Show Notes

In today’s episode, Julia Bocchese, SEO consultant and owner of Julia Renee Consulting will share strategic SEO for your practice website without the overwhelm.

Hi, Julia. Welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here today.

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

Julia, before we dive into today’s episode, please introduce yourself, where you’re from. And tell us a little bit about you and your practice journey.

Yeah, so I live in Philadelphia. I’ve had my business, Julia Renee Consulting for going on nine years now. I fell into the world of SEO just by, learning SEO and other marketing skills for a photography website that I had. And I was doing a lot of like content writing and content optimization for small businesses and realized that they didn’t know what I was doing or why it mattered or anything like that. So that’s when I started transitioning to focus on optimizing their sites as a whole to really help them reach people who are searching for their services.

I also do Pinterest work as well, so for anyone who has like blog posts or podcast episodes or other types of content, Pinterest can be a really great search engine. It is actually a search engine for people who have a lot of content that they’re able to, put on Pinterest and reach people when they’re searching for the information that they have.

Amazing. And I’m definitely going to ask you a little bit about Pinterest later and, if it is effective for therapists specifically. So we’re going to come back to that, but I’m curious because you did mention, you said, you work with people that just didn’t know why SEO mattered. Can you tell us why it matters and why therapists should consider focusing on SEO for their websites?

Yeah, so I’m sure a lot of people are pretty active on social media. I’m sure you follow a lot of people that you are never going to hire on Instagram. I know I follow some like interior designers and people like that on Instagram that either are out of my budget or aren’t even in the location that I am in.

So I was seeing a lot of that with, people like therapists who have a more location specific business a lot of times, where they might have followers from all over the country because these people like. You know what they’re saying, the advice that they’re giving or even just who they are.

But when someone goes to Google and searches for, trauma therapists near me, they’re much more likely to be in the mindset where they’re ready to hire someone. They’re ready to, look for a service. So that’s where SEO can really help with those conversions and reach people who are. In your area, if it’s something that you can only serve your local area or even just like your state or something like that, and they’re searching specifically for a need that they have, so that’s where SEO can really help reach people who are searching for what you have to offer and are ready to hire you.

 Love that. And something that I like to also say to therapists is that when we’re thinking about SEO, SEO, for all intents and purposes, is free. I hear a lot of therapists, thinking about, oh, maybe I’ll pay for pay-per-click ads, or I’ll pay for ad space, I’ll pay for all this, which I’m not against by the way.

But what I love about SEO is that as it grows with you over time. It’s a cost effective way to grow your business. The other thing, and not that many therapists think with the end in mind, but I do sometimes think we should think about the end in mind that what if one day you retire? Or what if one day you want to close your practice? You could sell your practice. SEO is sellable. Pay-per-click ads not sellable.

Yeah, definitely. And I’m actually working with a therapist right now who is trying to take herself out of the business a bit more and like she’s hiring some therapists to work with her. So even that where she’s not like really ready to sell it maybe yet. But she just wants to be less of the focus of the business. She wants to take some time off to spend with her kids and things like that. So even that is like a lot easier for people when they’re searching on Google, they’re searching for like a practice or for a specific type of service. Whereas like on Instagram, if you’ve been front and center this whole time and all of a sudden you’re gone or, actually saw this recently. Someone like sold their business and all of a sudden this new person was on Instagram on their account. I’m like, wait, who is that? I have no idea who you are. Like what happened with the business? So Instagram can be a lot more focused on the person.

Whereas SEO you can focus more on the business and it doesn’t have to be you or if you need to take time off, SEO can still work for you. Whereas like on Instagram or Facebook or something like that, you do need to be like active all the time. So it can be a good way for even if you’re not ready to sell, you can still take a step back or be less of the focus in your business.

Absolutely. I love that. So what pages do therapists need to have on their website, especially when we’re thinking about SEO and SEO conversions.

Yeah, so having multiple pages on your website can help each page rank for different types of keywords. You definitely don’t need to have 50 pages on your website. You don’t need to, go crazy or anything like that. But having at least, I recommend the home about one service page and a contact page as like your base level. That’s what you need to start with. You can add on more things as you, get going or maybe you shift your focus or add new services. But that’s like the minimum is what I recommend.

For service pages, you can have more than one service page if you have, different types of things that you specialize in. So if you maybe help both, like individuals and couples, you can have separate pages for those because that way you can both speak to the people in different ways for, depending on what they need.

And then also you have the opportunity for your couples page to rank for couples therapy, marriage counseling, things like that. And then your individual page can rank for individual therapy or if you have another specialty. So you can break it down into different things that you might specialize in or different services that different types of people need or are searching for. But you don’t need to have tons and tons of service pages.

I love that. And so I know that there are some therapists out there that might have a one pager where they have their service page or about me page, everything on the one page. Is that helpful for SEO in particular?

I would say it’s a good starting point. It’s not going to hurt you necessarily, but it’s not going to be helpful for SEO because you only have that one page that has an opportunity to rank. So you can’t target a variety of different types of keywords. So if you only have time to just launch a one page website. Just start with that and then you can add on the pages as you build them out. I do recommend having a separate contact page. I see sometimes people just have the contact form at the bottom of the homepage or something like that, but having a separate contact page means that people can go to a page to specifically, find your email address your contact form, social media, whatever it’s they’re looking for. Because some people won’t know to scroll to the bottom of the homepage for that. So it’s just an easy place for people to go to.

And then it’s also an easy place for you to be able to track the data, to see how many people are going to your contact page versus how many people are reaching out to you, or, filling out your contact form so that we can see, what the conversions of the contact page are.

So definitely having an easy place for people to be able to find you. And then you can also track that information.

Amazing. So I love talking about blogging because that’s like my favorite thing ever to do. I’ve been blogging for so long and I think it’s such a great SEO builder. So can you tell us a little bit about why blogs can be helpful and also how often should therapists blog if they are looking to start seeing some traction with SEO?

Yeah, so blogging can be really helpful. Similar to why you would have multiple pages on your website. You can target different types of keywords. So blog posts, they’re on different topics that you’re, an expert in. They can also be more like informational keywords. So if someone isn’t necessarily sure if they’re ready for a marriage counselor, but they’re like, we’re having these problems in our relationship. When should we hire a marriage counselor? Something like that, where they’re searching more for the information. They’re in the early stages of being interested in a service. So that’s where having these blog posts can reach people who are searching for those.

Also, you can show off your expertise. You can show your knowledge, even just showing your brand voice and how you speak or how you relay information, that can be a good indication to someone if they are interested in working with you, if you’re like the right fit.

Whereas if you maybe just have a couple sentences on your homepage or something like that, they don’t really get a good sense of who you are or how you speak. So blog posts can be really good for that. So it’s a whole mix of, ranking well on Google for some more keywords, but then also being able to speak to potential clients, answer any questions that they might have. So if they’re not sure if you know a specific type of therapy, like EMDR or something like that is for them. Answering any questions that they could initially have in blog posts can be helpful.

And then how many blog posts? I’ll say, there is an ideal and then also a realistic number. So ideally, I would say blogging at least twice a month pretty consistently is what I would recommend. Making sure they are high quality blog posts. They’re at least 750 to a thousand words. Answering detailed questions going into things in depth. Also showing off your expertise and your experience specifically because you want to make sure that you’re showing that there’s a human writing these blog posts. It’s not just like a bot, it’s not just answering like generic information that, people aren’t really interested in. So that’s like the ideal is. At least twice a month.

Realistically, if you can manage once a month or even once every other month if you’re not able to really sit down and write high quality long blog posts that frequently something is better than nothing. So don’t panic if you’re not able to keep up with twice a month. Just start with once a month or once a quarter even, and get something going because that is going to help you more than not blogging at all.

I love that. And something I talk about is specifically when we’re talking about building passive income streams, and I do talk about blog being a passive income stream in addition to a great client converter.

But when we think of just passive income in general. I tell people to think about the client journey and something you talked about really highlights that, is that when someone is looking up a key term like therapist near me, they’re actively ready to find a therapist.

But in my kind of framework of the client journey. That’s stage four. They’re literally like, I’m looking for professional help. I tried all of these other options before I got here, but there’s people looking up free content online that can then lead into your services. That can then lead to them being like, oh, I think I’m going to work with this therapist because they know what they’re talking about. And that’s when you’re writing blogs, you’re writing about topics that people are legitimately searching in search engines that may not be therapists near me.

Another thing too is the actual keyword therapist near me. Is often used a lot by almost every therapist in every single city, town, wherever you’re from. Whereas you can show up for, again, additional keywords regardless of the person’s journey by creating blog posts about what people are searching for. So you’re getting people when they’re probably not at that stage where they’re like, I’m ready to hire a therapist, but maybe something in your blog shares information or they get a small win or there’s just something that they read in this particular blog post and they’re like, I think I’m ready to reach out to a therapist, and that would be you.

So I love that you’re able to show up for when people are ready to work with a therapist or even those who might still be contemplating. And again, this is a whole different podcast episode, but you can also monetize your blogs and then make passive income whether they ever do reach out to you. So I love that too. But again, total different episode.

Yeah. Blogs are great for so many different purposes and what you’re saying is you need to make sure that you’re leading people to wherever it is you want them to go. You don’t want them just to land on your blog, get the information, then leave. So you have an email list or a call to action button that leads to your services or your about page, or whatever is most relevant to that particular blog post. You want to make sure you are leading people around your website so they’re not just. Yeah, coming and then leaving quickly.

Absolutely. So I want to go back a little bit. You mentioned about Pinterest. So let’s talk about, first of all, it being a search engine, and second of all, how effective is it for therapists to have their blogs or content on Pinterest?

Yeah, so Pinterest is a search engine, so it’s like a visual search engine, I think they call search and discovery platform. But if you’ve ever used Pinterest, you’re likely going there to search for something specific. So whether it’s information or answers to questions or inspiration like with recipes or interior design, things like that. But people typically don’t go to Pinterest to follow accounts or just to scroll on their home feed. They are most likely going to search for something.

So if you have those blog posts that you are creating for SEO purposes, very similar with targeting keywords and making sure you’re writing blog posts that people are searching for. It’s going to be the same on Pinterest. So if you have like blog posts. YouTube videos, even if you’re creating Instagram reels, you can repurpose those as video pins on Pinterest. So you do need to have content and I would say a decent amount of it, or at least a pretty good content schedule that you’re able to stick to if you are only able to manage that one blog post a quarter. Right now, I would say hold off on Pinterest because you’re not going to get, the ROI that you’re really looking for.

But if you have 20 blog posts already published and you’re able to maintain one or two blog posts per month. You have some like Instagram reels or podcast episodes or something like that. That’s when I would say I would, recommend starting with Pinterest. So that way you’re able to keep up with the content that you need to put there.

So with Pinterest, it’s very similar to, Google where you have like the content and then you create a pin design. I know this sounds overwhelming, but Canva has like so many free templates. So you just need to have like your branding colors and fonts and make sure everything’s cohesive with your brand. And then create a graphic that says either the blog post title or something similar to the blog post title because Pinterest AI can read the text that’s on a pin as long as it’s able to be easily read. And it’s also what helps your pin stand out when people are scrolling through the pins that they’re searching for. So making sure you have the keywords or something related to the blog post title on the pin graphic itself. And then also you can fill in the pin title and pin description with, again, similar to kind of the title tag and meta description on SEO, it’s just describing what’s in the pin, what people are going to get when they click on the pin to go to your website. So very similar to Google, just a lot more like visual.

I love that. What SEO strategies gets the best results without needing to spend a ton of time on it?

I would say blogging probably does because it is such a long-term gain, you are not going to get immediate results. But any blog posts that you put up that aren’t seasonal or trendy, which typically with therapy you don’t really come into. But you can still get traffic for those blog posts for like months to, years down the road. Also with AI search, which is something I’m helping a lot more clients with lately. Getting like citations from AI platforms that is something that can, help your blog posts live on for again, months to years. So blogging doesn’t have to be super overwhelming. Again, just start where you’re able to. But you can get really good results from blogging.

I totally agree a hundred percent and I’ve been blogging since 2021 and honestly, in my opinion, it’s one of the best marketing strategies that I have out there. Even though we’re on a podcast today. I think my blog, supersedes my podcast, 10 times. And it’s because, even when we think podcasts. People need to follow, even though that they can find certain topics in podcast platforms, more and more people are on Google looking up certain questions and with that, your blog can, be ranked in that way.

And even though you mentioned that, you’re not going to instantly rank with blogging and it’s totally true, you’re not going to instantly, but when you have a strategy, you’re going to start seeing increases.

And let me give you an example. Now I’ve been blogging since 2021, but in 2023. I knew that I was going to create what’s called a Canadian Clinical Supervision Therapist directory, which is a website for clinical supervisors to advertise their services for therapists to find them in Canada.

And so I started my SEO strategy before it even launched. So I started my SEO strategy, which was essentially blogging in September 2024. And then in January, 2025, that is when I officially launched. And at that point I was already getting organic traffic, but I was creating at least about two to three blogs every month. Topics regarding clinical supervision. So that was only four months of my time and I was seeing traction. Of course, I continued to blog after, and it’s constantly growing my website because the more content I put on, of course the more traction it gets, but this just shows that it doesn’t take a long time. If you’re writing about the right topics and you’re writing consistently and you’re willing to have a little bit of patience and being able to write about those topics even when you’re not seeing traction initially, because it does start working, and again, four months with a brand new website, starting to see traction to the website organically is pretty good. So it is possible.

Yeah, it’s definitely possible and like four months is really good. I would say have your website for a while and you’ve been blogging for a while and you need to take a step back, that doesn’t mean that like your rankings are going to plummet overnight. The great thing is like you can still get, tons of great traffic, your traffic can even grow. I’ve seen this from my own website where like I’ve had to take time off for maternity leaves or things in life that happened. So I have not been blogging as consistently as I should. But I have so many blogs already on my website that are already ranking well. So I’m not concerned about my rankings. I’m not concerned about drop in inquiries from Google or anything like that. So it is great for if you need to take a step back or, if you want to start that like runway for a new business. And you don’t want to have to jump in and do your launch all at the same time. SEO can be just a really great tool for that.

I appreciate that you said that and I agree because actually my very first blog post that I wrote in 2021 still gets traction today. So blogs, if they answer questions, then of course I do update blogs too. That’s a good strategy to continue to update your blogs, especially if things change and to keep them relevant. But even today, I’m still getting traction on that blog.

Whereas you were talking about Instagram and social media, usually a social media post is no longer building any traction after 24 hours, at least by 48 hours, it’s not seen by people. So blogs do tend to last a lot longer than any social media post.

Yeah. Which is why I love SEO so much. I know I’m like hating on Instagram so much, but I do in terms of getting clients and increasing your visibility without having to show your face and dance around on reels or whatever every day SEO is, just really great for that.

I agree. I’ve worked with so many therapists and social media is not really their jam anyway. So I’m sure that listeners are actually feeling relieved that you’re saying that they do not have to become social media influencers to be successful at growing their practice.

So this is a topic that we don’t talk enough about, but I think is super important. How can someone track their SEO progress and also why should we track our SEO progress?

Yeah, so tracking is really important to make sure that you are ranking for the right types of keywords that you are growing consistently on google if you are like, really working on your SEO, you do want to make sure that you’re getting those results. You want to make sure that you are ranking for the right locations, if that’s something that’s important.

And then you also want to make sure that Google doesn’t have any. Issues indexing any pages, which means they can’t look at a page or they can’t crawl it properly. So if they can’t crawl it, then they’re not going to rank it on Google.

I actually did an audit for someone recently who, I think she had 50 blog posts and none of them were indexed by Google. I’m not sure like why there wasn’t any weird tech issue that I could find. It’s just Google decided not to index it or, maybe there was an issue that had been fixed, but Google, didn’t go back to re crawl everything. So you do want to make sure, there’s nothing weird going on there.

So the two tools that I recommend that are totally free are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. So Google Analytics will track all of the data for your website and no matter where people are coming from. So if it’s from your email list or Instagram or a referral, if you got featured in a local publication or something like that. So it’ll show you wherever people came from, their location. So that might be important for people who are, trying to reach a specific area. How long they’re staying on your website. Which pages they’re going to. Making sure that people are engaged with your website. They’re not just leaving quickly.

This is also where you can track to see how many people have visited that contact page. So that way you can check to make sure your contact form is working. Because if you’re getting 200 people visiting your contact page and zero people have submitted the contact form, there might be something weird going on there. So just making sure everything with your website is functioning well and people are engaging with it.

Google Search console is just specific to how your site is performing on Google. So this will show you what keywords you’re ranking for, how much traffic you’re getting for the different keywords, which pages are ranking or blog posts. What keywords those pages or blog posts are ranking for. And again, just making sure that you are growing over time. There’s no like weird drop off in traffic or you’re just like have plateaued and you’re not growing at all. This is also where you can see if there are any of those indexing errors. You also don’t want to have too many broken links that people might land on and not be able to go where they want to.

And then those discover, not index, crawled, not index. That means Google is having maybe problems indexing it, or if it’s a new page, they just haven’t gotten around to indexing it yet. So if you just want to make sure that there’s nothing weird going on, Google is able to crawl your website properly and that you are ranking for the types of keywords that you want to be.

I’m wondering if some listeners are like, I’ve never even heard of Google Search Console, and I think it’s a beautiful tool because one of the benefits is that you can literally tell Google, I just created a blog. Here’s the URL and tell it to index.

And not a lot of people know that you can do that. So what we do is we create a blog or even create a new page on our website. And we just hope Google is eventually going to find our website. But I kind of use the analogy of driving in a car. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re eventually going to show up somewhere. It might not be where you’re going, but it’s going to take you a lot longer to find out where you’re going. Whereas if you’re told this is the address. You are going to get there a lot quicker. And Google is exactly the same way. Every time I create a blog, I just copy the URL of that blog, put it into Google Search Console, and, usually within 24 hours, sometimes 48, depending. It is now on Google, like it is literally ranking somewhere on Google. However, if I don’t tell Google, it could be weeks or even months before you start showing up.

Also you mentioned about consistency and how consistency is really important is Google actually starts understanding if you have a consistent schedule on when you’re releasing content every week, and as a result, it’s actually going to know, oh, I think I’ll go to this website today at one o’clock because a new thing drops every week. And I’ll give an example of this podcast. This podcast drops every Tuesday. It has for three years. As a result, every Tuesday, Google is crawling my website because it knows that I’m going to be releasing a new page every single week. A new podcast episode.

So as a result, it begins to know my specific routine. So if I don’t go into Google Search Console, it’s going to come anyway because it knows my routine. So when we talk about consistency, it’s not just about creating that one or two blog posts every month, it’s about what’s your schedule? Because if you are always posting the first Monday of the month Google’s going to start knowing that process. If it knows it’s every second Monday, every second Tuesday, whatever it is. Whereas if you’re just posting on a Monday, or I’m going to post on Friday, and then I’m not going to post for three weeks and then I’m going to post again. It’s hard for Google to know when it should show up. So that’s a couple cute tidbits too. Any comments on any of that?

I was going to say, it’s funny that you brought up like the requesting to index, because I did that literally five minutes before our call for a new blog post. I hit publish and then I just immediately went to Google Search Console and enter the link. So yes, definitely recommend doing that. Also. Even if you don’t have a new link, but you made like a lot of changes to a page or after this episode you go through and you optimize your entire website, you can still request re-indexing. So it doesn’t even have to be brand new page. But even if you’d make these significant updates, you can still let Google know to help speed up the process. And the longer that you have your website, the more trust that you build up with Google. So if they know your consistent schedule or even if they just know your trustworthy website and you request indexing for a new blog post, you’re going to see results much faster than if you just launched a website last month or something like that. So definitely it can take some time to build up that trust with Google, but once you have it, you can start to see these results so much faster.

Absolutely. So Julia, you have a free resource you’d like to share. Could you tell us what it is and how it can help listeners?

Yeah, so I have a guide on helping people convert clients once they land on their website from Google. So going through some SEO strategies to make sure that you’re reaching the right types of people on Google, but then also making sure once they land on your website, you are helping them convert to clients and customers. So that way they don’t just land on your website and leave quickly.

Amazing. So to sign up for Julia’s five strategies to rank on Google and convert clients with SEO, head to juliareneeconsulting.com/seo-client-freebie.

Julia, if any listener would like to connect, how can they.

Yeah, so you can find my website at juliareneeconsulting.com. So I do have lots of blog posts, of course. If want to dig into some more like SEO or Pinterest topics you can find me on Instagram, even though I hate on it a little bit. I am fairly active there at Julia Renee Consulting. And then you can find me on LinkedIn at you can either find Julia Renee Consulting or search for Julia Bocchese.

So you can connect with Julia at all of those links, which will be down in the show notes.

Julia, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today to discuss SEO without overwhelm.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

And thank you everyone for tuning into today’s episode, and I hope you join me again soon on The Designer Practice Podcast.

Until next time, bye for now.

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