Building a successful practice is going to require marketing. There are many ways you can market – and we talk about them often here on our blog and on our Facebook, so please follow to stay in the loop – but you will need to make sure that potential clients have a way to find you. Without marketing, no one will know you exist.
While there are many marketing agencies that can help, and we’d be more than happy to recommend some to you, there are also many tasks that you can do on your own. You just have to know what they are and how they work.
Today, we’ll talk about “Backlinking,” also known as “Link Building.” Don’t worry about how complicated the terminology is, the basic idea will be easy to understand.
How Does Google Rank Websites?
Let’s say you’re in need of a therapist, and you’re going to use Google to find one. You search for something like “Therapist in Phoenix” and look at the results. What do you see?
First, you see ads. We can talk about ads in another post, but these are ads that therapists pay for in order to show up 1st and 2nd in search engines. Ads are expensive and you have to pay money every time someone clicks on an ad.
But after the ads are the regular results. These are called “Organic” because they are not paid for. They are the results that the Google Algorithm determined are the most relevant to the search term.
The Google Algorithm is complicated, flawed, and very opaque. But one thing you can say with certainty: if someone searches for you (eg, “therapist in Los Angeles”), you want to be as close to first in search as possible.
The question is: How do you get there? There are hundreds of therapists in big cities. How will Google Rank you above all of them?
Once again, this is a big question with a big answer that we will talk about more over time, but the rankings are largely based on three factors:
- Content on your website – how much, its quality, its words.
- Basics of your website design – is it fast, is it broken, is it user friendly?
- Links to your site from other websites on the internet.
This long intro is about that last part: other people’s websites that have a link on them that points to your site in some form. Those are “backlinks.” Those are the links that point back to you.
Why Do Backlinks Matter?
Imagine that you manually had to go through thousands of websites in order to determine which one should be first for a specific search phrase, which one should be second, third, etc. How would you do it?
You might look at what the website is about based on the words. You might look at how pretty the website is. You might look at the person’s expertise or how long they have been in business. These would all be good things, but it would still be really hard to determine who deserves to be first, second, third, etc. from those alone.
Search engines have the same issue. So what they did is they look at these backlinks and use them as a sort of trust score. If the New York Times links to your website, chances are you’re a real therapist that is highly regarded and very trustworthy. The New York Times is not linking to some random scammer’s website. It’s making editorial decisions and has determined you to be trustworthy and worth listening to. Google’s algorithm is then taking that into consideration.
Now, think about the opposite situation. If no one links to your website at all, what does that tell the algorithm? You could be a spammer, or you could be inexperienced, or you could be someone that no one likes or trusts.
Again, Google doesn’t know who you are, and it’s trying to determine whether or not you’re a good choice for a search term using any means necessary. These links help it determine that you are relevant and trustworthy.
Now, in Google, More=Better, always. 100 links is better than 10, which is better than 1. But the number of links alone is not enough. Google is also looking at:
- How trustworthy is the website that is linking to you? Are they another therapist, or PsychologyToday, or a newspaper? Or is it a scam website called “CheapHandbagsXYZ dot com”? The quality and trustworthiness of the source of the link matters.
- Did you pay for it? Google doesn’t like when people pay to have links placed on websites, so if the website that is linking to you is one that accepts payments to link to a lot of people, the benefit of the link goes down.
- How relevant is it? Is it in your city? Or is it another therapist? If you are a therapist in Los Angeles, and you’re getting a link from a roofer in Kentucky, that’s worth less than a link from another mental health professional or someone in your area.
These are some of the factors that affect the value of the link. More links from relevant sources that are trustworthy provides more benefits.
How Do You Get Links?
Obtaining links, however, is one of the most challenging parts of online marketing. In fact, it is so challenging, that some marketing agencies will not even do it, and many of the ones that offer it use spam tactics that are highly discouraged.
So what can you do?
You can:
- Use your network. Ask your colleagues if they’ll accept a guest post, or will link to you in a blog of their own. See if your old school or colleagues in the medical field will link to you in content related to psychotherapy or mental health. Your network is going to be your strongest tool for getting links.
- Be in the community. Local links are also valuable, because it helps Google understand your location. If you’re a member of the Chamber of Commerce, or you donate to the local Little League, often times there are options within the community to get links back to your site.
- Open yourself up to news. Many of us are shy about the idea of being interviewed, but a link to your website in a newspaper article about mental health is a great link to obtain, so if you have a chance to get interviewed, take advantage of it.
- Write – or have someone else write – long, detailed, amazing content. You can sometimes obtain links naturally by writing content so good, so interesting, and so detailed that other people want to link to it for their own readers.
These are the strategies that are going to give you some of the more easy to obtain links. It’s very hard to get featured in major national newspapers, or get an article up on Psychology Today, but these strategies can get you some much needed backlinks to help with your marketing efforts – backlinks that few companies will be able to obtain for you.
There is no magic strategy that will instantly help you reach #1 in Google. The best marketing agencies have to work tirelessly on your behalf to get there. But you CAN get there. Links like this are part of the process, and once you show up high in search, you’ll start noticing a steady supply of new clients as a result.
Looking for more help with starting or growing your own private practice? Reach out to PsychFusion today!