Do you have a strategy for getting traffic to your private practice website?
In order to use your website as a marketing machine that fuels your business, it’s going to require people actually viewing it.
And a steady stream of eyeballs on your website can mean a steady stream of therapy clients for you and your team.
That’s exactly why traffic-building is a big part of our process here at Private Practice Elevation.
Most people turn to two strategies for getting traffic: SEO or paid advertising (Google Ads or Facebook Ads).
But if you don’t know the benefits of each and when to properly use them, you could end up losing both money and potential traffic to your private practice website.
So, which is a better investment? SEO or Google Ads?
In this article, you’ll learn 3 reasons why investing in SEO for your therapy practice is often a better investment than paid advertising.
Table of Contents
- Why do I need a website traffic strategy?
- The Top 3 Reasons Why SEO is a Better Investment than Google Ads
- What Happens When You Don’t Get Your Website & SEO Right
- The Most Important Part of SEO for Private Practice
- Final Word
Why Do I Need A Traffic Strategy for My Therapy Website?
Just having a website is often not enough to actually get potential clients to view it and convert them into paying clients.
Don’t get me wrong, some therapists do hit the nail on the head and get some really great foundational SEO content on their website that brings in some traffic.
Making sure you’ve got detailed content, such as landing pages for each your services, will certainly get the traffic ball rolling.
But it’s when you layer on the extra strategies that you can really see an exponential increase in traffic to your website and clients from your website.
It’s when you let your website sit there, becoming stale and doing nothing to get traffic that leave you wondering why you even have a website for your practice in the first place.
Most private practice owners are familiar with two strategies, search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising, such as Google Ads.
Both of these strategies can send more traffic to your website, and both are powerful tools in their own right.
For example, you may have a webinar or a therapy group that you need to fill by a specific date.
Paid advertising can be a great way to get those offers in front of your ideal audience quickly.
But in this article, I want to talk more about the bigger vision of your practice and the longevity of it.
And that’s where SEO can be extremely powerful.
Related: Online Marketing for Private Practice: The Traffic Phase
The Top 3 Reasons Why SEO is a Better Investment than Google Ads
1: SEO Can Bring Consistent Organic Traffic to Your Therapy Website
While SEO may take an investment of time and/or money upfront, it’s the long term impact on your business that makes it such a powerful investment.
Once you’re able to rank your website for keywords related to your services and ideal clients, you can generate traffic to your website month after month.
Like a mutual fund gaining compound interest, once the momentum of traffic is built, you’ll be able to focus on other things while people continue to find your website in Google.
Google Ads work more like a traffic-on-demand service.
Pay money and traffic shows up. But turn off those ads and you’re left with no consistent traffic and a website that people still can’t find in search engines.
But focusing on SEO as soon as possible means that you’re paying into a long term plan to see your traffic increase and get your ideal client to your website for years to come.
Related: What SEO Keywords Should I Use on My Private Practice Website?
2: SEO Makes Your Website Better & Raises Your Professionalism
Google is concerned about one thing: making sure they give the best experience and search results to their users.
This means showing their users the best websites with the best content that’s most relevant to what the user is looking for.
So, if you’re investing in SEO, you’re investing in making your website better and giving potential therapy clients a great experience with your brand.
You can certainly pay for Google ads and get traffic to your website, but if your website is slow, is hard for your potential clients to use, or doesn’t convert well, then you’re really just wasting your money.
I’d rather see you invest in a professional website that’s designed to convert and optimized for search at the outset of your digital marketing.
I’d rather see you invest in a professional website that’s designed to convert and optimized for search at the outset of your digital marketing.
Then you can layer on the SEO strategy by creating consistent content and backlinks, and you should have enough traffic to help you understand your conversion rates on the website.
Then, if you do decide to use paid advertising to get traffic to your website, you can do so confidently knowing that you understand your conversion rates and what the return on investment will be.
Getting your website SEO and content right means that any future marketing you do will be more effective because you’ll have already done the foundational work to create a great website with great content that gets you clients.
3: SEO Is Cheaper in The Long Term
Your goal as a private practice owner is to make your business as profitable as possible.
One reason why I love SEO so much more than paid advertising is that it’s often cheaper in the long run.
You can invest in having someone write (or invest your own time and write it yourself) a monthly blog post that’s optimized for your desired keywords and you may see that blog post attract traffic each month.
That’s a one-time investment with a long term impact on your traffic.
With paid advertising, you’re going to pay for each click on your ad, which can get pretty expensive if you’ve got a lot of competition for your keywords.
You’ll most likely be paying someone to manage your ad campaign as well (which I recommend) because ads take lots of testing to get it right.
So you may spend $400 a month for a professional to manage your campaigns, plus the cost of the ad spend on top of that.
And, as we mentioned earlier, if you turn off those ads, then your traffic dries up.
But invest in SEO and you’ll likely have ongoing traffic coming to your website even if you decide to take a break from your marketing efforts, saving you money in the long run.
What Happens When You Don’t Get Your Website & SEO Right
I consult with many private practice owners, which allows me to look under the hood of many therapy websites and see how they are performing.
I often see people lose money as they try to do everything all at once, constantly changing their strategy and what they think will yield the best results.
We recently worked with someone who came to us after they had a friend redesign their website.
The website looked pretty nice, and this therapist did like the way it looked, but it was built in straight code without much ability to edit meta tags for SEO.
She was paying hundreds of dollars a month for someone to manage her Google Ads and came to us looking for SEO help just to try and compensate and get more traffic to the website.
While we recommended investing in more optimized content, copywriting and switching over to WordPress, she declined.
We saw very little impact from the SEO work we did, because it was done out of order and the client kept changing her focus.
It’s cases like this that led us to develop our own process so that we can ensure our clients get the most out of their investment and create a solid online presence and foundation for their marketing and SEO.
The Most Important Part of SEO for Private Practice
If you want to begin investing in SEO for your therapy practice, the best place to start is your content.
You need to make sure that each page on your therapy website is using the best practices and on-page SEO to ensure that content can rank.
When people come to us and ask why their website isn’t ranking in Google for any keywords, the first place I always look is the content.
You want to make sure that you’ve got as many of Google’s ranking factors as possible active on your pages. This includes:
- High page speed
- The website is secure with an SSL certificate
- Your content contains at least 500 words (more is always better when trying to rank for keywords
- The keyword appears in the H1, title tag, URL and throughout the page’s content
- You’ve written a custom meta description for each page and included your keywords in that description
- Your copy is relevant and useful to your target audience
Getting your on-page SEO up to speed means you’re building a foundation for your SEO efforts in the future.
Final Word
Just having a website is often not enough to attract traffic. That’s why we turn to other online marketing strategies to help.
Both paid advertising and SEO can be powerful tools to get more traffic to your private practice website.
But when it comes to the long term sustainability of your practice and its ability to attract and convert your ideal clients, SEO makes for a better investment.
This is exactly why we offer monthly SEO Content Plans that help our clients build their organic traffic and attract more clients. Our professionally written content, backlinks and local SEO can help your website gain visibility, traffic, and clients.
