What is SEO you may ask? Or maybe you have an idea of what SEO is as it has become increasingly more important over the past few years just as mental health has become a popular topic in the media and culturally across the country. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first reported plummeting mental well-being between April and June 2020. A study revealed that 40% of respondents were suffering from at least one behavioral health condition — anxiety, depression and the like — related to the pandemic “Edelstein, 2022).” As mental health professionals, it’s imperative to understand what SEO is and how to implement it on your website and other relevant digital assets in order for the individuals seeking your services to easily find you online. “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks (Backlinko.com).” With mental health being such a popular topic online, especially after covid-19, it is imperative for you to take advantage of the buzz. You can do this by investing in your SEO. While the goal of search engines is to provide good results to search queries, the goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to be a result of many different search queries—and even better, to be the top result on many different searches. So when someone searches for  “therapist near me” on google or “mental health support”, you want to ensure your website is one of the first links to show in the search results. You can do this by showing up in the organic search results or by purchasing ad placements with search engines such as Google Ads.

Optimizing a website for organic search is important because online conversion are often a result of consumers searching for the products and services they want via search engine. Prospective consumers start their search for items with a quick google search and a lot of those people feel ads aren’t always the best source. When you take the proper steps to optimize your website for organic searches, your products and services will show up in the most relevant searches and also the greatest number of searches. Though improving customer experience on your website is a primary consideration, website optimization works hand in hand with that goal because search engines want to direct users to the best websites. You can accomplish SEO optimization through various steps. One overall goal should be to maximize relevance. This is done by formatting your website so the search engine can accurately assess the topics your website is relevant to. An example would be choosing a great target phrase like “mental health service” and placing it in key places like URL, the main content of your webpages, and tags. When looking externally, or at off-site SEO, you want to make sure your website is a popular source amongst other reputable sites. It could be helpful to reach out to other mental health providers in your community to ask about possible partnerships or even offer them links to helpful resources from your website! This is done through links to your webpages, which search engines consider an endorsement. However, the very first task within search engine optimization is to optimize your home: your website. You want to format your website so that search engines can recognize it as a reliable source of information related to the topics on your website.

Let’s check out an example from one of my favorite organizations, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Their mission statement is as follows: “The mission of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is to advance cures, and means of prevention, for pediatric catastrophic diseases through research and treatment. Consistent with the vision of our founder Danny Thomas, no child is denied treatment based on race, religion or a family’s ability to pay.” After analyzing St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital’s donation webpage (Links to an external site.), I noticed a few things I like in terms of organic search. “Donate” is in the URL, making it relevant to people searching for organizations to donate to online. However, I would love to see “children” or “cancer research” in the URL as well as anchor terms in the URL. The header is great in that it reads “Make a donation to end childhood cancer” which surely gets this webpage a lot of traffic from potential donors searching to donate to similar causes. I’m also a fan of the large and clear photo they use. This makes the page looks updated and neat, creating a more pleasurable experience for visitors and signaling to search engines that St. Jude’s is active and reputable. I also checked the mobile display/function of this page and it looks great! One thing I’d like to see more of are links to other pages on the website from this donation page. Maybe a link to more information on their cancer research or success stories to improve their backlinks. There should always be a way for your website or webpage visitors to explore other content on your pages. Making it easy for them to become even more emerged in the experience of your website is sure way to increase conversions.

Now that we have a better understanding of SEO, let’s talk a bit about conversions. Conversions happen when a website visitor completes a desired task on your website. This ranges from filling out a form to actually buying something on your website. It’s important to keep an eye on your website’s conversion data to better track the effectiveness of your SEO/digital marketing strategy when it comes to conversion rates. To create successful conversion paths, you must know your client personas. These personas are detailed descriptions of someone who represents your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research of your existing or desired audience. Your research should include secondary and primary research methods to capture a complete picture of who you want to target. By understanding client personas, you can determine what best supplements their online experience. Are they young college students who hang out on Instagram and Twitter? Or are they boomers who prefer Facebook and/or paper mail? Whatever they might be, you will want to them to convert once they get to your website.  Conversions can come in a variety of formats such as buttons, landing pages, blog posts with buttons, pop-ups, etc. Each one those provide a unique supplement to your website visitor’s experience and allows you to collect pertinent data to help you create better conversion paths in the future which is all made possible through SEO.

References:

Larson, J., & Draper, S. (2017). Digital Marketing Essentials: A Comprehensive Digital Marketing Textbook. Stukent, Incorporated.

T., K. P., & Lane, K. K. (2015). Framework for Marketing Management (2-downloads) (6th ed.). Pearson.

Edelstein, B. (2022, July 2). Increasing Mental Health Crisis Accompanying Pandemic. GovTech. https://www.govtech.com/em/safety/increasing-mental-health-crisis-accompanying-pandemic