Strategic Web Marketing
for Therapists

Convey your unique, special qualities as a Therapist.

Answers To Your Questions

Any time we get a question from our clients that's not covered on our website we'll post it here. You need answers. We've got 'em.

Questions about your website

• What will my website cost?

The base prices are listed for each of our packages on our Website Design Packages page. There you will also learn what is included with your package. The optional extras and their cost are there as well. Here's a direct link to Optional Additional Services.

The cost of hosting is covered on our page about Hosting.
For additional services such as logo design or business cards see our Services page and click on the service you are interested in.

• What tasks will I be expected to do myself?

Send us your text and work with us to improve it.
Send us a digital photo of you (unless you don't want one on your website)
Participate with us on Search Engine Optimization (This is easy and we will guide you)
Order your own domain registration and hosting account (This is easy, and it is extremely important that you have complete control over your website.)
If you will be adding extra royalty-free stock photo images you will be doing your own image searches. (This is easy, and we will teach you and assist you).
If applicable, there may be one or two phone meetings where we'll both be online to do design work together.

• What is the process for getting my website built?

The steps are listed on our Website Creation Process page.

• Is customer service free like it is at TherapySites.com?

Take a look at what is included with the base price of your website design package and what optional extras you can purchase. Consultation beyond what is explicitly included is billed at our standard hourly rate.

The reason TherapySites can "give" you "free" customer service is because you will be paying them thousands of dollars over the years of $59/month hosting fees. With Successful-Therapist your hosting need not cost more than $4.95 a month! So invest once in an hour or so of professional consultation and then sit back and enjoy the savings.

• Why do I have to pay for 10 pages if I only want 5?

Well, actually you're paying for 5 pages and getting 10.

When we do our evaluation of a client's text, we usually find that a finer-grained, more logically organized organization will improve search engine rankings AND make it more likely your visitors will take in your message and contact you. So most therapists who start out with five pages end up with ten.

We don't want that to cost you extra.

• Will we be meeting in person?

Not unless it's for lunch. For working, the easiest way is to use email and the phone, with you at your computer and me at mine. Consequently it doesn't matter where you are located. So far my most distant client is in Zurich, Switzerland. It made no difference whatsoever! All we need to do is match up our time zones. I'm in California.

• If after we are done I decide I want to add a whole new page, what will I need to do? Will I need to pay you to add it or will I be able to do so alone?

If you have a set of pages set up with the Articles module (ideal for either articles or for therapy specialty pages) you can easily add one yourself. Pages added this way will have the same appearance them as their overview (table of contents) page, including the "local" image if you have one there.

If you need a page added that will require a new "button" in your main navigation, then that would require a change to every page on your website. In that case, I would need to do that for you. It would probably typically cost about $100. I've never actually had anyone ask me to do this. They always seem to get it right the first time as to their main pages, and if they anticipate wanting to add pages they use the Articles module and/or a blog.

Questions about Search Engine Optimization

• I want to be clear about what you do and what I'd need to do about optimization. I assume that you'll incorporate common search terms therapists want for headers and meta tags. Correct?

I'll guide you to come up with those yourself, and if I don't think you've got it right I'll correct them for you.

• I was told that further optimization includes calculating the percentage that those terms appear in the text on the site, and that you don't want the percentage to be too low or too high. Do you know the percentages? Will you help me with this?

Let me begin by saying I'm an expert at search engine optimization. Here is an article that features me, and it will answer most of your questions about SEO.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/11577.asp

Here is my SEO website: http://roi-seo.com/

Attempting to micromanage your SEO with carefully researched keywords applied the exact right percentage of times is a mistake for a small therapist website: it will not be cost-effective. No matter how awesomely your small website could be "optimized" it is only going to bring you modest amounts of traffic through search engines. Why? Because there are really only just so many people who will type in "Therapy for depression and anxiety in San Ramon, California" on a given day. Or even the far more likely "therapy depression san ramon ca".

There are many unethical SEO companies who take horrible advantage of uneducated clients by letting them believe the end always justifies the means with SEO. Likewise, there are many clients who are convinced that SEO will mean hordes of traffic will come if you merely do things like pick the right keywords and get the right percentages.

Many clients assume that they can get their little website in the top ten for something like "therapy" or at least "perinatal psychotherapy". If you actually think your website has a shot at keywords like that, please read at least the first two articles on this page which I wrote to help you to put that in perspective:

http://roi-seo.com/seo-articles.html

I will teach you basic SEO for making it so your website has the absolute best possible chance to be found on your name and your town and specialty, but there is never any way to guarantee rankings.

• Why should I have a website at all if I won't be getting a huge number of clients from search engines?

You will get clients from search engines, just not huge numbers of them, for the reasons discussed above. But the real reason to have a website is to show prospective clients that you are the right therapist for them.

Your prospective clients will find your website by a lot of different means. Perhaps you gave someone your business card (which of course has your website url on it). Perhaps someone clicked through from your ad on Psychology Today or TherapistFinder. Perhaps you published an article, either online or in print (and of course you included your website url). You can and should use as many different ways you can think of to promote your website.

The point is that prospective clients will arrive at your website, and what they see there will most likely be compared with what they see on other therapists' websites that they are considering as well. The goal of your website is to make a very compelling connection with the kind of client you want to attract. The purpose of your website is to make it crystal clear to that person that they have found exactly the therapist they were looking for

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