Show Notes

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

Does the lack of good search engine optimization or SEO on your practice website impact your client reach?

In other words, do you have difficulty getting clients when they search for a therapist on Google? Building SEO is essential in order to raise the ranks on search engines and reach clients for free.

But how do you build a CEO and how does it all really work?

Well, in today’s episode, Josh Shankowsky, SEO specialist and owner of SnapSEO, will break down what you need to know to grow your SEO.

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

Josh: Hey Kayla, how are you doing? Well, it’s my first podcast, so I’m more than excited to be here.

Kayla: Well, I am so excited that I get to share you with the world today, because I really want to share to our listeners how we met and how you became a guest on this podcast.

So, in May, I hired Josh to help me optimize my website, specifically my website speed, because as many of you know I have lots of content through blogging and podcasts, but my website speed has really been impacting my SEO. There are some technical pieces I needed serious improvement on to enhance my website SEO, such as my website speed, internal linking, improving my website’s authority through high quality backlinks, so Josh helped me with all of that.

And because Josh, you did such an amazing job, not only on my website, but also explaining all those technical components of SEO that sometimes can go over our heads, I knew instantly I needed to share you on the show because I often get people asking me, do you know an SEO expert or SEO specialist that you would recommend? And because I haven’t worked with an SEO specialist in the past. I really didn’t feel confident giving any personal referrals. But you are a really great SEO expert.

Josh: SEO is so obscure to a lot of people and a lot of people just don’t get it or they think, “Okay I do this one thing but It’s not why is my website not ranking,” but there’s actually a whole story behind your website like a sphere of influence that we have to look at.

So, taking something as complex as SEO and putting it into those layman terms so anyone coming to us can understand because ultimately you don’t want to just buy something and not know what you’re getting. It’s an investment in your business that we want to help you with and we want to be a partner.

Kayla: Well, I think that’s the key. One of the things that I know some therapists have faced is that they would hire an SEO, quote, unquote, expert or specialist, and then they would pay thousands of dollars. And they, one, aren’t taught how to maintain that work as they keep going, or they are promised magic. They’re promised the world and they don’t necessarily see results. But I feel that the way you’ve shared, you’ve educated me, you’ve taught me the things that I need to do moving forward. And then of course you help with some of those technical pieces that I either didn’t have time for or just didn’t know how to do.

Josh: Yeah, I get a lot of people calling us and they come to us and they’re like, “I’m not happy with my SEO guy.” And I’m like, “Okay, let’s take a look at this.” So, the first thing we do before we do any work is an audit, right? And we could literally see there’s next to no work done on their website. And just as you said, they spent thousands and thousands of dollars.

So, when I set out with SnapSEO, I said, okay, let’s be different. Every month, our clients get approval of what we want to do for their website. We want to be as transparent as we can, so they know what we’re doing. And at the end of the month, they have an updated report of, “Okay, this is all the work we’ve did, and here is the results. Here’s our 24/7 reporting dashboard.” so, it’s really important to be transparent.

And also, a lot of people I noticed is there’s no customer service so just having that back-and-forth dialogue could really improve customer relationship. And ultimately, like I said before, we want to be your partner.

Kayla: Well, I definitely agree as being a customer, you have been very transparent, whether it was through phone calls or whether it’s through emails, with everything that you do. Even sometimes you did work that I didn’t even expect. So, I definitely want to say that to our audience that when we go through this episode today, you definitely know what you’re talking about and I think that this is going to be a really great episode.

But before we do dive into the content of today, please introduce yourself, where you’re from, and tell us a little bit about what you do and who you are.

Josh: Yeah, so my name is Josh. I started at SnapSEO in 2018, but I myself have been doing SEO and web design actually since I was 16, 17 years old, probably even, before that. I picked up this book, HTML and I learned how to code HTML probably grade eight. So quite a long time ago, I’m 34 now, but. I’m here in Edmonton and over the time I was in high school and I was a little bit of a troublemaker because in our computer classes and, communication technology information processing, I would just– I completed the class fairly early,, within like a couple of weeks, so I would just sit and play video games actually, and my teachers really did not like it, so they thought I could be of help with the class and actually help some of the students. And then I, they actually started actually giving me work to do in class and finding me, okay, can you build this website for a client? And, of course, as a student, I might not have got paid, but you know what, I’d get like gift baskets and goodies and stuff like that.

But, after you make a websites, the question is, how do you get visitors to that website and how do you get those sales? So, kind of learned the hard way in the early years of Google where I was just some hyperlinks to a website. That’s what worked. But now Google’s just this totally different beast and, I love it. It’s dynamic. It’s always changing. So that’s kind of where I am, where I come from. So

Kayla: Amazing. Can you explain to us what SEO is? And why should therapists care about SEO? And why should they focus on it on their website? Like why is it important?

Josh: Yeah. So, SEO or search engine optimization, as you mentioned earlier, is a very organic way to get visitors to your website. And a lot of people don’t even know that someone like me exists where we could get you boosted to the front of Google or other search engines to get those clicks on your website. So really SEO is optimizing your website the best as we can to get people searching for your services. And a lot of people think, okay, “Well, I’m ranking for my name, I’m ranking for my business,” but if people don’t know about your business, how are they going to find you? So, we have to add the right keywords and phrases to the website to actually show, “Okay, I’m searching for an anxiety therapist or someone who can help you with depression or PTSD,” you name it, whatever you’re looking for. So, we want to get you ranked on Google because a large portion of the clicks on Google actually go to the top three results and those are often really trusted, in the SEO world. So just being on the top three to get you a substantial amount of traffic and in the long run, it eventually just comes like really cheap traffic and people just search it. And it’s just probably one of the best ways to get traffic. And, if you do like Google ads or Facebook ads, you’re going to get some leads. But actually SEO you’re going to get better quality leads and it’s going to be cheaper

Kayla: No, that makes complete sense. And I know since we’ve been working together you’ve increased my speed like I keep talking about speed because that’s the main reason I came to you. I believe my speed was a 29 and you got it up to like a 79 or something like that. We don’t always think about those pieces. And I know we’re going to talk about Google searches, writer guidelines in a little bit. But some of these pieces are really important and when you can get to page one of Google, I just know as a Google searcher myself, I very rarely go to the second page and I definitely don’t go to the third page. So if you can be on that first page at first one, two, or three and if those people can answer those questions or be the people you want to reach out to, they’re going to get that traffic for free. I personally don’t pay for pay per click ads like Google or Facebook ads. There’s nothing wrong with those, and I know lots of therapists who do but being able to be on that first page can be that free advertising.

Josh: It’s not just free advertising. It’s also building your brand because as more people search for your services, they’re going to be more likely to search for your brand and recognize and refer your brand to other people as well. To me, it’s kind of like the starting point of your marketing journey.

Kayla: Yes. So, in previous episodes, I have discussed Google’s search rater guidelines, what we call Double EAT or also known as EEAT. But can you explain what Double EAT is and what should listeners focus on in each category so that they improve their SEO?

Josh: Yeah. So, Google search rater guidelines is this 170-page document that outlines what’s the best practices are for ranking a website on Google. And back in the day it used to be just called EAT. So that stands for expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness. And we’ll get into those in a second, but they just updated it this last year into Double EAT or EEAT or there’s different ways to pronounce it. But what it is, is it adds an extra E in front for experience. So if we could fulfill these best practices on our website, we could ideally get a website ranked on Google just by following some best practices.

So, we’ll start with just normal EAT so, expertise, that’s the heart of your content. You want to find out what searchers love. You want to find out what people are searching for. So, and you want to find the intent behind the search. So, some people call it search intent or search relevant, but. Ideally, when you’re making content for your website, you will want to often reverse engineer what’s going on Google. And it’s a great starting point. Like one of my favorite SEO or marketing tools is actually looking at the front page of Google and seeing what’s ranking.

So, if I’m making a piece of content, let’s say trauma therapy. I’m going to go to Google. I’m going to type in trauma therapy. I’m in Edmonton. So, trauma therapy, Edmonton and see what’s ranking. And I could be like, “Oh, this header is common in all of these articles, or some variation of it. Maybe this is an important topic to talk about.” And maybe it’s more like a sales servicing page if I’m searching for that. So that’s also something that I want to look for. Now, if I was going to type in benefits of trauma therapy, that’s going to often come up as a blog post. So, the intent behind the search is a little bit different. Often people are searching for information. More so than a service, right? So that’s the kind of the very starting point that we take for EAT.

And then as we’re building that, we want to build authority to your website. So that’s when what’s called a backlink comes into play. So, if you’re reading a blog, for example, and you see a little blue hyperlink linking to another website. That’s a backlink or hyperlink. With the new search rater guidelines is we want something relevant to your website. So, I’m not going to go to a casino website and go “Hey, I want this link to my trauma therapy page,” it’s totally irrelevant and it looks spammy and it’s not going to work. Because we want to be as ethical and non-spammy as we can, right? And it just shows for a good brand if we’re doing that as well.

If we could create that relevance and have like maybe it’s a blog about healthcare and we write about the benefits of trauma therapy and we’re going to link to that trauma therapy page. Well, now you’re creating that relevance and you’re going to have a better-quality link to your website. And not all links are created equal. That’s one thing that we have to look at. So, when we’re looking at links, we want to look at, “Okay, is there traffic coming to this website?” It’s a very hard metric to fake and only 3 percent of websites have traffic from Google. So, if that website is getting traffic, then it’s kind of pre-qualified by Google and it’s something that we want to look at right?

And then we have the t and e that’s building trust for our businesses. And when we build trust like you’re a therapist, you’re an expert in your field, right? And I’m not, but Google doesn’t know that. So, we want to show that we could be trustworthy. So, some things we can look at is, we want an about page, telling about us. And a contact page because if you don’t really have your contact information or telling about yourself it’s fairly hard to be a trustworthy business if you’re hiding everything. As well as just seeing results and consistency over time. So, a lot of people will go, “Oh, I built this blog post. And why am I not ranking?” Well, if we continue building a blog post on our subject. So not just going about the benefits of trauma therapy, but we can build types of trauma therapy and start going into CBT for trauma therapy or dialectical behavior therapy. If we start actually building out a blog and becoming an authority in our subject. You’re going to naturally rank and that’s just from a content perspective. Never mind the backlinks. And then so if we think about this as your website’s like a car. The content is the body of the car and then the backlinks are like the fuel and the engine and they’re really what drive the website, if that makes sense.

And then finally we come to the. experience in EEAT or double EAT. And just showing that we have experience and it’s kind of redundant but one of the ways we could show experience is having those backlinks. Because if I’m a therapist and I’m building a blog and I need to cite an article I’m not going to cite just some random person on the internet. I’m going to cite someone who has that PhD or they’re registered therapist and I could be like, okay, this person said this, so they’re more likely to show experience and just having that relevancy and having those links from those other relevant websites is also going to show that experience.

When we look at it and having those backlinks, a lot of people are like, okay, well, to show experience, you need a properly written bio, right? That’s something that, that is important. But it’s not like the end all be all, for experience. If we can have our own case studies and our own numbers, stuff that we could have that’s original on our websites, that’s also going to show some experience as well.

But, the main factor for experience is having those backlinks.

Kayla: I love that. When we think a Double EAT, really what I’m hearing is when we think of the expertise, it’s really about what are people searching? And how can you fulfill that need? Something that I do when I create my either podcast or blog titles, is I will go to Google and I will just search a word. So let’s say like anxiety, for instance. And then I will see before I press enter. I will see what’s populating. It might be how to manage test anxiety, or how to deal with stress at work, or something like that. And when that pops down it gives me more ideas about things to write about, and then it also gives me actual titles. So if someone’s typing in how to manage test anxiety, that in itself can be a blog post or a podcast episode because they’re actually typing that in. So, the content is also what they’re searching.

Josh: Yes, that’s very true. So, we call it the Google auto suggest feature. So, yeah, if you’re just typing like anxiety and then, or you don’t even have to finish the word anxiety, but it gives you ideas of what people are searching for. There’s other tools that you could use. So, there’s another good one is Also Asked. I’m not sure if you use that. But it gives you a workflow of how you should link your articles together to funnel the authority to your page. And I guess since we’re on that one thing that I’ve seen quite often is a lot of people are not interlinking pages.

And one of the most common things I see actually is people on their blog posts don’t link to other pages, but with backlinks and interlinks, Google gets signals from other pages about what your page is about. That’s also why we want to create that relevancy for search engines. So let’s say we have the external backlinks coming to your blog post. Well, all that authority comes and just kind of ends. But if we have a link from the, from that blog post to your target, money page that you’re looking to rank, it’s going to transfer some of that authority all the way through and you’re going to rank not just one page, you’re going to rank multiple pages. And as weird as that is in the SEO world, we call that link juice, so.

Kayla: That’s actually something you helped me with as well is interlinking. Now I did have some interlinking between my blogs but you definitely help boost that.

Some other pieces that made me think about when we’re going through Double EAT is when we think of authority, you need to have some type of content on your website. Because sometimes we think that we can just create a website and then we’ll have a homepage and a contact page and that’s enough to start ranking on Google. But you do need some fresh content. You need those blogs so that you can interlink. You do need blogs so that people can find you and that you can build that authority and that trust all of those things. So, I love that you talked about some of that as well. And the same with the trust piece.

So, when we think about trust, I also think about what some SEO experts might use is what’s called black hat techniques, trying to trick Google and Google cannot be tricked. I’ve heard of business owners, where SEO experts have actually tried to use black hat techniques on their website and it ended up de-ranking them. When we think of these black hat techniques, they are not good. I mean, Google hires the top 1 percent of people in the world to help train their bots. So, their bots are quite knowledgeable and they can see when this happens.

Josh: Yeah. So, I guess for people that don’t know, there’s different types of SEO and there’s called white hat, gray hat and black hat. So, white hat is the most organic way to do SEO, that’s building the content waiting for people to link to you creating those relationships with the websites. That’s the best way to do SEO if we can.

Black hat there’s keyword stuffing and this is very much like a 2000s, 2007 kind of strategy. Is you back in the day, you could just go to a website, put in a whole bunch of keywords. At the bottom of the page, there’s just a paragraph of just keywords, not written for humans at all. And sometimes people trying to be sneaking, they’re like, “Oh, let’s make it white text on the white background. People won’t see it.” But you’re right. Google does have these algorithms that detect that and they de-rank you.

A lot of people don’t know is they actually have a manual penalty team. And so, there is actual humans reviewing this content. And if you get a manual penalty, it takes. often months to reverse and they have to see that you’re doing all this work for you to actually reverse it. And during that time, you’re just not on Google. So usually, it’s best to play in more in the white gray hat area. But going black hat is not good for your website.

And if we actually look at some of the spam policies that Google’s putting out. There’s a lot of SEO people that are like, oh, I’ll give you comment links. So that’s a lot of people will go and just comment on other people’s posts. Well, those are kind of spammy. Creating forum links those are spammy and social bookmarking. And Google specifically lays these out in their guidelines as spam. So, you take what they’re saying with a grain of salt because I mean, they want the best for your website. But you also have to look at what’s the industry doing and what’s been working for years.

But, ultimately in the black hat area, you’ll get those quick gains within one to three months and you’ll be ranking good. And then all of a sudden you’ll just crash. And that’s pretty much it.

Kayla: I appreciate that you broke it down that way, because these are not things that we always think about, right? We think that SEO is so technical, but really, it’s quite personal. Are you trying to be trustworthy? Are you trying to help the person that is reading your content? Or are you trying to fake your way through encouraging the bots to rank you?

Josh: Yeah, so really what they look for is, if we can provide just the best user experience for our users. That’s ultimately what I think wins. Is there a ton of ads on there? Okay, are the ads getting in the way? Yeah, google recognizes that, okay, people are going to monetize their websites they’re going to have affiliate links and stuff like that. But if we have like really intrusive ads that’s going to take away from the user experience If our content is half written and doesn’t answer the person’s search intent or what they’re looking for that’s not really providing a good user experience either, right?

And then just even from a conversion rate optimization standpoint, so we could deliver traffic to a user’s website. But what we do with that traffic is another thing. We want them to convert and ideally, click your website and get those clinical sessions booked for you guys. So, just providing that user experience, answering everything and being authority in your subject is what we look for. And actually, that’s what Google set up to be. If you read the book, How Google Works by the CEO of Google or one of the former CEOs. And that’s what they found it to be is that it’s a good user experience.

Kayla: And that makes me think about something we talked about off air, was the new SEO guidelines specifically regarding content created by AI. So, I’m wondering if you can share a little bit about what those new guidelines are and how Google is looking at AI generated content on websites?

Josh: Yeah, so Google’s been changing this, for quite some time. And so, at first, they had a very hard, hard line on you know what no AI generated content. Written by the human for the human kind of thing. Google recognizes a little bit now, like, okay, there is going to be some AI it’s pretty much to the point where you can’t stop it.

But if you’re using something like ChatGPT, for example. When we create content, a lot of it is just very generic and it adds a lot of fluff to the content. So, it’s not really offering that good user experience and it’s just kind of regurgitating what people have been saying over and over again. So that kind of goes back to that experience standpoint of EEAT. And just having that original content. Like I mentioned, if you could create your own case studies and have some numbers where people could quote you. That’s going to help you get ranked a little bit.

So, with AI, a lot of people also will create content at scale, and that’s what Google is looking at now. So, if we’re creating like 20, 30 blog articles a day, Google’s going to be like, okay, like this isn’t very natural, especially if you’re just a small website, right? What we do is we just kind of try and stay away from that ChatGPT and really look at creating the high-quality content. I have seen some websites rank with ChatGPT, but is it worth the risk? In my opinion I say no.

Kayla: Good point. I know you have an offer for listeners providing a free website SEO audit. Can you share what an SEO audit is and how it can help listeners?

Josh: Yeah, so before we do any work on a website is we want to do an audit. And this kind of gives us a standing point of where your website is currently. And also lets us know what work has been done in the past and what work needs to be done to help you rank on Google.

And I think Kayla, we’re mentioning like about audits as well and how some companies will charge a couple hundred dollars and I’ve seen it all the way up to over a thousand and that’s a thousand U. S. dollars for these audits. But if you reach out to me and you’re like, hey, Can I get a free video audit on my website? Feel free to reach out to me or just even go to snapseo.ca and go in the contact form and be like, “Hey, I want a free audit. That’s okay.”

Usually what we’ll do is we’ll pick up the phone, do a little discovery. Learn where you want to take your business. Sometimes we could be like, okay, you’re ranking for these keywords. Maybe it’s better to take your business here. But you might have other ideas. So, then what we’re doing in the audit is we could look at, okay, how can we take your business to where we want to be while doing the best SEO practices as well. So, having that audit is not just an audit. It’s also creating a marketing strategy.

Kayla: Fabulous. Yeah. And don’t forget to mention to Josh that you listened to us on the podcast as well. Like when you reach out to him.

And as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, Josh has helped me improve my SEO. Before he started any work, he conducted a comprehensive audit of my website. Through the audit, I learned so much about my website’s performance that I really didn’t know. Like, I knew my speed was not so great. And that’s actually one of the reasons I reached out to you. But there was so many other pieces that I just didn’t know. And this audit helped me feel so confident that you knew what you were doing.

And I did reach out to other SEO experts as I was going through this. And similar to what you said, some people were charging $200, or $500 or $700. And you’re the only person that offered it for free. And it helped me really understand, I need this to help me grow. So, I really appreciated that you had offered that to me.

Also, I also pride myself of being somewhat tech savvy. But I also appreciated how you broke it down into concepts that were tangible actions. And essentially created a SEO strategy plan and similar to what you talked about today, you broke down Double EAT in a very understandable way so that I know moving forward that, you know, what I need to focus on backlinks or I need to focus on this, right? I know I have a lot of content on there. But how can I improve that content and you really helped me with that. I really want listeners to know if they are looking for an SEO expert, I truly endorse your services because it’s been invaluable to me and my website and my business.

Josh: Thank you so much. Yeah. Actually, the word that you gave me– so Kayla actually called me back and said the audit was actually “phenomenal.” I think that was the word that you gave. But with these audits, you said everything is very, very tangible and that’s kind of the goal is I want to break it down enough where you could actually take this audit and you could do a lot of this stuff yourselves. Should you have the time or the willpower to do it?

And it’s not just about an audit. Yeah, it gets my foot in the door, but it’s much more of a educational experience. And learning not just about us, but also learning about your business and where it could kind of take you.

Kayla: Yeah, and it was phenomenal. And you got back to me, it was either the same day or the morning after. But you were so quick at getting the audit to me. It was phenomenal. And I just want listeners to know if they get this free audit and work with you, they can’t go wrong.

Josh: Thank you.

Kayla: So, if you would like to receive a free website SEO audit from Josh, email him at [email protected]

Or you can head to his website, www.snapseo.ca

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

But don’t forget to mention that you heard Josh and the Designer Practice Podcast.

Josh, thank you so much for joining us today and to discuss how to improve therapist SEO, and how we can grow our practice.

Josh: Yeah, you’re very welcome. And also, just a touch point, if someone just wants to talk about some SEO and pass some ideas by, we’re more than happy to do that as well. So, we try to be open, honest, transparent, and educational as possible. But thank you so much for having me on the show.

Kayla: Fabulous. 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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