Optimizing Your Website for Best Results

Hi, this is Dave Kats for Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

So many times we hear that you have to not only have a website, but you have to have your website optimized. How do you optimize your website? Here are probably the four major ways to optimize your website.
Number one is, make sure that all your titles and subtitles have something substantive in them for the search engines. Let me give you an example. Years ago, I did websites just for some of our clients just for fun, and I did about 25 websites and a lot of times I'd put there on the homepage something warm and inviting like this, "Welcome to our website, I think you're going to like what you see."
That felt warm and inviting for a therapist's office, but to a search engine like Google, that told them absolutely nothing. It was a worthless first-page title. If I would have said, "Providing couples counseling to Denton, Texas for the last 12 years", then the search engine would have saw that I was a counselor, that I did marriage counseling. That I had been doing it for 12 years and that I was in Denton, Texas, and I would have been raised a lot higher in the ranking.
Make sure your titles and subtitles talk about what you do, who you are, where you're located and things like that. Not just some things like, "Did you know this?" That's not a great title. It says nothing to the search engine. Make sure that your titles and subtitles are information-rich, as far as the search engines are concerned.
Then the next thing that makes a lot of difference is video. You should try putting video on your website. By the way, you can shoot your own video, just go to a format like zoom.us, sign up for zoom.us and use it sparingly. It's totally free and it'll allow you to either record yourself or record two people, and then you can just have your Webmaster upload that video for you. They can trim and upload videos for a very small price.
I think two other things that are important on your website to optimize it; make sure that you have at least one place and hopefully two places above the fold on every page that says "set an appointment", "make an appointment". In other words, when I say above the fold, they don't have to scroll down. If they're on your homepage, they see, "set an appointment", "make an appointment".
If they're on your "about you" page, "set an appointment", "make an appointment". Make sure you have two places above the fold, so they don't have to scroll down, in other words, to set an appointment. That they can just click on it because you never can tell where they're at on your website when they make the decision to set an appointment. When you have those there, it's very important.
Then as far as setting an appointment, make sure that your phone number is real big. I don't mean outrageously big, but I mean some of them are so small. They're like a 12-point-type on a computer and you just can hardly see them. Make sure that it gets up into a large enough point-type that your phone number stands out because you're never going to tell when they're going to pick up and call you for an appointment.

This is Dave Kats, thanks for listening.