Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Testing Psychologist podcast. I’m Dr. Jeremy Sharp and today I am talking with Mr. John Clarke. John is someone who I met personally about a month ago at Slow Down School. So we have a little bit of an interview series of Slow Down School acquaintances here. I interviewed Jaime Jay last week and this week is John Clarke.
I had a run into John before that online in two Facebook groups and we originally connected when we found out we both were going to Slow Down School. [00:01:00] I put out a request for anyone who’d be willing to do some trail runs with me and John jumped on that right away. So I was like, this guy’s probably going to be cool. And that turned out to be true.
John was my roommate at Slow Down School. I got to talk with him and get to know him and found that he’s an incredible professional and also a nice, genuine individual with a ton of knowledge.
Welcome to the podcast, John.
John: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Dr. Sharp: Me too. We’re going to be talking all about digital marketing and talking about how digital marketing can be super helpful for mental health practitioners in general but especially testing folks. So I’m excited to dig into that.
Before I do that, let me read a little bio for you just to give you an idea of who John is. We’ll try to summarize everything you’re doing. You’re a busy guy these days, [00:02:00] but this will give everybody a little taste of what you’re up to.
John is a licensed psychotherapist and the founder of privatepracticeworkshop.com where he helps therapists build or grow a thriving private practice. He is the founder and Director of Charlotte Counseling and Wellness, a group psychotherapy practice that offers innovative evidence-based therapy and coaching in Charlotte, North Carolina primarily for busy, anxious professionals.
Most recently, and maybe most importantly for us, John launched Unconditional Media, which is a digital marketing team specifically for therapists. I am excited to be talking about that. Again, welcome to the podcast, John. Glad to have you.
John: Thanks. I’ve always been wanting to demystify marketing in general, but also digital marketing. I think there are a lot of [00:03:00] images or fears or questions that come up when we start talking about this stuff among therapists and psychologists, and it can be daunting. It can be overwhelming. There’s been plenty of times in my career and in my learning of this stuff where it’s been overwhelming and daunting.
Above all else, I’m always trying to demystify it. The people who work with me know that that’s my aim or the same thing with my podcast. That’s the aim of everything that I do.
Dr. Sharp: I think that’s important and that was something that I was struck by during a lot of our chats in the dorm room and around the dorm there at Slow Down School. You know a lot about this stuff but the way that you talk about it is also easy to understand and very insightful at the same time. So I like that balance and I hope that we can communicate some of those elements to our folks [00:04:00] here today.
John: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Sharp: I think we can jump right into it. Let’s start and maybe talk about, when we say digital marketing, what does that even mean?
John: The typical marketing strategies of someone in private practice or in a testing practice are; we have in-person strategies where we are connecting with whether it’s other providers or ideally potential referral sources. I look at those as one branch of marketing and one branch of a well-rounded marketing plan.
There’s print marketing that you can do as well. So that’s your printed materials. Maybe you’re sending those out. Maybe you have a physical mail campaign that you do or even delivering those physical materials, that’s [00:05:00] the traditional, the old school way of getting the word out.
As the internet continues to evolve and become more integrated into our lives, it becomes that much more important to have an online presence. What I mean by that is:
1. You want to exist in as many places as possible on the internet.
2. If you’re going to exist there, you want to have a quality presence. You don’t want to just be on there recycling NPR articles about mental health that you happen to see and not contributing anything original or anything that advances your position as an expert.
I think therapists and psychologists can get spread thin trying to do, one, exist everywhere and not do any medium real justice, not do anything particularly well with their digital presence. [00:06:00] There’s a caveat to number one in that if you’re going to use these different mediums, whether it’s your website, Psychology Today, or social media, I want you to make sure that you’re doing it well and having even two mediums that are strong rather than being scattered over six mediums that you’re not keeping up with.
Because what does that convey? Let’s say you have your website, Psychology Today, you have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, and someone starts to look at all the stuff you’re doing online, or they’re looking at all the social media platforms for your practice, what kind of impression does it give off when they go and your Pinterest has one post, your Twitter has one post, your Instagram has two posts. You’re just there.
I think it’s better to commit to two platforms that you know, that you [00:07:00] can figure out, the learning curve is not too steep and you know you can commit to having a strong presence with two of those mediums.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. We talk about being a specialist in the clinical sense, but it sounds like you’re saying it makes sense from a digital marketing perspective to almost be like specialists or have a niche in a particular social media platform.
John: It does, especially if you’re not getting help with it. There are plenty of folks who get whether it’s a virtual assistant or someone to do this stuff for them, or they use social media scheduling software like MeetEdgar or Hootsuite or something like that. That can be a bit of a game changer but you still need to put out enough original content to fill up those channels.
I think we just get sidetracked easily and we get overwhelmed easily in running a practice of any kind, and it’s [00:08:00] important to boil it down and say, okay, what’s important and for my particular client, where do I need to exist? So that’s the other thing is going back to choosing the channels that you’re going to exist on is thinking about, there’s no hard science to this part of where do my future clients hang out on the internet? Where do they go to search for someone like me, whether you’re doing therapy or you’re doing all testing or neuropsychological testing or something like that? I think any good marketing plan starts by getting into the mind of your customer.
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely. Maybe we could dive into that. I like the idea of where my clients hang out on social media or on the internet. Thinking about testing folks, I would say, for me, I have been working with a lot of kids, [00:09:00] my target client, so to speak, is the parent, most likely. And then we have school counselors and physicians as well but if I’m talking about a client that I might try to attract on social media, that’s probably the parent.
Do you have any way to gauge, guess, or determine how to target that and where you might find those folks or learn where they hang out, so to speak?
John: I would start with using the information that you know, or thinking of a typical client of yours or typical family that comes to your testing practice. First of all, look at how your current clients are finding you. If you’re going to network with other therapists and psychologists, one of the best things you can do is make sure you’re asking that person, hey, how do clients find you? What are your [00:10:00] top referral sources?
Most of the time, therapists will tell you and that information is so critical, especially for your area, because I will tell you that different things work for different regions, different cities. Is it a small town? Are you in a college town? Are you in a major city?
When I’m designing a marketing plan for a clinician, it can look different depending on where they are and depending on what’s already worked. So if you’re not already doing this and I hope you are, make sure that you’re tracking your referral sources to begin with.
For my group practice, our assistant, whenever she answers the phone, it’s Charlotte Counseling and Wellness, thanks for calling. And then also, oh, how did you find out about us? And that goes into a spreadsheet.
So I know, right off the bat, how people are finding me and what’s working. When I know what’s working, I can double down on that approach. For some folks, it’s as simple as that. If you know it’s working, [00:11:00] double down on that approach.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. It’s a little something that might get overlooked over time.
John: I think so. Sometimes it’s hard, especially with the online stuff, to figure out, you’ll ask a client or let’s say for your testing practice, you ask a client, oh, how’d you find out about me? Either they won’t remember, or they’ll say Google.
Google can mean a lot of different things. Google can mean I put in testing psychologist Chicago and then it took me to Psychology Today or something like that, or it took me to a doctor’s website that had a link to your website or whatever it is. Even with that, sometimes you have to try to get more specific.
Maybe if your website is ranking high on Google organically and through your efforts of search engine optimization, you might be getting traffic that way. If you’re running ads on Google or using [00:12:00] what’s called Google AdWords, you might be getting traffic that way and it can be hard to differentiate, but you at least want to try to narrow it down and get that information from your new clients.
Dr. Sharp: Do you have any recommendations about how to narrow that down? Do you just list out all of the options on your intake paperwork or ask them specifically? How would you go about that?
John: I ask them specifically and if they say Google, I ask them to clarify if they can. What I’ll tell, for most people listening, you can already narrow it down by asking yourself this question, am I ranking on page one or the first two pages of Google for my kind of practice? If you are, then it’s possible that people are finding you organically in that regard, but there’s a very large number of practitioners who are not ranking at all for Google because they haven’t focused on that search engine optimization.
[00:13:00] For some folks, or let’s say, if you’re starting a new practice and you built a website last week, clients are not going to be finding you organically. That’s not enough time to rank up in Google and be competitive on that first page. That’s one way to realize it.Even googling yourself or googling neuropsychological testing Chicago or whatever it is, and seeing if you’re ranking up for terms like that. You should know right off the bat how competitive you are with that ranking system. If you’re on page seven, you can pretty much know that you’re not going to be found organically.
Same thing is, I’ll tell, even if you’re on page three, the odds of someone finding organically are very low. People rarely even go past the first page of Google, better yet, the bottom half of the first page of Google. It’s crazy.
There are [00:14:00] numbers that are out there on what that threshold looks like, but it starts to drop off after about the second half of the first page. So it makes it that much more important to make sure you’re ranking up there and ranking up for the right terms.
Dr. Sharp: Sure.
John: Have I overwhelmed anyone yet?
Dr. Sharp: Probably, I’m just going to …
John: Take a breath. Take a sip of your tea and we’re going to walk through this.
Dr. Sharp: I like that confidence. Let’s back up a little bit and walk through, I’m going to own to that I’ve done a fair amount of research into some of this so I know a lot of these terms that you’re using and maybe a little more comfortable than some of the listeners might be, I don’t know.
Maybe we could back up and think big picture; you talked about marketing [00:15:00] in general, you listed there’s in-person marketing, there’s print marketing, and then we dove into internet marketing. Can you outline internet marketing or digital marketing a little bit and talk about what are the main ways to do that that people might even consider?
John: Yeah, for sure. That’s great. The most valuable asset to a practice of any kind is your website. I’ll tell you that and in the work that we do, I work with a lot of therapists, both as a coach and then also with our digital marketing team. It’s not uncommon to have a therapist come to us and say, hey, I’ve got my website. Maybe I built it myself. It’s ready to go. I just need it ranking higher on Google, or I want to pay for Google AdWords to get my site recognized and clicked on.
So I’ll [00:16:00] say, okay, great. I’m so glad you’re interested in that. I’ll click on their website. If I get to their website and I see, okay, this is not putting your best foot forward. If it’s not a website that is beautiful, functional, and has clear calls to action, or a CTA, call to action is a button or a link or something obvious that says call, click to call or click to schedule your first appointment or more information here.
We can increase traffic to your website, but I’ll tell to start with the essentials, if you don’t have a solid website, then all the work that you do on top of that could potentially not pay off. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if no one knows how to find your phone number or how to schedule an intake on your website, then you might be getting this traffic but not converting those [00:17:00] leads; converting visitors into paying customers. I think I’ve really overwhelmed people.
Dr. Sharp: Hey, no, I think we’re good. I want to ask maybe your top three tips for making a website, you said beautiful, functional, and easy to navigate.
Before we totally dive into that, I want to mention though, that I was talking to Jaime Jay who I interviewed last time on the podcast about websites and he put it really well, I think you would agree with this, which is that when someone comes to our website, we have to assume that they have no idea where they should go on the website or how to find us or schedule services. We want our website to walk someone through the process of finding out about us, learning about our services, and then scheduling.
So you have to make that clear with [00:18:00] the flow, with the buttons, with the calls to action, with the click here to schedule, that kind of stuff, and make it really clear what kind of behavior you would like your potential client to engage in on your website. Does that make sense?
John: That’s it. Jaime’s amazing with this stuff. He has a wealth of knowledge about it. There are people who study what’s called UX or user behavior. A friend of mine has a master’s degree in user behavior. And so it’s really amazing, just like we study clinical psychology for a number of years, people study website behavior for a number of years and have advanced degrees in that.
First of all, why would we know about this stuff? We spend all of our years becoming clinicians so cut yourself some slack in that regard and figure out what your comfort is with any of this stuff. Am I comfortable learning it? Does it cause me a ton of [00:19:00] anxiety? Do I have a budget that could pay someone like Jaime to do this stuff for me?
Your website, beyond encouraging the right behavior, it also needs to have some compelling website copy. Copy is the words on your website that are used to keep people there, communicate what you do and then also to encourage action. If you want, I can talk about that briefly, the way that I approach it.
Dr. Sharp: Yeah. And maybe that wraps back into some of those tips for making your website functional and useful.
John: One quick way that I look at it and that friend of mine has taught me about user behaviors, if you think about F, the way that people scan a website, and stop me if Jaime Jay said this.
Dr. Sharp: No, not at all.
John: If you come to a webpage, people tend to scan in [00:20:00] form of F. So if you’re starting at the top left corner, that’s where usually a logo is or something like that and then they’re going to scan right all the way to the end. In the very top right, that’s where a clear call to action or a button or something should usually be, because that’s such a critical point where people’s eyes just naturally go.
Moving down from there, moving down the F, they’re going to come down about a quarter or halfway, and they’re going to see some text, and they’re going to read about half of it. That’s the bottom part of F. They’re going to read a bit of that, they’re either going to keep reading or they’re going to click out of your website.
So that section is so important. It’s either your mission statement or you’re starting to talk about the pain points of your client, whatever it is, and then they might scan down a little bit and skim-read more of your website.
One thing I see a lot is therapists who have an overwhelming amount of website copy or have listed all of their credentials and this [00:21:00] and that on the first page or this elaborate paragraph form of trying to describe their clients’ issues and you can lose people that way. I tend to err on the side of simplicity and minimalism when I’m writing website copy and coaching therapists on how to do this as well.
First of all, you need to have the right buttons in the right places and in multiple places on every page. And then you need to have a compelling copy that is succinct enough to be skimmed.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. In terms of writing copy, do you suggest that people do that themselves, or are there folks that can do that for you? How do you approach that?
John: There are a lot of folks who can do it for you. I think a lot of the practice coaches are getting into this now and seeing the value in it. What I’ll say is this, if you’re a strong writer and then the reality is a lot of us are, especially clinical psychologists, you all have had to [00:22:00] a lot of writing and you do technical writing or you do report writing so you’re a strong writer in the most obvious way.
We’ve learned to write APA style and you’ve learned to write these reports, et cetera but writing website copy is very different. We’ve got to extract clinical language from it and clinical jargon and psychobabble. I believe most people don’t want to read about your credentials, at least not on the homepage. What people are looking for on the homepage is, am I in the right place and do you get me?
The way that we capture that is when I’m walking through this with therapists or even working on my own practice website, speak directly to the pain of your clients. And so for testing, it might be, your child has been [00:23:00] struggling in school for months, the school counselors or the staff can’t figure out the right combination of services and as a parent, you’re worried, you’re concerned. You want to make sure that you get the right concept of your child or the right understanding of what your child is going through so they can get the help they need, something like that.
You want to do it better than that, but you want to capture the pain of your client. Then you want to walk through the next phase, how do you help them? So the process of what you offer and then focus on the outcome of your product.
Dr. Sharp: That’s interesting. I think we lose the outcomes sometimes. When I do website reviews for my own consulting clients, I see a lot of focus on the testing process and what’s included, the measures, the price, and all of that, which is good but then [00:24:00] I don’t see a whole lot about the outcome, what will you walk away with and how is this going to make a difference in your life?
John: I think if most of your website was predominantly inclined toward the outcome, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. And that even comes down to things like the website images that you use, do they convey a sense of resolution or of greater understanding or of moving forward with your life? Did they convey this, by selecting a commercial of the dude with his head and his hands, who’s never going to get better and everything is blue?
Dr. Sharp: That’s an interesting point. When I was putting together my own website, I thought about, do we show pictures that capture the client’s experience as they find you or do you try to incorporate pictures that show where you hope they will be after your services. Not like it’s a black and white thing by any means, like sad and happy, but that [00:25:00] general theme. It sounds like you’re saying go for the hopeful, optimistic pictures that show the outcome.
John: That’s what I push for because I think what you’re doing with a website is you’re already starting to create expectations within your clients and within the families you work with. So when they arrive, I don’t do testing but at least in terms of therapy, we know that a large part of the success of therapy has to do with client expectation.
I would imagine there are similar studies out there in the academic world for testing psychology if the family comes and they believe that you are the one to help them, you’re the right person and that I’m in the right place, and that this testing process is going to lead to something beneficial for my family, that’s all going to show up when you get them in the office, when you’re sitting down with them, when you’re running through the actual test, you’re going to use the pricing, all of that stuff. So I do think it is [00:26:00] about building expectation and in a way, building hope.
You’re doing that with testing as well. You’re building hope that we can get you some clarity on what you or your child is struggling with. When we get you that clarity, it’s going to unlock X, Y, and Z, or the result will be X, Y, and Z. I think there’s a lot that we can look at there.
Dr. Sharp: Got you. That’s great. We’ve talked a fair bit about the website which has been super helpful. Can you talk about other aspects or arms of digital marketing that you find valuable?
John: Sure. Let me talk about two problems that we run into with websites. There’s some different solutions for them, depending on which problem you’re facing.
One problem is that you have website traffic, meaning people are finding your website, but they’re not calling. So that’s an issue [00:27:00] of conversion. Meaning when these potential customers come to your website, they’re not picking up the phone. They don’t know where to click or what to do or how to get in touch. Well, that’s a problem.
Dr. Sharp: Can I jump in, John, real quick and ask you a question? Getting basic, how would we even know if someone was finding our website but not calling?
John: Awesome question. It depends on if you run your own website or have built it or have access to editing your website, everyone should have what’s called Google Analytics set up for your website. Google Analytics is the tool that you can use and install for your website to study the behavior of your visitors.
Even in the most basic form of how many people am I getting to my website? And then even, which pages of my website are most important? That information alone can tell you a ton, because you might have 15 pages on your site that no one is ever looking [00:28:00] at.
Typically, the most popular pages are your homepage, your about page, and then your services and fees. Who are you? What do you do? What can I get from this? How much does it cost? You want to think about that as well. You want to, at minimum, get that tool for yourself or work with your web developer, whoever it is to make sure you have that tool. That’s where you’re going to get these metrics.
I’ll tell you, with anything you do with your marketing, it’s good to know what those numbers are. You might install Google Analytics and you might even jot down those numbers or just look on the graphs that they provide and see, okay, so in September, my traffic was at 200 visitors per month and then you might work with someone to do marketing or hire someone or do your own SEO work or your own promotion in person.
And looking at those numbers is a great way to [00:29:00] gauge what you’re doing. Given that you all are testing psychologists and are inclined toward numbers, results, and metrics, you should be applying that same philosophy to your own website and to your own marketing endeavors.
Dr. Sharp: Sure. Okay. Let’s say we have a good handle on visitors to the website. I’ll put a link to Google Analytics in the show notes, of course. So let’s say we have that information and we have figured out that people are coming to the website but not calling, then what do we do?
John: So then you look into where are you losing people and what is the fallout. Or on a page, is it not clear where to go, where to click, and how to start the process of working together? You might take a stab at that yourself if you can add buttons to your website or change the format and stuff like that, or you might hire someone to do it [00:30:00] for you.
You make that decision and you say, is it a good use of my time to learn this? Do I enjoy learning this or does it suck the energy out of me and give me a great deal of anxiety?
Dr. Sharp: Absolutely.
John: You make that decision. I will tell you, if that is your problem and you’re already getting good traffic to your website, that’s probably the better problem to have, overall. That’s a quicker fix than getting to rank up high on Google in the first place. Either one needs to be addressed.
The other website problem is you’ve got a great website. It’s beautiful. It’s got amazing images, and amazing copy. It’s got clear calls to action, but no one’s finding it. This marketing asset is only as good as its discoverability. So that’s a problem of SEO or of search engine optimization and making sure that [00:31:00] your website is actually being found by the people who need to find it at the most basic level.
Dr. Sharp: Yes. Okay. Let’s take that then, so for the first problem, you said that’s a little bit of an easier fix. You can add buttons to make sure that people know how to call you or email you. You can change the layout of your website a little bit to guide their behavior and make it clear what they want or what they need to do.
For the second problem though, how do you improve search engine optimization or how do you help people find your website or find your practice? How would you do that?
John: Great question. Let me say a few things about SEO. There’s a lot out there even for therapists to learn about SEO. You can get deep with it real fast. It can get really overwhelming. [00:32:00] Let me say this, first of all, SEO is an ever-evolving beast.
A lot of therapists that I work with, I’ll get the sense of like, well, someone said or my web developer said, “I’ll do your SEO”. It’s not black and white. It’s not like you either did your SEO or you didn’t, it’s that there is a complex formula that only Google knows that has to do with who ranks up and who doesn’t.
We know a great deal about this formula, but it’s changing all the time. There are people who stay on top of this just like you stay on top of politics, or some people who get really deep into foreign affairs, and stuff like that.
You can study and you can read the news of SEO and still not know it all.
In general, you want to be doing things to tell Google that your website is important. So how do we do [00:33:00] that? One, you have the right keywords in the right places for SEO. I won’t go deep into the technical parts because I think it’s going to get people lost, but you want to figure out, what are people searching for in my particular area.
You want to use something called the Google Keyword Planner. If you want to do some of this work, your stuff, that’s another tool for you is Google Keyword Planner because you might say, okay, well, I do neuropsychological testing and so I want to rank up for that term, neuropsychological testing, Boulder, Colorado. We don’t know for sure that people are searching for that. Maybe they’re searching brain injury testing or TBI test or something like that, Boulder. We don’t know necessarily until we do that research as to what people are searching for.
Dr. Sharp: I want to stop and highlight that pretty heavily. [00:34:00] I think that’s super important that we, especially as testing folks, can get into the nuances of what we call our service. We say neuropsychological testing or assessment or evaluation, it’s important to know for listeners that that might not be at all what people are searching for.
So using the Google keyword planner, finding some way to figure out whether our potential clients are actually searching for those terms or not. And then use that to guide your website copy.
John: That’s it. We can’t assume, we have to make sure that we’re making these edits to our website based on some research, which I think a lot of testing psychologists will resonate with, using data to draw conclusions and make decisions.
So having the right keywords in the right places, which we could talk about for six [00:35:00] hours here, but in general, you want more people to find your website, you want them to spend more time on your website, and then you want them to click around a good bit as well.
How do you do that? One way that you do that, and I get a lot of questions about blogging, should I be blogging? Do I have to have a blog? Well, you need something, you need some form of content. I’m not going to tell you it has to be a blog, but I’m going to tell you it needs to be some form of content. I’m also going to tell you that you don’t necessarily have to be the one to actually write it.
The purpose of blogging, for instance, or the purpose of content is sending more people to your website, having them sit there, read an article, watch a video, listen to a podcast on your website, because all that time spent is money in the bank for your SEO. When people are doing that, people are coming to your website from different sources, they’re [00:36:00] sitting there and they’re engaging in something, that tells Google, hey, this website’s important, you should rank it up.
Dr. Sharp: Got you.
John: It’s about building that content but it’s also about keeping that content coming. It’s not enough to write two blog posts in December and not at all for the next six months or whatever it is. There’s a lot things you do to rank high and then there’s things you do to keep ranking high as well.
Dr. Sharp: Okay. That’s great. So you can put new content on your website via a blog, which others might be able to write for you. I think that’s a good tie-in with our virtual assistant conversation from last time with Jaime. That’s also a task that I have delegated to my administrative assistant. You can also find graduate students or even undergraduates who can write quality blog posts. Just to put that out there that you can definitely outsource that.
John: Absolutely.
Dr. Sharp: Cool. [00:37:00] Earlier in the podcast, you mentioned AdWords, we also talked a little bit about social media. Can you speak to what is AdWords for anybody who doesn’t know and how would you recommend using social media as part of your marketing strategy?
John: Sure. At Unconditional Media, our digital marketing team for therapists, our two most popular services are SEO and Google AdWords. For SEO, when you work with one of our specialists, they are going to take your website, they’re going to sit down with you and figure out what do you do? Who are you trying to attract? What kind of services do you offer?
They’re going to take that information and do all the keyword research for you. And then they’re going to go through your website page by page, paragraph by paragraph, and plug in the right keywords in the right places. There’s a lot of places that those keywords need to be and you have to have the region-specific [00:38:00] keywords.
And then they’re going to use Google Analytics and set up everything there so they can watch this stuff performing. The other important step that often gets missed when people try to do it themselves is telling Google to index the pages. They have bots that crawl your different pages.
This is where it gets technical and crazy. When you make these changes to your website, it’s like raising your hand and saying, hey Google, I made a change, come look at what I did.
So once we make all these changes, we go through page by page, tell Google to reindex these different pages with their big system and their big algorithms. There’s a lot of steps. When you try to do it yourself, you might do 5 out of 6 steps, but not that 6th step. Sometimes that is the difference between your SEO taking off and it stagnating.
In general, unless you’re pretty [00:39:00] savvy or you’ve done this in another job or another life, I recommend getting some help with it. The same goes for Google AdWords. I learned all of this the hard way for two years doing my own SEO and my own AdWords.
With SEO, you are ranking up naturally or organically for searches. You’re making changes to your website, to these keywords for your content to rank up naturally when people search for anxiety therapy in Charlotte. It takes some time. It takes anywhere between three and six months after you’ve done the SEO work for your website to rank up for the right terms.
You might be thinking; I need to rank up now. I need new clients right now. Or let’s say I just hired a new psychologist for my practice and I need to fill them up. If you call me and we talk about your different options, I’m probably going to steer you toward Google AdWords if your main goal is to [00:40:00] get people calling right away, calling this week or next week or whenever we launch these campaigns.
So for Google AdWords, it’s a pay-per-click platform where we create ads for you that are based on those same keywords that you need to be ranking up for with your SEO but we are plugging those into Google AdWords, creating ad sets for the different services you want to promote. And then we are paying Google per click to rank up for those terms at the very top in a section that is very subtly the ad section. It has a little yellow watermark that says, add on it and you can Google anything and you’ll see those.
That’s what Google AdWords is doing. You’re paying to show up at the very top and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. That’s the great part about it as well, is you can set that budget. You can toggle that campaign on or off depending on the season that it is, or depending on where you’re at in your practice, maybe [00:41:00] you’re at a lull and you need to boost.
That’s one of the great things with AdWords is when you have two campaigns that are dialed in and dialed in professionally, it’s as simple as toggling them on or off when you want more clients. It’s a powerful platform. I love it.
Dr. Sharp: That’s great. I know that we are getting close time-wise. I want to be mindful of that. I wanted to ask maybe one last question that I think relates to what you were just saying. I get a lot of questions both about growing testing practices, which of course involves needing people to call soon. I’ve also gotten a lot of questions around how to start a practice in a place where you don’t know anyone.
Several of my consulting clients for whatever reason are setting up practices in communities where maybe they didn’t go to graduate school or they [00:42:00] moved there for their spouse’s job or something like that. Could we talk about that in a specific or focused way?
Let’s say someone has moved to a new city, let’s say it’s a medium to large size city. It’s not a rural area. They don’t have any contacts. What would you recommend from a digital perspective or marketing perspective to start to build a testing practice?
John: Right off the bat, I will say that for something like a testing practice in a new city, I do think it’s critical to connect with those referral sources because a lot of times when people are coming to you all, it’s through a referral or it’s through a doctor or school counselor, whomever who said, hey, you need testing or you need more than we can provide here or some names.
I do think you have to start there. I think for someone in that particular position, that’s the right [00:43:00] place to start while you’re also doing this digital stuff. I’ve started practices now in San Francisco and in Charlotte knowing absolutely no one. It’s a little different with therapy, but I do have a psychologist in my practice now doing testing so we have walked through this.
I would go back to doing some of that keyword research or hiring someone to do your SEO as you’re building a new site. That’s the optimal time to do the SEO work. If you’re already going to be building a new site, you should do that work in the beginning so that you’re building these pages and the page URLs and the page headings and all this good stuff to make sure that you’re optimized for all those correct keywords in the very beginning rather than having to come back and do it again.
If you need to build quickly, I would think about working with someone to create [00:44:00] Google AdWords campaigns for you based around those different terms. So if people are searching testing psychologists in Charlotte, I want to rank up for those basic terms. And that might be one way to start it.
Even if you do neuropsychological testing, maybe I also need to be ranking up for those basic terms like ADHD testing Charlotte or whatever it is. It’s going to pay off. You’re going to see a return on that investment and you could spend six months trying to learn it yourself or you could have someone like our team doing it in six hours and doing it way better than you’ll ever be able to do it because this is what they do all day.
I think making that investment early on is going to help. It also depends on how quickly you want to grow. Some psychologists might say, I need to get to X amount of clients in six months or this amount of revenue in six [00:45:00] months. I’ll say, okay, in that case, we need to structure your marketing plan accordingly.
If you’re growing slowly, you work at an agency full-time, or something like that, we’re going to take a different approach with your marketing. So it comes down to how much time do you have. How much money do you have to put into it? What is the other work that you’re doing? I want everyone to have a well-balanced and well-rounded marketing plan between doing some in-person stuff and also doing some digital stuff and making sure you’re giving some attention to both realms.
Dr. Sharp: That makes sense. We’ve talked a lot about the in-person marketing here for a testing practice so I totally agree with that. I like how you said, it’s this one-two punch of making sure that you have a great website if you’re starting a new practice because, you didn’t say this explicitly but I think through our conversation, I figured out that [00:46:00] you can run a great AdWords campaign and get people to click to your site but if you don’t have the content and the website layout to tell them exactly how to schedule with you and how to get them engaged, it’s going to work too well. So that one-two punches, that sounds really important.
John: Oh, it’s huge. The last thing I’ll say about social media, just because we don’t have time to get into it today, but I want to dispel some of this right now that I see going on. We feel all this pressure to be on social media and to exist everywhere. I think it’s good to exist on two platforms at some point, but I also want to tell you, especially if you’re just starting your practice, quit wasting your time on Facebook, quit wasting your time on Twitter because it’s simple, where do clients go to find their next therapist?
Do you open up Twitter and start looking for a neuropsychological testing? No, you don’t. Do you go to Facebook? No, you don’t. You go to Google or maybe [00:47:00] Psychology Today or something like that, but you have to think about where clients are.
And so social media is more useful for what we call brand recognition and this slower-burning solution to I need to keep getting my brand recognized. Especially if I’m growing a group practice, people need to know, hey, we’re open, we’re in business. We like to have our logo and our brand out there so it’s in the consciousness of people and in the consciousness of your community.
I want you to not feel pressured to be on social media and fall under this trap of, oh, I’ve got to be posting on Facebook or sharing articles. I see a lot of therapists wasting their time there right now. I want you to know there’s bigger fish to fry here.
Dr. Sharp: I think that’s so important. I’m glad that you said that because I think for a lot of us, Facebook feels like low-hanging fruit because we’re on there so much and we see so many ads and I know I’m certainly guilty of thinking, oh, this is so easy.
For a lot of businesses, [00:48:00] they’ll give you that little pop-up that says, boost this post or boost this ad. It seems so easy, but hearing you say that it’s not valuable and we should be focusing elsewhere is important.
John: Absolutely.
Dr. Sharp: Thank you for that and thanks for everything else. This has been a great conversation to lay the groundwork for what digital marketing is and how to spend our time. I could tell any number of stories of where I’ve tried to do it myself. I have that problem and have talked about that problem on this podcast as I have built my practice, but I have had many times where I have completely wasted money on Google AdWords because it seemed easy enough and I’m curious/dangerous enough to try to get into it myself.
I can’t emphasize enough that it is a [00:49:00] science unto itself and that there are people out there that know it way better than we do. It’s worth it. That’s one of those things that’s worth the investment if you’re trying to grow your practice.
John: Absolutely.
Dr. Sharp: Well, John, thank you so much. You clearly know so much about this stuff and I feel so privileged that I got to spend an entire week with you getting to be friends, building a relationship, and also sharing in all the knowledge that you have. Thanks for coming on the podcast. I think people will certainly find this helpful as they move forward in setting up some type of marketing plan for their practice.
John: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. I love working with therapists and our whole team loves working with therapists. So if it’s something you want some help with or just want to pick my brain about, I offer free consultations with no expectations.
I want us to [00:50:00] all thrive. I want to see everyone advancing their practice and being better marketers or better business owners. And so that’s what I’m all about. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening to what I had to say today.
Dr. Sharp: On that final note, what’s the best way to find you or get in touch with you if people do want to talk through some of this?
John: My two sites are privatepracticeworkshop.com for practice-building resources and courses and my podcast and stuff like that. And then the marketing team is at www.unconditional.media. From there, you can set up a free 15-minute consultation that will be scheduled on my calendar and we’ll sit down and talk about what you need and what’s going on and I’ll walk you through step by step what are your different options and here’s what I recommend right off the bat or I might recommend something entirely different.
I [00:51:00] don’t know, but I’m going to look at your practice very holistically and see what is it that you need right now that makes sense developmentally for your practice and where you’re at in conjunction with your goals. I’d love to talk to you.
For anyone who gets in touch with Unconditional Media and will reference this episode, I’ll offer $50 off an SEO package or an AdWords package when you reference this episode. So I’d love to hear from you.
Dr. Sharp: Oh, that sounds great. Thank you so much. I’ll have links to each of those in the show notes too, so people can make sure to find you easily.
John: Cool.
Dr. Sharp: Well, thanks, John. It was a pleasure as always talking to you. I look forward to talking to you again soon, I’m sure.
John: Sounds good. See you around.
Dr. Sharp: Take care, man. All right, y’all. I hope that you enjoyed that episode with John Clarke from Unconditional Media. John clearly has a lot of knowledge around this area and he has been on the [00:52:00] ground, so to speak. He’s a therapist by training. He started practices in two separate cities from the ground up and he’s done so very well. All of that knowledge goes into what he offers at Unconditional Media.
As you heard, John, was willing to offer a $50 discount for anybody who references The Testing Psychologist podcast episode if you give him a call. I know that he does complimentary consultations if you’re just interested in what digital marketing might look like for your practice right now. Links to that are in the show notes. You can get in touch with John that way.
Thanks again for listening. Been great to get back into the interview game and be talking with folks in the field about things that are important for us as testing psychologists. Next time, I will be talking with the President and CEO of TherapyNotes, which is an EHR that’s out there, and very friendly for testing folks. So hope [00:53:00] to look forward to that.
As always, if you are finding this podcast helpful please, go to iTunes or wherever you’re listening and subscribe, rate it, and review it if you have the time. I appreciate any of those actions are helpful in building the audience and helping others find out about TheTesting Psychologist and help us continue to spread valuable information.
If you are interested in talking about testing specific practice issues, I am happy to talk with you for 20 or 30 minutes totally complimentary. We can chat through where your practice is going and if consulting would be helpful in building your practice.
I hope everybody is taking care. Fall is definitely upon us here in Colorado. I think as I speak, it’s about 45 degrees, and looking out my window, the trees are changing and we are headed into [00:54:00] the fall season, which brings with it all sorts of nice things. So hope y’all are doing well, enjoying the fall. We’ll talk with you next time. Take care.