Our Office Online: An Intro to SEO

For many therapists in the field for years, word of mouth is key to their success. They’ve worked everywhere and know everyone and are well connected.

What if that isn’t you? How are YOU seen?

TalkingWorks is helpful, don’t get me wrong, but potential clients are leaving the platform at an alarming rate.

PsychToday is a great platform to be seen on as they have a large audience overall but isn’t as widely viewed or known in New Zealand as it is overseas.

The surefire way to be seen is to be where people are looking. With the rise of technology and online counselling, there has been a big shift in people looking online for solutions.

That’s where Our Office Online comes in!

In my household, we call Google, Uncle Google, because of how often we use it to answer life’s questions. If you don’t think your clients are searching for keywords like “therapy near me”, “how to get counselling”, and the like, you’re very much mistaken.

How many times do terms like “therapy in New Zealand” or “counselling in Canterbury” come up on your website? Do you have local and international keywords placed throughout your text to ensure the Google crawler knows what you’re all about?

Looking up keywords related to what clients are actually looking for will ensure that when they do type: “where do I get depression help in Whangarei?”, they will find you.

On-page SEO

This is the very basis of on-page SEO. The idea is to ensure that you use related keywords to your niche and client’s searching habits to strengthen your ranking on Google.

Knowing how many keywords, how to use them, and in what context is key. Back in the early days of search engines, you could’ve written a webpage with nothing but the word “therapy in Christchurch” 100 times on the page and would’ve ranked #1 on Google.

Algorithm technology has advanced over the past 25 years and this is no longer the case. It’s about how natural the words fit into the text on your website; how closely related all your keywords are to each other without overlapping terms competing on different pages, and getting the right keywords in the right order.

I’ve spent years learning how to do on-page SEO and I still feel like I’ve only just cracked the surface. If you don’t have years of experience with SEO but want to get the most out of your website, I highly recommend engaging with an SEO specialist somewhere like Our Office Online (OOO).

OOO works with both an internal and external team of SEO professionals with specialisations such as speed optimization, caching settings, on-page SEO optimization, article creation, and backlink generation to ensure a well-rounded approach to getting your website seen on Google affordably.

If you’d rather take the time to learn more about SEO yourself, I can’t speak highly enough of the courses I took on Udemy. Udemy has been my absolute go-to for all things business, marketing, SEO-related since I started the A Change for Better journey in 2019.