Transcript
The Topic of Keywords in SEO is More than “Getting Keywords on the Page
Let’s talk keywords for therapists. If you’re a therapist looking to fill your calendar with leads coming in through organic search, getting your keyword strategy right is going to be the first step to making that a reality. In this video, I’m going to explain to you how SEO keywords work, how it’s likely that you’re not approaching it from the right direction to begin with, and what you can do to target these keywords and get in front of the patients that you want to treat.
My name is Frank. I’m the founder of Sagapixel. We are a digital marketing firm that works with healthcare providers. SEO and Google Ads are our sweet spot, and in this video I’m going to give you a primer on what you need to know so that you can get your SEO and your keywords right.
Keywords Indicate Search Intent When Looking for a Therapist or Researching a Condition and Treatment
So let’s start off by dispelling them. SEO is not taking keywords and putting them on the page. What we need to do is identify the types of searches that your target patient is performing online and ensuring that we have content on the website that is relevant to those searches. These are usually going to fall into one of two categories. On one side, you’re going to have patients that are explicitly looking for a therapist where they’re located or a therapist that specializes in a specific disorder, or a therapist that accepts a specific type of insurance. You get the idea.
Keywords with Transactional Intent: Searches Explicitly Looking for a Specific Type of Therapist
Keyword research can help you to identify all of these different, let’s say, subtypes of therapists that people are searching for, and then you are going to go ahead and build dedicated pages on your website to target each one of them by intent. In other words, you don’t want to try to get your homepage to rank for seven different disorders and the three insurances that you accept. We want dedicated pages that are going to be highly aligned and relevant to the searches that people are performing and frankly, the type of therapists that they want to say.
SEO Keywords with Informational Intent: Signs, Symptoms, & Treatments
The other type of keyword that we’re going to be targeting are the types of investigational and informational searches that people are performing. For example, a therapist that specializes in anxiety may want to rank for keywords such as, “How to deal with a bully at work.” The goal being that someone is going to Google this, they may recognize that they’re suffering from anxiety and you may be the therapist to treat them.
This is largely done through a content strategy. We would never try to get a homepage to try to rank for a keyword like that. That needs to be an article, and even better if you can shoot a video that goes along with it. You very well may be on our website right now watching this video. You need to do the same thing for your patients. Using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, a trained SEO will find the different types of keywords that you may want to target, the kinds of queries that are on your buyer’s journey. We would not want to target something like gift for therapists or starting salary for physical therapists, but people are looking for therapists for LGBTQ. If that describes you, you should target that keyword.
Once a Set of Keywords is Identified, We Map Them to New Content
Once the keyword plan is put together, we’ll then put together a content plan to have dedicated pages or articles that will target each one of these keywords. Then we’ll check the search engine results to see what is already ranking. There may be an angle that we need to target when we’re writing an article, for example, and if it’s a practice page like therapist for depression that we’re going to write, it’s very important to take a look at the search engine results and see what’s already ranking there. There are going to be subsections on each one of those pages that we are going to need to cover and include if we want to outrank them in search.
After Writing the Content, We Perform Entity Optimization
Ultimately, Google wants to give the best, most comprehensive, and informative results when people perform searches, and failing to do so is going to land you on page four. Finally, we want to complete what is referred to as entity optimization. Basically, we’ll take the piece of content that’s been written, be it a landing page or an article, and we’ll run it through a natural language processing tool that will compare the content that has been written to the stuff that’s already ranking on Google. It’ll give us suggestions for keywords that are missing, or maybe if we overused some keywords in comparison to competitors, we’ll edit it and then publish it.
I hope this video was helpful. If it was, please give it a like, and if you’d like to meet with me or someone from my team, check out our website, click on the contact, and you schedule a time.
