Private Practice Elevation with Daniel Fava 117 - The 4 Mountains of Successful SEO for Private Practice Websites
In this episode of The Private Practice Elevation podcast, you’re going to learn about the 4 Mountains of Successful SEO for private practice websites.
“What do you mean by ‘the 4 mountains of SEO’”, you ask?
The 4 Mountains are the main pillars or categories that make up a holistic SEO (search engine optimization) strategy for your website.
Most people, when they think about “doing SEO”, focus solely on making sure they have some keywords in a few places on a page.
Or they may put keywords in page titles and meta descriptions and hope that may move the needle of their ranking results.
But there’s actually much more that can and should be done in order to make sure your SEO efforts are truly effective.
It’s when all 4 Mountains are working together that we see exponential growth in organic traffic, bringing more of your ideal clients to your website.
So let’s break down these 4 Mountains of Successful SEO and what goes into each of them.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:- The four main pillars that need to be in place to have a greater impact on your SEO efforts
- The tasks that you’ll focus on within each of the 4 mountains to help you rank your website better for keywords
- How to think holistically about your search engine optimization strategy so that you can grow your website traffic month after month
We’ve been refining our SEO process over the last couple of years and we’re super excited with the results our clients are getting. For some time now I’ve wanted to share that process with a small group of private practice owners so that they can learn how to implement their own SEO strategy. So we’re putting together an SEO mastermind group/training program. It will consist of live classes, content templates, an SEO workbook, and private online community to give you a step by step process to create and implement a holistic SEO strategy for your business.
If you’re interested in more information and want to be notified when we launch, please click here.
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Episode Transcript:
0:00
Well, hello there, and welcome to episode number 118 of the private practice elevation podcast. I am your host, Daniel fava. And I'm excited to have another solo episode. So here I am, it's been it's been a long summer, it's been a fun summer, it's been a full summer. But one thing I did at the beginning of summer is I started interviewing some great people, and I really hope that you've been enjoying those conversations that I've had. But one of the purposes of doing that was to Yes, connect with people bring you great content, but also for me to kind of pull back just a little bit and just enjoy the summer.
0:35
So that is really what I've been doing, we dropped down to every other week on this podcast. And that was just it was really helpful, just to have a little bit of time off and not worry about, you know, having content all the time. And, you know, even for myself, it can be, it can be hard to keep up with everything. And I know that some of you kind of feel that if you have a podcast, or if you're trying to create consistent content for your blog, to get it ranking for SEO and all that stuff. You know, a lot of people will recommend you got to have a blog post every week, you got to get your website full of content.
1:10
And while that stuff is helpful, I believe it doesn't really serve your life, if it's going to cause you more stress, and kind of suck your productivity and your creativity, then something needs to change. So that's one thing that I really just love about having my own business is that I can make those changes when needed and will likely pick up I believe in the new year with with more frequent episodes. I'm even thinking about maybe working on some sort of quick tip episodes that could be you know, just really digestible tips for you to apply to your online. Your online marketing your website, SEO, you know, stuff like that. So if you're thinking about doing that in the new year, but for now this every other week deal has been working really great. So yeah, it's been a it's been a long summer.
2:00
So we have two boys, five year old Samuel, and our one and a half year old Caleb. So it's been it's been a blast. But it's been you know, hard to, to keep them busy sometimes and juggle, you know, work life balance and all that sort of stuff. So we had, we had the kids and camps when when they were available. We had babysitters over here and babysitters over there and then we lost our babysitter because she went back to school before our kids preschool and kindergarten started. So we had to find a new person and we got a new person. Then we took a couple trips here and there went to North Carolina.
2:36
And actually, as I'm recording this now planning to go on our last trip of the summer to Cape sandblast in Florida, and I'm really looking forward to that. Because our our North Carolina trip was really great. It was fun got to see my brother and his wife and four kids. They live in Virginia, so we don't see them a lot. So our kids just had a blast playing with the cousins doing that whole thing and, and also my parents came down we met North Carolina and Wilmington, and just had fun going to the beach and just hanging out. There was lots of rain. So there was it was it was a little bit tricky trying to manage, you know, just having fun with the kids and all that sort of stuff. But it was it was a full house. There was a packed house. It wasn't on the beach. So you know me as an introvert that was it was hard at times to find that time to get away and escape. So I'm really looking forward to this trip in Florida because we're going to Cape Sand Blas, which is like Old Florida from what I hear. I haven't been yet but it's you know, white sand beaches, not a lot of stores, restaurants. And just there's a state park there. So really just looking forward to some downtime, you know, before the school year starts.
3:45
And our kids still go to school and preschool for another two weeks. For some reason their school starts pretty late. Everyone else, you know, all the public schools have been back. Oh, that two weeks now? Pretty much.
3:57
So yeah, we're just hanging on to summer here. So. So yeah, so that's, that's where I'm at. That's where my summers been. One thing that has kept me just kind of sane or just kind of excited over the summer sounds funny to say, but if you've been reading my emails, you know that I'm very into bourbon. So I've been I've been enjoying bourbon for years and years. But back in June, my brother and I went to Kentucky and we took a trip toward the distilleries, a handful of distilleries, obviously not all of them, but really just started loving just the history and learning about it and just how the different processes can change how bourbon tastes and so yeah, I've just been really just enjoying trying new bottles and even have a geeky spreadsheet where I keep track of which ones I want to try next. And you know what's hard to find and all that stuff.
4:47
So that's been just kind of fun. And in my wife, Liz, she doesn't enjoy it as much as I do. And she'll say that I'm completely obsessed and kind of just geeking out over this. This is just kind of what I do with hobbies. I get really into stuff especially at the beginning.
5:00
So I've kind of been in that phase right now. But Liz does enjoy a good old fashion with me. So it's been, it's been fun to have her taste some of the stuff that I've been enjoying. So that's, that's been a nutshell, that's where, where I've been what I've been doing.
5:14
And we've just been rocking and rolling in private practice elevation, just working with some really great clients lately. And, you know, over over the last year or so, our SEO services have really, really grown a lot, we've really refined how we work with folks on SEO, because people are at different stages in in their journey with SEO. Some people, they know a little bit about it, or they've done their research. So they've created content, that's for it. So their websites, optimized to a degree, but they don't know what to do next, you know, so we've been providing SEO assessments as a great starting point for our clients that we can come in and understand, Okay, what's been done? Where do your opportunities lie?
5:56
And what should you focus on. And then from there, we work on our SEO base camp service, which is a foundational service, it's a two month project pretty quick. But it's really doing the heavy lifting and making sure that your website is optimized, you know, those main service pages, but also, you got to understand which keywords to use in order to optimize the website.
6:16
So we'll do the keyword research, we'll come up with that content plan on which pages are your biggest opportunities, and then we'll optimize those pages, and fill in some gaps like optimize your Google business profile to go along with this work that we're doing just really give you that foundation give you that base camp for your SEO. And then we have had for a long time our monthly SEO service, which is more of an SEO maintenance, you know, once you have that foundation in place, that is the hard work the heavy lifting, but then you have to maintain that.
6:49
And so we take that content calendar, that content strategy, plan, those keywords that we researched in SEO Basecamp project, and then we apply that long term on a monthly basis and continue optimizing the website, creating blog content, that sort of thing. So in a nutshell, that's what SEO looks like. So what we're talking about today, we're talking about the four mountains of successful SEO. So these are the four main pillars, the main things that are going to really hold up your SEO, campaign or SEO strategy, so to speak.
7:23
And so when we do an assessment, or when we work on any website for SEO, these are the four main categories that our work is going to fall under. A lot of the times people have one or two of these in place, or maybe none of these in place, but they just don't know where to begin. So what I'm going to do is just kind of outline these pieces, these are the things that you're going to want to have in place in order to have a successful SEO strategy working for you in your practice.
7:51
So as always, I want to make this digestible. And so you know, if you're new to this idea of search engine optimization, SEO, and that's what it stands for, like, Yeah, let's start at the very beginning here, if you're not familiar, SEO stands for search engine optimization.
8:04
So it's all the things that you can do on your website. And as you'll learn here to also off of your website to help Google and search engines understand what your content is about, and then serve that content up to a user, you know, searching on those search engines.
8:21
So basically, how it works is search engine will crawl through your website pages, it's going to create an index, almost like a Rolodex, you know, it's going to look at those pages and say, oh, there's a page about EMDR therapy, there's a page about trauma therapy on this page are anxiety therapy in Atlanta, and it creates that index, and then it's going to deliver those results in an order of what it feels like the user is going to be most useful to the user. And so you know, when we talk about rankings and ranking on Google, that's what the algorithm does, the algorithm takes that index of pages, and it says, oh, this person typed this into Google, I believe that this page is going to be the most useful for what they are searching for.
9:06
And so if your website is optimized well, when somebody searches for those specific terms, such as anxiety therapy in Atlanta, you hope to be at the top of that list, because of all the different factors that are at play here. And so when we talk about these four mountains of successful SEO, that is where you spend your time on those optimization pieces in order to help your website rank better. So I'm going to outline these, these four mountains of successful SEO here and then we're going to kind of dive in a little bit, just to give you a little more context on each one here. Alright, so these four mountains of successful SEO, these are the categories that we focus on.
9:48
So if we're going to assess your website, if you come to us and say hey, how can I not ranking? What can I do? We are going to grade you and assess you on each of these and so they are technical SEO
10:00
Your content, and on site SEO, and off site SEO. So again, that's technical SEO, there's your content. There's your on site optimization, and off site optimization.
10:15
Alright, so now that you know what these four categories are, let's dive in here. Let's pick these apart a little bit. So you can understand what goes into each category. So you can help get your website ranking a little bit better for the keywords that are important for you.
10:29
Alright, so technical SEO for for a web page to appear in search results, the search engines must be able to crawl it, and index that they must be able to access those pages in order to understand what those pages are about, so that it can create that Rolodex of content.
10:46
So solid technical SEO makes this a seamless process. And there are a few components that go into your technical SEO that you want in place for it to for Google to be able to crawl it really well. And so some of these might sound pretty confusing, or pretty geeky. Most of these pieces are already in place. You know, if you have a Squarespace website, or if you have a WordPress website, and just kind of straight out of the box, a lot of this stuff is in place. There's some aspects of it that might require a little more tweaking. But sometimes those those things, you know, those situations arise when No, they aren't in place or something isn't set up, right. So that's where it becomes important to be aware of these different pieces. So the first thing is your robots dot txt file. So that obviously sounds geeky robots.
11:37
What the heck is that about? So a robots dot txt is a file that lives on your hosting server that has a couple of different like commands in there that says, hey, Google index this, Hey, Google, don't index that every once in a while. It's very rare. It hasn't happened with any of the clients that we assess their websites or worked on SEO for every once in a while, it might have something in there that shouldn't be there that basically says, Hey, don't crawl through these important pages that I want to rank.
12:05
So that's your robots file.
12:07
The next is your XML sitemap. So this is super important. So a sitemap, you've probably heard that term before. This is what Google will look for, to see all the different pages on your website. If you are on WordPress, we recommend using Yoast SEO, if you install that plugin is automatically going to create a sitemap for you. Other platforms like Squarespace, they also will just include a sitemap that's part of it. But the next step is making sure that Google actually knows where that Sitemap is.
12:36
And so that's why we use Google Search Console, which is a free service, you can get on there. And you can let them know where your Sitemap is located, to nudge it to crawl through that, and then Google over time will continue to crawl through through those pages. The next component of technical SEO, SEO is your speed. This is a big one. So making sure that your website loads fast is very important. And Google has said over the last few years, that this becomes increasingly more important, especially as more people are viewing the your website on their mobile phone.
13:11
So they want to make sure that your page loads quickly. We can't really get into all the details about speed optimization here. But there's something to be aware of if your website loads slow. And somebody else has very similar content on their website, but it loads fast, Google is going to consider that a better experience. And another aspect of this is also mobile usability. So that's another technical SEO component, you want to make sure that your website is accessible on mobile phones, because Google considers mobile now before it considers the desktop. So a Google search console will also give you errors if your website doesn't appear well on mobile, it'll tell you some things you got to fix for that. Another thing is security.
13:53
So that's your SSL certificate, making sure that your website has some encryption, especially if you have forms on the website. That's something that's just super easy to get through your hosting company, something we include when we host websites at private practice elevation, have an SSL security certificate installed on your website. And the other aspect of technical SEO is just errors, errors that appear.
14:16
And again, Search Console is helpful here. It'll tell you if there are broken links on the website 404 errors, which means page not found errors, those types of errors, you want to be able to understand where they are and how to fix those. So that is technical SEO in a nutshell, you know, in each of those, we can really break down things that you can do in that but you know, we're really just trying to give you the overall view of these four mountains of successful SEO.
14:46
All right, the next mountain that we're going to talk about is your content. So content has been the absolute backbone of SEO since its inception. It's really It's how you share your expertise, which is what the search engines value because that content
15:00
It really provides insight into your services, and just the value that you provide to visitors to your website and potential clients. So let's dive into content and kind of what we are looking for in order to make
15:14
your content successful. So for search engines, so your content should have four qualities, that kind of sets, that's kind of funny, because it kind of sets up the first one is quality that your content needs to have. It's got to be quality, quality content. So if you have similar services to somebody in your area, but they have just great content on their website quality content, meaning it goes into depth, it's not just 300 words on a page with a couple of bullet points about your services, but they've got landing pages for each service.
15:47
That's quality, you also want to have photos on there, just you know, all the information that somebody would need in order to consider your service. So that's number one quality, it's got to have keywords. So that's kind of an obvious thing for search engine optimization is to make sure that you're using the right keywords, and those keywords should appear on the pages that you want to rank for those services.
16:10
So anxiety therapy, and Atlanta. If that is an important keyword for you, you want to have a landing page devoted to anxiety therapy in Atlanta and make sure that that keyword appears throughout that page. recency is another factor, Google likes websites that are up to date, that are recent that are growing in content, in the fourth quality that you want to have in your content is relevancy.
16:34
So it is relevant for your ideal clients, for your potential clients. That is kind of it kind of goes along with keywords, you know, if you're focused on the right keywords, it should stand to say it's probably relevant to the service that you're providing. It's when you start adding content that is maybe more like you're using your blog, like a journal and has a random thoughts and stuff like that.
16:56
That's not really relevant for your ideal client. But if you're focused on, you know, 10 ways to decrease your anxiety this week, stuff like that, that goes along with those service pages that you're that you're writing, you know, that is relevant.
17:15
So when we're assessing websites, we're taking a look at those service pages, we want to make sure that it's got all of these all these aspects in place, we want to make sure it's using keywords, there's images and text on the pages. And also that has got a nice structure to the content itself. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in the on site optimization piece.
17:35
Another thing too, those service pages, a great way to get more of those keywords and more of that great content is to have an FAQ section on your service pages, you know, so if you feel like you're having trouble getting that content on those service pages, you can include an FAQ section on each and every service page. And that will help you there. Alright, so let's get on to the third mountain of successful SEO. And this is likely where you've probably spent most of your time if you've done any search engine optimization. This is really what comes to mind when people think about SEO and how to improve their rankings of their website. And that is on site optimization. So on site SEO, is how we add context to that content. So we've created that great content. So how do we break that page into sections and optimize headers, you know, and make it easier for search engines to really understand what those pages are all about.
18:31
We use on site SEO to do that. And there are four main factors or four main places that we're gonna spend our time when it comes to on site SEO, and that is number one, your page Titles and Meta descriptions, your headers on the page itself, alternative tax that goes along with images, and then internal links. So for your page titles, and meta descriptions, this is this one carries probably probably the most weight, I would say. And making sure that you've got an optimized title for the page, and a meta description. And so these are the things that show up in search engines when you type in, I always use this as an example. It's just easy anxiety therapy in Atlanta and you see those search results.
19:14
The page title is what you see, you know, is that larger text and then the meta description is going to be that little intro deck intro text, you know that that kind of entices you to click gives you a little more context about what the page is about. So once you know which keywords you want to optimize a page for, you want to make sure that you're using those keywords in the page title and in the meta descriptions. So that just makes it easier for Google to understand what that's about.
19:41
The next step is your headers. Now, I would say that this has probably been one of the biggest trouble areas for most people that come to us and they want us to do that SEO base camp where we optimize their their current website, is their headers are just they're all out of whack.
20:00
So I want you to think about Wikipedia. If you've ever been to Wikipedia, and you're searching for information on a specific subject, the first thing that they show on Wikipedia, when you come to a landing page is you'll see that nice outline. And you'll see, you know, just that, the those headers, and this is kind of just how they operate, they organize it so well. It's just, it's a page outline.
20:24
And so you'll see that sort of top level subject. And then underneath that main subject, you'll see a couple other subjects, but then under that you've got, you know, ABCD under that, and it just the content follows a very nice flow. And a lot of the times when we look at these pages that you know, that people want optimize, we can see that they've got just different headers all over the place. So a lot of times people use headers, because, you know, especially in like Squarespace, if you're building the website, yourself, if you highlight text, and you choose h1, or h2, and that's what we're talking about, like the header code there. A lot of the times in the styles of the website, it will be styled differently, you know, so you sometimes you just want to give more emphasis to a sentence on your web page.
21:11
So if you're not aware of this, you might just highlight something and choose h1, well, h1 should, there should only be one h1 on your on any landing page on your website. And that is really where your main keyword should be. And then under that you've got a hierarchy. So h2 are the next top level subjects that go along with that content. And so you can break up your text into these headers and sub headers so that Google can can see just the different your keywords, and you just see the different topics that fall underneath the main topic. And this is another great way that FAQs on service pages works really well.
21:50
Because you can have those h2 sub headers for those different questions such as How much does anxiety therapy cost? How do I know if I'm a good fit for anxiety therapy, you know all those things. So that helps Google read through the content, and understand what the page is about and also helps users skim through the content because people don't read people will skim through, they'll see those headers, and then they'll decide what to dig into and read further. So that's headers.
22:19
Next is alternative text. So that is a little bit of code that goes along with your images. So that's why it's really good to have some images throughout your landing pages. Because you can insert some alternative text that basically is really designed for people visually impaired, to understand what text what images, sorry, which images, you're what they're about. But you can also put some keywords in there, you don't want to just stuff it with keywords you can describe the images about but try to work in the keywords. And that's another way that we optimize your your on site, how you do your on site optimization.
22:55
The other part of on site optimization is internal links. And so this helps Google actually crawl through your website quicker. When you create new content, it can help it get indexed a little bit quicker, it can also help people just find more related content throughout the website. So things that you can do anytime you write a blog post, you want that blog post to really serve those service landing pages that you have. So you can always just put related content, you know, and link over to your service landing page.
23:26
So you know, you can mention in that blog post, if you're considering anxiety therapy, you know, check out this page here and link over to that. Likewise, on those service landing pages, you can have a related blog post about anxiety therapy, and then have links to those blog posts. And that just creates this this interlinking web that Google can crawl through and see that related content.
23:49
All right, our fourth and final mountain of successful SEO is your off site SEO. So off site SEO is everything that happens outside of your website makes sense off of your site. The search engines look for external signals such as backlinks, Google Maps, social media, as a gauge of your online authority and trustworthiness.
24:11
The way I kind of like to describe this as that it's kind of like a resume when you have you're applying for a job and you have those referrals. You know, please reach out to my former employer, you know, and get some recommendations. You know, it is a vote for your website, having a great referral network to your website tells Google that okay people trust you people are linking to you. And so if you have more backlinks and also quality backlinks from other websites that have good authority, all of that is really that pours a lot of fuel on the SEO fire and that can be a real catalyst for growth of your SEO.
24:51
It's also one of the steps that most people overlook because it does take time to build backlinks into to build relationships with people to get those backlinks. And so it can often be overlooked in an SEO strategy. But as I mentioned, the main factors of offer off site SEO are backlinks, your social media presence, and also local search. So you want to have all of those in place, local search is probably the easiest place to begin. So that's your Google business profile.
25:23
Starting there, if you don't have a Google business profile, which is a free listing of your business, definitely get that set up. If you are online, only, I really encourage you to still set up a Google business profile. And you're allowed to list your service areas.
25:39
So you don't necessarily need to list a physical address, you can list your service areas, you know, if you work in multiple states, or you're trying to get you know, all of one state, that's where your license, do that it can help you show up at when people are still searching near you, for your services, you want to be able to show up. And so definitely get a get a Google business profile set up on the other aspect of local search is having other business profiles set up.
26:07
So having your business listed on other business directories can be helpful for a local search as well. So Google sees that your business is listed repeatedly, in a certain area, certain physical address, if you are, you know, working with people who you have a physical office, you know, that you can list, you know, go for that do that. The other aspect, as I mentioned, is backlinks, you know, so things that you can do for backlinks, you could you can sponsor some events in your local area, you could get listed on different business websites in your community. If you have other people who are referring to you see if you can have a place on their website to be listed as a referral source. Another thing that you can do that's great is guest guest blogging, guest blogging on other websites, or writing articles for other websites.
27:00
And those articles, you know, list you as an author, and they link back to your website. Podcasts are also great too, if you mean you have expertise to share, so there's likely a handful of podcasts that you could do a little research, follow the the host of those podcasts on social media and learn a little bit about them, and then offer your expertise as an episode for their for their podcast, and then you will likely be linked from their website to your website, building that authority.
27:31
And so it's great for traffic building, as well as just building that backlink SEO stuff. And then the other piece is social media. And that's just another part of building authority is just Google wants to see that, okay, this business is established, they've also got social media channels.
27:48
And if you're not really active on social media, that's okay. If you're writing a blog post, maybe like once a month, you can always just use that blog post to share on social media, you don't have to answer comments, you don't have to, you know, get all in with a with a social strategy. And all that, I kind of say that, because that's kind of,
28:09
I'm kind of preaching to the choir here, because I have that love hate relationship with social media, I mostly spend my time on Instagram, just because it's simpler for me. But sometimes you get, it can be so easy to get overwhelmed with social media and like, you know, trying to get likes and followers and all that stuff.
28:25
But at least as a starting point, you can always just list your business on the different channels, and then share a couple blog posts here and there to show that you're active. And all of that can help Google just see that you are, you know, you're a legit business, you're active, that sort of thing. Another thing too, you can share your blog post on your Google business profile as well, which is another another great thing to do, which can link back over to your website.
28:49
So it's a way of showing Google Hey, my profiles active, and I'm contributing. So those are the four mountains of successful SEO. So just to review, we had technical SEO, content, on site optimization, and off site optimization. So those are the four main mountains that we look into when we work with our clients. And we have aspects of all of the all of those mountains, it baked into the services that we provide, because we really, really want to take that holistic approach to SEO, in order to make sure that all of these mountains are being tended to to really create a great strategy for your online visibility. So I hope that this has been helpful for you.
29:34
And if you are feeling like all of this stuff is pretty overwhelming. You're not really sure you know how to go from point A to point B. There's something that I've been working on, it's been just kind of just in my brain for a while and you know, now that we're getting back into the school year, I'm focusing a little bit more on this idea. And so what it is, is I'm calling it SEO base camp live. So as I mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, we have our SEO base camp service, which really takes our clients through the keyword optimization, content planning content calendar, and on site optimization of their website.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai