Craig Alsup Talks About Digital Marketing for Private Practice

One of the most common questions I hear about attracting counseling clients is, “Can I use digital marketing for private practice?” If you've been following the podcast, you know the answer is a resounding YES. My interview with Craig Alsup of Live Beyond Counseling and Coaching.will walk you through the steps to create a solid marketing plan for your private practice that includes social media, Google SEO, and more. You can read snippets of the interview below, or click the podcast and hear the whole thing!

TCCBB Episode #20 How to Use Digital Marketing to Get More Clients With Craig Alsup

How do I market my private practice?

Craig:  I wanted to just talk with y’all today a little bit about search engine optimization, which is what SEO stands for, also a little bit about Google My Business because it is the number one way to get found as a local business, as a business that’s based in XYZ community, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, wherever. It’s the number one way to get found by people within a ten-mile radius of you, and really, as that radius gets closer, it gets a heck of a lot easier for people to find you if your Google Business profile is claimed, first step, and optimized. So we’ll talk a little bit about that as well.

Are there ethical issues with digital marketing for private practice?

Kate: Here’s where the ethics comes in, especially for you supervisors. If your associates are just going for SEO and they’re like oh, well, I’m going to advertise my marriage counseling and everybody is searching for Gottman, so I’m going to make sure that I make my H2 headings Gottman, you’ve got to be really careful that you’re also within your scope of practice. It’s not just about we’re all going fishing and we’re all going to use the same bait and catch big fish and then let them down gently when we read the email. “Hey, I’m so glad you read my blog post. Actually, I have no idea who Gottman is or what they do.” It’s a new frontier with advertising making sure that you’re being ethical and staying within your scope.

And then for those of you who are supervising self-employed associates, you get to make sure that they are staying within their scope. And no, you don’t have to know how to do the back office, you really, really don’t, because you guys could see very plainly, hey, this is what it looks like. You can just ask your associates to meet with you once a month and show you what they’re doing as far as building content for their digital marketing for private practice.

What is SEO for therapists?

Craig: Search engine optimization is basically all of the things that you can do on and off of your website to make Google like you, to make Google look at your site, look at your business, and say hey, this is a business that I want to show to other people. It’s important because Google is the number one search engine on the planet, it’s the number one search engine for getting found for counseling or therapy services. It’s the place where most people jump on their phone, they open up their Google app, and they search for “therapists near me,” or they search for “marriage counseling in Dallas.” They’re searching for those specific types of services and keywords, which gives you a huge opportunity, gives us a huge opportunity, to basically tailor our website, tailor what we say on our website and what we say throughout the web, to use those types of words, those types of keywords that people would be searching.

Listen to the entire interview with Craig Alsup and he will walk you through the steps to create a solid digital marketing plan for your private practice.

Blog post by Kate Walker Ph.D., LPC/LMFT Supervisor.