offering this information because it is extremely important for local rankings. It's one of the pillars of how the ranking algorithm works. And so if you have zero reviews and your competitors have 20, then that's going to be a pretty steep uphill climb to surpass that.

Just to say that if you offer other services, so some of us might offer coaching services, supervision services, consultancy, training, then all of those relationships are a bit easier, ethically, when it comes to getting reviews. So really think about that and think about your professional network. Who knows your work? You will have worked with lots of other psychologists and therapists that know that you're good. So to me, that doesn't feel unethical to ask them to comment on, say, my therapy when they know it just in a different way.

But I also wanted to ask a question from Jennifer, and she was asking what should we do about the location, I'm guessing on the Google My Business page and on the location page and our website, if we exclusively work online. So what's your view on that one?

Yeah, so that's an interesting one, because if you have a Google listing, by default it has a physical address unless you switch it to be a service area business where Google knows the address, but it's not being shared visibly to clients. If you have it visible to potential clients to search for you, then I don't think I've ever heard of somebody saying a person just showed up. And so it helps with local targeting. You're more likely to rank if there's people searching right around your area, because proximity is such a big factor in the local algorithm. And so I think of it as a way to start a conversation and then you can explain to them on that call or via that email that you respond to, we only work online and so that's how this would go from here on out. In terms of let's say somebody doesn't have a listing at all and they just work online, they just want to target like, again, I don't know exactly how it is in the UK. I seem to remember Rosie, you said you're licensed across the entire country. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right,

Man, that's so much better than the States where it's like, I'm in Texas and California and only this other part and it's just so complicated.

Yeah, that system’s insane.

Yeah, it's really complicated. And so if you don't have a local listing, it's become extremely hard to create one. Again, I think of it as a tool because it's just another place that people can find you because the way that at least 50 percent, probably more like 75 percent of potential clients will find you, they're on their phone, it's like 11:30 at night and they're in bed and they're like, ah, my life, it’s terrible. And they go online and they search for like ‘therapists near me’ or ‘EMDR therapist in town name’ or whatever it happens to be that pertains to their particular issue. And so because of the device and the nature of those searches, how they're kind of locally oriented Google is always going to show them that map section of map results at the top before the website results. So if you don't have a local listing you're missing an opportunity to show up at the top of that results page and so the problem is that because of the millions of fake listings that are created every month, like it's really hard to even comprehend how much spam and fake stuff is created that Google has to deal with, the newest update to their verification system is that you need to do a video. And the video shows you looking down the street and then entering a building. The latest update, as of like last week, says that you have to have physical signage. So this is stuff that an online therapist will never have. And so my concern is that it's going to be more and more difficult for online therapists to have a local listing at all. If that's the case and it's just a no go for you, you don't have one from before, then you can still target a zone. You can still target a particular city because a big part, and what I'm actually going to mention right here, is the ongoing blog creation. And blogs can be regional or local and you can talk about providing services in a specific area. If say, you wanted to target that area. And the suggestion here is even if you can work with people all across the UK, pick a place that makes sense for you, because it's going to be a lot harder for you to rank for Therapist UK than it is for Therapist in a neighborhood of Liverpool or something like that. And I'm not great with the geography there, but I think you get the idea. We start small and we try to capitalize on a particular area, and then we can expand from there, like even when we run like PPC, for example, for a nationwide company in the U.S. It's really about targeting specific population centers. We're never just like blasted spaghetti against the wall, trying to hit everybody across the whole country. So even if you don't have the local listing, if you just want to focus on using your website and blog content, things like that, you can target a region. I would highly recommend that versus just trying to cover the whole country itself.

Thanks for that, Chris. I just wanted to say, Suzanne has mentioned an experience that might have happened to other people, too, where Google disabled their business profile because they worked out that they were an online only service that had listed as a local service. So that happened to me because I'm military and I've moved around a lot and Google was just like, hey, this doesn't look legit, you've moved too often. So eventually I ended up being able to get on a zoom call with them and showing them that actually people can come physically to my space, they just don't very often. They were okay with that, reinstated the listing. If you don't have a space that people can come to at all, then I think the service area option might be the only one that's available to you, which is tricky and I think it discriminates against us.

Absolutely.

But that's where it is.

Absolutely. Like I had a client that was living in Costa Rica, but her practice was based in Austin, Texas, and she hadn't verified her listing. And I said, can you get your parents to do it? Cause that's the address. She's like, no, they don't even know that I have their address as the listing. And it's like, well, I don't know what to tell you. Like you have to be there. Someone has to be there. And it's an unfortunate situation that it puts therapists into where if these certain situations arise, then you're forced to rely on just good friends or colleagues to do it because you can't set up a listing in most coworking spaces or often many shared practice spaces. It won't work to verify a listing there either. And so is it unethical to do that? I guess that's for everyone to decide. At the end of the day, I think, you know, we're trying to provide the most ethical care to clients in a way that makes sense. And this is really just about how to access them more effectively and because of the limitations of these platforms, it causes us to jump through some weird little hoops. But again, it's up to everybody to decide.

So, moving on, this is really, when you think about a campaign, you know, we're trying to get all this kind of stuff taken care of in the beginning, make sure that the site is dialed in. It's technically sound. It's fast. It's secure. The pages are set up properly. There's like an effective hierarchy to navigate through, all of the foundational stuff for directories is set up. The Google business profile is optimized if you have one. And so that creates a really powerful foundation where we can now create blog content. Blogs, everybody knows about them, but the way that we like to write blogs, they're long form. So at least 2000 to 3000 words, we're talking about keyword clusters. So if you want to target EMDR therapy, it's not just list EMDR therapy in your blog 10 times and that's the magic formula. The thing about Google's algorithms today is that they're so brilliant, they understand the semantics of language. And so if you're talking about EMDR, it would make sense to talk about the eight phases and it would make sense to talk about, you know, subjective units of distress, and it would make sense to talk about a lot of things that are in the context of that modality. And so the whole idea of an effective blog post is to demonstrate your experience and expertise in this particular topic you're writing about, so that Google believes that it will provide a lot of unique value to people that are looking for something related to that. And that's the formula. So when we're writing blogs, we're researching other websites that are in the same region that are talking about the same type of thing to see what kind of insights we can glean from those blogs so that when we create something, we're going to transcend the comprehensiveness of those blogs and check as many boxes with Google as possible. So that's one of the big pieces of the ongoing content creation that we're doing for clients.

But the next step is backlinks. And the simple explanation of a backlink is a link that's coming from another website and it's pointing to yours, either to your homepage or to a service page or whatever. And the idea of a backlink is it's kind of the internet's way of vouching for you. Like if you have a link coming from a high authority website that gets good traffic and it's in the same niche as you, then Google is going to see all those connections and think, well, if they're sending a backlink to this other site, there must be a good reason for that. So perhaps this other site deserves to rank higher as well and get more traffic as well. And that's the whole strategy behind backlinks. It used to be more about the sheer number, ‘get a thousand backlinks and you'll beat everybody’. But now it's more about the relevance and the authority. So a lower number of backlinks that are connected to the health and wellness space that are coming from good websites that have good traffic. And again, it could focus on your homepage. It could focus on specific service pages that are most important to you. And the idea is that it's coming from what we call a guest post. It's basically a blog post that lives somewhere else, and then it's pointing back to you. And so, yeah, that's, I won't get into the backlink creation process. That's, you know, a whole other masterclass.

So as it is now, this is the magic formula that I've identified to drive the best results for SEO. And even with all of this stuff, I just want to mention that there's a timeline here, because this is a practice that takes a while, so, you know, give yourself three months to see preliminary results, oh, look, I'm starting to show up in search results for the right types of things. Three to six months, oh, I'm starting to generate traffic from this. Six to 12 months, people are usually glad that they started when they did, because they have good problems. Like what the hell am I going to do with all these potential clients? And that's the idea just to stick with it long enough that it eventually works. And just like so many things in life, like, you could have the perfect physical fitness routine. And if you do it for two weeks, it's not nearly as good as a mediocre plan if you do it for a year. So consistency is absolutely key here. And we're shooting for at least one blog a week if we can, but you know, if you can't do that, a blog a month is better than nothing.

So a few tools that are invaluable in the process of analyzing SEO. Google search console is number one. So this is free. These are both free, so you can set this up. It's really simple to configure. Again, that's outside of the scope of this campaign. And without going into like a full comprehensive overview, one of the most important things here is that we can look at comparisons, we can say, let's compare the last three months to the, to the three months prior to that. Let's see how things are going. Okay. We gained another 120 clicks. We gained 37,000 more impressions. The click through rate changed. Let's look at the difference. We can look at search, actual search terms. We can look at pages. Oh, look, this page got 235 more clicks on the IFS retreat page. And oh, we lost a bunch of traffic on this blog. And so it helps us to understand the implications of this content that we're creating and how people are finding us. And a note about Google search console, this is only tracking traffic that comes directly from Google search results to your website. It's not tracking them when they go from one page to the next page to the next page. That's more Google analytics. And I'll talk about that in a minute. And in terms of the Google business profile, if you do have a Google listing, the built in analytics are just fine. There's really not much more you need to see than that. And so you would navigate there. Let me look at the same client here. And so you're going to see a whole bunch, the layout is atrocious. I'll be honest. A lot of these Google platforms, the navigation is terrible, but there's a lot of information in this performance section here. And especially valuable, in a similar way as Google search console is the searches breakdown. So it shows all of the terms that people use to search for that brought them to that local listing. And so it gives us an idea, how are people finding us? And this is really useful because it can help validate if your strategy is working, or if you don't show up at all for a specific target that you really want to rank for, then maybe it's time to focus on those terms more heavily than we did before.

So let's talk about PCC. Paid ads. There's some caveats to paid ads. Paid ads are extremely effective, especially when there's a manager that is an expert at using the platform. Cause Google ads is an absolute beast. I am terrible at it. That's why I do SEO. My business partner has managed over a quarter billion on that platform. And so I just leave all of it to him because he knows it like he's, you know, in his sleep. And, but even still, it's very important to determine is PPC the right thing for your practice? So for example, if you're just trying to generate like five more clients a week, then the cost of PPC may not, it may outweigh the benefits. You know, the idea is you should stand to earn at least two times more per month than what you're going to spend on a campaign, if not more, because it needs to be justified. And the thing about PPC is we can get very, very specific about targeting people in a specific region, even a zip code. We can put a box around a building if we want to, the demographic, the… I don't even want to get into the details, but the amount of ways that we can target people is pretty creepy, to be honest. And so we can get very specific and we can get a lot of leads in a very specific way very quickly. And so this is a tactic that I would say is more aligned with solo therapists if they're in a highly competitive area. Where also perhaps the earnings per session or higher, or a group practice that wants to scale because the rate at which you can generate qualified leads is rapid enough that you might run out of room to put people in two months, if it's just you. And so what we find is that group practices, because they're already set up to include a team, they can absorb more clientele more quickly, and they can also add more associates more quickly if they need to. And it's really complicated to do this. And so it's the kind of thing where, you know, if you have the resources or if you have a marketing person to do it, that's great. If not, then perhaps a better strategy would be to focus on SEO and maybe the referral outreach instead.

That said, so that you have an idea of what really goes into an ad campaign. There's a whole setup and structuring things in terms of groups of keywords. There's writing copy. And if it's for social ads, the creative, like the video or the photo that goes with it. Split testing everything to make sure that it actually resonates with people. Making sure that the audience that we're targeting is, is not only aligned, but also looking for your services right now, so it's relevant and timely for them. Maybe they get sent to a separate landing page that's optimized to convert for one specific call to action, which is like, Hey, book a call with us instead of showing them the whole website with all these different options to pick your own adventure. It's just a very focused page. It says, here's who we are. Here's an awesome thing. And here's why you should reach out. And of course, there's a lot of tools to track conversions and analytics. So this is a, again, as I said, this is more of a full time job, kind of like the social media influencer thing. This is not like an amateur type of strategy. And I know a lot of therapists that have lost a lot of money on Google ads, cause they just didn't have a lot of experience. If you've been doing a good job on your own, then that's awesome. I don't want to diminish the results, but again, I always tread carefully with PPC just because of the risk involved there.

And tools to be used to analyze PPC. You can't run a Google ads account without Google ads. There's nothing going on in mine cause we don't run it through our account, but that's what it looks like. And Google analytics is extremely important for running Google ads campaigns, because it helps us see the way that people navigate through the site. We can also track what we call events, which are specific things that we're monitoring for conversions. Like, oh, a person showed up at the thank you page. They only do that if they fill out a form or they click submit on this survey or something like that. So analytics is a lot more useful than Google search console when it comes to paid ads and looking at things that people do once they get to the website. Whereas Google search console is really all about just organic traffic, just SEO and how people come from search results to first show up to the website.

All right, let's move on. Referral outreach. So this is a really exciting one. As I mentioned before, this is how I got in this situation to be on this webinar. So it works for everybody. The idea is that we just want to be more intentional than hoping that our clients are going to refer us to their friends and family. The idea of referral outreach is to come up with a strategy. Who are the target referral sources that you want to work with? Like local healthcare providers or organisations or other professionals that are aligned with you. And then coming up with a messaging strategy, basically the simplest way to do outreach is a cold email. And what I mean by that is it's just an email that you send to them that they did not expect. And you cannot send 10,000 of these with no customisation and expect anybody to open it because we all get those emails and we all hate them and we all throw them in spam. So the idea of getting a response is to say, Hey, I saw that piece of content that you wrote about that topic and I really loved it. It resonated with me because of X, Y, Z. And the reason I brought that up is because I also do this thing that is adjacent to what you do, and I'd love to talk about possible collaboration. Again, that's exactly what I did. That's why I'm on this webinar. So it works and it gets people's attention a lot better than it's just like, Hey, I'm a person and I do a thing, do you want to talk? So think about that. And it's really about quality over quantity. And so once you identify a list of your, what I would call like the categories of people that you want to target, then you really need to build the actual list. Like who are the specific people? Where are they? What are the specialties that they have? And let's generate a list of actual people, email addresses, social media accounts, things like that. So when we reach out to them, we can target them effectively and basically just, you know, run through that list more systematically. You might consider directing them to a page specifically for referral relationships, because if you think about it, the pages that are geared towards your direct clients is different than the page that would share information about a potential partnership. And so that would be a page talking about, well, here's the value that I can provide to your clientele because of my related specialties and, oh, you're a personal injury lawyer and your clients are traumatized, well, I focus on trauma and we do EMDR and we've had success with car accidents, or whatever, something like that. So it really resonates with them. So when they click through an email and see this resource that you've prepared for them, it gets them more excited to make contact with you and actually have a discussion.

Of course, there's tracking and analytics because if we don't know what's happening, then we don't know how to improve it. And it can be really simple. Like I sent 20 emails this week and two people opened it. And it could be really, really straightforward. Just mark it on a Google sheet. It doesn't have to be super crazy with this tactic. It's just a few things that we want to keep track of so that you can monitor your progress. And of course, we can also continuously improve things, try to split test different messages, see what resonates with our target audience the most, and see how your improved, how your open rates or your click through rates or your response rates improve as you try different messaging.

And so the platforms I use for this, really simple Google sheets. So this is literally the sheet that I prepared for this exact thing. Every single B2B therapist resource known to humanity. And we just migrate it over to this new sheet, so there's not a lot going on. Also tracking a bunch of Facebook groups. It's going to look different for you, but that's the idea. Just having a list and filling it with information. And then it's just tracking who you reach out to and what the outcome is. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. And a great tool that I've used to enhance the ease and the speed that I can do a tactic like this is a platform called Superhuman. I really love this. It basically, it's like a piggybacking on your Gmail account. And so it has a whole lot of cool features like, you know, saved email templates, little key combinations to make things easier. But most importantly, for this purpose is follow up reminders to bring messages back into your inbox. So you can see right here, I can write an email and then I can set in the system, Hey, bug me about this in two days. So I'm using my email almost like a lightweight CRM, which is, you know, client relationship management platform where I'm going to send 10 emails to potential partners today. And I'm going to have the system remind me in a week to follow up with those people. And a follow up could be really, really simple. And I mean it like, following up on this message, exclamation point, or any thoughts, like you don't have to get crazy with it. You can literally just say two words and it just brings it back to the top of someone's inbox and they're like, oh shoot You know, I really forgot about that, but I would like to talk to this person. So don't give up after one try. I send messages probably three to five times and you'd be surprised how many people get back after like the seventh time and they're like, Oh gosh, I'm so sorry, the last three months have been hell and we just moved and there's a new baby and, and they're grateful that you kept going. So I just try to remember that, like I've had so many great connections that happened so long after I expected that they were still interested in talking to me.

One thing that kind of can turbocharge the referral outreach that's available to us and has worked really well for me is taking speaking opportunities. So if you can go to a networking event where there might be people from organisations that might want to work with you, and take that opportunity to speak. So sometimes they have speaker slots. I'm delivering a talk for the CIPD people who are a group for HR professionals on pregnancy mental health. So there's going to be a load of people there who are HR directors who might well want to hire somebody to come and support their staff, either with therapy or with training or consultation. And it's, you know, a 20 minute presentation free for me to do it. I've got all the material already, and I know that people after I've given my talk will come and talk to me. I write their names down, and they're the people that I follow up with. And it, you know, it gets a better response rate than the cold outreach, which does work, but you do have to be pretty resilient to keep going with it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's great. That's a great point. Thank you for that. So any other questions about traffic generation before we move on?

Holly had a question about where to put a blog. So whether it should be on your website or social platforms. Substack is kind of blowing up over here. So what's your thoughts on that Chris?

So in regards to blogs for Google rankings, it needs to be on your website. There's no harm in duplicating or cloning it on multiple additional platforms, but I would consider that more of an auxiliary tactic. And so when we put blogs on a website to help rank that website and its service pages on Google. We have a separate section that's called blog, it's in the top navigation, it needs to be visible. Because as a quick note, just about the theory of a website, Google is crawling your website in a similar way as people that come to your site and navigate it. And so if you don't have your blog in the top, now you're sending a signal to Google that your Blog does not matter and that they should not include that content there. And so basically you need to have it visible in the top navigation.

Oh, another one relating to that. Is it still true that if we do repurpose our blog, so we've done it in the right way on our website, using our keywords, if we then decide I'm going to put this on LinkedIn as an article or on Substack, do we need to do things like changing the title and the subtitles or include a canonical link? I know we used to, but I don't know now.

I don't really think so. It's, you know, those platforms are kind of like their own little ecosystems. And I think Google understands that there's a lot of tools out there that automatically clone things. And so it's not gonna whack you. It's not going to be considered plagiarism if Google sees that you have a blog that is copied over to your LinkedIn or other platforms like that.

Fab. That's really good news.

All right, let's move on to website conversion. So this is one of my favorites because it's very visual. So why should you care about website conversion? So this is essential to your practice's growth, because the last thing we want to do is generate a bunch of traffic and then have those people come to your website, not receive any value, and then leave before they actually follow through and make contact with you. And so the more visitors to your site, the more people that follow through with a call to action, the more opportunities you have to get people on calls and then convert them to clients. And so the most effective method to do this is called conversion rate optimization. And that basically involves enhancing the site's design, the content, and also the user experience to guide visitors towards your call to action, which is most likely going to be to fill out a contact form or schedule a consultation.

And we have some specialized tools that we use to track and analyze the performance of CRO.

And so first, before we talk about any tools, I just want to talk about the four crucial elements of the hero section. So the hero section is the very top of the page and the most important real estate on your entire website is the hero section on your homepage. That's the place where most people are going to see. And the goal is to hit them with these four things before they make a single scroll. So the number one piece is an emotionally compelling ‘Why?’ And I have Rosie's site right here. So here it is ‘build an impactful thriving practice, private practice, and live your values’. And so if you're a therapist that feels like you're not achieving that yet, then this can be a really powerful thing to hear. And if that resonates with you, you're going to be like, Oh yes, I really want more of that. And so that's going to grip you. That's a good hook. Number two is the simple and concise ‘What’. Now I made a point here to show that the ‘what’ is down below and the social proof is down below. Ideally, I would love to see that a little higher. But I'm going to show you the actual website so you can get a sense of where it is. Number three, prominent social proof and affiliations. Again, that's down below.And then number four is a clear and direct call to action. So we see that right here. There's a get started button.

If we go over to this page, we can see here that as soon as you scroll down, we have, there's this little bar right here that shows some of the actual, what I would call the ‘What’. The actual details that are behind this emotionally impactful why. And then when you scroll down further, we have a whole bunch of testimonials. Now, if I was going through and doing like a CRO redesign with Rosie, I would say, can we move the testimonials up closer? Can we get all of this into this area so that people can make a decision about whether or not they want to reach out without doing a single scroll.

And I want to show you an example. This is a good example of the formula. Big honking WHY, get a year's worth of healing in just one week, boom. If someone's suffering, that's gonna be a powerful statement. Oh my god, I would love that. Here's the WHAT that you will be utilizing to achieve that WHY. Here's some social proof right here. And then here's a clear call to action. And so you can see all this before you do a single scroll. And if we squash this down and look at it as a mobile view, we can see that it's just a single scroll. And then we can see all the same information. So it's just about as optimized as we can be.

And a note about these affiliations here. This doesn't really need to mean anything to us because of course they're verified by Psych Today. Of course, most of them are affiliated with Emdrea. They're EMDR therapists. Some of them do CAP therapy. So they've been through this program. And one of them was on a podcast on NPR. But when people come to the website, they see this and it checks off a box in their mind and they think, Oh, okay, that looks legit. I know NPR. That's cool. That's a nice logo. I think that they're the real deal. I'm going to reach out to them. And it's, it's really that simple. And it happens that fast because we're dealing with the TikTok generation here. This is five seconds. Maybe less that we have to actually convert them to a potential lead in the form of following through with that call to action, or at the very least keeping on the page longer so that they scroll down and consume more of the content because they're emotionally gripped by what they see here.

So some other important platforms to note. So there's a platform called website optimizer. You can get a free version of it and it allows you to split test various elements. So what that means is you could come on here, and let me go back to this site as an example, you could say, hey, website optimizer, I want to split test this. I want to split test my ‘what’, and you can highlight this area. And the system will come up with three or four variants of different ways to organize these main points using different wording. And then it will automatically send a certain percentage of the site visitors to the different versions. So 25 percent will see variant A, 25 percent see B and C and D. And after four to six weeks, we're going to have some results that show hopefully that one of those variants overshadows all the others. And it resulted in people staying on the page longer. And once you see a clear winner, you can go in, you can hard code those changes and then move on and split test something else like this sounds cool to me. And it seemed impressive to me, but maybe it's not impressive to the majority of people that come to the site and we could do a better job of explaining that emotional value. And so we're going to split test this thing next. And as I said, it's free and it's just really helpful. This is the kind of tool that, you know, we dreamt about even two years ago and they're here now, and they're just so fun to play with. Another tool, this is one called Pathmonk. This is something that I've really been loving. You can see there's this little bar on the side, the idea of this plugin is to analyze users' on site behavior using some form of algorithm, I don't know the details, but it's determining how serious they are in their visit. Are they just tire kicking? Are they just information gathering? Are they weighing different options or are they trying to find a way to reach out and sign up with you right now? And so depending on where they are in that process, it serves them different pop ups that are specifically catered to their position in the client journey. And the goal is that it increases conversions and we've had it running on this site for a little under a month, and it's actually converted a 115 percent higher than the site without it. And it's just extraordinary. Like, I can't even believe that I'm saying that because it's kind of like we just got double the traffic. It's insane. Like these are numbers that we would never achieve from just like, I'm going to tweak this and I'm going to tweak that. And obviously I'm telling you that stuff because it's also important, but there's some incredible tools that are out now that can absolutely supercharge the process and get extraordinary results very quickly with also very little work.

All right. I want to get a little bit more information about consultation attendance. This is not a particularly dense section because literally all this is, is how do we encourage people to actually go from the booked call that they just set up and how do we encourage them to actually show up to that call? And the simplest way to do that is with an email nurture sequence. And so what that looks like is a simple formula. And this is something that is pretty standard on most of the booking platforms, like most people are aware of platforms like Calendly. If you use Squarespace, Acuity scheduling is owned by Squarespace now,

so they offer a similar thing. The idea is they get an immediate confirmation after they book a call that has all the relevant details of the call, and then they also get a series of reminder messages. And this is the part that we can really play with and add more value because at the very least we want to say ‘Hey, your calls in two days’, ‘hey, four hours until our call’ and then, you know, breaking it down. So for example, if somebody books a call with me, they get an immediate confirmation. They see an email two days out that says, ‘Hey, think about your practice goals. What's the purpose of what you do? I want to learn more about you’.

And then four hours before the call, ‘Hey, our call is in four hours. Can't wait to meet you and talk about the purpose of your practice’. And then I hit them again, 10 minutes beforehand. And like, ‘Hey, I'm in the room. I'm getting ready to talk to you. Can't wait to meet you’. And it's just a way of actually reminding people that the call is coming. But also my strategy was just continue to connect with the emotional WHY, that was what we were talking about in the previous section. How do we grip people emotionally? What matters to them? Just, I just continue to talk about that. Like there's a purpose behind your practice. And the goal of our services is to help you connect with more people so that you can share your purpose with the world. For you, it might be different. And so maybe for, for your practice, you can share some tips for preparation, or you can share like a free resource that is like a, Oh, here's a meditation that I recorded, and now it's a chance to show like a one minute video of you talking to them or anything like that, that helps them feel more confident and more motivated to show up to the call so that when they get to the call, you're going to be a little bit further beyond where you would have started before, which is, first of all, they're there. Awesome. But now they already trust you a little bit. There's already a relationship that's developing from the moment they show up to the website. And so we want to make that relationship as positive as possible, so by the time they talk to you, we're over these fundamental questions. Like, can I trust you as a professional? And now we can get into the real core of the services, which is, here's my challenges, I'd love to talk to you about how we can work together to find my way through them.

And so just to finish this particular stage of the funnel up, some platforms that we use for that. I wanted to mention Acuity scheduling first, because it's tied into a lot of Squarespace websites already. This should be GDPR compliant, so there should be no issues with that. And it has the automated nurture sequence type functionality, so you can customize all those messages. I also love a platform called Therasas. We use a very similar but modified platform for how we track leads through our own agency. And it's a full fledged customer relationship management platform. And so that's, you know, forums, the booking calendars, messaging, and all sorts of other things to just visualize prospects as they go from being a complete stranger and then move forward through that client journey until the point when they eventually sign up for your services. So that's one of the things that for whatever reason, I feel like a lot of the EHRs don't get concerned with that stuff at all, and it's so important because the function of managing their, the relationship once they're a client is important, but also managing the communications and their, you know, their path to, to signing up with you is just as important before that happens as well. So any questions on that?

Oh, this has been absolutely fascinating, Chris. So one thing, Holly asks, what is better in the hero section of your website where you can have a picture, is it best to have one of us, like our face, or is it better to have something like this, like a pretty picture?

It's a great question. And to be honest, I don't have a conclusive answer. There's some people to say that the psychology of an image of someone looking at words makes the words seem more important. And so, you know, if it's an attractive person looking at your main call to action, maybe that would encourage more people to click on it. I don't know. In this case, of course, it was just like, we want them to feel calm and feel like it's a safe Haven. So let's put a pretty picture of grass. Um, if you have a picture of your practice or your team, that's great. One thing I want to be clear about that I don't encourage and everybody has a different perspective, but my perspective is that especially for solo practitioners, where you are essentially your brand, it's important to remember, and this might sound harsh, but nobody cares who we are until they believe that we can help them. And so when I see a web website that's like, ‘Hi, this is me, and this is a little bit about me, and I like cats and I also do therapy’, like no one cares. They care about that once they believe, oh, this is somebody that is aligned with my goals and they're offering the right services and, now I want to go and learn more about them. And so the homepage really should be in the service of connecting emotionally with your target audience. And then from there, they will go to probably your pricing and more information page, probably your about page or your team page, and then eventually to the services pages after that.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So if you're selling something like a retreat, and like this person, I already want to go and be in their practice and be really well looked after in a nurturing environment, then that's your selling point. So it makes sense to me to have a picture which shows that. But if you've got a really strong personal brand, and people are coming because they already know you from another platform, then they're going to want to know they're in the right place, so they might want to see your face. I think that it makes a big difference. And Margaret's asking a really sensible question. What website platform would you recommend for speed and security?

I recommend Square, uh, I recommend WordPress. I think Squarespace is a decent platform, and I see a lot of people in this space that are offering templates for Squarespace.

The good thing about Squarespace is that it's pretty fast and secure out of the box, and it usually looks good on all devices. So I would avoid Wix if possible, because Wix scores terribly on mobile speed scores and there's nothing we can do about it. And so that's the biggest limitation. It's also like constant upsells in the dashboard and it's sold as if it's, you know, beginner friendly, but I find it to be a real nightmare personally. And I apologize to anybody that has a site on Wix and especially the people that really like Wix, that's just been our experience.

Chris knows I have a site on Wix. But that's okay. Like I, for what it's worth, I completely agree. I've had WordPress and Squarespace and Wix. And I have to say that WordPress has always got me the best results. Where I think Wix and Squarespace can be useful to you, and there'll be lots of people here in this position, is when you're not quite sure what you're offering yet, and so you want that kind of sandbox to play around in, you might want to be changing your services regularly, and so you're not quite ready yet to invest the time or the money in a WordPress site. That's okay, but I think it's really good to know that from an optimization point of view, WordPress is always going to be the best one for us. And that's still true now, just like it was when people asked me about this five years ago.

Yeah, there's a million plugins we can add to improve the security and the speed and all sorts of other technical optimizations. But it's important to note that most of the new platforms, especially some of the ones that we talked about here, they're platform agnostic. So we can use them on all sites. We can do technical optimizations on all sites. We can do CRO optimization on all sites. It's just the way of installing them and then updating them is slightly different. And for anybody that's like, Oh no, I just spent all this time and effort to build a Wix site. What should I do now? It's not worth changing platforms. I promise. Like this is important and this is a big piece, but the number one driving factor behind SEO, at least is going to be your ongoing content creation. So don't redo your whole website just because I said, I don't like Wix, but if you have a choice, then yeah, WordPress is great, especially if you want to augment it with additional features down the line.

Brilliant, that's really, really helpful. Nicole's asking, I might be better equipped to answer this actually, Nicole's asking, is WordPress user friendly?

I don't think so.

Not, no, not really. But, Nicole, there is nothing that you won't be able to master if you're willing to give it time. So it's always weighing up between time and money. So I built my own WordPress site a long time ago when it was less user friendly because at that time I didn't really have any clients and I could spend hours and hours and hours watching YouTube videos, fiddling with things, and I've got the kind of brain that sort of enjoys that. These days I really wouldn't have the time to learn that from the ground up. So I would be recommending, if you're time poor, but you've got clients, so you've got income, I would outsource it every day of the week. And I can give you recommendations for people to outsource too, if you want to get in touch with me about that. If you like the Psychology Business School site, I can tell you who did that one. Wix, I've been playing with it because I, as you all know, because you've listened to the podcast, I really wasn't sure what my practice was going to look like. And so I wanted a bit of space to play and not have to watch loads of YouTube videos. And it's been okay for that.

Thank you so much Chris.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Really appreciate your time.