Show Notes

Kayla: Welcome back to the Designer Practice Podcast and I’m your host Kayla Das.

Ever think about investing in Google Ads to promote your practice?

In today’s episode, Mike Zoladkowski, Google Ads Expert, and Monika Zoladkowska, psychotherapist, and owners of Fully Booked Pros are going to share how to effectively utilize Google ads so that you can grow your practice faster.

Hi, Mike and Monica. Welcome to the show. It’s so great to have you here today.

Mike: Hi, Kayla. Thanks for having us.

Monika: Hello. Thank you for inviting us. I’m happy that we can meet and talk today.

Introduction

Kayla: This is such a great topic, so I’m super excited. But before we dive in to today’s episode, please introduce yourselves, where you’re from. And also, Monika, tell us a little bit about your private practice journey. And also, how you have both founded Fully Booked Pros.

Monika: Yeah. We are from Poland, but now we live in Calgary. At first, I was working with children and youth, but a few years ago, I decided to start working with adults. And for over three years now, I’ve been working with adults as a psychotherapist. And in 2021, I started my private therapy practice. Now I work with eight therapists.

Mike: Yeah, so where was the idea for Fully Booked Pros, right? So, we were responsible for the development of Monika’s company from the very beginning. We designed and we created the website with our befriended WordPress developer. We were running Google Ads to promote it. We were also looking for additional therapists. So, we took care of the whole company, right? It was all our work. And what we did, it worked, right? So, at some point, we thought, why not do the same thing for other therapists? Many of them don’t have that experience with marketing, they don’t know much about website design and all that stuff. So, we thought that probably they could use some of our help. And that’s how FullyBookedPros.com was born.

Kayla: Fabulous. So just tell us a little bit about what Fully Booked Pros does for therapists, just so that listeners have a good understanding.

Mike: Right. So, what we do is we help therapists grow their businesses. So, our work usually starts with designing or optimizing the website based on what was the current situation of our clients. Then we help them set up and run Google Ads on regular basis. And then the last step is optimization of what we do for our clients, it’s an ongoing work. So, we can say that it’s a three-step process.

How Google Ads Work

Kayla: Amazing. So, I know Google ads is something that comes up in my communities a lot, and I personally don’t use Google ads. It is something that I want to dabble in in the future. So, I think this is a really great topic because I’ve heard from some therapists, how they’ve used Google Ads and how it’s really helped them. But I’ve also heard from therapists, who may not necessarily have optimized their website or know how to use Google ads, not necessarily see the results. So, I’m glad that you’re here today so that you can give listeners some tips and strategies on how making Google ads work for them.

So first of all, for anyone who may not know, what are Google ads and how do they work?

Monika: Yeah, so Google ads are simply ads that are displayed in the search engine result page in response to a specific query. So, for instance, if someone is looking for a psychotherapist in Calgary, and they type in such a query on Google, they will see ads published by therapists in the city.

Mike: Yeah, and I think that’s the true potential of Google ads. It lies in the fact that these ads are triggered by a specific user query. So, this means that we can show our ads specifically to people who are looking for our service, which, of course, increases the chances of getting a new client, right? Because those people are usually ready to start a therapy or to ask about the therapy and book therapy with a chosen therapist.

Kayla: That makes sense. And I think also just for some of us less techie people out there, really, it’s the first thing you see when you put in, say, therapist near me into Google, sponsored ads are usually the first things that pop up before anything else. So, it has a chance of really getting clicked on because it’s really the first thing that shows up.

Mike: Yep, that’s right. That’s how it works.

Why Therapists Should Invest in Google Ads

Kayla: So why should therapists and coaches consider even investing into Google ads to grow their practice?

Monika: Yeah, for many people, Google is the obvious first place where they are looking for answers and services. This refers to mental health services as well. We are promoting our practice almost exclusively using Google Ads. And we can confirm this source of bookings have been very effective from the very beginning.

Mike: Yeah, that’s what’s very important is that the Google makes it very easy for people who are looking for those services. Google is all about providing users with relevant search results, right? So, for many therapists, if you run not just an online practice, but you also have a walk-in office, you can also put your business on Google Maps and be found by people who are living nearby or are looking for a therapy in a given part of town. And what’s also great is the fact that the Google Maps account is free to set up and run. And once you do this, it can be integrated with your Google Ads account so that you get better results and you get visibility not just in the search results, but also on Google Maps, which is also a very frequent place where people are looking for services.

Kayla: Just for clarity, when you say Google Maps, you’re talking about Google business profiles, right?

Mike: Right. It’s the same thing. It’s integrated. When you set up a Google business profile for your company, you automatically end up also on Google Maps.

Key Elements to Creating Effective Google Ads

Kayla: That’s really good to know. So, I think we’ve all heard of stories of people who invested into pay-per-click ads like Google Ads and not see some results. So, what are some of the key elements or considerations to creating an effective Google Ads campaign that gets results?

Monika: In general, there are three questions to consider. First off, it’s very important to start with a good website. Next, you need to create ads that are relevant to what you offer, but also to keywords people use to find your service. And the third element is ongoing optimization. You can just set up your account and let it run it. You need to take care of it.

Mike: Yeah. So like Monika said, it all starts with a website and actually many people kind of neglect this part of work, but it’s crucial. Your website must be fully relevant to your target audience and also have some elements that will encourage people to start therapy with you, right?

So, for example, what works for us, and I know it works for many therapists, is offering free discovery calls or free initial consultations for a potential client. It’s a great lead magnet because you can book free therapy, get in touch with the chosen therapist, see if you’re a good fit together, if you work together. And then you can decide to start a full therapy with a chosen therapist or move on to someone else.

Secondly, when it comes specifically to Google ads keywords are very, very important. And this also may come as a surprise for many people because we usually correlate keywords with SEO work. But when it comes to Google ads, they are actually very important as well, and they have to be everywhere. So on your website, in your ads and within your account.

So, for example, if you are a therapist running a practice in, let’s say, Seattle, right? And you want to promote your business using keywords, Psychotherapist Seattle, Therapist Seattle. This specific phrase has to be everywhere. It has to be on your website. It has to be in your ads. And you have to add this keyword or key phrase as the one that you want to target with your Google ads campaign. So, this is very important. Because for Google, it’s a clear indication that your offer is relevant to related searches. So again, if you are a psychotherapist running practice in Seattle and you have a potential patient typing in psychotherapist Seattle in Google and they see, Ads, they see among those ads, they see your ads, they go to your website and they everywhere see the same phrase. For Google, it’s an indication that the search result that they provided was relevant to the query. And that’s what it’s all about.

And the third element is yet again, that’s what Monika said, you need to optimize your account on a regular basis. The thing is, people sometimes think that you can just set up your account and then let it running on autopilot. That’s not really the case. The thing is, Google ads are very dynamic. Things can change almost overnight.

For example, you can have a new competitor that wasn’t in the picture in the first place, and they can come on in the same area in the same niche with a very big budget and they can outbid you, right? So, your ads can suddenly go down and you need to be prepared for this scenario and react. And in order to react you have to keep tabs on what’s going on.

Keywords and Google Ads Policies

Kayla: That’s really great points and something that I know that we’ve talked about was that there are certain words that therapists or coaches might use in their private practices that are very legitimate words, but might actually violate Google ads terms of use or conditions. Can you shed a little bit of light on what that might look like, especially for therapists and coaches who might be in certain fields?

Mike: So this is especially a big problem in Canada, but in the United States as well. When it comes to therapists, psychotherapists, psychologists. Everything that’s in any way related to addiction-related services, addiction recovery, addiction therapy, all those keywords, they are very delicate when it comes to Google ads.

In Canada, those keywords are like band altogether. You cannot promote any addiction-related services in Canada. In the U. S. in theory, you can. But at any point, Google can ask you for a specific certification, which from what I know is very expensive to obtain and can be difficult to obtain for a therapist who’s working on their own. So, in most of the cases, the best thing that you can do is just stay clear of addiction-related keywords in your ads.

But what many people don’t know is Google pays attention also to your website. So, if you have any addiction-related content on your website, it can also trigger Google’s control and get your account blocked. And you don’t even have to have a very extended website devoted to addiction-related services. Even if you have this keyword anywhere on your website, for example, in a blog post or in a book that you recommend your readers or your clients to read. If it tackles addiction-related stuff, this can also get your account blocked.

So, for therapists who want to run Google ads for themselves and they have anything related to addiction on their website. Our advice is to remove it altogether from the website if you want to keep running ads for your company. And the thing is, if you can start this account, right? Google ads account. You can start a campaign and it can go well for a week to even half a year because it’s not like Google verifies those websites on regular basis, right? Google bots can crawl your website. That’s the term. They can crawl your website tomorrow or they can crawl your website a year from now. So your account can be good for half a year for a year and you may not see anything coming or anything wrong with your account, and then overnight, you get this notification that your account was blocked due to addiction-related services. And getting this account unblocked is actually a very, very difficult job.

Kayla: So, if someone is an addiction counselor or an addiction therapist is there two routes, either to remove things that are related to addiction from their website completely or not invest in Google ads? Is that kind of their only two options?

Mike: So, if addiction is your only specialty, the only niche that you work in, I’m afraid so. You can either remove it from your website or look for other channels to promote your website. If not, if you’re doing also other kinds of services, other kinds of therapy. I would focus specifically on advertising those other kinds of therapy, but then again, you would have to remove addiction-related content from your website, yeah.

Kayla: Do you have a link or any resource that we can provide listeners in the show notes about the different types of words or terminology that might violate Google’s terms of use?

Mike: Yeah, so Google has its own advertising policies along with the countries that they apply to and there is a separate policy that’s called healthcare and medicines. And you will find in this policy that Google Ads are restricted or banned for pharmaceutical companies, for companies selling or promoting any drugs, for companies that promote painkillers, clinical trial recruitments, HIV tests, abortion, birth control, addiction services. This is the major issue for psychotherapists. Also, health insurance is restricted when it comes to promoting on Google ads. And in some countries, you’ll need to have a specific certification that enables you to use any of those terms in your Google ads.

Steps and Strategies to be Successful with Google Ads

Kayla: Well, that’s really great information, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to actually refer to Google’s policy in the show notes, so if anyone is interested in learning which terms are against their terms of use, please scroll down to the show notes and click on the link there.

So, what are some steps or strategies that listeners can take if they want to be successful with Google Ads?

Mike: So, there are several things to consider here. For starters, you need to structure your account properly. So, with Google ads, we have three layers.

The first layer is of course the campaign. So, it’s like a general term that encompasses everything that you want to promote within Google ads. Then the campaign can be structured into several ad groups. So, ad groups should be referring to specific services that you run as a psychotherapist. So, for example, if you are a therapist running several different services, your campaign could be called psychotherapy, for example, or therapy. And then ad groups could refer to depression to trauma to anxiety to stress, all those terms. These are different search queries. These are different ads. Different messages. So, they should be separated into different ad groups.

And then within ad groups, we can create several ads. And right now, Google uses something that’s called responsive search ads. So, what Google does is it streamlines the work for you. So, they create one big ad that can be made of 15 different headlines and four different descriptions. And Google uses its AI algorithms to determine which headline and which description should work best for a given search query or for a given patient. So, you don’t have to create like thousands of different ads on your own. You can just type in several headlines, several descriptions, and Google will mix them for you. So that would be the one thing. So, the proper structure of your Google ads account.

And then again, every ad group needs its own keywords. So, keywords come at the ad group level. So, if you have an ad group, for example, saying trauma or anxiety, you also need a list of trauma and anxiety-related keywords that need to be uploaded into the specific ad group. And then those keywords also have to appear in your ads. Okay. So, this is very important.

And then when it comes to ads themselves, there’s also a link, right? When people click your ads, they go to a specific website and what we do we discourage people from directing customers or patients to the main website. It’s a much better idea to create a separate landing page that’s devoted specifically to what you advertise on Google within a specific ad group. So, in ideal scenario, you should have a different landing page for anxiety, different landing page for trauma, different landing page for stress, because all of these are different problems. So, people looking for help with anxiety, they are not necessarily interested in other stuff.

And what’s also important, you do not want to distract them. If you have a patient who is on your website on a given landing page, right? Your goal is to get them to book therapy with you as quickly as possible, right? You don’t want them to scroll through 15 different subpages, read 10 different blog posts. You need to give them all the relevant information within one landing page so that they are not distracted. They can get all the stuff that they need on the specific landing page. And ideally, they can make a decision on the spot and book consultation or book therapy.

Kayla: That makes complete sense. And something that I always tell listeners too is that typically when people are searching for therapists, they’re searching more for a problem first. And that’s really what you shared is that you want to have a landing page or a web page that is for each individual problem instead of just having everything on one page. Because I think as therapists, we try to put it all on the one page. These are all the people that I serve. But when it comes to Google ads, what’s going to pop up is those keywords. And the keywords are what people are actually typing into Google. And usually, it’s more than just therapists near me, it might be managing anxiety, or therapists who can help with anxiety, or something like that. Because like you said, they’re looking for help with a specific problem. So that makes complete sense.

Mike: Yeah, and this is something that Google calls landing page experience. And actually, it’s a very important factor when it comes to assessing the quality of your ads. So, for example, if you are promoting specifically anxiety services, but you lead your potential patients to a main website where there’s nothing specifically about anxiety. Or there’s just one sentence, I help with anxiety. This will give you minus points for landing page experience because the person who clicked your ad, they didn’t find what they were looking for on it.

So, if you get minus points, so to speak for the quality of your ads, they will become more expensive to run. And it is likely that they will show up less often compared to ads who have more points for ad quality. So, this landing page experience is actually very, very important.

How to Optimize Your Google Ad Campaigns

Kayla: It’s really good to know. So, for any listener who might already be using Google Ads but are not seeing the results that they had originally hoped for, are there ways that they can optimize their Google Ad campaigns for better results?

Mike: So, in general, you need to take care of all those elements that we mentioned so far. So, you need to make sure that your account is properly structured. You need to make sure that you use the right keywords because keywords can also differ between each other. So, for example, all the “How to” keywords, they are not necessarily used by people who are ready to book.

So, if I’m looking for “how to deal with depression?” This can mean that I want to deal with this problem on my own. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m looking for a therapist to help me with my depression. I may be looking for some self-help solutions, right? And I’m not ready to buy, not ready to book therapy. So, you want to focus on keywords that indicate readiness to buy. So we usually call them SIL keywords. So, this would be Service in the Location. So, this is what I mentioned before. So, therapist Seattle. People who use this kind of keywords, they are usually not always, but usually ready to buy, ready to book therapy. So, this is important.

The next thing to consider is the quality of your ads. So, they need to be attractive. They need to be relevant to what people are looking for. So, if you are promoting therapy, you need to focus on what you can do for those people. So usually, therapists would have a free initial consultation. You need to mention this free initial consultation specifically in your ads and in your descriptions, right? So, the people who are about to click your ad, they know what to expect. They know that if they click your ad, they can sign up for a free consultation. No obligation. And they can decide whether they want to work with you or not.

The other thing that we talked about is the website. It has to be high quality. It has to be adjusted to your ads. And also have all those keywords that we were talking about. If possible, if you feel like people click your ads, but they are not necessarily booking with you, they are not necessarily taking this next step. It’s a good idea to see what they do on your website. So there are tools that enable that. Sometimes they use so called heat maps so that you can see where the patients or customers attention was focused and some of those tools, like, for example, Microsoft Clarity is free to use, and they are very easy to install. So you can do it on your own. And when you have such a tool in place, you can see what people are doing on your website. Which parts are they reading? Which parts are they just scrolling? What their attention is focused on. This is really important because it can help you make your website better and improve all the elements.

So, for example, if you have a service that’s listed on your website and you can see in this tool that someone tried to click this service, but it wasn’t linked; for you, it’s a clear indication that you should put a link in there and maybe add some more information because your patient was clearly looking for some content that you did not provide so that’s an easy fix.

And then the last thing that you need to consider is of course the budget because Google ads is basically an auction, right? So, there are 5, 10, sometimes even more advertisers who are competing for the same keywords. And Google will show ads for the highest bidder. This is how it works. It doesn’t mean that you need a $10, 000 budget to run your Google ads because there’s the other question that’s also crucial and that’s the quality of your ads.

So, if your ads are of high quality, Google will run them for less money. But if your ads are not optimized, then you have to be prepared to pay more. In order for your ads to show up and to outbid other competitors. So those two questions, they go hand in hand. You need to work on your ads and then you need a specific budget that will be sufficient to get your ads running.

Kayla: Really what I heard, the better optimize your Google ads, the less it’s going to cost long term.

Mike: Correct.

Google Ads and Private Practice Growth

Kayla: Amazing. So, Monika, obviously, you have used Google Ads in your business. Tell us how Google Ads has helped you get clients.

Monika: So, I’ve got my clients mostly from Google Ads. And my therapists who works with me the same. And it’s really helpful. Every month I’ve got few new clients, maybe not specifically for me now because I’m full now. But for my therapists. And it’s works all the time. And I think it’s a very good place to get new clients.

We saw that when we canceled Google ads for a few weeks because we decided, okay, it’s not necessarily for us to pay for that now. Maybe we can get clients from different ways. But it wasn’t as good as google ads. So, we decided, okay, we need to invest some money, but it’s much, much better to have this clients from Google ads. It works better than without that much, much better. For example, last week, from last seven days, I’ve got 12 new appointments. It’s not like every week I’ve got 12. But sometimes it’s four, sometimes it’s five. This week was amazing.

Kayla: That’s fabulous. And to even hear that you’re full and you were even out of place, you’re like, I think I’ll remove Google Ads because why pay for it if we’re full? But you seen the impact of not having that as a part of your marketing strategy. So, I think that that’s very powerful.

As someone who hasn’t used Google Ads and, really, you are making me think about maybe I should be investing in Google ads. But hearing your experience, I think is really relatable because whether it’s four or five or 12 clients, I mean, that’s four or five or 12 clients that are likely going to book with you more than once, right? You’re going to have them ongoing for as long as they need support.

Free Google Ad Optimization Checklist

So, I know you both have a free checklist, a Google ad optimization checklist. Can you please tell us a little bit about the checklist and how it can help listeners?

Monika: Yeah, that’s right. There are over 20 elements to consider when optimizing Google ads, and we decided to put all of them together in a checklist that anyone who is running Google ads for themselves just can go through and improve their campaign.

Mike: Yeah. Cause the thing is Google ads dashboard is not necessarily intuitive. And I know it was very overwhelming for me at the beginning because there are tons of options, tons of tabs and links and everything, and you can get lost. So, especially at the beginning, it’s very important to have a list that shows you what to go through so that you don’t have to wonder, “Okay, what should I do now? What should I check? What should I improve?” You need a list that puts it all together, and that’s what we did.

Kayla: Fabulous. So, if you’re interested in downloading Mike and Monika’s free Google Ads Optimization Checklist, check out kayladas.com/fullybookedpros.

That’s kayladas.com/fullybookedpros

Or simply scroll down to the show notes and click on the link.

Mike and Monika, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast and sharing with us these helpful tips, strategies, and even a checklist to help us grow our therapy practices with Google Ads.

Mike: Thank you. We’re always happy to help.

Monika: Thank you so much.

Kayla: 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.

Credits & Disclaimers

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