Website and SEO Essentials with Austin Kirkland from Brighter Vision | GP 85

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Image of Austin Kirkland. On this therapist podcast, Austin Kirkland talks about website and SEO essentials.

Are you interested in marketing your practice in multiple states? What are some website essentials that can significantly boost your SEO ranking? Why should you have separate pages within your website?

In this podcast episode, Alison Pidgeon talks with Austin Kirkland from Brighter Vision about Website and SEO Essentials.

Podcast Sponsor: Brighter Vision

An image of Brighter Vision Web Solutions is featured as the sponsor on The Practice of the Practice Podcast, a therapist podcast. Brighter Vision builds all in one websites for therapists.

How would you like to fall into cash this month? Every year, my friends over at Brighter Vision kick off the fall season with a month-long digital conference event they call ‘Fall Into Cash’.

For the entire month of September, they’ll be teaming up with the top brands, consultants, and coaches in the mental health industry to provide you with the best advice, tools, content, podcasts, and giveaways; all centered around one main theme – helping you grow your practice and make more money.

Plus, in celebration of the 5th anniversary of ‘Fall Into Cash’, they’re also offering a very special discount exclusively for Practice of the Practice listeners. From now until the end of the month, they’re offering new websites for only $49/month for your whole first year plus no setup fees – that’s a savings of over $200!

For more information and to take advantage of this great offer, head on over to brightervision.com/joe.

Meet Austin Kirkland

A photo of Austin Kirkland is captured. Austin Kirkland is a Senior Account Executive with Brighter Vision. Austin is featured on the Grow A Group Practice Podcast. He speaks with Alison Pidgeon Vision about Website and SEO Essentials.

Austin Kirkland is a Senior Account Executive with Brighter Vision and has been on the team for 4 years. He primarily consults with prospective clients to learn about their business goals, goes over the services Brighter Vision offers, and covers how Brighter Vision can help potentially grow their practice.

Austin is offering listeners $250 off any Brighter Vision package.

To find out more, email him at [email protected]. Phone him at (303) 223-9809 or alternatively 720-660-2890.

Check out Brighter Vision’s free SEO Playbook and visit the Brighter Vision website.

In This Podcast

  • Professional tips for your group practice website
  • How to build up your SEO ranking
  • How to market in multiple states with one website

Professional tips for your group practice website

Have separate bio pages for each clinician

Having each clinician on your practice be on their page on the practice website is good for multiple reasons:

  • A prospective client can read through each clinician’s bio and decide which clinician is the best fit for them.
  • From a marketing standpoint, having each clinician on their page means that you can market them separately and boost their client conversion.
  • Marketing each clinician on a separate page is also a great way to boost your SEO.

It’s important to make sure that when you have a client actually visiting the website, you want to do everything that you can to make sure they’re going to reach out to you. (Austin Kirkland)

Divide up your website

Instead of having a handful of pages with lots of information, spread your information out across your website and divide it up by dedicating a page to a different topic.

Most importantly [with] having those specialty pages is that it does help with search engine optimization because when a prospective client goes into Google … it is just another avenue to help draw clients to the website, and once they’re there, contact pages will help them … to reach out to you. (Austin Kirkland)

Consider having separate pages for:

  • Each clinician that works in the practice
  • The different services that the practice provides
  • Contact information
  • Landing pages for resources
  • Frequently asked questions

 Give your practice a name

Starting your private practice off under your name is a great way to start because it literally puts your name out there into the counseling world.
Once your practice starts to grow and you hire other clinicians, professionals recommend giving the practice its name to make it stand apart from you. Have a page on the practice website that is dedicated to you and your services as the practice owner.

How to build up your SEO ranking

Open a Google My Business account

This is especially helpful for in-person counseling practices because it will place your practice within Google Maps.

If you have multiple locations, this can further boost your SEO ranking because you can create separate Google My Business accounts for each location.

You can keep the main website for your practice and have different pages for each location if you have more than one physical practice space, as this will help to boost your SEO ranking

How to market in multiple states with one website

Virtual therapy has become the new staple in counseling after the pandemic, and with this change came a shift in marketing strategies as well.

  • Find an address within a certain city that you want to market to.
  • Focus on medium-sized cities.
  • Have separate pages within the website categorized by state, and market for the state through that specific page, which directs any foot traffic from that state to its dedicated landing page.
  • You can have a website per state, but it might be more costly.

From a search engine optimization standpoint that’s not good either because you don’t want to have the same content on multiple pages, so mixing it up a bit is definitely recommended. I understand it does take a little bit of extra time, but we can certainly help aid some of that. (Austin Kirkland)

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Alison Pidgeon, Group Practice Owner

An image of Alison Pidgeon is displayed. She is a successful group practice owner and offers private practice consultation for private practice owners to assist in how to grow a group practice. She is the host of Grow A Group Practice Podcast and one of the founders of Group Practice Boss.Alison Pidgeon, LPC is the owner of Move Forward Counseling, a group practice in Lancaster, PA and she runs a virtual assistant company, Move Forward Virtual Assistants.

Alison has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016.  She has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses, through mastermind groups and individual consulting.

Transformation From A Private Practice To Group Practice

In addition, she is a private practice consultant for Practice of the Practice. Allison’s private practice ‘grew up.’ What started out as a solo private practice in early 2015 quickly grew into a group practice and has been expanding ever since.

Visit Alison’s website, listen to her podcast, or consult with Alison. Email Alison at [email protected]

Thanks For Listening!

Feel free to leave a comment below or share this podcast on social media by clicking on one of the social media links below! Alternatively, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe!

Podcast Transcription

[ALISON PIDGEON]
You are listening to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. Whether you were thinking about starting a group practice or in the beginning stages, or want to learn how to scale up your already existing group practice, you are in the right place. I’m Alison Pidgeon, your host, a serial entrepreneur with four businesses, one of which is a large group practice that I started in 2015. Each week, I feature a guest or topic that is relevant to group practice owners. Let’s get started.

Hello, I’m Alison Pidgeon your host. I’m so glad you decided to join me today. If you have website questions, if you feel like your website is lacking and really needs to be overhauled, this is definitely a great interview for you to listen to. I am talking to Austin Kirkland today. He is a senior account executive with a company called Brighter Vision. Brighter Vision helps therapists specifically to make great websites that convert clients and his main job is to consult with prospective clients, learn about their business goals and help explain how Brighter Vision can help them potentially grow their practice. So I’ve actually been a Brighter Vision customer for the past five years and have been very pleased with the service that I have received.

Austin and I talk about trends that are happening with digital marketing in terms of the pandemic, how that changed marketing, how things have changed with marketing in terms of being able to reach more people because of telehealth. He also talks about tips for people that have group practices and how to really optimize their group practice websites, as opposed to an individual solo provider website. So there’s definitely a lot of great content here, and I am excited to share with you my interview with Austin Kirkland.
[ALISON]
Hi, Austin. Welcome to the podcast.
[AUSTIN KIRKLAND]
Hi, thank you so much. I appreciate you letting me on here.
[ALISON]
I think a good place to start would be just for you to give us an introduction of yourself and what you do at Brighter Vision.
[AUSTIN]
Yes, absolutely. So my name’s Austin Kirkland. I’m one of our senior customer happiness specialists here. I’ve been a part of Brighter Vision for the better part of four years now. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while. So what I do specifically is I work with prospective clients who are looking to gather more information about our services. So I go over the benefits of having a website, having a proper marketing plan of action in place, and I just see if we’re a good fit for them and get them started and help them ensure that their practice is going to get started on the right foot.
[ALISON]
So for anybody who’s not familiar with Brighter Vision, it is a specific website company for therapists and they do a subscription model, so you pay a fee every month, and then you get unlimited tech support and they can also make your website for you. So I just wanted to mention that in case people aren’t familiar and I also wanted to mention too, I’ve had a Brighter Vision website for, I think it’s almost now five years for my own practice. I really appreciate the ongoing tech support because that’s not my strong suit. So I really appreciate being able to just email and say, “Hey, can you fix this thing? Can we add a page here?” So anything else that you would add about Brighter Vision in general?
[AUSTIN]
Yes, I think you really hit the nail on the head as far as the time, it takes sometimes not just to build the website initially, but the management of it once it’s live. I would say just about every single person I talk to classifies themselves as not being the most technical savvy or not having the time to do the website. That’s the beautiful part about our service. We handle all of that stuff for our clients and we only work with folks in the mental health field. So that really is our specialty and we have thousands of clients. So we really are experts in working with our clients to custom build a website that’s unique to their practice and their clients, but then also being able to market to their ideal clients, that way that they’re working with the type of people that they want to work with.
[ALISON]
I think having that specialization is so important because I find that our field, you know just things that are different about it compared to other types of industries. So I think it’s great that you specialize in that area. I was hoping you could share with us some tips for group practice owners in terms of how they have their website set up. So whether or not they’re using Brighter Vision or have another service, what are just some kind of best practices around how a website specifically for a group practice should look?
[AUSTIN]
Yes, so there’s a number of different ways you can build a group practice website, but I think there are important factors. So you want to make sure you absolutely include within that website. The main one being having separate pages, bio pages for each one of the clinicians. This is good for multiple reasons. The primary one is the prospective clients can go through and read each person’s bio and figure out which clinician is going to be the best fit for them. But from a marketing standpoint, we can actually go in to each one of those individual clinicians pages and say, if they had like different specialties, we want to make sure we’re marketing for each individual condition. That way we can drive in the new patients for that person specifically.

So it’ll really help the practice grow for each individual person. Additionally, it’s also very important to have contact pages within the website. This is vital, I would say, and I think each clinician under their bio page should have their own, if it’s necessary or you can have one central one. But it’s important to make sure that when you have a client actually visiting the website, you want to do everything that you can to make sure that they’re going to reach out to you because it’s hard enough to get people to view that website. So when they’re there, you want to do everything you can to make sure that they’re brought in to that practice. So marketing through search engine optimization via individual pages is a great way to get those people in. Then the contact pages in various calls to action within the website will really help keep those people coming back.
[ALISON]
Yes, it’s amazing to me, how many people have a website where the contact information is not obvious. I know that’s one great thing about the Brighter Vision website is it seems like every single website you make, it always has the contact information in the header and the footer and then there’s the separate contact page. It’s very obvious anywhere you go on the website the contact information is there. And I’ve seen a lot of websites that don’t do a very good job of that.
[AUSTIN]
Right. That always kind of blows my mind in a way, because like I was saying, I mean, it really is hard enough to get website visitors, so you don’t want to lose any of that traction. So having those contact pages really obvious and throughout the website is important because you want those people reaching out.
[ALISON]
Yes. And I’m glad that you mentioned about having the separate bio pages for each of the therapist. And I think essentially what you were alluding to is that helps with SEO or search engine optimization. And then I believe that having separate services pages is kind of the same concept as well. So you recommend that to like, if you have somebody who specializes in one thing you’d have a separate page for that and you have another therapist who maybe specializes in couples counseling, you have a separate page for that. You want to talk a little bit about that?
[AUSTIN]
So that is equally as important. I’ll speak from personal experience. When I was reaching out for a therapist for the first time ever, when I was going through that process, I just knew something was off personally with me. I just didn’t really know what that was. So for starters, having a services page is a good informational page for that prospective client. Because for me, I was reading through those services pages and kind of figuring out, oh, okay, that sounds like what I’m going through right now. This sounds like a good clinician that I should reach out to. For me it was anxiety. So it was like, “Oh, that’s what I’m feeling.” But most importantly having those specialty pages does help with a search engine optimization because when a prospective client goes into Google, you know, once I figured out what it was, I was searching, I was living in San Diego at the time. So I was searching anxiety therapist in San Diego. So that’s what I was searching for and then all these pages would come up and it would be therapists websites, but it was specific to that specialty page on their website. So it’s just another avenue to help draw in clients to that website and then once they’re there, the contact pages and all that will help them, implore them really to reach out to you.
[ALISON]
Great. Any other specific tips you have about group practice websites in particular?
[AUSTIN]
Yes, I think one of the common kind of, not necessarily mistakes, but things that you can do differently, so a lot of times what will happen is it’ll be a single clinician who grows into like a group practice situation. And a lot of times they have their website marketed as their name, which is totally fine to begin with, but if you grow into a group practice scenario, you want to make sure that you’re kind of separating yourself from that group practice specifically. So it’s good to have a general business name like “happycounselingservices.com” or something. And then within that, you can have your specific page, you can have other multiple clinicians pages. So I think it’s good for a client’s perspective to understand that there’s more than one option within that company.
[ALISON]
Yes, that’s something we recommend as well, because especially if you imagine one day selling the business, it’s harder to sell it when your name’s attached to it and you’re not going to be there anymore. One other thing I wanted to ask about ,too, was just with SEO, if there’s particular things that folks could do, even if they don’t necessarily know a whole lot about SEO, but just if they maybe want to start trying to build up their ranking in Google, are there some simple things that they can do?
[AUSTIN]
Yes, I would definitely recommend creating a Google My Business account. This is really helpful, especially if you’re doing in-person practice. It will really help because a lot of times when I’m placing a search, I will go to Google Maps and actually place my search in there and if you have a Google My Business account it’ll show up within the Google Maps. So if it’s like a location based search, that’s really helpful because it’ll help bring in those people that are around you into your specific in-person practice. So I highly recommend setting up an account with that. From my understanding, I believe that’s free.
[ALISON]
Yes, for sure. I think that’s one of those things that people don’t often think about that can be super helpful, that they don’t even bother just going on in claiming like their business name. I mean, it’s just putting in basic demographic information and basically claiming yes, this is my business and it does help quite a bit with people finding you on Google.
[AUSTIN]
Yes, and it’s especially helpful too if you have multiple locations. You can create separate Google My Business accounts for each individual location.
[ALISON]
Yes. I think that’s another thing, too, that I ran into along with some other clinicians that I work with. When you start to grow and start to open up additional locations, do you typically recommend that you start a whole new website for SEO purposes and just to help people find you better or do you recommend people just keep all in one website and just add the multiple locations or does it kind of depend on the circumstances?
[AUSTIN]
So we recommend keeping the singular website and adding multiple locations within that website. The reason being is you don’t really want to be fighting each website. So if you’re doing a really good job on search engine optimization with one site, and then you have a brand new website, which already will take a little bit of time to kind of get up the rankings, because part of Google’s algorithm is simply longevity, how long that website’s been live, but if both websites kind of get that longevity piece taken care of at that point, you don’t really want to be bidding against, if you will, each website. So it’s better to have one website with multiple addresses within that site because we can market its various locations within a single site.
[ALISON]
Okay, nice. So one thing I was really curious about is obviously when the pandemic started in early 2020, lots of things changed in our industry obviously with everything turning to telehealth, but then I think what came along with that is a change in how practices were marketing. I know in my own practice, we put a lot more time and energy into digital marketing because everybody was at home on the internet. So can you talk a little bit about kind of the shifts that you saw as a result of the pandemic with websites and marketing?
[AUSTIN]
Oh, big time. So prior to the pandemic, it was few and far in between people that I was speaking to that were either doing some sort of telehealth or solely telehealth. It was a very rare occurrence. Now it’s exactly the opposite. It’s a very rare occurrence that I hear about someone who’s going to be doing solely in-person. So with that being said, there’s going to be a lot more competition out there with websites, because there’s an understanding if you’re going to be fully telehealth, everything’s going to be digital. So therefore your websites now are going to be the face of your business. So there’s more and more therapists out there now getting their website. So as far as, you know, from a Google standpoint or just a general search engine optimization standpoint, you have a lot more competition out there.

So it’s even more vital now to have not only a website, but a well-built professional looking website with very good marketing, because you’re not going to be bidding against, when I say bidding, I mean, you’re kind of working against other clinicians in your area on Google. So you’ll be there, there’s a lot more competition out there now. So you really need to make sure everything is kind of up to date with your website and the search engine optimization side of things. It really is going to be a vital part of the business moving forward.
[ALISON]
Yes, and I think at the beginning of the pandemic, I realized, too, that before I had really focused our marketing on who was kind of within a half an hour driving distance of the office and then I realized, oh, well now we can market to the whole state. Obviously Pennsylvania is quite large and so I had never thought about, well, how do I market to somebody who might be in Pittsburgh, which is four hours away from us? So we had to start doing a lot of different things with SEO and using different keywords and things on our website. And I’m assuming you were getting a lot of those same requests from your clients as well, right?
[AUSTIN]
Yes. That’s a very good point you bring up there. Yes. So now your opportunity has expanded dramatically because instead of it’s, like you said, being within, say a half hour drive, which is probably what most people are comfortable in driving to an appointment now, but now we have a statewide deal. Because if you’re licensed in one state, you can serve anyone in that state. Then with that being said, we’ll have clients who are multi-state licensed so they want to market to multiple states, which we can do. Then there’s also the Saypac, which, there’s a group of states now where if you’re licensed in one you’re kind of licensed in all. You can practice within all those states. So we have some clinicians who are part of that SayPac, then we’re marketing to all those states as well. So you really have now kind of an open possibility with the types of clients you can bring in and the areas that you can market to, and we support all that.
[BRIGHTER VISION PROMO]
How would you like to fall into cash this month? Every year, my friends over at Brighter Vision kick off the fall season with a month long digital event they call Fall Into Cash. For the entire month of September, they’ll be teaming up with the top brands, consultants and coaches in the mental health industry to provide you with the best advice, tools, content, podcasts, and giveaways, all centered around one main theme, helping you grow your practice and make more money. Plus in celebrate of the fifth anniversary of Fall Into Cash, they’re also offering a very special discount exclusively for Practice of the Practice listeners. From now until the end of the month, they’re offering new websites for only $49 a month for your whole first year plus no setup fees. That’s a savings of over $200. For more information and to take it advantage of this great offer, head on over to brightervision.com/joe. That’s brighter vision.com/joe.
[ALISON]
Okay. I’m glad you run up Saypac and I’ll just quickly explain that if folks haven’t heard of that before, but essentially it’s like a collection of states got together and is offering reciprocity just for psychologists who are licensed. So I forget exactly the states that are in that packed, compact or whatever you want to call it. But that brings up a really interesting question, which is how do you market in multiple states on one website? What are the kind of strategies for that type of situation?
[AUSTIN]
So that can be pretty difficult. So the best way to do that is to find an address within those states, within like a certain city that you want to market to. Obviously, you probably want to hit either the medium populated cities, because if you’re in New York, it’s hard to market New York City, not just because, I mean, there’s just a lot of people there and there’s a lot of clinicians there and there’s a lot of competitions. So the more narrow you can get with the search, the better it is, but as far as how we do it within the website, we typically will have separate pages by website or city, by state and then we’ll mark it via that individual webpage. So that’s how we do it within a singular website.

Sometimes, though we are having clinicians pop up multiple sites for each individual state, which is a different strategy that you can do. That way you can actually really funnel in specific people to that state. You can get a little more people that way, but there is an extra cost associated to having multiple websites, of course, which can be a pain point for some people, which is understandable. But I think having each individual state with its own pages is kind of the best way to go all around.
[ALISON]
So is that literally looked like there’s a drop down menu that says locations and then there’s a page for Pennsylvania and there’s a page for Maryland, there’s a page for New Jersey or whatever?
[AUSTIN]
That’s exactly right. Yep, that’s exactly how it is. And from a website visitor perspective, I think it’s very obvious as to how they should flow through that, both from a marketing standpoint, it really does help separate everything and draw in those people for those specific states.
[ALISON]
So then do you have like the same content on each of those pages? Because if it’s like one provider who’s trying to advertise to multiple states, than, like no matter what state you click on, is it the same text or do you try to make the text different so it’s not —
[AUSTIN]
We definitely try to make the text different. For repetitive reason, they’re just browsing through the different states. You don’t want them to visually see the same text there, but from a search engine optimization standpoint, that’s not good either because you don’t want to have the same content on multiple pages. So mixing it up a bit is definitely recommended. I understand it does take a little bit of extra time, but we can certainly help aid with some of that. But yes, having different content across those various state pages would be the best way to go if you had the time for it, which I would recommend. It’s worth the extra hour it might take to write the content for those pages, but it’ll really help everything else.
[ALISON]
And what do you think about blogging? Is blogging changed at all since the pandemic started? Or is it kind of the same as it’s always been?
[AUSTIN]
I would say, it’s more important now maybe because I mean, blogging always has been important, but it’s extra vital now to do it because by blogging, you’re doing a couple of things simultaneously. Of course, you’re providing helpful information to the website visitor. They can read a nice article about various different topics that might interest them, but from a website marketing perspective, blogging, what you’re doing simply is updating your website on a regular basis. So if you’re able to blog just once a month, that’s going to do wonders for the search engine optimization, because another key factor with how a website will rank over time is simply how often it’s being updated. Blog is a great way to update that website and what you’re doing, what you’re telling Google is the information on your website is relevant because if you’re updating every single month Google says, “Hey, this is a brand new topic. We want to show this website first.” Because Google wants to provide helpful information to their end user, which is that person placing the search. So blogging really helps a ton. I understand it does take some time. We do have a great tool called Social Genie, which will kind of automatically do this for you in various topics, but either way, definitely try to get into the habit of blogging. It’ll really help the long-term SEO results.
[ALISON]
Yes, that’s actually something that we figured out in my practice. Once we got up to page one of Google, all we’ve had to do to maintain it is posting two blogs a month and we’ve been doing that for years and it’s awesome Yes, it helps and that’s pretty much all we have to do. So can you tell us a little bit more about the Social Genie tool? Because I know there’s a lot of our consulting clients, there’ll be practice owners that use it and I hear good things about it. So can you kind of explain it?
[AUSTIN]
Yes. So for starters, Social Genie is kind of my baby, if you will. I was actually the employee who named it Social Genie, which is pretty cool. We did like an internal poll. We threw out some names and mine is the one that won and my best friend is actually the software developer behind it. So it’s just some cool, interesting facts, but what it is specifically, is a social media marketing automation tool and automated blogging tool. So the best way to describe it, there’s two halves to it. The first half is, so it’s the social media side of things. So there’s a repository, it’s thousands of pre-created, therapist-specific social media posts and they’re all ready to go and they’re organized by specialty. So these campaigns, a campaign is a series of posts under one topic. It’d be like anxiety, depression, trauma, family therapy, et cetera.

So what a client can do is select one of these campaigns, let’s say anxiety, for example, and maybe they want to have an ongoing posts on anxiety going out every Mondays and Thursdays at 9:00 AM and want that to reoccur every week for the next year. So just click that, they set up the timing, they link up their social media accounts and it’ll automatically create these posts for them. The client would also have the ability to go into the calendar that we have and view the upcoming posts. So you can review them, you can edit them if you want to, you can sweep them all together if you don’t like them. But ultimately when those days and times come around, that post will shoot out to the social media accounts. So that’s the first task.

The other half is the blogging tool that I was talking about. So very similarly there’s a repository, it’s thousands of blogs in there on a lot of different topics. So what a client can do is search by keyword. I’ll just continue with my example of anxiety. So when you put in that key word, there’s a number of blogs that will populate based on that topic and then you can go in, you can read the blogs, you can edit them if you want to, and then you schedule them. So you can say, “Okay, I want this blog going out tomorrow at 12:00 PM and I want this other blog going out three weeks from now on Thursday at 9:00 AM.” It’ll just automatically post that blog to the website on those days and times. And if you want it to, you can link it up to Facebook and LinkedIn and automatically post there as well.
[ALISON]
Yes, that’s great because I feel like that’s one of the big barriers for practice owners to do that on a regular basis. It’s not automated and then they get bogged down with actually like writing the blog post. So I think any way you can kind of make that more easier, automatic, then you’re going to actually follow through with doing it.
[AUSTIN]
That’s exactly right. I actually have a website myself. I’m a photographer on the side. That’s kind of my hobby, but I blog as well and there’s no blogging tool like that for photographers. So just sitting there, just trying to figure out what to write for those blog. What’s funny is the only reason why I’m doing it is to help with my search engine optimization, but it’s so difficult to do that. I have probably more time on my hands than a typical therapist does. So I can’t imagine that feeling going in there just first trying to figure out what to write and then spending an hour and a half writing that blog and having to do that every other week. That sounds like a lot. So this tool really helps alleviate that pain point and will just automatically do it for the client.
[ALISON]
That’s awesome. So tell us about kind of looking ahead, obviously we’re still kind of dealing with the effects of the pandemic and we’re about to go into fall and winter time and things seem like they’re shifting unfortunately with just what’s happening with COVID-19, so are you thinking about how that’s going to affect marketing or the mental health industry or how maybe like websites are going to have to adapt or do you feel like you’ve kind of already done all of that at the beginning of the pandemic and it’s just going to be more of the same or kind of what’s your prediction for the future, I guess?
[AUSTIN]
So I mean, I definitely, my prediction for the future is telehealth is here to stay. I definitely agree that there is unfortunate shifts coming with this Delta variant and COVID-19 and all that. I wouldn’t be surprised that there’s going to be another sort of lockdown of some kind coming. So I think what’s nice is we’ve kind of already gone through this so there has been a lot of learning across the board, whether it be with us or telehealth companies, EHRs, things like that. But with us, we already kind of already had our systems in place. So it wasn’t really too much of a trial and error process for us to begin with, but we have kind of refined everything. We’ve really learned sort of based off what we’ve done with our clients so far, who are marketing solely for telehealth. We’ve learned that based off like their analytics and all that what’s working, what’s not working.

So if anything, when a client comes to us now, the results would be more effective. So we have a very solid understanding, more so than we did a year ago of how to properly market a clinician for telehealth. So I definitely think it’s here to stay. If anything, it’s going to continue growing even more, especially with, I’m guessing the upcoming lockdown, that’s probably eminent. So yes, I think that’s here to stay regardless. Even after everything’s all cleared up telehealth is going to be here to stay. From what I’ve heard with speaking with clinicians therapy seems to still be effective via telehealth. And it sounds like the clients themselves are much more comfortable taking that session from the comfort of their own home and there’s a lack of no-shows. That’s a big thing I’ve been hearing. People are making appointments more often, so it’s definitely here to stay. And I think given our experience in the past with everything that’s already happened we’re just more refined and we’ll be able to market even better in the future.
[ALISON]
Yes, I agree. I think telehealth isn’t going to go away. I’m curious too, I don’t know if you track this at Brighter Vision, but did you see things shifting in terms of what people were searching for online, like if they were going into Google and typing in “online therapy” more? What words were they using? Was there a shift when the pandemic started?
[AUSTIN]
Huge shift? It was almost always “online therapists,” “therapists in my state that can help with this problem online.” So yes, the online portion of the search term kept coming up over and over and over again. It was a very typical search and it was always just added plus online. Telehealth was kind of there. Typically the clients don’t really know that verbiage quite yet. They might now that’s probably going to be something we have to look into because is now everything is telehealth. That was a very big buzz word in the media kind of at the time. So now there probably will be a shift from online to telehealth, I’m guessing. But that was a big thing online. That word online was commonly used.
[ALISON]
So it was like they were using online, not virtual or not telehealth or telemedicine?
[AUSTIN]
Yes, telehealth, telemedicine that didn’t really kick in until like eight months or so into the pandemic when that word was getting used more and more. People started having that knowledge of that word, basically. The virtual thing actually didn’t really shift. It’s kind of funny. So that was kind of, that stayed the same even before and after the pandemic, the virtual part of things. So it sounds like those people already knew what that was but online was a big one. I think that’s probably for the older clients. Online is probably the more common term that they’re searching for but now telehealth, I think will probably surpass that the online search phrase.
[ALISON]
Okay, cool. Yes, I think that’s great because again, putting keywords into different pages of your website using online therapy or online counseling is more effective than using telehealth.
[AUSTIN]
Oh yes, absolutely. And another thing too, we have some tools that, well, we don’t have tools, but we know of some resources as well. There are links, but you can actually search and figure out what people are searching for to find various things within Google. So I can send over that link. You’re more than welcome to hand out, but it’s a great way to get an understanding of what key words to use when you’re writing the content of the website.
[ALISON]
Yes, that would be great because yes, that was something interesting last summer. Just because I had recognized that things were shifting with the marketing, I hired a SEO company and they did some of that research and said, yes, online therapy is what the exact phrase people are searching for, like in my area. And I wonder if it varies across the country, like what terms people are using.
[AUSTIN]
It might vary across the country. For us the reporting on that for all of our clients, it’s sort of, we just gather everything and we just kind of mesh it into one big report. So it’s hard for us to kind of dial into demographically what people are searching for. As far as the report that I know of, I’m sure if a client asks for that, we can search specifically for that area and see what the more commonly used terms are. But online therapy seems like across the board was the highest search term that we were seeing during that time.
[ALISON]
Yes, that’s super valuable. Thank you for sharing that. So for folks who want to check out Brighter Vision, or maybe want to get in touch with you about getting a Brighter Vision website or just what you offer, what’s the best way for them to contact you?
[AUSTIN]
Yes, absolutely. If you just want to talk, to pick my brain, you’re more than welcome to contact me as well. But of course, if you’re interested in our website and marketing services, feel free to reach out. The best way to contact me is either by phone or by email. My direct phone number, you’re all more than welcome to call me anytime. It’s (303) 223-9809. And then also email is another great way. It’s simply [email protected]. Either one of those is perfectly fine. If you want to even text that phone number, you’re more than welcome to just let me know where heard me. That way I kind of understand the topic, but yes, you reach out for anything you might need. I’m not going to try to sell you on anything that you don’t want. If you just want to learn more information just about anything just reach out. That’s my job.
[ALISON]
That’s awesome. That’s brave giving away your phone number. You might catch some people texting in the middle of the night.
[AUSTIN]
I hope so. I really, I genuinely love helping therapists. That’s a big reason why I liked my job. It changed my life and I want to do everything I can to make sure they’re successful because if they are successful, that means a lot of other people are getting the help that they need. So yes, I’m here to help any way possible.
[ALISON]
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Austin. It’s been great talking with you and just really interesting to hear about all the changes happening with websites and marketing. So I really appreciate your time.
[AUSTIN]
Absolutely. My pleasure. Anytime and feel free again, anyone listening, feel free to reach out for anything you might need.
[ALISON]
Thank you so much again, to Brighter Vision for being our sponsor this week. They are having their special Fall Into Cash event. Definitely check that out over at their website, brightervision.com. And if you want to get the promotional offer they’re running right now to get a new website for only $49 a month for the full first year, go to the special link they’ve set up for us brightervision.com/joe.

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