You can’t have a plan if you don’t know how it works.

Every single week, I get contacted by therapists wanting to make changes to their site, with improving their SEO being a top concern.

There’s an idea that, by making a few simple changes to type formatting, optimizing images for page load speed, and adding some descriptive text, your site will suddenly dominate Google—and that is absolutely not the case.

For a while, I thought I thought I understood how SEO worked, but I still didn’t understand how some SEO agencies were able to make any site rank in the top results. I believed the idea of “content is king” and that if you’re consistent and make good content, people will find you. Unfortunately, this is not true.

Understanding the factors that affect ranking is the key to putting your effort into the right things.

Content, alone, is not enough, you need the right content with little competition. The other factor that plays the biggest role in SEO is your site’s authority. Authority is the piece of the puzzle that’s missing for most people the helps complete the picture of how SEO works.

In writing this, I’m hoping to demystify SEO for you, so that you know where to focus your efforts and have a clear and realistic idea of what you can expect from all your work.

Key concepts covered in this post include:

• Backlinks: The things that gives your site credibility.

• Domain Authority: The reputation of your site.

• Long-Tail Keywords: The things you can actually be found for.

First and foremost, I need to give credit where credit is due. The big ranking factors for SEO were a huge mystery to me as well until I discovered my new favorite SEO podcast, Grumpy SEO Guy. He gets VERY in-depth and technical if it’s truly a topic you are interested in. Now, back to the post!

Your website SEO tells Google what your site is all about.

The Quick and Dirty of What SEO Is (and What Search Is) and Why It Matters

Let’s back up a bit. What’s the purpose of SEO? In fact, in fact…what’s the purpose of Google? We may be getting a little basic but hang in there.

NOTE: When I say Google, I’m referring to all search engines. Google is by far the biggest—and easier & more fun to say/type/read than “search engines”.

Google helps connect people with content on the internet. Without Google, you would have to know the EXACT URL of where you wanted to go. Searching would not be a thing.

To find what’s out on the indexable (pages that WANT to be found) web, Google has digital bots called spiders that go out and crawl the web (get it?). They see (index) what’s out there, so when someone types a question into Google, it says “a-ha! I think I know what this person’s looking for!” And the Google machine returns results that seem to relate to the person’s search.

NOTE: In this post, when I say “rank in search” or “show up in the results” I am generally referring to the first page of Google. On-Page SEO and Keywords Tell Google What Your Site Is About.

That’s where setting up your page correctly comes in. Google can scan your page and know exactly what it’s about. This includes the main things you deal with, but also additional content that really completes the picture: "therapy, counseling, in-office, online video therapy, adults, teens, your location, EMDR" etc.

NOTE: Keywords aren’t just one word, btw. "Therapy" is a keyword, but so is “Therapy for adults with OCD near me.” A search phrase is considered a keyword.

And we’re done, right? That’s SEO! Headlines, a little formatting, and BOOM! #1 on Google!

Again…not really.

What happens when you have dozens and hundreds (or thousands) of pages with the same keywords, all properly set up with On-Page SEO? How do search engines know what to show?

Enter…Domain Authority.

Domain Authority is their biggest ranking factor in your site’s ability to rank in search results.

It’s not just about content…it’s about authority.

The pie chart below demonstrates just how important it is in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, Domain Authority and, well, location (but that’s for another post!). Domain Authority is a score from 0-100 and the higher your score, the better. FYI. You have to be a site like Wikipedia or CNN to come near the 90s, and brand new sites are a NA (essentially 0).

NOTE: Domain Authority is not an official metric used by Google. It’s a 3rd party metric to sum up all the factors that a site has that determines it’s “weight” in search results.

Domain authority shows you are authoritative on a given topic (keyword) and others are are vouching for your content (linking to you). The theory is that people only link to good content, so sites with more links must have better content.

People only link to you if your content is good, right?

In reality, You can have the best content with no backlinks and you will not rank…and you can have terrible content and millions of backlinks and you WILL rank. It’s sad, but that’s the reality of it. Without a decent domain authority (and backlinks), you won’t show up in search results for competitive searches.

NOTE: When SEO agencies guarantee to make you rank, this is what they’re talking about. I’ll do a post on this, but in short: DON’T DO THIS. It violates Google’s policy which could get you penalized. 99% of people offering this service are scammers, and the ones who can deliver cost thousands of dollars up front, and hundreds more every single month forever. Stop paying, you stop ranking. Plus, you have no way to know if they’re legit or not.

The more competitive your keywords are, they more authority you will need.

What are competitive keywords?

Competitive keywords are, well…competitive!

Competitive keywords are the ones with the most competition. The ones EVERYONE is going for. Think of a Google search for “anxiety therapist.” It may be easier when the search is from someone down the street and location is taken into account, but nowadays when most therapists try to cover their entire state, you are now competing with every therapist in the state for anxiety treatment.

Without proper domain authority, you will not rank for these searches.

You can increase domain authority by getting sites to link to you.

To raise your domain authority, you need something called backlinks—links from other (reputable) websites, back to YOUR website.

Domain authority is like popularity in high school. You can become popular slowly by being kind, smart, helpful, and funny, and people get to know this little by little through sitting next to you at lunch, in class and through little interactions. Slowly you build a reputation as a reliable person that others want to be around.

This is blogging. It’s a slow, long-term strategy to build a catalog of content that ranks for long-tail keywords.

The hope is that others find your content, go there, and either buy your services or link to your page—which helps raise your domain authority.

Another, and faster, way is by hanging out with the coolest kid in school. You immediately become more popular by associating with that person.

Digitally, this is done through having websites with a decent domain authority linking to your site. A website has something called “link juice” (think popularity), and they lend some of it when they link to your site. Your website gets some link juice, and its domain authority bumps up.

Not all links are created equal.

If a site has no link juice, it won’t help your site at all. For example, having a single link from a site with a domain authority of 45 will do more good than 500 links from sites with a domain authority of 2 (those number are made up to help illustrate the concept).

There’s no set rule for how many backlinks you need.

There are far too any factors at play to know how many links you need—including how competitive your keywords are, your competition’s domain authority, and more. For some keywords, you might need less than 5, for others you might need thousands.

Getting backlinks can take a lot of work and can be extremely expensive you try to pay to have people link to your site.

There are several ways you can get more backlinks.

The most popular way to get backlinks is simply to produce good content people want to link to. In the next section, I’ll take about using low competition keywords, so you can actually be found for your content.

Some other ways of getting backlinks include:

• Having your own podcast. When you have a podcast pushed out to the major platforms (like Spotify, Apple, etc), you can get dozens and dozens of backlinks per episode.

• Being a guest on a podcast. This will give you a link from their show website to yours, AND it introduces you to their audience and helps establish you as an expert on a topic.

• Directories. Directories work sometimes, and only a little. Some directories, like Psychology Today, use “nofollow” links so you very little link juice from PT. For those that don’t use the nofollow links, any link juice you get will be minimal. Directories should be treated as opportunities to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

• Event appearances and speaking engagements. If you speak at a conference or other event, you should get a link to your page from the event website.

• Guest posting (writing) for a local publication, or site that is relevant to the niche you serve.

• Be cited as an expert on a niche. This can be tricky to establish, but has a lot of potential. If you can connect with reporters that write on topics you’re an expert in, you can become a cited source, with a link to your site.

NOTE: There used to be a site called HARO (Help A Reporter Out) where reporters would seek experts, and you could reply to their request and be cited. HARO is, sadly, gone but the idea remains. If I find a replacement site I will update this article.

Low competition keywords will allow your site to rank even if you have little or no domain authority.

The riches are in the niches.

Depending on how you say it, that may or may not rhyme, but the fact remains true that if you focus on a niche, people in that niche will be looking for you.

When I make a website for people, I often ask about their “Ideal Client”. Some people try to see everyone for everything and have no idea how to answer this question. However, this is what that idea is all about. Speak to a specific subset of people, so at least those people can seek and find you.

In SEO land, these specific searches are called Long-Tail Keywords, and this actually makes up the bulk of search results. A chart of keyword distribution, The Search Demand Curve, is below:

Long-Tail keywords are the ultra specific searches that don’t have a ton of content on the internet. Because of this, Google is starved for content and is desperately trying to find results that match the search. You don’t need domain authority here, just content using the words of that specific search.

You’ll want to identify long-tail keywords you can rank for—that are relevant to what you do, of course. These are less competitive things you should include on your page or blogs in addition to those border keywords.

Let me show you how this works with some data from an SEO tool I use called Moz.

In this search for “therapist”, there are 184 THOUSAND monthly searches and you will need a domain authority of 35 to rank. For context, most of the therapist websites I’ve worked on have a domain authority of between 2-7.

So the keyword “therapist” is extremely broad and covers a lot: people looking for a therapist, people who are a therapist, physical therapists, and more. I think you’d agree this is far too vague, so let’s get a little more specific.

Now we’re including a location—Spokane, in this case.

With this more specific search, there are fewer searches, BUT people searching this are searching with a more specific intent—which is what you want. Also, you only need a domain authority of 9 to rank. That’s an improvement, but let’s get more specific still.

Now we’re talking! Yes, there are fewer searches, BUT they are very easy to rank for, and these searches are performed with more intent

In the three keyword overviews, maybe you saw the Organic CTR percentage. That means Organic Click Through Rate and it’s a measure of the percent that people click on a result when doing that search. You’ll also notice that as the searches get more specific, the percentage also goes up. As mentioned before, people are searching with more and specific intent.

I think you see how this works.

The more specific your long-tail keywords are, the easier it will be to rank.

These are the types of topics you need to fill your blogs with, and sprinkle throughout your website where relevant.

So how do you find these long-tail keywords?

There are free and paid tools you can use to identify these long-tail keywords. Usually, you will search for a topic, and you will be provided with alternatives, variations, and also questions asked around that topic.

Many do require some technical skill and have a steep learning curve. The free tools, also, tend to be vague on the search volume and ranking difficulty.

Some free SEO tools to get you started include:

Keyword Tool by Ryan Robinson: https://www.ryrob.com/keyword-tool/

Free Keyword Tool by WordStream: https://www.wordstream.com/keywords

Professional tools that give you more data include SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic. They can be a bit pricey and aren’t practical for most people to have just for their own use.

neilpatel.com is another site with a variety of excellent free & paid tools to help with keywords,  blogging, finding questions to address, and more.

Showing up in search results isn’t enough.

When people see you in the search results, you have to get them to click on YOUR link and not someone else’s—a topic I’ll go into a bit more in a another blog post. Essentially, you need a page title (or blog post title) and meta description that takes them from browsing the window display, to walking into the store, so to speak.

Once people land on your page, you want to make sure they don’t click the back button right away. This is called “pogo-sticking” and it’s a signal to Google that your page isn’t a good one for that specific search.

To keep people on your page—and keep them from pogo-sticking—do the following:

• Craft a compelling headline

• Write your page/post well, make it your own, and make it unique.

• Format your text so it’s not a chore to read and is scannable

• Include images to make your post interesting

• End with asking the reader to do the thin you want. Book a consult call, share your link with someone it can help, etc.

Don’t create content for the sake of creating content.

You need to have a goal in mind with anything you’re creating. For therapists, your goals will usually be one of two things:

Therapist Website Goal # 1

Get them to become a client. This is the ONE thing you want people coming to your page to do—to request your services (book that consult call). This is the goal of your website, it’s the goal of your pages, it’s the goal of your blogging.

With this in mind, write your content with intention. Keep this in mind throughout your post, and always end your page or post with a specific call to action.

Therapist Website Goal # 2

If you reader doesn’t become a client, you at least want to make them a fan. This can be done by linking to you. People are not going to link to garbage or poorly made content, so take the time and craft your content well so that people will link to it. You can also simply ask that if they know someone the information can help, be sure to send them the link.

Summing it all up.

So we've covered a lot of ground here. We've explored the basics of SEO, from understanding how search engines work to the importance of on-page optimization. We've delved into the world of domain authority and the power of backlinks. And we've discussed the strategic use of long-tail keywords to improve your website's visibility.

SEO is a huge topic that even I’m still learning about,. Each new topic or point introduced could easily be it’s own article, but I hope this paints a more complete picture of what SEO really is, what’s within your control, and what you can expect when you set out blogging.

Remember, SEO is an ongoing process. It's not a one-time fix. To maintain your website's ranking, you'll need to consistently create high-quality content, build backlinks, and stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends.

Key Takeaways:

• Long-Tail Keywords: Very specific (3+ words) phrases that have a much higher chance of showing up early in search results. This is what you should have on your website and, if you blog, these are what your blog topics should cover.

• Backlinks: Links from other websites to YOUR site. It’s a way to boost credibility in the eyes of Google. It’s like having a large network of colleagues in real life vouching for you.

• Domain Authority: An overall score for your site. Several factors influence domain authority, but nothing is more important than quality backlinks to your site.

Even though this (should) clarify how SEO works, it’s still a huge, massive, complicated thing that takes a while to gain a good understanding of.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsure where to start, don’t hesitate to reach out! I’m here to help you navigate the complexities of SEO and help you identify long-tail keywords within your niche, to help boost your website’s visibility and attract more clients.

For help with identifying low competition keywords to help bring traffic to your site, contact me and let’s discuss how we can work together.

If you’re not sure if your website is helping (or hurting) your marketing efforts, click here to purchase a website audit and I’ll give you my honest feedback abut what needs to change to help you get more people booking that consultation call.

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