Private Practice Marketing: SEO – Q and A

Private Practice Marketing: SEO – Q and A

Question: Private Practice Marketing: Are there any advantages to using a pre-made website for therapists that include SEO and marketing support?
I am a new counselor and am working on getting a website for my private practice marketing. I am wondering about the advantages/disadvantages of using a pre-built therapist website (most expensive but with SEO and marketing).

Answer: Be Careful!

When buying pre-built sites, be careful that you read through all of the terms of agreement. Sometimes when you buy a pre-built site, they use the same keywords in their page description that they used with hundreds of other sites they have already built. And since age is a factor that plays into rankings, the counselors with the older sites from the “pre-built company” will more than likely rank better than you.

Be aware of keyword stuffing. Many pre-built sites will contain simple forms for you to fill out that look like this:

Title:                                      Description:                                              Keywords:

That Keyword section is useless. The “keyword” tag inside the meta tag is obsolete. It went away about 10 years ago because marketers abused the HTML tag.

It looked something like this: <meta name=”Keywords” content=”counseling”/>

Another downside is that sometimes the pre-built sites (not all) do not allow you to have complete control over your website – meaning they will not let you determine meta tags for all the pages without 1) paying more, or 2) they only allow one description for the entire site. This is bad for SEO and bad for you. Additionally, they may charge you per hour to construct changes to your website. 

One other caution – some of the pre-built sites are “Adobe Flash” based. Flash is bad for SEO (because flash action animation does not contain any words for Google to crawl) and it is bad for mobile browsers – many (Apple iOS included) mobile browsers do not support Flash website.

If you need help with private practice marketing, feel free to contact us. Through white hat SEO and standards web design, we can help you succeed.

Contact us today at 1-855-4-THRIVE to get your practice growing.