Does A Local Therapist Need A Blog, or Should They Focus on Main Service Pages?

[onitamara]

Hi everyone!

I am just starting to practice SEO by assisting a friend with her local relationship therapy practice, and I'm not sure whether or not she needs a blog.

Here's the content they currently have:

• A page for specific categories within relationship therapy (unmarried couples, marriage, divorce, pre-marital, etc)
• On each page, she describes what that type of therapy is, what clients can expect, and how she will help them during the process.

My question is this:

• Does it make sense to start a blog, or, is it better to build out the main, static service pages with more content?

I'm worried that if she does start a blog, that it could potentially take away from the authority of the main service pages.

For example, let's say she writes a highly specific post titled "how to talk to your husband about marriage". Is it better to just incorporate aspects of this post on the main marriage page, or keep it as a blog post?

I really appreciate any suggestions and I'm happy to answer any questions.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

OK so I have a dentists.  So we basically do the same thing from a digital marketing perspective.  We make users trust us and then get them to come in for a consultation, pay us and begin a trusting relationship where we listen to their problems and heal them.

Blogs are Extremely important.  The things you need to remember are that blogs can be written about specific topics and subjects (how do I talk to my husband) (why doesn't he take out the trash) all the little things that people will be googling when they need an answer to a question but don't necessarily think they need a relationship councillor.

So structure your main pages into main topics: her, him, confrontations, sex etc. and then think of 'sub-topics' and questions specifically surrounding these main topics.  Then link (with anchor text) from your blogs to your main service pages with links, opt-in boxes and all the other ways you'll find out about when you research writing a blog. Also use the blog to get people to sign up for your newsletter and join your social media groups.

Some of your main traffic sources will be your blog and it's native content that you own so you can run ads on it - for yourself - right there in the copy.

So to give you an example, we have a veneers page.  It has on it everything you need to know if you want to come in and buy veneers.  But we also have a 'Veneers price' blogpost and this gets 100x more traffic and it talks about all the different ins and outs of prices and how much different types of veneers cost.  Throughout that piece are sentences like, "If you're interested to come for an appointment to discuss composite veneers then click here to see our main services page "composite veneers" This tells google that your main page is the most important and you'll not get internal competition if you think about the data architecture and site structure of the main pages and blogs carefully.  Use FAQ's at the end of your main pages or blogs to pick up other questions and mark them up to get better CTR in the SERPS and more exposure to potential patients.

I ended up in a funnel for a South African Guy with a site called 'love at first fight' because I typed in 'why does my wife get so irate about me not putting the bins out the day before the cleaner is coming' and ended up learning so much, subscribing to his newsletters and almost hiring him! (the answer is basically that if she can't trust you with the bins - an easy job - then how can she trust you doing the Digital Marketing for her dental practice.

Hope this makes sense.  But Blog. Get writing.  Right now!! lol.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Also from a linking perspective you're much more likely to be able to get links to a blogpost answering a great question about relationships than to a page on how smart you are and that you have a pHD and can save a marriage. So getting links is also important and blogs are the way to do that.  It's called 'linkworthy content' for outreach.

[onitamara]

Thank you, Ed, that's extremely helpful!

I see the benefit of linking to a static service page from a related blog post. A quick clarification I'm wondering about; I'll use your veneers example.

Does your main veneers page include a link to the "veneers price" blog post? Or, and with any other service, have you found more success only linking in one direction?

I'm curious if linking in both directions versus one has any noticeable impact on link equity or conversions.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

That's an extremely important and pertinent question.  So i've identified that `Veneers' and 'Veneers Prices' are two separate topics in the eyes of google.  So this page is doing really well  On the other hand 'Dental Implant Prices' and 'Dental Implants' are considered by google to be in the same 'topic'.  So I did have a dental implants price blog but it just didn't rank and I suspected it also pulled my dental implants page down the rankings with internal competition.

So I made it into a glossy PDF and now have it as a download on my dental implants page and we're now ranking better for dental implants price/cost.

It can be difficult to determine what's a topic and what isn't a topic and what to bundle together and keep seperate and i'll be honest, I've done lots of research and testing to get our high dental rankings. Go with your gut and use google by searching for different things and seeing what comes up on the top pages.

As for the linking question, pagerank sculpting is dead.  If it's useful for someone to navigate off a page and to another page then have a link.  More the merrier I always think and I've never seen any differences trying to squeeze all my traffic down highways on my website that i've devised.  Let people do what they want and then use the insights to make the page better.

This idea of 'Leaky landing pages' (something TOTALLY DIFFERENT from direct response advertising)  has somehow gotten itself over to SEO but it doesn't matter.  I'd link in both directions if it's appropriate and you think it will help people not to get stranded or stuck on your site.  There's always the navigation if they are feeling like they don't know where to go next. and if you use something like hotjar you can see where they are going to by using the navigation and bang a link in there to make life easier.

What you MUST do though is have all the little sub-categories linking into the main category like spokes on a wheel.  This tells google that's the main category.  But you'll still see loads of people landing on the spokes and navigating in and rarely the other way around at first.

So say, 'this article is about how to not be passive-aggressive' if you are looking at how to calm aggressive partners, maybe check this out [how to calm an argument] etc with anchor text, so google know's what that article means.  Use exact anchor text.  You're not going to get into trouble for that.  You can even occasionally use the local identifier.  I've not gotten any heat for that.  So visit our main page here: "Dental Implants Liverpool" Depends whether you're more interested in local or national rankings to start you off.

If you think this is helpful please mark it as a helpful answer.  Then I get love from Moz.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Thanks!  Drop me a line directly (email is in profile) I'm not a consultant and don't charge people but if you have particular difficulties than I can get right in there with you.  SEO for services (especially local ones) is a minefield sometimes.  But be open, honest and answer the questions you get asked the most at work and google will reward you whether it's super-duper schema-marked up with a ton of links or whether it's just the best article from an expert with some letters after her name who knows what she's talking about.  Google prefers the latter.  So much content today is written by people with no education.  Show them your therapist went to College and has some authority and you'll out rank them all - even from powerful domains.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Onitamara!

Good discussion going on here. I'll add a few big picture thoughts:

How much content (whether in the form of pages or posts) the therapist will want to build should be determined by 3 things:

• How much she enjoys sharing what she knows and how much time she has to devote to writing
• How helpful this will be to the public both in terms of informing them, and transforming them into clients
• How competitive her market is

If she likes to write, this is a good start, and if she is a good writer, it's an even better one. And, of course, she needs to have the time.

The true usefulness of the content will determine how much it impacts both the lives of the readers and the financial bottom line of the therapist. The true usefulness will also gradually impact Google's perception of the website as an authoritative source on its topics.

The happy medium being aimed for is to publish enough content to attain the bookings and rankings the therapist ideally desires, but not going overboard beyond that. So, for example, if the therapist is located in a small, rural area, she may discover that writing two blog posts a month is all it takes for her to become competitively ranked and to have a full patient roster. But, if her practice is in a metropolis, the effort she'll need to put into being ranked and booked is likely to be much, much greater. Because of this, it's smart to assess the competitive landscape the therapist is entering, and to implement as much tracking as possible to help determine how much content (pages or posts) is needed to meet goals, and how that content is assisting in those goals being met.

Finally, as Ed is mentioning, it's important that your most important pages are the easiest to find, by means of your internal linking structure. In other words, the therapist's page on "Couples Therapy" will likely be one you're internally linking to more prominently than a single article she wrote about "How to Apologize Sincerely" or something like that.

In the long run, though, the decision to create a blog or a library of static articles should be based on the therapist's desire to share, the need to use content as a vehicle for client education and conversion, and the unique competitive landscape in which the practice is operating.