Table in wooden table near coffee and plant. SEO for mental health professionals is very important to get your people, but ethical seo is a must. Learn how optimizing SEO for backlinking can help you build credible traffic to your website.

A 3 Prong Approach to SEO

Once you have a website that you love, it’s targeting the clients you most enjoy working with and it’s free from technical errors, it’s time to get started on Search Engine Optimization.  I talk about a lot of different things and ways you can approach your website. So, you can do to improve your search engine ranking. Along with driving more traffic to your site, but most of it falls into three categories.

The Three Prongs for Improving SEO

Prong 1: On-Page SEO Approach starting with your service pages

This is probably what you hear me talk about the most.  A lot of things fall into this category including headings, and subheadings. Including the right content on the page, internal links, potentially some external links, optimizing photos and so much more!  I see optimizing your service pages in particular as “laying the foundation” for good SEO.  If your SEO is built on the foundation of well-optimized service pages, it will be so much easier to get it ranking well. This is why we always start with optimizing the on-service pages. Then move to on-page optimization for other key pages on a website.

This is the prong we work on for our clients who purchase our “Done for You”packages.

Prong 2: Building Backlinks

In general, I think that building backlinks are one approach and one of the best strategies to give you long-ranking SEO power.  Google assumes that if a lot of other websites are pointing to your website, it must have some pretty awesome, helpful content!  In some fields, you need thousands and thousands of backlinks to get to the top for the keyword you target. In the field of mental health, we often need fewer because not as many therapists work on building backlinks.  If you can get a couple of hundred backlinks you’ll be way ahead of many of your competitors…especially if you’re also working on Prong 1 & Prong 2.

This is the prong that is the hardest to outsource because Google has a policy that you shouldn’t pay for backlinks for the purpose of improving your ranking.  There are a LOT of different ways you can get more backlinks to your website. Including everything from getting listed on resource lists to guest blogging or even posting open positions on strategic sites.

I’m actually offering an upcoming Building Backlinks training that will be a 2 part live Masterclass. This is where we’ll go over a lot of different strategies and approaches for ethically and effectively building backlinks to your site!

Prong 3: Informative, Relevant Blog Posts

Well-written blog posts that provide a lot of useful information and are written about the topics your ideal clients have questions about are SEO gold.  In fact, as time moves on this should become a major focus on your SEO strategy.  Especially because Google likes to see that regular content is uploaded to your page, but blog posts do so much more than just put regular content up there!  If you’ve got the right blogging strategy, it’s communicating to potential clients who you are, bringing regular traffic to your site, and can even be used to enhance treatment with your current clients!

Which of these main three SEO strategies do I focus on?

Ultimately, I believe all three of these are really important for SEO on a therapist’s website. In a perfect world, you’d be working on all three prongs at the same time.  What we often see clients do is hire us for our Done for You services.  We get to work on Prong 1 right away by optimizing their service pages. Then other key pages on the site. Meanwhile, from our very first month, we’re sending them blog post ideas. This is so they can start creating blog posts that will really catapult them to the top of Google!  Then, around month 3 our staff are starting to talk more about backlinks so they can begin building backlinks in an organic, really effective way.

Our goal is that 6 months into working on SEO, a therapist’s website has fully optimized key pages on their site, produced a variety of blog posts written strategically to enhance their SEO, had some of those blog posts fully optimized AND built some amazing organic blog posts!

Upcoming Training: Building Backlinks

Image of a city with the words" Building Backlinks Simplified SEO Consulting" to promote our upcoming Building Backlinks training for private practice owners.

Building Backlinks: Learn to ethically and effectively build backlinks to your psychotherapy website.

Backlinks are one of the most powerful tools you can use to improve your Search Engine Optimization. Even if you outsource your on-page optimization, you should still have a plan to work on organically increasing the number of

In this TWO part Masterclass, you’ll learn:

1. The importance of building your own backlinks
2. What types of backlinks are most valuable
3. A variety of techniques for building backlinks
4. What to do if a low-quality site happens to link to yours

*Webinar will take place on Thursday 7/2 and 7/9 from 1-2:15 Central Time and will cost only $59.

Register for our Building Backlinks 2 Part Webinar
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