• Visit Sessions Sites to find out more AND Receive 3 free marketing strategy calls with Tom O’Malley!
• Visit Nicole’s website and connect on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Joe Sanok 00:00:00  You're someone with a vision for your practice, for your side hustle, and for your personal journey. But when it comes to establishing your path and how to get to where you want to be with your practice, things get a little messy. You're also someone who'd prefer to go in person instead of to groups and listening to everyone else's story. To me, it sounds like you could benefit from one on one consulting with our experienced practice of the practice consultants from 595 a month and up. You can work with a consultant that will give you more direction and practical, tried and tested tips matched to you and your goals. For more information, visit practice of the practice. Com forward slash apply. Again, that's practice of the practice. Com forward slash apply. This is the practice of the practice podcast with Joe Santos. Session number 1225. I'm Joe, your host, and welcome to the practice of the Practice podcast. This is our last of three takeovers from session sites. Tom from Session Sites has been so gracious to do some teachings.

Joe Sanok 00:01:15  If you missed our first one. He talked all about using the right words and how they work within your website. Next, in the last one he talked about from click to client how to optimize your website for conversions. And then lastly today he's talking about therapist SEO demystified. So like how is it that we use SEO to rank higher in Google. So without any further ado, here is Tom from session sites.

Tom O'Malley 00:01:40  You can't help people if they can't find you. In this final episode of Therapy Marketing Summer camp, we're pulling back the curtain on SEO, what it is, why it matters, and how to do it without the overwhelm. My guest is Nicole Arts, an And accomplished therapists and highly sought after SEO expert who knows exactly how to get your practice noticed online. Hey Nicole, thanks for joining us from sunny LA.

Nicole Arzt 00:02:09  Hi. Thank you for having me.

Tom O'Malley 00:02:11  Of course, it's an honor I, I consider myself to be, I would say proficient in SEO best practices. I've been at this for a couple decades, as you know.

Tom O'Malley 00:02:24  but I consider you to be the Beyonce of organic search.

Nicole Arzt 00:02:30  That's quite a compliment. I have never been called Beyonce in a sentence. I will take that in.

Tom O'Malley 00:02:35  We'll catch on.

Nicole Arzt 00:02:36  Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Tom O'Malley 00:02:41  So a little bit about how you got here. I mean, you're a lefty in your own right?

Nicole Arzt 00:02:47  Yes.

Tom O'Malley 00:02:48  So how did we get into content marketing and SEO?

Nicole Arzt 00:02:52  Yes. Great question. I think, like many people in the web space. It was unintentional. What ended up happening is I've always dabbled in some form of writing here and there, and I knew I wanted to be a therapist. so while I was in graduate school to become a therapist, and this is a story I candidly share with a lot of people, I needed to also pay my bills and pay my rent. Because therapists historically don't make much money, especially starting out. and so to augment my early years of my internship work, I started writing. I started making a kind of freelancing on the side, helping my colleagues with their website content.

Nicole Arzt 00:03:42  A lot of private practice therapist websites, group practices, Psychology Today profile statements. so I just started learning as I was going. And you do this for some time, you start learning about SEO. which kind of opened that rabbit hole, so to speak, of what is SEO? How do we, as therapists harness SEO to build our online presence and ideally, build our practices? And with people becoming more and more interconnected and going online to search for services and products. I found that it was becoming essential for therapists to really understand this space. So that was how this work, I say, came to me rather than I came to it, so to speak.

Tom O'Malley 00:04:27  What a journey.

Nicole Arzt 00:04:28  Yeah, a great journey.

Tom O'Malley 00:04:30  Very grateful. In my own work, I've definitely seen a shift somewhat recently where there was definitely a time, I don't know, five, ten years ago. I've been making websites forever where, you know, SEO would come up and the client would be like, don't know, don't care.

Tom O'Malley 00:04:50  Something shifted. Something shifted. Where? Past few years. Especially therapists. They bring it up to me first. It is. It is top of mind. It doesn't always necessarily mean they understand it. They just know what's important. And that's a huge first step. Yes, I get to skip that whole education portion of of my spiel. And because they know we need to focus on it.

Nicole Arzt 00:05:15  Yes, absolutely. It's certainly become far more mainstream. I know early in my career of of building my writing business, it was more telling therapists what it was, why it mattered. And now, yes, I am. More and more people are coming to me about, hey, what kind of SEO do you do? This is what I already know about SEO. This is what I've already dabbled with. How can you help me? How do I know if this is working? So people do seem now to have at least some broad strokes. That SEO is important. sometimes that's the extent of it.

Nicole Arzt 00:05:51  But yeah, the the term has certainly become a lot more popular in recent years.

Tom O'Malley 00:05:56  Nicole, when we say SEO for therapists and it is kind of its own brand of SEO, what are we really talking about?

Nicole Arzt 00:06:05  Absolutely. So when we're talking about SEO, which stands for search Engine optimization, what we're really talking about is how do we create online content that people can find that people value and that eventually converts to what it is you want people to do. So when it comes to therapists, most of us want to build our practices. We want to either obtain new clients. We want to be known as a good referral source in our local community. We want to stand out for the niche or expertise that we bring to the table. If we have other services, as many therapists do, such as courses or workshops or books that we sell. SEO helps with that. So it maintains our professional online reputation. So what are we talking about is when it comes to search engines, there's this kind of this common metaphor that it's like one big popularity contest.

Nicole Arzt 00:07:03  So you want to play really nice with Google. It's not necessarily about getting on page one of Google. That used to be the goal. Nowadays it's a lot harder to do, as you know, Tom. because most therapists aren't competing with the biggest of budgets, right? We're never going to outrank a lot of times like Psychology Today or some of those huge, online companies that I won't name names that take up the therapy space. So but we're still trying to come up on Google. We're trying if people are searching for, you know, trauma therapist for young adults in Los Angeles, if that's your thing, you want that to show up on Google. You want people to see you find your content, click on your website, read around on your blog, read around on your about me and say, okay, this person speaks to me. This person sounds like they can help me. I'm going to reach out. I'm going to schedule that consult. That's what we're looking for. That's what good SEO helps connect clients to therapists, therapists to clients.

Tom O'Malley 00:08:03  So well said. And back to your point about how ranking on page one used to kind of be the the hot term to use. Yeah, that's kind of gone away. I mean, first and foremost, Google has been experimenting with not doing pages at all. but there's I've always believed there is enough traffic to go around. I mean, Google gets billions, trillions of searches a day. Let the let the big budget companies get the lion's share. That's just never going to change. unless your private practice goes public someday. it's just you don't have to compete with them, necessarily. But there's enough for all of us. So even if you're down there in position 1020, there's someone who is going to be diligent enough to to browse through all of those.

Nicole Arzt 00:08:55  Absolutely. I could not agree more. You and I both know the SEO game has changed. Even Google has changed. I know sometimes I go to ChatGPT before Google now, as do a lot of people. So SEO as we know, is continuing to evolve.

Nicole Arzt 00:09:11  It has always evolved. Maybe that's a topic for later in the conversation about how we want to be mindful of chasing trends, because that can cause burnout and actually backfire in many ways. but yeah, it used to be a couple of years ago, I could almost guarantee getting someone a page one on Google, and now that's pretty rare, but not necessarily the goal either. And so I think for therapists it's really understanding, okay, what is realistic SEO look like. How can I make it work within my time and budget. And how do I how do I measure my metrics? How do I make sure what I'm doing is working and giving me the ROI that I'm seeking.

Tom O'Malley 00:09:48  And just so everyone can hear it from you. Everyone has their inbox flooded with people promising first page ranking on Google for for 2.99 act now this deal disappears at midnight. Can can we just hear from you that that is snake oil. Stay far, far away from that stuff.

Nicole Arzt 00:10:08  That is snake oil. And if it's not, please send them my way.

Nicole Arzt 00:10:12  Because I want to give them my money too. Because that sounds really good. I've never seen that work. In fact, I've had to fix, unfortunately, a lot of people's content, they end up spending way more time and money than they originally sought out, and is because, for lack of better terms, they hired some shady person who who promised them the world. And just like in any industry, we have to be really mindful of of just these kind of snake oil promises. if it sounds too good to be true. Yeah, most likely it's too good to be true.

Tom O'Malley 00:10:47  Yeah. The name of the game is being realistic and also being patient, which we'll get to. What would you say to a therapist who is unsure if they need to be focusing on SEO? Because let's say that they actually do have healthy website traffic right now. They built up a following on social media. They have subscribers to their mailing lists. They get plenty of referrals from directories. Should they be just as concerned about SEO as the rest of us?

Nicole Arzt 00:11:16  Here's where I feel I have an advantage of being in the field, being a therapist, and having my own private practice myself.

Nicole Arzt 00:11:24  My husband's a therapist. He's a private practice. A lot of our friends do. So. If I were just a writer, an SEO guru, so to speak, I would say everybody needs SEO. But I'm always at the belief. You really need to find the marketing funnels that work well for you. So for some people, some of my writing clients SEO has been great for them. for others, we just haven't had the same results. And I'm not necessarily doing anything differently. They're not necessarily doing anything differently. That's where we get into the weeds of, okay, you have all this great stuff on your website, but you're not returning emails fast enough, you know, or you're sitting down with them for their first session and you're you're not creating a safe therapeutic environment. You're you're clinically needing some work. That's a whole separate thing that SEO really can't help you with. Right. But what I tell people is it's really important to kind of do an honest inventory of what has been working like, what have been my most successful ways of obtaining clients.

Nicole Arzt 00:12:29  What does my retention rate look like? In a sense, when I do get a new client, are they likely to complete a course of treatment? Am I attracting the types of clients I want to be working with, i.e. like is my copy clear to the clients I want to work with, and naturally kind of filtering out the ones I don't want to work with. A lot of times if that's not happening, SEO is definitely something worth considering because it means your content may be too broad or misaligned or vague, and the right kind of, potential client isn't going to find you. So I am biased and do believe SEO can be beneficial for everyone, but it's definitely not the only way for therapists to succeed. and that's why if someone's first starting out, I always recommend whatever approach you're going to try. Give it six months or I mean, at a minimum, give it three months. Whether that's really like dropping into strong social media, dropping into strong, you know, SEO, some people want to experiment with Google ads, insurance panels.

Nicole Arzt 00:13:37  There's so many different options. But you really have to commit to a plan for several months to see it through. The worst thing you can do is dabble in a little bit of everything, but not stay consistent with anything.

Tom O'Malley 00:13:49  I fully agree, and especially when it comes to SEO. Yeah, I've heard that sometimes it can take Google up to six months to fully index changes on a website. I mean, patience is the name of the game there.

Nicole Arzt 00:14:03  We know that to be true. and I've seen it time and time again with blog posts I've written for clients. They don't show up and then suddenly they do and they stay for sometimes months, years. I have an article I posted in like 2018 for a client. She's still number one, and at this point all the the bigger names have written content similar to her. So she's bumped down a few spots, but we're still up there seven years later. And, it was just, you know, a relevant keyword based on on what her practice specialized in.

Nicole Arzt 00:14:34  but that one article alone Loan has continued to just funnel on going traffic. And since then we've, you know, revised the article, clustered some more content around it. but to this day, she's like, that's my best referral source. That one article. And I'm not using that as a unicorn story, that that certainly can happen. And that's what's so nice about it, is it becomes passive in that sense if your content starts working well. But back to what you said about that six month game. it's not going to happen overnight. Not anymore. Not in 2025. It's going to take a lot of high quality content, coupled with some strong patience to start to see those results.

Tom O'Malley 00:15:15  In regards to that unicorn story. I feel like that is everyone's dream and that's not specific to private practice owners. Any business, any website on the internet. Their dream is free traffic. That's what you want. And free form traffic that is your target client is even better. But the the reason SEO exists and just stop me if I'm off base here is because everybody wants it.

Tom O'Malley 00:15:45  It's it's a competitive game. So it actually puts Google in a tough position where they have to pick and choose who's the most.

Nicole Arzt 00:15:53  The most authoritative, the most.

Tom O'Malley 00:15:55  The most authoritative.

Nicole Arzt 00:15:57  And that's a hard one because I don't know about you, Tom, but we've all looked up something and read the first couple articles and been like, I'm not so sure if this feels a little questionable, and you can almost tell was this written by a person? Was this written by AI? I know, I know, nowadays that's that's how a lot of content feels. and we all know misinformation is real, right? That's a whole thing that transcends the therapy sphere. but yes, Google is constantly updating its algorithms and constantly trying to. Google's a product at the end of the day, so it wants people to click on content that they believe is the most user friendly and the most informative, and so they will essentially reward the best ranking content to show up first.

Tom O'Malley 00:16:45  And for anyone listening who might not understand algorithms again, Nicole, correct me if I'm wrong here.

Tom O'Malley 00:16:52  This is like the mathematical equation on the back end of Google that is making all the decisions on what results you see when you search anything.

Nicole Arzt 00:17:00  Correct. And what's hard with algorithms is we never fully know how they work. to my knowledge, Google does not fully disclose. They will sometimes create public statements indicating, what practices they prefer, and they'll certainly indicate what's prohibited. But anybody in the web or SEO space knows there's a lot of gray there. and so people are constantly trying to game the system. That's why I always say don't chase trends if you do know anything about SEO, if you read about, oh, just write the same keyword ten times. No, that doesn't work anymore. at the end of the day, what really matters is high quality, authentic content. Even if you know nothing about keywords or meta descriptions or any of that jargon, if you can write in a way that is attracting the right kind of people consistently over time, eventually, for the most part, you start to get some return on your investment.

Nicole Arzt 00:18:05  How much should be determined? Yes.

Tom O'Malley 00:18:09  yeah. That's on a case by case basis.

Nicole Arzt 00:18:12  Absolutely.

Tom O'Malley 00:18:13  The the algorithm, as you mentioned, it's kind of a moving target. They're always changing it. And frankly, it doesn't matter if they change it because they're secretive about it to begin with. So what are some kind of things that are never going to change about SEO? That will always be true. I. If I'm not mistaken, there was there was a major algorithm update, I think it was last March, and it wiped out the traffic of some major sites that rely on content. And, you know, I think I think the criticism was it gave all the traffic to Reddit. again, don't know how true any of that is. But you know, it's a scary thought that, if you're relying on organic traffic from Google and it can be taken away in an instant. So if we're not chasing trends or doing the hottest new tip or trick to to rise in the ranks of Google, what are the things that are never going to change in terms of our best practices?

Nicole Arzt 00:19:14  I don't know if you're gonna like my answer, Tom.

Nicole Arzt 00:19:16  It reminds me of something I wrote in my most recent book. I've written I've written two books for therapists, and my answer is I don't. I can't say in good faith that we can trust that anything will stay static forever. technology evolves rapidly. It's very hard in good faith to say, oh, this, this one way of doing it will never change. I want to say. Word of mouth will never change. But that has nothing to do with SEO, right? as it stands now, I'm pretty confident having a good website will never change. an online presence of some sort, whether they're how websites look today or something dramatically different. I don't think we're moving away from people going on their phone or their laptop. Although younger generations increasingly with their phone to look something up. I don't think that's changing anytime soon. So whether it's looking for a therapist, looking for a psychiatrist, looking for some support group, I'm talking about different things in the mental health space. It's pretty common. They're going to search it in some way.

Nicole Arzt 00:20:22  Now search engines being one way again. AI has disrupted the space a bit. We have now a lot of therapist directories. People use those. so we kind of have to be mindful of all of these. And I think as people. And this is something I talk about, you know, my therapy practice. We want to be flexible. We want to. We don't want to get super overwhelmed and bogged down by all the details, because that will send anyone into a frenzy. but we don't want to be so rigid with one method, assuming that's the only way something works. Because as you were just mentioning with that algorithm update, life has a way of just turning it all inside out unexpectedly, so we have to stay open and willing to pivot. So I know that answers your question in a more existential way, but that's what I truly do believe, and that's what I tell my writing clients as well.

Tom O'Malley 00:21:16  That makes sense. And that is mildly disheartening. So thanks for the warning on that one.

Nicole Arzt 00:21:22  Mildly disheartening, but there is some There's a lot of room for creativity. And, if we stay open to the therapeutic process and stay mindful of how are people reaching out for therapy, what is working, what is no longer working as much? Most people can naturally pivot. For example, it used to be really necessary to walk around with your business card everywhere. I've never had a business card for my therapy practice. I've never needed one, but the generations before me would probably be like, what do you mean? I don't need to walk around with my business card? It just shows how things have shifted.

Tom O'Malley 00:21:58  Yeah, I mean, business card requires actual human interaction, and that's extinct.

Nicole Arzt 00:22:04  I like to say I still believe a lot in the human interaction, but I'm not going to my local coffee shop trying to promote my practice, because I know most people are not going to find me that way. Some might, but the majority of people are probably going to find me through some virtual means.

Tom O'Malley 00:22:21  That's really true of most industries. I mean, people are doing their homework online, whether it's a restaurant reservation or seeking mental health help. It's it's it doesn't matter. They're beginning that kind of discovery process online. And that's where the most wealth of information is.

Nicole Arzt 00:22:40  Absolutely. And research shows that and anecdotally I can speak to that. I know when I'm researching something almost always I'm going online, I'm googling, I'm looking up different reviews, browsing my options. and that's where I do know SEO matters, because I'm looking at what those top websites are saying about that service, about that product. I'm not going to page 300 in Google. so I and I'm sure you're on the same page with me whenever you're looking at something as well.

Tom O'Malley 00:23:12  Yeah. You mentioned we talked about the snake oil salesman a bit, and there's a lot of misinformation out there about SEO because, again, because Google's secretive, It's kind of left us to speculate, What would you say is one big myth about SEO that therapists should let go of?

Nicole Arzt 00:23:34  I love this question.

Nicole Arzt 00:23:35  The biggest myth is that, okay, if you come to mind, I think people hear this idea of keywords and they somehow think they need to like plug in every possible keyword on one page, often like a service page, or the homepage. And it just sounds so impersonal, which is the actual biggest juxtaposition of what we therapists want to offer in our work. We want to come across as genuine and authentic and and we don't want to be. I am Nicole artist, Orange County trauma focused therapist who, you know, you just start sounding like a bot. Yeah. and that that stuff matters. You know, and and you want to learn how to embed those in the headers, the footer, different parts of the text. But, I think we've all well, if we haven't all if you start looking it up, if you, you can find these therapist websites where it just feels clunky, like they didn't write the text for the client, they wrote it for Google. and it starts sounding really, really obvious.

Nicole Arzt 00:24:38  And the way you can tell is they just kind of stuff in all these keywords, and it doesn't feel like it's connecting to anybody. And that's what good copy does. And I always tell people I'm therapist first, writer second, SEO third, which is different than how a lot of SEOs work. A lot of SEOs are SEO first, right, or second, and that's it. They don't even work in the industry. So I think that often feels pretty obvious because they're focusing so much on hitting these, you know, like SEO trends, these keywords, these word counts, these number of headers. And it often just feels sterile. It feels clunky. It doesn't sound like you. So when you get on the phone with a potential client, they don't really even know who they're talking to. I always tell people when they land on your website, it should feel like you are jumping off the page, like they are having a cup of coffee with the virtual you. When you when you reach out for that first touch point via email or phone call.

Nicole Arzt 00:25:38  There's already this felt sense of who you are because they can read it on your website or on your social media. They have a feeling of who you are. and that's grounding for everyone, especially a client who might be feeling a little anxious or insecure when reaching out for as vulnerable of a service as therapy can be. I know that's kind of a long winded answer, but it's very holistic in that sense. So what do we want to do when we avoid SEO? We want to avoid chasing trends, and we want to avoid losing our humanity for the sake of content.

Tom O'Malley 00:26:09  That was poetic. We are. We are totally aligned on that.

Nicole Arzt 00:26:13  Poetry too.

Tom O'Malley 00:26:17  yeah, I mean, we we could not be more on the same page there.

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Tom O'Malley 00:27:35  Earlier in this podcast series, actually, we had a enlightening conversation about the story brand framework. You know, Hero's journey, be the guide, all that. So let me ask you. When writing copy, how do you balance being human and engaging while still hitting important keywords? Because they have to be somewhere.

Nicole Arzt 00:27:57  Okay. I can tell you from my one time fee of $99 in my upcoming course. I'm just kidding. I do run a therapist meme page also on the side. So I have a I have a sense of therapist humor that that always comes in, but.

Tom O'Malley 00:28:12  we'll drop a link in the show notes for sure.

Nicole Arzt 00:28:16  it's actually very, parallel to the process that many that the audience can relate to, the audience being therapists. We all know we've all heard that phrase, you know, therapy is not an art or a therapy is not a science. It's an art. but I really like this idea. and it was something I was referencing in my most recent book that a lot of experts wouldn't consider it an art or a science. It's a craft, right? So it's applied skill that that we eventually develop an artistic flair for. And I think we can say the same for, for writing content for SEO. So what does that mean? in layman's terms is that you want to create content again, that feels like you, that sounds like you, that appeals to the types of clients you want to work with, and you want to have some basic SEO guidelines in mind.

Nicole Arzt 00:29:06  So there are a ton of different SEO tools, keyword research tools. I'm not going to get into all the recommendations and weeds of which ones to use are not used. those are those are very searchable. They're very doable where you can kind of just look at like best practices. It doesn't mean you need to follow all of them, but even just kind of committing to 3 or 5 of those best practices, whether it's, you know, using a certain amount of headers and a certain amount of text underneath. Being mindful of local SEO terms, being mindful of writing for the client, not writing for yourself. People probably don't want a long winded story of your background, but they want to feel like you're writing content. Oh, that's useful to me as the reader, as the potential client. You're writing content that is captivating to me, and you're trying to predict. You're trying to predict. What would someone type into Google? You know, what kinds of questions are they asking a search engine? What kinds of topics are trending? That's where good keyword research comes into play.

Nicole Arzt 00:30:08  and like anything else, it takes practice and it takes being able to measure. And so that's where you want to go into the back end of your website and look at your traffic. Okay. Which posts which content is getting hits? Okay. If I'm cross posting it on socials, are certain ones getting shared more than others and being able to track metrics over time, just like we do in any other skill we're trying to build, gives us that room to then reassess and pivot if needed. Okay, maybe the strategy's not working. And I always tell people SEO is absolutely something you can do yourself. You don't need to outsource it. You can start doing some of it on your own. But if you feel like you're spending so much time, so much money and it's just stressing you out, it could be something worth semi outsourcing or fully outsourcing again, just for 3 to 6 months to see. Okay, is this making a difference for my practice? Is this something that might be worth the investment because it's actually making me more money or saving me more time, both of which can have tremendous benefit to your work life balance?

Tom O'Malley 00:31:11  Yeah, I'd say in my experience, even if a therapist woke up one day and said, you know what, SEO is my thing this month I'm going all in and they're going to DIY it.

Tom O'Malley 00:31:21  And they do all the research and all the homework. They're super excited. And then it gets to like the in the weeds technical stuff, like as you mentioned, keyword research. And they're just like, I'm out. Just because that is so intimidating to the average person. I mean, myself included, I really think that if you want a free keyword research tool, listen to your clients. I mean, what questions are they asking you?

Nicole Arzt 00:31:47  I, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I literally talk about this a lot. I mean, what are your clients, you know, coming in with? What are the presenting concerns you hear during your consult calls?

Tom O'Malley 00:31:59  and how do they phrase it.

Nicole Arzt 00:32:01  And how do they phrase it? Absolutely. and that's where another big you know, earlier we were talking about mistakes that therapists make, jargon. You know, I, I can't emphasize enough. Most clients don't want to be saddled down by clinical jargon. You do sound smart. You do sound like you have your degrees and credentials, but you absolutely risk alienating yourself from the average person who just wants to read content, just wants to look at a website and be like, hey, can you help me? Are you the right person to understand what I'm going through?

Tom O'Malley 00:32:38  Yeah, that's that's a big one.

Tom O'Malley 00:32:40  And I get it. Sometimes it can be hard to turn that off because therapists are so well trained and they've been living and breathing this stuff for sometimes decades. So I get it. one of my selling points to to my web design clients is that, let a normie write your website. You know, I don't know any of this stuff, so, you know, let me talk like, like the rest of us talk on your website, and I, you know, I think that it just lands better, as you said.

Nicole Arzt 00:33:05  That. I could not agree more.

Tom O'Malley 00:33:09  You did mention local SEO which is kind of its own animal. Altogether. Yeah. Can you explain to us why is it that every time SEO comes up the Google business profile is part of the conversation.

Nicole Arzt 00:33:28  Yeah. So it's because Google essentially rewards you if you have pretty much, you know, established and validated your business. So now where this runs into some difficulties is obviously since the pandemic there's an increasing trend of clinicians who only provide virtual services.

Nicole Arzt 00:33:51  So it can be harder to claim that Google Business Profile because you do need a physical address. But it's just one more way that establishes authority through Google benefits SEO. But like anything else. If you don't have one, it's probably not going to destroy your business. again, we're all about grabbing different things that may or may not work to help you. I know plenty of successful therapists who don't have a good Google business profile. but it's certainly not something that's going to harm you either.

Tom O'Malley 00:34:24  One thing that I run into a lot in my work is when a therapist has licenses in multiple states, and even even worse, if those states are nowhere near each other geographically. Like pretty random. Yeah, throwing throwing darts at a map, so to speak. How do we reconcile that in in the lens of local search engine optimization?

Nicole Arzt 00:34:50  Such a good question. And to be honest, I have not fully mastered it myself. I don't I don't know anyone who has.

Tom O'Malley 00:34:57  Let me know if you do.

Nicole Arzt 00:34:59  Totally.

Nicole Arzt 00:35:00  Because you and I can retire, right?

Tom O'Malley 00:35:03  That'll be our ticket.

Nicole Arzt 00:35:04  Sell? Yes. We'll sell our course and be done. What I think, though, and something I have found to be helpful for some of my clients, is typically we will focus on one. The one that feels most important and just slightly lean a little bit more into that area. Well, not necessarily.

Tom O'Malley 00:35:23  8020 rule, so to speak.

Nicole Arzt 00:35:24  Yeah. Yeah, I love that you said that. Well, and I wouldn't even say it's a full 8020. It's probably more of a like a 6535. You want to focus kind of on a home base, so to speak. which is where you think you may be able to secure the most, amount of clients. And a lot of times people choose it based on, what location may have the most need, i.e. like fewer therapists, less saturation. so you target that area and then you also make it known that you provide services for these other service areas. And I think in some ways that's just there's some lag with Google and with the online space.

Nicole Arzt 00:36:02  Keeping up with the fact that so many businesses nowadays are just fully virtual and people are providing services in different locations that, you're right, like are nowhere near each other. And so in some ways, well, it's both it's a benefit and a detriment to therapists because you have wider reach to more clients, but it can be harder to actually narrow your focus and really, kind of like key in on your area. Some people do create multiple directory profiles. I know some have even created multiple websites, you know, and some of these have to do with budget constraints and with time constraints. It's a lot of extra legwork. But yeah, going full circle, it tends to be focusing on one area versus home base and then having kind of your satellite branches in the other other locations as well.

Tom O'Malley 00:36:54  Yeah. Yeah.

Nicole Arzt 00:36:56  I mean, you found a better method, but that's.

Tom O'Malley 00:36:57  What I'm.

Nicole Arzt 00:36:58  Not. Yeah.

Speaker 4 00:36:59  That's what.

Tom O'Malley 00:37:01  I mean. We're. We're playing with everything. a landing page for each each state.

Tom O'Malley 00:37:06  But, I mean, again, it's. We don't want to confuse Google further. Right. sometimes where we land with the client and AI is they they come to the realization they need to go all in. You know, the riches are in the niches. Well, that's geographically true as well. they need to go all in on, as you said, the 65% location and the rest, you know, we can talk about them, but we don't want to confuse Google. And, you know, it's good to have them there for physician referrals and colleague referrals and things like that. But we're not going to go crazy on the website about it. And that's just it's that's the necessity right now because there isn't a better answer.

Nicole Arzt 00:37:45  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because if you want to stand out for a local SEO, you just have to be able to, essentially commit to a local area or you are going to lose out to those therapists, to those clinicians who are really rooted in one area because they're investing 100% of their efforts into their their targeted area.

Tom O'Malley 00:38:07  Yeah. And I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I am pretty confident that the number of searches that end in near me are astronomical of people just like local. I mean, I'm a web designer, but you'd be surprised how many clients prefer a web designer near them. We're never going to meet in person. I could have been in Alaska. It's just that comfort. That geographic comfort sometimes.

Nicole Arzt 00:38:33  Yes. I appreciate you bringing that up. I work with clients all around the world, but I do get quite a few from California. and that could actually be that exact same reason. there is something comforting about someone right there. Your time zone knows your demographic. Maybe. I would imagine that's actually more of why people probably reach out to me who are local, because I. I know the market as a therapist myself, not just from the SEO back end.

Tom O'Malley 00:39:02  I want to touch on blogging a bit because it's my belief that your website is your website. It's relatively static, but your blog offers this kind of limitless ability to expand your message and and bring in traffic that way without cluttering up, you know, the main pages of your website.

Tom O'Malley 00:39:25  So I want to talk about how Google, when you Google something now Google AI answers it for you. So if you were to have a question, you could easily get an answer there without visiting an actual website. How is this impacting therapy blogs?

Nicole Arzt 00:39:44  It's a really good question. And because this Google AI is so new, it's really hard to know the full extent of this change, this disruption. And I'm using the term disruption very neutrally. I'm not one to put moral judgment, whether it's good or bad. It just is. I'm very curious, like you, to see kind of how it unfolds six months, a year or two years. you know, everything goes full circle, though I can certainly see us reaching another point where we're like, no, I want to just go back to grassroots content. I don't want it to be sounded like it's written by I, I want to I want to feel a human voice. the same way I noticed this. A lot of therapists went fully virtual after Covid, and now what a lot of therapists are seeing are more and more demand for in-person services.

Nicole Arzt 00:40:30  People are tired of, doing everything online. They're they're missing human connection. They're craving, you know, that kind of regulation that's achieved in therapy. So I wouldn't be surprised if we get like, an AI fatigue going on in the next 2 to 5 years. That could happen.

Speaker 4 00:40:47  But even if they already have it.

Nicole Arzt 00:40:49  So do I. And I'm someone who has used it for different things because it's interesting and it can be absolutely harnessed as a great tool to augment other things. But the fatigue is is cumulative, and I do believe it's going to have some short term and long term effects on all of us. But as I'm sure you can relate to, you've googled something, you've read the AI description and you're like, okay, that's cool, but but you still scroll down, right? A lot of the time, unless you're looking for a very quick answer, a lot of times you're going to still scroll down and you're going to see potentially an article that piques your interest and you're going to click on it and you're going to read it.

Nicole Arzt 00:41:25  And if it's a good article, you're going, Who's this author? Okay, this person seems to know their stuff. You might not do anything past that point, but in some cases you will. In some cases, that's a touchpoint. You're going to remember that content. You're going to think, okay, that was intriguing. You know, I kind of want to take the next step. What's really nice with blogs, too, is how shareable they can be. So if you're invested in consistent blog posting. What I always tell my clients is ideally you want to be connecting this with with social media, whether that's LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, wherever you are. Because you can cross post, you can speak more on that and then you're linking people to your website. so it's not just about the the blog ranking on Google. It's about how you can share that. So people are just interacting with your content across different platforms.

Tom O'Malley 00:42:24  I totally agree, you can get so much mileage out of a good blog post.

Tom O'Malley 00:42:27  It doesn't just begin and end on your website.

Nicole Arzt 00:42:30  No, no. You can get really good mileage. quality over quantity. although quantity does help, I always tell people that. But high quality content where you can kind of feel the passion and the authenticity. I don't believe that can be overstated.

Speaker 4 00:42:51  I agree.

Tom O'Malley 00:42:52  Hopefully that never goes out of style.

Nicole Arzt 00:42:54  I hope not. If not, I'm always like, we have bigger problems in this world than or therapy can really capture, right?

Tom O'Malley 00:43:03  We've we've touched on quite a few elements on the website that we can potentially spruce up on our own site, or maybe seek outside help to improve our ranking. However, there's a whole other side to this, and these are the factors beyond our control. I believe they're called the off site factors, backlinks, etc.. Sometimes that's the bad news I have to deliver to my clients is, all that beautiful, SEO friendly content we just wrote. We're kind of at the mercy of Google's other half now. And I don't know if you can weigh in on that at all.

Tom O'Malley 00:43:43  It's it kind of feels hopeless when there is something that's beyond our control that you can't even throw money at to fix when it comes to SEO, especially backlinks. Because for anyone listening who may not be aware of backlinks are huge because they're a vote of confidence for your website. That's how Google determines how important you are. And Google wants to deliver the most important websites first, the most likely to appease the people who are searching. So the more backlinks you have, like CNN.com, probably has millions of backlinks. But Tom's backyard news source.com has zero backlinks. So if you were to search on why eggs are expensive, do you think I'm going to come up before CNN? Probably not. So that's why backlinks are important. That's how backlinks are used. But everyone's scratching their head. How do you get backlinks?

Nicole Arzt 00:44:37  Don't pay for them. Number one and no matter what someone promises, you do not pay for a backlink. And number two, as many therapists know, We try to focus on what we can control because there's so much we can't control in our client's lives, in our work.

Nicole Arzt 00:44:53  So we're masters in some ways of knowing that. And the same can be said for SEO. I don't really believe in chasing backlinks, and I am someone who has a very strong backlink strategy, and I've done a lot of work with companies like help a reporter out Haro for short. That is actually a resource that I tend to recommend because what it does is it if you're familiar, Tom, it kind of connects journalists with experts, including therapists. You can sign up for our newsletter. You can respond to queries sometimes get some backlinks that way. But it is it's really hard for just like an individual clinician to chase backlinks because you're right. Like, why is CNN going to quote you there? Probably not. So it is one of those things sometimes we just have to we can't master all things with SEO unless you want to make it your full time job, or invest thousands and thousands of dollars into it for something that's not guaranteed to even secure more referrals. So while off site SEO does matter.

Nicole Arzt 00:45:53  What I always tell people is focus the most on what you know you can control right now, which is like optimizing your website, making sure your technicals are good, which is like solid site speed, mobile friendly. The website's intuitive, your content is clean, easy to read, putting your online presence on various directories because sometimes you can get a backlink through that, right? Just signing up to be on directories. A lot of times I'll let you link your website on there. and kind of letting the rest settle. I have never found it that effective to be chasing all this off site kind of popularity contest. It's just a lot of work. And what I see is people burn out in trying to do that. And maybe you can, you know, chime in on on your experiences with that. But it's hard to keep up with the big players, especially if you're a one person show.

Tom O'Malley 00:46:44  Yeah, I agree on all fronts. And and by the way, I totally am on board with the help of reporter out path.

Tom O'Malley 00:46:51  Especially as a therapist, you're kind of primed to be an expert as a subject matter expert for for any number of articles you would, you could easily get a lot of activity and a lot of backlinks to your site and just generally raise your authority profile in general. I mean, imagine being able to put major publication logos on your website to kind of, yeah. So let's say a lot of, a lot of our listeners today, they're, they're DIY on their website. They're maybe using Wix or Squarespace or who knows what. they, they have limited, limited expertise when it comes to web design, web maintenance. But, you know, they on a shoestring budget, but they want to make some moves in terms of SEO, what are some easy, quick win items they could take care of on their own website today.

Nicole Arzt 00:47:44  Yeah. Great question. more likely than not, focusing on more content that's higher quality is a good thing. I can't emphasize enough having 2 or 300 words on your homepage saying that you treat anxiety and depression and that you are, you know, here to help someone on their healing journey.

Nicole Arzt 00:48:04  That doesn't that doesn't say anything, to be honest. It doesn't say anything at all. So getting a lot more specific, a lot of times when I do onboarding with new clients, I'm sending them a very thorough questionnaire. And this is something I recommend anyone does internally, whether you hire someone or not, really get quiet and reflect on who are my ideal clients. What have they tried in the past? What are they looking for in a therapist? What other services are they using? What are their pain points? Why me? Why? How can I help them? What do I bring that's new to the table or different to the table? Why are we going to be a good match? You want to really know those answers because they're going to shape the way you create your website. Again, you want that for that right kind of client finding you and feeling really aligned with you. That's part of the attunement work. and attunement is a big topic I talk about in my therapy practice, but it connects with writing as well.

Nicole Arzt 00:49:07  And so a lot of people get worried because they're like, oh, if I, if I niche down too much, I'm going to alienate too many clients. And it's actually tends to be the opposite. But by narrowing your efforts, you're so much more likely to have better retention because the right clients are finding you, they're staying with you, you're doing less referring out. You're having less, retention issues. There's the alignment, like I said. And so going in to every page on your website and saying, does this speak to that person? Does that, can that person really feel me on the page. Do I know the right person that I want? Reading this? And if not, there may need to be some revisions. nowadays, directories are very popular, as I talked about, and so I always recommend, no matter how good your website is, you should probably be on some of those directories. And they should hinge on what your website has. Everything should feel consistent. Who you are should be consistent across all channels because it's very jarring if you're, you know, writing one way for one type of person, let's say on Psychology Today and your website feels totally different.

Nicole Arzt 00:50:13  People are gonna be like, well, which one are you? Which version of you am I going to be getting, you know, and then go in and look up some information about SEO best practices. There's so many good free resources, page resources too, but you don't have to spend money on them and look through some of those awesome cornerstone long blog posts and just sink into those and say, okay, how's my is my website integrating any of those things. Do I need to, you know, consider breaking up some of my text. Maybe I have 2000 words with no headers. yes, that's probably going to be a problem. or my my website looks really clunky, really slow. When when I'm on mobile that could be a problem. So you kind of want to do just a holistic audit again of thinking of are the right clients going to find this page? And if they do, are they going to resonate with what I'm writing? and you don't have to do it all. You don't have to do everything.

Nicole Arzt 00:51:08  You have to do it perfectly. You just got to start with something.

Tom O'Malley 00:51:11  And that's you could have all the organic traffic in the world coming to your website, but if it's not the right people and if they're not seeing the right message when they land on your website, it might as well be zero visitors.

Nicole Arzt 00:51:24  Absolutely, absolutely. And, my therapist spiel is you also have to be a good therapist. That one matters to.

Speaker 4 00:51:33  You have to be.

Nicole Arzt 00:51:34  You know, Confident and skilled and connected to what you do because you can have the best website in the world. But if people are calling you and you're. But that's a whole other conversation. But we want to be prioritizing both simultaneously.

Tom O'Malley 00:51:51  Yes, let's do that. Nicole, this flew by. I feel like we could we could do a three episode arc just on SEO. We, like randomly scratch the surface here and there. There's so much left to uncover. we might have to do a sequel, but for for today. Let's let's let you go.

Tom O'Malley 00:52:10  it's it's dinner time. They're in in beautiful California. Where can people go to learn more about you and solo therapy?

Nicole Arzt 00:52:18  Absolutely. My writing services can be found on solo therapy. my therapy practice, books, clinical offerings, memes, all that fun stuff is on my Nicole artist.com website. and those are my main resources.

Tom O'Malley 00:52:36  And thank you for pronouncing your last name for us.

Nicole Arzt 00:52:39  All good. I. Hard to spell. Hard to say.

Tom O'Malley 00:52:42  I know this has been a master class. I can't thank you enough. Have a great night.

Nicole Arzt 00:52:48  Thank you. Tom. Take care.

Tom O'Malley 00:52:50  As the sun sets on this episode. Therapy marketing summer camp comes to an end. I truly hope you found a lot of value and perhaps some inspiration in these last three episodes. Whether it's your message, your website, or how clients find you, your online presence matters. If this series sparked new ideas for your practice, visit session sites to explore what's possible. Let's build a practice that's not just powerful in session, but powerful online too.

Joe Sanok 00:53:31  Tom, thank you so much for doing this series. It has been amazing. If you want to check out session sites, they're an amazing website company. Over at session sites you can get started today. Also, we couldn't do the show without our sponsor. Our sponsor today is Therapy Notes. Head on over to Therapy Notes to get the best EHR out there with HIPAA compliant video. It's going to make so much easier to build insurance and to work with your biller and to just know exactly what's going on in your practice. Use promo code Joe at checkout to get some extra months for free. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. I'll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band. Silence is sexy for that intro music, and this podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers or guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information.

Joe Sanok 00:54:26  If you want a professional, you should find one.