Not Showing Up in Google?

1. Know This: Your website has in place an seo infrastructure which automagically utilizes specified text placed in strategic places on a page/post to build a meta-structure that the directory spiders can recognize and use to rank your site. That's already in place.

2 Know This: The only search results that matter are what shows up on Pages 1 and 2. Rarely do people look beyond that for whatever their reasons. So we need to show up on Page 1 or 2.

3. Problem: Everybody wants to show up on Page 1, above the fold, for every search term they can think of. That's not practical and it's not probable. There's ALWAYS someone with a bigger, badder site to beat you out especially with regard to the generic search terms.  Unless you live in Podunk, TX, population 23 you're probably not going to show up well for generic search terms like "counseling in (your city)".

4. Problem: The many mental health directories (Psychology Today, etc) and help wanted sites (Indeed.com, Glassdoor, etc) are goliath sites and are going to OWN Pg 1 and a chunk of Pg 2 for those generic search terms.

5. Problem: You can spend months, years and a retirement fund trying to create a stronger SEO environment by building back-links and other seo tactics but you'll never catch up with those guys in #4. You can't beat them at their game, you need a new game to play.

Main Theme: If you try and beat the big boy sites with basic, generic terms you're going to get the slobber knocked out of you almost every time.

So What's a Private Practice Counselor To Do?

Use a rifle approach to ranking instead of that shotgun you're using. Here's how. We're going to do something that NONE of the directories or the employment sites do and that is create a single piece of content (a blog post) pertaining to the specific topic and long-tail keyword questions/phrase(s) you've come up with. THAT is how you beat a Goliath site: create a piece of content that directly addresses a highly specific keyword search phrase. Google would rather serve up your blog post that directly answers the searcher's question than give it a giant result that might only get close. Make sense?

Let's Get Started

1. What TOPIC do you want to show up for? Keep it simple; a specific type of trauma, a specific type of depression, a specific type of addiction, ...you follow? Pick something right now. (Let's take this ONE topic at a time. Once you've proven the concept I'm outlining to yourself you can duplicate it endlessly for any topic you want.)

2. Now let's compile a list of long-tail keywords that your potential site visitors might be typing into a search engine to find answers to, and ultimately find you. Here's how we'll do that. Let's make a list of the top 5-10 questions that you think a client would ask about your specific topic. Keep those questions to 5-9 words each, please, and write 'em down right now. I'll wait...

All done? Those questions are your long-tail keywords! Here's why this is going to work. "Counseling" could mean a hundred things. "Mental health counseling" is better. "Mental health counseling for bi-polar depression in rockwall" is even better. The more specific, the better, but don't overdo it!

This is KEY....these long-tail keywords (that's what they're called when they're very specific in their search interest because they fall on the tail-end of the search results bell-curve) must be phrases that your potential clients would actually use, not something only a counselor would say. I repeat, it only counts if your potential site visitor can come up with the question/phrase themselves!!

Once you have a single topic and have come up with 5-10 questions a client might ask about it then it's time to move on to the next step.

Blow the Dust Off That Blog

1. You came up with a TOPIC earlier that you want to show up for, right? Then you came up with the top 5-10 questions you thought a site visitor might be asking about that specific topic. Now it's time to write that article.

2. Now go back and answer each of those 5-10 questions (you can leave the questions out if you want, just make it obvious in your answer what the question was.) As best you can, include a variation of your long-tail keyword in each answer without making it sound like you were getting paid $5 every time you stuffed the same phrase in the article! String these answers together and, voila, you have your article.

3. Read it out loud a few times until it flows well and sounds natural. Have someone else read it and ask them "what questions (they) have" about it.

4. Add a CTA, a Call-to-Action. That means tell them what they need to do next to set up an appointment with you.

You are 90% there! (Yes, it can be that simple.)

Finish It!

If you're website is WordPress based and your web guy has set things up properly (I do!) there's a "checklist" in the back-end of your website for you to follow when you post the article you just wrote. That checklist will ensure that your finished post is "Google friendly", including the other search engines.

Once you click, "Publish", give that post a day or two at most and Google will have added your new content to their library of available search results. Then this is where it gets fun. Now do a search for "whatever you specified as your main keyword" when you set up your blog post and watch that article knock the sense out of those directories, employment sites, and your local competitors.

Here's an example of a blog post that employed this exact technique. Do a search for "When Can I Take The 40 Hour LPC Supervisory Training Course" and see if a PracticeMentors.us blog post shows up or not! If I can do it, and I just told you how to do it, then....

You got this.