If you can use advertising to get people to your behavioral health website, does organic website traffic still matter? Yes! While getting people to your website organically can take more time and effort to do, you’ll reap many long-term benefits.
Organic website traffic comes from unpaid methods like having an SEO-friendly website, ranking for a blog, clicking on an infographic, watching a posted video, or writing a social media post. This means that people find your website by the content you produce and use that as a way to visit your website.
Getting people to click on your website page can be difficult. You have to think about a way to show up higher in search results and make your service appear the most appealing when someone searches for behavioral health services online.
For behavioral health practices, organic content such as can be one of the best ways to reach new people and build you behavioral health marketing strategy. The following is a guide on how to increase organic website traffic for your behavioral health practice and how a marketing agency can help you increase your organic numbers.
The Benefits of Investing in Building Your Organic Web Traffic
While a paid ads strategy can be thought of as a short-term, fast method in gaining new leads, organic traffic often takes more time. The foundation of your organic web presence is your website, and an SEO strategy is one of the main ways you can increase traffic.
If your website or one of your webpages appears at the top of the search engine results page, there is a much greater likelihood it will get clicked on. Very few people take the time to look at anything that doesn’t appear on the first page of the SERP for a Google search.
Also, if you nail the right keywords in your content, you reach a very specific, targeted audience without paying an ad spend or worrying about behavioral health ad regulations. In fact, while many people do click on Google Ads when searching for a service, some people will skip ad results and go straight to the organic search results.
If you’re trying to gain new clients, a strong organic website strategy gives your great visibility and is likely to convert visitors into clients. And if you’re worried that organic traffic results will take too long to be effective, you can combine organic web tactics with paid strategies to have the best chance at reaching people.
Are you interested in what work Beacon Media + Marketing can do for your behavioral health practice? Learn more about what work we’ve done.
1. Understand On-Page SEO
Understanding on-page SEO can be one of the best ways to boost your website to the top of search results. On-page SEO is optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and increase organic traffic. This includes steps like:
- Ensuring that you do keyword research to identify the search volume and ranking difficulty for words or phrases you want to rank for
- Creating engaging content that is relevant to your target audience is searching for
- Including click-worthy title tags and meta descriptions
- Paying extra attention to headers as they can help you rank for keywords,
- Boosting local SEO with location-specific keywords and location pages for multi-clinic practices.
2. Invest Time in Blogging
Blogging can be one of the best ways to gain organic traffic to your website. You can use blogs to answer people’s questions regarding behavioral health. If you create blogs that answer people’s questions well, they’ll be ranked higher on the search results, and people will be more likely to click on them.
Investing in long-form, SEO-friendly content can draw in website visitors and direct them to different pages if they’re interested in learning more. You can connect internal links or have CTAs that entice people to learn more about behavioral health and your clinic. You should update content as it becomes outdated or statistics change.
3. Create an Internal Linking Strategy
An internal linking strategy will help keep people on your website once you get them there. This includes what links you add to your blogs. This kind of strategy means adding links in your blogs that either lead readers to another blog, a service page, or other relevant page on your website. These are different that outbound links, which are hyperlinks to someone else’s website.
You can also implement an internal linking strategy for your website pages. This includes buttons that will allow them to schedule an appointment with you or link them to your service pages so they can see if you’re the right practice for them.
4. Have a Backlink Strategy
Similarly, having a backlinking strategy will help get people to your site from other people’s websites. When other websites use your content and link back to your pages, it allows Google to see you as a reliable source and will bump the ranking of your website to the top.
Since you can’t control if people use your website links, you can create a strategy for backlinking to your website. This can include writing press releases that announce your blog or having social media posts that link to your website. Having multiple outlets for backlinking will grow the popularity of your website and allow more people to reach your page organically.
5. Ensure Good Website Performance
One of the most important factors of having good organic traffic with a low bounce rate is creating a website that is updated and has enticing content. Your website should be responsive with short load times, as many people will leave the page if it takes too long to load. It should also have an updated design that is appealing to the eye.
Having good technical SEO will help push your website to the top of the search results. A great website is essential for gaining organic traffic and later leading to client conversions.
Do you need help creating a website that is beautiful and will convert clients? See how our website design and development service can help you!
6. Use Social Media
Social media can be an excellent tool for gaining organic traffic. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have built-in audiences that will be able to find your content. If you’re providing quality content such as educational videos, it will help spread your posts and gain new followers.
You should include links to your website, specific pages, or blogs on your social media posts and bios. This will help with backlinking but also allow people to access your website. You can also participate in groups or forums that raise brand awareness and allow more people searching for behavioral health treatment to find you.
7. Add to Print Materials
A traditional way to gain brand awareness and have people find your services is to add your website to print materials. This can include business cards that you hand out to people.
You can also create educational pamphlets or cards that include behavioral health information. This will help people learn more, and also, you can direct them to your website to get more information about your services and how you can help them.
8. Keep Online Listings Updated
One of the best ways to gain organic traffic is to have your behavioral health clinic listed with Google My Business. GMB works to help people find services in their area, so when someone searches “behavioral health clinic near me,” your practice will appear as an option for them.
You should ensure that your information is up to date. This includes the address, hours, website link, and contact information. It’s important to note that if you don’t have a physical location for your behavioral health practice, you won’t be able to use GMB.
9. Create Unique Infographics
Infographics are a great way to draw people to your website. They information that people may not know and will entice them to learn more about it. They can include statistics or steps for specific behavioral health treatment.
They should be beautifully designed using your brand colors and have engaging written content. You can add them to your blogs, and it’ll act as another way for people to get brief information regarding the behavioral health topic with something that draws their eye. They can also be used as social posts that draw people into reading the blogs to read more.
Infographics can also build organic traffic to your site by showing up in the images section of Google. People often recycle infographics instead of making their own. If someone finds your infographic relevant to what they’re writing about, they might use your infographic and link it back to your blog as a source – giving you a backlink which will boost SEO.
How Can Outsourcing Your Marketing Help Your Behavioral Health Practice?
Outsourcing your marketing can be a great way to have the benefits of effective marketing without needing to put in the time and effort in it yourself. Behavioral health marketing requires many moving pieces that can take away from the time you’d use to help your clients. Having experts help you with your marketing will ensure that you have high-quality marketing that leads to client conversions.
Beacon Media + Marketing can help your behavioral health practice thrive. We want you to focus on what you’re passionate about while we take care of your marketing. Our expert team can help you with multiple services such as blogging, social media, paid ads, website design and development, videos, and more. We’ll help you reach your goals while you provide exceptional services to people in your community.
Are you ready to see how Beacon Media + Marketing can help your behavioral health practice? Schedule your free consultation!
